Back in my Exfanding days, I wrote at length about attending Otakon, PAX East, and New York Comic-Con. I've been to other conventions since then—Castle Point Anime Convention and Trekonderoga, off the top of my head—but you'd never know it from this blog. It's been several years since I've posted anything about a convention experience, and my last attempt was essentially a self-reminder to have fun at conventions. I must have internalized my own advice pretty well, because I had a fantastic weekend at AnimeNEXT 2018.

...Wait, didn't I just get back from AnimeNEXT 2019? Apparently I've been sitting on a half-written convention writeup for the past 11-12 months, so I'd better discuss last year before moving on to this year. Here goes.

THURSDAY

I scooted out of work a bit early, picked up my wife, and began the trek to Atlantic City, NJ. My wife and I are relics from the era of putting together mix tapes for car trips, so she had burned a CD for the occasion: an assortment of intro and ending songs from anime series we'd watched together in the last few years. There's nothing like tunes from Bleach, Silver Spoon, Restaurant to Another World, Kill la Kill, Yuri on Ice!!, Himouto! Umaru-chan, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Valerian and Laureline, Magical Girl Ore, Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits, Bodacious Space Pirates, Free!, Orange, Little Witch Academia, and the original Devilman to get you pumped for sitting around in traffic. And there's nothing like the preceding list of titles to get you to question our taste in anime.

Our first destination was actually just outside Atlantic City—we had a room reserved at the historic Joseph Pitney House in Absecon. Ever since our honeymoon, my wife and I have been staying at bed and breakfasts instead of hotels whenever we have the opportunity; the food, hospitality, and unique charm are often as memorable as whatever we're in town to see or do, plus we tend to get better prices and quieter neighbors than we would at a hotel. We arrived fairly late in the evening, picked up our room key, visited the always-open snack pantry for some homemade shortbread, and settled into our spacious room.

We missed the window to check in early at the convention, so we didn't have our schedules and program booklets to be able to plan out our first day. Instead, my wife doodled around on her tablet while I read a book (specifically, Live From New York, a fascinating and highly entertaining collection of interviews recalling the first few decades of Saturday Night Live). My wife laughed about how we were spending the first night of our vacation doing exactly what we'd be doing at home. "Yeah," I responded, "but we don't have to worry about cleaning, or cooking, or going to work tomorrow; everything's taken care of, and we can relax without feeling like there's something else we should be doing."

I cannot begin to articulate how comfortable the bed was—once my head hit the pillow, the world beyond the bed ceased to exist. It was magnificent.

FRIDAY

The world beyond the bed reasserted its existence at 5:30 AM. My wife had a different costume planned for each day of the convention, and today's required over 2 hours to prepare. Taking into account when breakfast would be served, how long it might take to find parking at or near the venue, and how long the registration line was likely to be, we resigned ourselves to an unpleasantly early morning. Fortunately, I was cosplaying as "dude attending an anime convention," so I went back to sleep.

Eventually, I left the bed to pursue the "and breakfast" part of the arrangement, and it was delightful. Vanilla yogurt parfait with granola and berries (I'm not big on berries, but I'll eat them if sprinkled sparingly on yogurt parfait), followed by a two-egg omelet and a glass of orange juice—enough to fuel me through the start of the convention.

I get anxious driving around unfamiliar urban areas, what with their endless traffic lights and surprise one-way streets and claustrophobia-inducing architecture right up against the sidewalks, but the drive to the convention center was downright pleasant. There was plenty of parking onsite at the convention center—and as I would later discover, there were several food vendors and even a train station onsite, making this the most convenient convention venue I think I've ever been to.

I remember PAX East being obnoxious because the layout made no sense and there were waiting lines for everything (my wife refers to it as "Line Con"). I remember it taking forever to get around Comic-Con because of the incredible masses of people everywhere. The last Otakon I attended was uncomfortably over capacity, to the point where even the restaurants outside the convention center were overrun by otaku at all hours. As a midsized convention in a well-organized space, AnimeNEXT had none of these problems. The convention never got in the way of the convention, if that makes sense.

AnimeNEXT had the dealers' room, video game room, and concerts on the second floor; all the panels and screenings on the third floor; and all the niche events and novelty rooms (eg, the Cosplay Repair room, which I think is a brilliant idea) on the fourth floor. Escalators were plentiful and logically placed; and the design of the convention center gave every level a good view of the ground floor, where audience-participation events such as a cosplay wrestling tournament would occasionally occur. I also have to credit the building staff—from the folks in the parking garage to the folks at the front desk—for being friendly the entire weekend, and for being incredibly helpful every time I approached them with a question (mostly pertaining to food).

Of course, the first order of business was getting through the registration line. Ahead of us in the lobby was a group with one person cosplaying as Shrek, and someone in the group periodically used their smartphone to play a selection from the Shrek soundtrack to get us pumped for standing around in line. We struck up conversations with other attendees as the line snaked back and forth, commenting on one person's clever "Shyguys Burgers and Fries" t-shirt, praising an excellent Castle Crashers costume, and asking about a superb Stephen Universe cosplay we didn't recognize because we'd never seen Stephen Universe. I swear this was an anime convention.

Oh, but that was just the line to get into the registration line. Once we made it through the big doors into the registration area (which was the size of a basketball court), we split off into the queue for people who preregistered for tickets. There we encountered new cosplayers, such as Blair from Soul Eater, whom I mistook for I-No from Guilty Gear because my brain still thought we were at a video game convention. The hardest part of appreciating convention cosplay is that, as my wife put it, it's like playing one big trivia game all weekend. "Name that character." Which gets harder and harder with every passing year, thanks to new characters I've never heard of and old characters who've slipped my mind.

Case in point: my wife was cosplaying as Ujibe, the coach from Keijo!!!!!!!! (yes, there really are that many exclamation points in the title), and not a single person made any indication that they recognized her. This was a little heartbreaking to me, knowing the effort she had put into this costume. She had painstakingly reviewed clips and screencaps from the show to ensure every detail of her outfit was accurate. She had hand-dyed her shirt in an involved process using tea and tumeric. She had hand-stitched the clover logo on the shirt (never mind that it was rotated 45 degrees; it was late, she was tired). She had spent the morning styling her wig and beauty mark to precise specifications. I was proud of her for what she pulled off.

Granted, Ujibe is a side character in an anime that a lot of people might not admit to watching, on account of its subject matter. (I swear I watched it for the story, but it's about girls in bathing suits hitting each other with their butts.) However, I think my wife hit the nail on the head: she believes people just aren't accustomed to seeing plus-size women cosplaying as plus-size women. If people assumed my wife was pretending to be one of the bajillion characters as scrawny as Sailor Moon, of course they wouldn't recognize her costume. This would account for why one dude thought she was the 4chan mascot.

Anydigression, as soon as we cleared the registration line, we sat down with our schedules and mapped out the first half of our day. I marked up anything that seemed remotely interesting (I wanted backup plans, in case anything was a dud or too full to get into), but I opted to follow my wife around whenever there was any overlap in our interests. Our last Otakon was marred by the logistical frustrations of trying to meet back up with people after going off to do our own things, and I was more concerned about having a fun convention together than getting to do and see everything I wanted most.

Japanese Feminism 101: In our first dynamic panel of the day, we waited about half an hour for the presenter to show up. Around 11:35, one of the convention staff wandered in to see why we were sitting around in an empty room. Apparently, there had been schedule changes since the agenda was printed.

Look, I understand that plans change. But nobody at registration told us about it. Nobody put up a sign. Although we later discovered that the most current room schedule was displayed in a tiny box beside the door, that didn't help anyone trying to plan their day before they got to the room. I asked the staff at the information desk whether they had a list of corrections to the printed agenda. Not only did they seem surprised about there being schedule changes, but they directed me to view the updated schedule online—which is a poor solution for anyone who doesn't have a smartphone or has to deal with roaming data in a place with no public Wi-Fi. We eventually noticed a widescreen monitor rotating all the events and their locations for the next couple hours—not ideal, but better than nothing.

Game the Gamer: With an unexpected hole in our schedule and the dealers' room not yet open to the public, we wandered over to the only event that wasn't already deeply in progress. The premise of "Cutthroat Kitchen, with Wii games" sounded like a decent use of the next hour, but I started to lose interest when too much time was being spent auctioning off more sabotages than I felt were necessary for the first round. I stuck around long enough to see one of the contestants attempt WarioWare: Smooth Moves while handcuffed to a chair; my wife stayed for the whole thing, but I headed out somewhere around when they were trying to get someone to play Smash Bros. with a Wii bowling ball.

Kaibyo: The Supernatural Cats of Japan: I'm sorry I missed the beginning of this, because I'm interested in Japanese mythology and folklore, the presenter (Zack Davisson) was very engaging, and I'm enough of a cat person that my wife and I meow at each other as a form of communication. At least I got there in time to laugh about cats who gain power from wearing silly things on their head, see the tragic portrait of a cat minstrel playing a shamisen (an instrument that would have been partially constructed of cat leather), and learn about the origin of Japan's fondness for catgirls. The Japanese government at one point prohibited artists from drawing or painting people of a certain social variety (eg, prostitutes)—and the artists cleverly got around the issue by creating the exact same art, but with anthropomorphic cats instead of humans.

Lunch: I think I had a barbecue chicken wrap. I'm not a big wrap guy, but that's what they served at Esquires, the food stand in the train station attached to the convention center. I don't know about you, but I don't think of wraps when I hear "Esquires."

Finding Your Anime Voice: I popped in a bit late for what I hoped would be a panel on doing different voices, which would have been helpful for me on Twitch and YouTube with all the dialogue I read aloud while playing games. Unfortunately, the part for which I was present consisted mostly of random audience members trying to speak in a different register (eg, head voice) with minimal coaching. I left after maybe 5 minutes.

Dealers' Room: With an unexpected hole in my schedule and the dealers' room now open to the public, I meandered down to peruse the treasure trove. Geekery in every format was for sale—posters, wall scrolls, books, clothes, figurines, body pillows, DVDs, video games, and so on. Normally, this is where most of my convention budget goes, but I found myself exercising an unexpected amount of self-control.

Much of the merchandise was from new anime series that I hadn't seen or didn't have a special attachment to, so that helped. But I'm also in a different phase of my life than I was the last time I attended a convention with this much for sale. There's very little I actually want anymore—and I'm subscribed to the Star Trek Official Starships Collection, so shelf space in my home is at a premium like never before. I think about all the other ways I could be using my money—bills, charities, clothes that fit.

To that end, one of the few things I bought for myself was a t-shirt mashing up Mega Man and Iron Man. I also picked up a copy of the NES game Faxanadu, which has been on my radar for a while, as well as a RWBY poster. I'm particularly happy with the poster, because I had a similar image as a desktop wallpaper for a while and I love the multi-panel aesthetic.

HIATUS

Then I saved this post as a draft and didn't come back to it for almost a year.

My original intention was to pick up where I left off, using the online schedule for 2018 (with the numerous updates not reflected on my print schedule) to jog my memory and organize my storytelling. However, at the time of this post, I can only find online schedules for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017...and 2019. As much as I want to keep going with the blow-by-blow recap, I recognize that this is a good excuse to scale back the verbosity and focus on the highlights. Nobody needs to hear about the mediocre pizza I ate.

I could regale you with tales of the three minutes I spent at an 18+ panel that I thought would be like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for adults only, but ended up being a YouTuber showing us his skeevy hentai game playthrough videos and creepily talking over his own recorded commentary. I could gush about Anime Burger Time, the BYOB (Bring Your Own Burger) panel where the host chowed down on Johnny Rockets while showing us clips of hamburgers appearing in various anime. I could recount what I recall of the Mazinger Z: Infinity movie, or of the Gaijin Girl: Life in Japan presentation. I could describe the hilarious Bad Anime Bad! panel and invoke the infamous names Garzey's Wing and Titanic: The Legend Goes On.

Instead, I'll attempt to work some untold stories into my writeup of AnimeNEXT 2019, where they'll still be relevant due to how often I found myself thinking back to 2018. If I write in a less comprehensive and detail-oriented format, I may even finish before the 2020 convention. In the meantime, please enjoy some photos from 2018, which we'll pretend are the intended conclusion to this post.

NOTE: If you (you, the reader) are in any of the photos below and don't want to be featured here, or if you'd like to be credited, please let me know (see the main page for contact options) and I'll action your request accordingly.

First up, a couple scenes from the convention in general:

A couple characters I don't recognize, but their costumes looked cool:

Some woman I'm married to, cosplaying as Tamako from Silver Spoon and then Ujibe from Keijo!!!!!!!! in an alternate outfit:

Umaru from Himouto! Umaru-chan, Uno and Nico from Nanbaka, Ryuko from Kill La Kill, and Dark Samus from the Metroid Prime series:

Nora, Ruby, and Yang from RWBY:

Buncha characters from the Phoenix Wright series:

Lastly, some group cosplay from Fullmetal Alchemist, Black Lagoon, and Gurren Lagann:

Ah, but that's not all. Carrying on with a tradition my wife started at the 2011 New York Comic-Con, I purchased a sketchbook and went around collecting doodles from the people at the booths in artist alley (regardless of whether they were an artist or just the person looking after the booth). These weren't formal commissions; rather, I asked for whatever they felt like drawing, if they felt like drawing anything in the first place. No pressure, no restrictions. Surprisingly, only one person drew genitalia.

Here are the sketches I collected—and as with the photos above, please contact me if your art is featured here and you'd like it to be removed or credited:

So there you have it. AnimeNEXT 2018. At least, as much of it as is contained in this post.

Collecting art is a funny thing for me. Geeky memorabilia notwithstanding, there's relatively little in my home that I myself have collected for the sake of putting on display...but I'm my no means an implacable art critic or a hater of the visual arts. I like small souvenirs of the neat places I've visited—a model lighthouse here, a golden trolley there—and I appreciate certain examples of painting and photography as much as anyone. Glass, stone, and metal are materials I find interesting in raw form, let alone crafted into something deliberately for display. There's plenty of art I could collect, but unlike practically anything else I collect, I approach each piece like I'm getting married to it.

Collectables from my favorite fandoms are easy. Do I like it? Can I afford it? Decision made. Putting fictional worlds into tangible form brings my escapist fantasies closer to reality, on top of looking cool. Collecting objects purely for their decorative properties—and perhaps for some sentimental value, depending on the circumstances—is another matter entirely. Art is often an investment. Can I justify spending boo-hah bucks on a painting that fills a space on the wall that could otherwise be covered with a cheap-but-awesome poster? Art is often impractical. I can always pick up my model spaceships and fly them around the house if I want to give them a more practical function as playthings (I'm grown-up enough to admit I still do this sometimes), but swinging around a statue of The Thinker can only end in calamity, if we've learned anything from Phoenix Wright. If all I'm going to do is look at the thing, it's gotta be visually interesting to the point where I can justify paying money to have it in my house and taking up space for the rest of my life.

Suddenly I'm wondering if marriage was the best comparison to use here.

All I'm getting at is that collecting art is, to me, not something I do without careful consideration. I've since turned my attention elsewhere from some of my earlier favorite fandoms, but if you gave me an Inspector Gadget action figure or a Fraggle Rock poster, I'd gladly put them on display—remembering the times when those were big influences makes me happy, and I never really stopped being a fan. I don't know that I'd say the same about some of the more traditional art I've considered over the years; tastes change, and I would be doing myself a disservice to commit to bringing such an investment into my life strictly because I think it's pretty at this particular moment. If I'm going to be serious about collecting art, I want the object of my interest to fascinate me, transform a room by its presence, start compelling conversations, be a suitable companion no matter where my life may lead me, and look nice. But that last part's just a bonus.

Suddenly I think marriage might've been the right comparison after all.

I wonder how long things will last. In general. Things. This blog post—will you still be able to find it in another 200 years? My NES games—will I still be able to play Final Fantasy on the original hardware once I hit retirement age? The fun little notes my wife puts in my lunches--I'm saving them, but will anyone else, after I'm gone? Our legacy to our possible future children: a box full of Post-It Note doodles. What, you were expecting an inheritance?

I'm a pack rat, but not nearly as bad as I used to be. I've moved my collections of Who Knows What; Haven't Looked At It In A Decade from one home to the next over the last several years, and I've grown weary of hanging onto stuff that might become relevant again someday. When I trash or donate things, what happens to them? I wonder if that tiny Star Wars Dagobah playset I gave away is still in good hands, or whether it got swept away in a toy purge, half-eaten by the cat, or tossed into a forgotten container in a closet somewhere. Does a remnant of my first car still exist in a landfill somewhere?

People, even. At this moment, I have 4,895 subscribers on my YouTube channel. Will those same people be watching my videos a decade from now? Will I be making new videos a decade from now? Will there even be a place to upload new videos a decade from now? Part of me wants to still be recording when I'm an old man, playing Mega Man 38 for the grandkids of my original viewers, and complaining about how I can't get Final Fantasy to work on the original hardware.

Even if every tangible thing is destined to break down and wear out in time, how long will we be remembered—individuals, cultures, the human race itself? How far into the future will our influence reach? I think of all the time-travel stories where the littlest details of timeline disruption have no lasting impact on history, and then of all the time-travel stories where the tiniest action leads to a future where it rains doughnuts and Biff Tannen owns the world. It's interesting to think about the fate of our stuff and the legacy of the people around us. Makes the crucial seem less crucial, and the trivial seem less trivial.

It's no secret I'm a fan of Star Trek. Perhaps you've seen my necktie with the Original Series cast on it, or the Next Generation lunchbox I had in elementary school, or the Deep Space Nine graphic novel I picked up on my last big comic shop run, or my review of Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force on GameFAQs, or the model Enterprise NX-01 that served as a makeshift star atop my Christmas tree last year.

Perhaps you've seen my collection of three sets of the Star Trek: The Next Generation PEZ dispensers.

The first one I brought home from the gift-swapping segment of last year's company holiday party. The second one I received from my family for this past Christmas. The third one came from a friend just this weekend. Now, I do collect PEZ dispensers, and I think it's the coolest thing in the world that my friends, family, and coworkers were thinking of me, and spotted this nifty gift that I otherwise wouldn't have known existed. It's also become a ridiculous running gag that I keep getting these PEZ dispensers.

This isn't the first time this has happened, though. I bought myself a Mega Man E-Tank mug when I first saw them on ThinkGeek. Then a friend bought one for me. Then another friend bought the Fangamer version of the mug for me. Don't get me wrong—I'm still appreciative, and you can never have too many mugs. (That's a lie. You can. But all of these see frequent use.)

But wait, there's more!

A friend sent me an e-mail the other day with a link to a plush Mega Buster and Mega Man helmet set that can be used both for cosplay and as a stylish pillow. I thought this was hysterical, and very clever. Then someone posted the same link to my Facebook timeline. And then another person.

ME: Oh, jeez. #3 person to share this. I should clear some room in the back closet in anticipation of Christmas...
FRIEND: Nah, I'm broke. Maybe you should just diversify your interests?
ME: I ALSO LIKE MEGA MAN X, THANK YOU.

Aside from Star Trek and Mega Man being the two fandoms I talk about most often--in large part because I'm slowly but actively watching through every episode of every Star Trek with my wife, and because I'm locked into in the Mega Man mindset thanks to daily comments on my YouTube videos—I suspect part of the issue here is that many of my other interests are more obscure, rarely seem to come up in conversation, and/or are tricky to buy for. I can tell you I like listening to James Taylor, but that narrows your options down to buying a CD I most likely already have, or springing for pricey concert tickets (which my parents have done twice now, because they are very cool parents). I can tell you I liked that Ralston Batman cereal they made for a limited time in the late '80s, but your response will be, "What the heck am I supposed to do with that information!?"

Star Trek and Mega Man are more mainstream than they've ever been thanks to J.J. Abrams, Mega Man 9-10, and all the merchandise and publicity that have gone with them; you'll never come across something like The Space Quest Companion as a gift idea unless you're doing some intense research, and know I'm enough of a Space Quest fan to be interested in something like that in the first place. I only pay attention to all the old, obscure stuff you can't get anymore, anyhow; anything that's mainstream, brand-new, and related to my interests is a great gift idea.

Still, I'm wondering what to do with these other two PEZ dispenser sets that doesn't involve painting them with goatees and evil eyebrows to make them look like they're from the Mirror Universe.