Conventional Wisdom

Just to be clear, I’ve been ducking out of cons early to find something else to do with myself long before this, so it’s not just me dunking on Cosplay America here.  Still, I did wind up heading out at the same time as I would at one of those cons in Charlotte, despite having two hours less of a commute to worry about.

I did have a more practical reason for ducking out, though.  Especially attentive readers already know that I decided to set ConCONcon at this exact hotel, just as a little in-joke between myself and North Carolina otaku of a certain vintage.  The problem with said in-joke, however, was that I didn’t start obsessively taking pictures of every empty hall of the convention center until around a decade after Animazement moved out of the Sheraton Imperial, so I had to rely entirely on the limited supply of stock photos I could find online.  NOT ANYMORE, THOUGH!  Yes, it may be objectively absurd that I bailed on a convention in order to go take pictures of an entirely different hotel, but now I’ve got supply of all-new background resources to use for ConCONcon 2022 and beyond!  That’s at least SOMEWHAT justifiable, right?  …though, admittedly, I still didn’t get QUITE as many pictures as I would have liked.  Even when I went back on Sunday, there was still a lot of wedding stuff left up in the back half of the convention center, so I guess I’ll still have to get creative if I want to draw any comics about ConCONcon’s Artist Alley or the Dealer’s Room.  That, or go back down there in the MIDDLE of the week, when there’s definitely not going to be an event going on.  (The idea thing would be to book a room at the place for a night, since I also don’t have any nightime pics or anything up in the actual hotel section, but Lord knows I don’t have that kind of money to blow on taking some pictures.)

Oh, and just for the record, there wasn’t actually a wedding going on at that very moment, just the set up.  But still, even if I’d avoided the parts where they were setting up the wedding stuff, I still wouldn’t have been able to take any pictures without looking like I was creeping on a bunch of elderly Indian people.