Conventional Wisdom

(Historical Notes: Okay, Past Me ABSOLUTELY avoided getting into the nitty gritty on this one.  Aside from the whole “not wanting to tick off the cons” thing, I think Past Me was still a bit embarrassed over what a bad job I’d done as a host the previous year and didn’t want to look like I was thinking too highly of myself.  But you know what?  No.  Even if this panel HAD already been approved for somebody else and I’d only taken over as host when he couldn’t go, and even if I STILL was an objectively bad main host, I still have totally valid grounds to say the con didn’t know what they were doing here.  I’ve already told you about how the room wasn’t set up when we got there, but that kind of dances around the bigger issue.  They scheduled Awesomely Bad Japanese Music Videos as a morning panel, the first one that room.  That is SO stupid!  Anybody who’s ever seen Awesomely Bad knows it’s an end of the day, last panel of the night sort of event.  The energy is TOTALLY wrong for a morning slot.  What’s more, that not-set-up room they stuck us in was one of the absolute smallest ones, which the panel was WAY too big for.  The poor schmuck staffer who was supposed to be our liaison in the room all panel couldn’t even get in the room until the panel was over half-way done because he was having to run crowd control with all the overflow lined up outside.  You know, the sort of thing security or somebody else was already supposed to be doing so he could come in and do his ACTUAL job.  And, of course, when he finally DID managed to get inside, he had no idea what we were doing and it was way too late to catch him up and… it was just a mess.  AWA is so far outside of Awesomely Bad’s usual stomping grounds, I’d always had the sense that nobody there really understood what they were getting into.  This whole experience really confirmed it.  This was my last time doing anything panel-related at AWA, and I can’t say I missed it afterwards.

And, of course, I’ve got to link to the comic this one’s referencing.)