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Youmacon - Author's Notes Notes completed at a motel in Jackson, Michigan: Thanks to a kind offer from Youmacon's organizers, we spent the weekend running one of our photo sales booths in the main hotel lobby. It was a pleasantly busy experience: each day would start quietly, then business would suddenly increase and stay that way for the rest of the day. We didn't finish until 11 p.m. Friday - and we had to disappoint at least one customer when we packed up then to get some sleep - and Saturday night didn't end until 1:30 a.m. Sunday. We were told by Steve, who watched the booth while we slipped off to get pictures of the costume contest, that people still stopped by the booth during the contest, looking for us to take pictures of them. Our sometimes balky notebook PC worked well after the contest; the computer and its EV-DO broadband wireless link let us get the contest's pictures online before the awards had been presented. Often, we were asked during the weekend how long it would take to get the pictures on the web site, and one person said he had been told that others took as long as two weeks. Thanks to Steve, Kent and Jack for helping us pack up the booth, and to others who assisted with the setup a couple of times. We tried to warn them the bags were heavy... Those who wonder about the direction of anime conventions would have gotten much of their answers from the booth's customers. A good proportion of those who bought prints were parents, and not just of elementary school children - mostly of middle school and high school kids, and a few wore costumes with their children. The other customers seemed younger - again, mostly high school kids - than when we last ran the photo booth at Youmacon in 2005. The crowd's youthful energy was demonstrated at 10 a.m. Sunday: at an hour when other conventions are sleepy and struggling to wake, Youmacon fans were busy and forming a conga line through the halls. There were plenty of activities that some conventions, run by stern controllers, would have frowned upon - people holding "free hug" signs, stopping wherever they pleased in the halls to take pictures. No one lifted a finger or had a single complaint about that activity, and the world did not come to an end and no one cared. Apparently, some of the hall horseplay led to a broken piece of drywall around a lobby support pillar. It was ceremoniously wrapped with a piece of plywood and yellow "caution" tape, and the convention continued. People love to read about the things that went wrong, So - the Friday registration line was ridiculously long; the crowds trying to get to the small dealers' room kept overlapping with the crowds headed to the artists' alley and the main events hall; dealers said they had shoplifting problems; and the Saturday night costume contest was an hour late in starting, supposedly because the convention staff couldn't get an online simulcast to work. There was just enough room for the convention to fit inside the Hilton at Troy, Mich. A second-floor balcony above our booth usually was filled by fans queuing for autographs from the many dub acting guests of honor. At the end of that upstairs corridor was an open area slated for costumers' gatherings, but the largest group ran out of room. In a scene that resembled of Anime Expo in 2006, a large Bleach group had to head outdoors for their photo shoot, although Anaheim in July was far warmer than Michigan in November. That's football season, and the Youmacon crowd had plenty of people wearing Michigan's block "M" and the green of Michigan State, but the anime fans from those universities didn't share the rest of the state's obsession with the two teams' football showdown, an 90-minute drive away in East Lansing. Michigan came from behind to win, 28-24. Most of the space problems may be solved when Youmacon moves to Dearborn, not far from the headquarters of the Ford Motor Company, in 2008. People kept asking us about our future convention plans: we hope to be able to run another photo sales booth at Sugoicon in Kentucky in a couple of weeks, then head to the inaugural New York Anime Fest. Then, after the annual midget races in Fort Wave, we're hoping to spend as much time as possible at Ohayocon in January. It took us a while to get used to the breakneck pace of interstate traffic in the Detroit area. We'd been to the region a few times but never had to drive before, and it was obvious that we weren't ready to drive as fast as the natives. At one point we experimented with running 80 mph on I-75, only to find ourselves being passed by traffic that seemed to be running 20 mph faster. It was a weekend when the least expensive gasoline was selling for $3.10 per gallon, yet the fastest drivers were in the least fuel-efficient vehicles - trucks and SUV's that would be luck to get 15 mpg on the highway. There was a reminder of the consequences of interstate travel on the westbound I-94 sun on Sunday night. Just west of Ann Arbor, the eastbound lanes were filled with a collection of fire trucks with red emergency lights flashing, and eastbound traffic was slowed for several miles. The westbound traffic never slowed. At least we managed to get quickly used to the infamous "Michigan lefts," and became reacquainted with the state's 44-wheel, 120,000-pound trucks. On the Tuesday before Youmacon began in Michigan, the World Series victory parade for the Boston Red Sox rolled down Boylston Street and past the Hynes Convention center, the once-a-year home of the Anime Boston convention. It may have seemed as if there were as many people at anime conventions on the first weekend of November as there were baseball fans at the victory parade. We don't keep exact statistics on these things, but it's hard to think of a convention weekend as busy as this one, ever. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been updating the 2008 convention schedule, which led us to take another look at events set for the rest of 2007. After we found some conventions we hadn't listed for Central and South America, we came up with a total of ten events worldwide for the first weekend of November. Add the Reactor convention, a former anime event outside Chicago, the World Fantasy Convention in upstate New York, and the huge Lucca Comics event in Italy, and fans had plenty of reasons to turn the computer off, get out of the house and hit the road. If that wasn't enough, we count at least another 13 U.S. conventions for the rest of November (Puerto Rico is part of the U.S.). We haven't found any U.S. anime conventions on the Thanksgiving weekend, but there is the Mid-Ohio Con in Columbus, which will be held in the same convention center that will host Ohayocon in - two months? What happened to the off season? With two conventions on the weekend before New Year's and three events on the weekend after the holiday, the off season has disappeared. Youmacon Main Page