Anime USA 2016 – page 6
(Historical Notes: Okay, half of this comic won’t make sense to people who can’t remember fleeting news stories from seven years ago. The rest won’t make sense to anybody who never went to the Wardman Park hotel when it was open. There was some kind of big DOS attack that Friday that pretty much shut down the whole Internet for the entire Eastern half of the United States, but it didn’t really change things THAT much for anybody in Artist Alley because the Internet down there sucked anyway. I can remember multiple instances of dealers with card readers having to leave their tables, head all the way down the hall, and take the escalator up to the main level just to get a good enough signal to actually swipe the card. Admittedly, I’m not sure where else the convention COULD have put Artist Alley or the Dealer’s Room, but being down below still was as inconvenient as it was isolating. This is another place where I need to remember to come back and include a link to one of the Patreon comics when I finally get that Public Gallery set up, because there’s a good one on this very subject.)
Yeah, that hotel had one of the weirder layouts I’ve ever seen. AUSA was good about finding hotels that had the strangest ways of building their underground level ballrooms and exhibit hall spaces.
Heck for a few years I didn’t even know about that third wing of rooms that was off on the far side of the building from where artist alley and the game room was that you took an elevator DOWN from the lobby level to get to. What a weird venue.
I still say the Wardman Park had some of Winchester House curse going on where the place would become haunted if they ever stopped building new wings or extensions and THAT’S why everything was so sprawling.
Maybe THAT’S why the owners of the property are shutting it down? When everything closed in 2020, that unleashed the ghosts, and now the only way to capture them again is to turn everything into apartments?
Makes as much sense as the actual hotel layout ever did.
No joke, even now I have trouble looking at pictures taken in there and figuring out where they were taken in relation to each other. It all just meshes into an M.C. Escher tangle.