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Youmacon - Author's Notes - 2006 There are five anime conventions in the U.S. on the same weekend. There's only enough time to attend one of them. Which one? Might as well travel to the closest event. That's how this writer dealt with the dilemma of how to handle this weekend's events. Only Sunday was open for travel, which kept us from traveling to two conventions. The best way to handle things was to make a brief trip to Youmacon in Michigan. That meant the sad decision of passing up NekoCon and its beautiful home at the Hampton convention center. We'd traveled to every edition of NekoCon since the event opened in 1998, the first full year for this site, and wanted to head back in 2006, but time didn't work out. We found ourself scratching our head and wondering why there would be so many events on the same weekend - there's also Anime South in Florida, Bakaretsu Con in Vermont and Cos-Con in Oklahoma. The crowded conjunction seems odder when you consider that after a weekend with five U.S. conventions, there are only four U.S. events for the rest of the month. We'll guess that the event promoters found it easier to make deals for this weekend, possibly because no one else wanted to have conventions on the weekend before the general election. We're making so many Sunday-only convention trips because our real-world work schedule was shifted to include Friday and Saturday nights. We're hoping to get to all three days of Anime USA, though. We'd wondered how the unusual choice of former wrestler Lou Albano as a guest of honor would work, and it turned out to be a good decision. At 73 and coming off a heart attack earlier in the year, he's not as active as he was during his rasslin' and music video days, but he was still friendly and very approachable. Missing Youmacon's Friday means we missed the maid cafe, but it looked as if some of the maids were still hanging around on Sunday. Youmacon was a small event by 21st-century standards, but it wasn't as small in 2006 as in 2005. Sunday felt larger than the previous year's Friday. The show resembled the previous weekend's SugoiCon in size and scope, and we saw some people in Michigan who we'd seen a week earlier in Kentucky - Melissa and the Spoony Bards among them. We also were asked why we didn't go to the previous month's Reactor in Illinois - we traveled to Texas that weekend for another Sunday-only trip - and if we were planing to go to Ohayocon in 2007 (yes). The event's organizers kept trying to spoil us, but we kept spoiling their plans - getting our own ride from the Detroit Metro airport when they'd sent a volunteer to pick us up, inviting us to dinner after we'd already gotten a room service meal. We did use the hotel room they offered us, and spent time there watching Tony Stewart win the NASCAR race in Texas. The TV set remote control didn't work, though, and that was one of the biggest things that went wrong all weekend. Another light stand was knocked over and for a moment, we profanely thought we'd had a second Sunpak strobe broken in as many weekend, but we were able to snap the plastic parts back back together and used the equipment later in the weekend. We're a bit too obsessed with light, which is why we carry our own. While the WiFi in the Troy Hilton works fine in the guest rooms, the signal still doesn't extend to the meeting room area where most of the convention is held. That kept us from making a mid-afternoon web site update and was the reason why you may have seen nothing fresh until Sunday evening. Youmacon Main Page