Conventional Wisdom

(Historical Notes: Holy crap, Broken Matt Hardy first happened this long ago?  What the heck? *ahem* Anyway, I suppose there’s some unintended poetry in this last comic ending on “DELETE,” when that’s exactly what happened to Anime USA afterwards.  Yup, the more I reexamined my priorities and where my time/energy was being spent, the more I realized that AUSA just couldn’t stay on the schedule.  And that’s not just sour grapes over losing money in Artist Alley, either.  As long as I was still committed to going to AWA, a second convention so close just wasn’t reasonable.  Of course, what I had no way of knowing at the time was that this wasn’t just my last Anime USA for the foreseeable future, it’d be the last time EVER that I’d set foot inside the Wardman Park hotel.  They shut down like so many other hotels during 2020, and as I write this in 2021, the hotel’s owners have finalized plans to turn it all into apartments.  One can only hope that those apartments are easier to find your way around in than the hotel was.  I don’t feel like I EVER truly learned to find my way around that sprawling labyrinth.  But yeah, that’s all for AWA 2016, and if you’ve got any memories of your own, consider yourself encouraged to leave ’em in the comments!)