...or, how to abuse your position in a non-profit organization for maximum personal gain.

The first convention I ever went to was Katsucon 2003. In six years of attending conventions, almost always in the artist alley, never once have I been told I was breaking the rules. No stickers at your convention? They get left at home. No adult work at your convention? I don't even bring the binder. In fact, I wrote a tutorial on attending conventions as an artist, reminding everyone to follow the rules as they were laid out. I should have listened to my friends who said that Ohayocon was rife with problems.

This was the first time I'd been to Ohayocon – with an eight hour drive, venturing into an unknown is always a risk, but I submitted my product list (prints, buttons, stickers, and bookmarks) and portfolio (links to my deviantart account and my main site at ghostfire.net) to their jury for consideration and made it in, so I was excited to give it a go.
( Incident the first )
( Incident the second )
( This is a joke, right? )
( Incident the third... god damn )
( the aftermath )

It seems that, for the first time in six years, I won't be attending Katsucon. Not by choice, mind you, but simply because I failed to get a spot in the Artist Alley. :( I booked my room at the Hyatt ages ago, but now I can't use it. Anyone interested?

Not as painterly as my usual style? Blame it on finding out, about 36 hours before the convention, that I'd be going to AnimeBoston after all. Not that a waitlist table opened up, but someone decided to up and give me theirs, having only gotten half of one and deciding he wasn't ready for selling his work. (I managed to upgrade that to a full table on Saturday, but that's getting a bit ahead of myself.)

I've only ever last-minuted one con before - last year's AnimeNext. I can safely say that I'm a lot more prepared than I was then. Despite so little warning, I was able to get everything together and be successful... not that the convention itself helped all that much. If you don't know the story, AnimeBoston is, perhaps, the worst-run convention I've ever been to. ELEVEN HOUR LINES, PEOPLE!@ You can't possibly run a convention double the size of Katsucon, fast approaching the size of Otakon, and not have some degree of flexiblity when your system goes utterly and completely awry. Fail fail fail! I arrived at 9:30am on Friday, having to do the regular registration line for, again, the first time in a year. Getting there that early, nimgrim and I, along with our friend Eric (I can't remember your livejournal!), waited a mere six and a half hours in line! I'll entirely grant that sometimes screw-ups happen, and something you thought would work great actually turns out to suck, but wow... someone should have taken it on themselves to start fixing it either Thursday night or Friday morning!

Whew... that being said, I can't fault most of the rest of the convention for the horrible nightmare that was registration, I guess. Artist alley was well run, and the staff there was nice. I was told that panels and such were enjoyable, at least on Saturday when a good portion of the people had gotten though the line, then come back rested. The convention center was also great - I can see the convention continuing to expand for years there.

( And now, a tremendous timeline - twelve years of my art... see the progress! )

The slightly leaky toilet that has caused intermittent grief for over a year is finally being repaired. I don't think that would have happened had our hot water heater not given out, though. It'll be nice, after they leave, to enjoy a long, hot shower after two days of lukewarm to frigid bathing. At least the house doesn't look quite like the disaster area it did 20 hours ago - no matter who's coming over, I always clean up, even for repairmen. I think it's part of a paranoia that both Mark and I share, though he seems to have it worse than I do. Right now they're chipping through the cement subflooring for some reason I'm not equipped to fathom. Likely, this toilet hasn't been serviced since the apartment was built and thus has 30+ years of badness lurking beneath.

Conventions, Good:
(My list for the year, thus far.)

Katsucon
February 15-17
Omni Shoreham Hotel
Washington DC

Castle Point Anime Convention
April 13
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, NJ

AnimeNEXT
June 20-22
Meadowlands Exposition Center / Holiday Inn
Secaucus, NJ

ColossalCon
June 26-29
Hilton Cleveland East / Beachwood
Cleveland, OH

ConnectiCon
August 1-3
Connecticut Convention Center
Hartford, CT

Otakon
August 8-10
Baltimore Convention Center
Baltimore, MD

AnimeUSA
October 10-12
Hyatt Regency Crystal City
Arlington, VA

Zenkaikon
October 17-18
Valley Forge Scanticon Hotel and Conference Center
King of Prussia, PA

Nekocon
November 7-9
Hampton Roads Convention Center
Hampton, VA

Conventions, Bad:
(To which I direct my rage.)

AnimeBoston
March 21-23
Hynes Convention Center
Boston, MA

Conventions, Explanation:

First of all, at the moment, AnimeBoston can bite my ass. True, I don't have enough pride to not go, should the opportunity arise, but damn... I was sitting on their website the moment registration opened and was one of many who were shut out because of an error on their site. Since the Artist Alley filled up in 23 seconds despite this, I'm sure they don't care about those of us who missed out, and certainly I haven't seen any apology to anyone for it. Immediately after, I sent an inquiry about a dealer's room table, even though their information wasn't even posted yet, and got no reply. When it was posted, about a week later, nearly all of the tables were filled before that was posted. I sent a second inquiry, only to get a reply yet another week plus later to say that the tables were filled. This pretty much leaves me with nothing between mid-February and late June. RAGE

I wish I could go further afield, but I just can't figure out a way to get two people, our stuff, and our stock from point A to very far away point B and back in a timely and reasonably inexpensive manner. At least inexpensive enough to make the trip worthwhile. What I need is advice from artists who travel the country for their convention appearances. Are they all attending as guests and getting their tables/rooms/registrations comped?

Room Sharing

Right now, the only conventions where we have a full room are Otakon and Katsucon. Anyone attending the others, we're open to room-sharing, especially with other artists. For most of these, it'd be a maximum of two other people. The exceptions are Connecticon, where we have a room, but it's a king bed (we can bring an inflatable mattress or ask for a rollaway), and Nekocon, where we're in the Embassy Suites with two double beds and a pull-out sleeper sofa, meaning possibly up to four. For AnimeNext, we have a room in the Embassy Suites right next to the convention center, but only for Friday and Saturday nights (not Thursday), and it's a King Suite, but two others could take the pull-out sleeper sofa. We're especially interested in a solid, two-person roommate situation for AnimeUSA, as we're right in the convention hotel for a change.

Otaku Diet (see this post)

I've got a lot of thoughts on this one - looked into printing it as a t-shirt and a poster. The problem is a very risky and expensive initial layout, at the very least for the posters. No one seems to want to pay the $20 for the 13x19 poster I can print here, but in order to bring the price down to $10 or $15 for a 13x19 or 18x24", I'd have to print a run of at least 500. That's a tremendous amount of faith on a single picture. The situation is even worse for t-shirts. No one, simply no one, wants to wear a white t-shirt. I'm willing to give it a try again on using iron-on transfers for dark cloth, but in the past they've always been tricky at best and shirt-ruining at worst. I've hard a hard time stomaching the idea of ordering 500+ t-shirts and laying out several grand to get a halfway decent price per shirt. Introducing t-shirts into the sales mix would also be a stocking nightmare. Can you imagine the space a stack of 500 shirts would take up? Then how would I move them to cons, let alone have table space to sell them? It's quickly getting to the point where I need dealer's room table space.

----

Right now I wish I were napping, or at least working. I can't do either of those things with strange people in the house.

Spending a couple of hours at Mitsuwa on Sunday was enough to inspire this one.

Continuing my parade of females, and probably the last thing I'll do before AnimeUSA. Everyone's looking for Samus these days.

So I started re-watching Hellsing a few days ago. I'm already beyond where I stopped last time I tried to watch the series, and I'm enjoying it immeasurably more. I find Seras adorable, so she was a good choice to start out a new series that nimgrim and I have been talking about ever since the first hours of T-Mode.