TL;DR – I partied too hardily, so tired, didn’t get to do all I wanted to do.

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A fellow wota has one nice schedule that he was sharing with people on his social network attending Otakon. It sort of sums up my feeling about Otakon this year.

Despite being located a 3-hour drive away from home, Otakon is my home con in that I feel at home there. I am familiar with it. The con is run, for the past decade plus, by the same group of people. For better or worse, it brings a strong continuity and a sense of familiarity to the convention that I’ve been attending since I was way younger. And I’ve met all kind of people via Otakon as an offkai. Don’t offkai at cons, they say, but that’s only because it misses the fact that America is huge-large and it’s in this context of physical reality shaping cultural sensibilities that one can have a home con at all. It doesn’t seem like a strange concept, but it makes you wonder how do Tokyoites feel about the events that happen year-round in the city, versus some countryside hick and the few events they have locally.

Enough about that. My seventeenth-to-be Otakon is shaping up to be a chill weekend. A major programming track called “Yoshiki” is largely off my schedule due to non-interest. I guess I could splurge for his MSG show with the rest of the X-Japan crew if I must, but I just can’t spare the energy–attention span–to mark and process it. There are just too much else going on that I can barely keep up with.

For once, Otakon is going to be focused on hanging out. There is still plenty of logistical challenges that face the fans following the GOH tracks I follow, plus the usual ones that almost everyone has to deal with. So let’s see. Like how to score some time to eat dinner on Friday.

Baltimore RW week begins last week and continues into the next. This means some good deals for people who want to eat a little more upscale.

There is a possibility that panel tickets will be in play this year for autograph sessions, which applies mainly for ALTIMA and Hayami Saori. ALTIMA might have an autograph session after their concert, it’s not certain and it may not be likely. There are not much in terms of changes in how Otakon is suppose to do autographs (and the fact that you can find out well before the con is a huge plus for Otakon and how it works the thing), but they are using a new space this year, in the Hyatt. We’ll see how that turns out. More info here.

Opening ceremony might be worth going to just to catch Ojou/Sats/Motsu before her show during the day. Hayamin supposedly has a rough schedule and might only be at the con in a meaningful sense on Saturday. Gotta play that by ear.

I’m a big sucker for Mai Mai Miracle, and I think Katabuchi can do it…as in, become a popular anime filmmaker. The question is how. He is going to talk about his new film at Otakon and I might even make it to the first panel where he’s going to talk about it. There’s an art exhibition, which hopefully I can catch at some point during the weekend. One last thing, his birthday is on Sunday, 8/10.

Matsubara-san is also a cool bro. I just hope I can make his programs without issues, at least he has a bunch of them. Play by ear. It’s a bit like Katabuchi, I met both of them before so the urgency is less about attending their programing, over the people I didn’t. It’s times like this that makes me feel a weekend for Otakon is just too short.

The Baltimore Ravens and SF Giants play a pre-season game on Thursday. I know one guy who’s going to see it. I also know I will do my best to avoid all that traffic. Sport-wise, the St. Louis Cardinals are in town Friday to Sunday for a series with the Os. STL fans travel well, but probably not in large droves as Yankees fans do for Baltimore. Both the Cards and Os are (birds, and) doing well so it should be a fun inter-league match.

I totally don’t have the CIA guys on my radar, but it would be nice to say hello to them.

There will be a Real Escape Game event at Otakon. I would like to try it, actually, but who knows if timing would work. Presumably you just sign up for a session?

Peelander-Z will be at the Otakon Matsuri. That’s a free show on Thursday.

Aniplex has a Game Show… And they’re giving away some freebie at Hayamin’s panel. Usually Aniplex guests will do an autograph session for their booth, but it doesn’t sound like that’s happening. Well, who knows.

ALTIMA has only one full studio album on their discography, so it’s easy to guess what they will perform at the show. It probably won’t be too far from what they did in Europe. The question is which songs they will cover, and if we’ll get lucky with any of Maon’s (or even motsu or Sats’s) discography. I’m okay with the KOTOKO songs Sats wrote, if they choose to do those.

A particular P is trying to get a bunch of notes for Hayamin. Not sure how he will collect it but it will make a nice memento, I hope.

Meanwhile I still can’t quite find my copy of Love Plus+, so I can’t import my latest save…don’t really want to start over. I’ll probably still get my game box signed, though. I have all those.

I hope I can wrap up all that I have to do before I take off, and that looks to be a list that gets long each time I glance at it. Sigh.

Otakon is doing info desk duty using social media this year–there’s a SMS line, twitter and a ticketing system?

So, as you can see, even in such a laid back Otakon schedule-wise in terms of priority, it’s still conflict hell full of strife and programing inefficiencies.

It’s about three weeks to Otakon, and Otakon still has one guest to announce for their Sunday music showcase. For those of you unfamiliar with North America’s second largest anime convention (boasting probably close to 35000 unique attendees for this year), in recent years Otakon employed their main events each day in this way: Friday night features a concert, Saturday night features the masquerade, and Sunday afternoon the second concert. For the 20th Otakon they did things differently by doing a concert on Saturday instead of Friday so they can reinstate the MST3K event that Otakon used to do, but that was just for last year. Also, it made renting the Baltimore’s First Mariner Arena more feasible.

Again, it’s about three weeks to Otakon. As mentioned before ALTIMA is Otakon’s Friday guest. We have no idea who will be for Sunday yet. Three weeks is a magical period of time because of how the airline industry works. Booking too close to the date of the event and you will be paying out of your nose, and there are rarely any deals closer than 21 days prior. That’s not to mention availability of flights. So yeah, good luck, west coast bros.

The great thing about Otakon is that the management knows this. In fact it’s not just them. Knowing however is only half the battle. It is all too common with multi-party negotiations though, that if working with these third parties things invariably can get drawn out and delayed. Japan will take its time. There might be something unexpected that delay the process, who knows. What makes Otakon slightly better, in my estimates, compared to others, is how they work to avoid these issues that comes with the process. Because knowing means you can try to mitigate these external factors. Emphasis here is try.

Because, let’s face it, these things happen all the time. I’m grateful for the opportunities these large or mid-size cons provide, to make a concerted effort and bring over Japanese guests who worked on anime or what not. But in the end it’s these little things that distinguishes a great con from just a good con. It’s the difference between being able to meet one hardcore JP fan at the con versus a dozen of them. It’s the difference between going to a con or not going to a con for me, if it’s not a con already on my agenda that year.

As someone who had a jolly time hanging out with said JP fans at AN and Acen this year, it makes a difference to me. I guess it’s just something that can’t be helped. But is it? I think it can, even if it is very difficult. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the enjoyment of fans going to a con directly hinges on the competencies of the con management. I’m just numerating a clear example of it. Some things might matter more or less to some people. Some might not matter at all to just about no one. I wonder if you’ve got a group of experienced con managers (like Otakon has in the past few years), this is one way they can iteratively level-up how they run a con and squeeze that last drop of enjoyment from the whole endeavor. And since JP guests cost so much resources to bring over, why not maximize the experience for the fans who enjoy the guests? Go all the way.

But then again you still have the situation we’re seeing today. It’s three weeks till Otakon. Do you know where your guests are?

PS. On the flip side, Otakon hotel cancellation deadline is Friday, so if they announce the music guest Thursday and it’s a hit for you, you might have a shot at getting hotel space. Hotel space is likely not the most important item for attendees, but it’s probably second most important for a lot of people.