Conventional Wisdom

Now, just to be clear, most cons that know what they’re doing deliberately enforce a buffer zone between the end of one panel and the beginning of the next one, specifically to ensure that the host of the next panel actually have time to set up after the previous panel clears out.  In fact, Animazement left a whole half hour on the schedule between events, just to avoid pile-ups.  The thing is, though, most panelist ALSO use that extra time as a bit of a “grace period” to run a little overtime.  We’re all at least a little guilty of it, no matter how much we complain about OTHER people doing it, and the industry guests in particular can REEEAAALLy get away with taking forever to clear out.  So that made it all the more surprising when, even BEFORE the half-hour marker, the room for where Awesomely Bad was happening had already been completely cleared out.  Like, TOTALLY empty, and completely clean too!  Honestly, it looked like whatever was supposed to happen before us might have been canceled or something, though I don’t pay enough attention to either the schedule or con gossip to know if that actually happened or not.  All I know is, after getting all psyched up to be stuck in a crowded hall for at least half an hour, then scrambling to get everything set up in, like, five minutes, we turned out to have an absolutely DECADENT amount of time to set up.  That was pretty darn nice.

In fact, this was one of the more fun Awesomely Bad experiences I’d had in a while.  Obviously, finally getting to do the Manos cosplay we’d talked about for years set things off on the right foot, and the unusually stress-free set up helped too, but just in general I feel like this was one of the more fun crowds we’ve had for this nonsense.  Awesomely Bad is like pro wrestling, the right crowd is an absolutely essential ingredient.