Otakon 2023 – page 3
Some important context that I couldn’t find a way of fitting into the comic itself: the traffic situation surrounding Washington DC is… less than ideal. Basically, we were approaching the city from the opposite side of where the hotel was, and there’s just no way to drive directly there without some combination of (A.) sitting in hours of gridlock, (B.) dropping lots of cash on toll roads, or (C.) adding several extra hours of really long alternate routes through the country. Long story short, we had to park on the far-West end of the DC metro system to ride into town, to stay at a hotel north of DC in Silver Spring, both of which are a decent trek away from the Washington Convention Center at the heart of the city. So yeah, there was a loooot of sweaty foot travel over the course of this weekend… like, even more than usual for an anime convention.
Oh, and if anybody reading this feels like I should treat myself better and just spend the extra money to stay closer to the con, GOOD NEWS! YOUR GENEROUS CONTRIBUTIONS OVER ON PATREON COULD MAKE THAT POSSIBLE! Even just a few dollars a month would go a long way towards making sure I don’t have suffer heat exhaustion walking miles to and from sketchy hotels in the middle of a sweltering swamp ever again! In other words, if I have to do this again next year, it’s all YOUR fault! (That sounded a lot more obviously sarcastic in my head than it looks now that I’ve written it out)
Oh, and if that bit about “sketchy hotels” caught your attention, well, check back for page 4…
The real question being why on earth they choose to hold these things at the hottest time of the year, in a location with an abjectly miserable climate, and which is not just expensive for attendees to stay at but surely for the cost of the venue itself, and which is nowhere close to being centrally located for attendees from around the U.S., not to mention if you want guests from a particular foreign nation, to pick the part of the U.S. that requires them to endure 17 hour airplane flights to get there from that nation….never could figure that out. Just because it started there? That’s a lot of misery to endure just to continue a tradition! 🙂
When I start up my own Anime/Otaku convention, which I surely will do any day now, it’s going to the in the late Fall, in Denver. Or something like that. (Though with my luck there’ll be some bizarre heat wave making it 102 in Denver in November….)
Well, I can’t speak for the time issue, but I know that really big events like Otakon are restricted to places with venues big enough to hold them, which are unfortunately restricted to big cities busy enough to consistently use them. And the bigger they get, the more connections with surrounding establishments they need to function, which makes moving less and less do-able.
Of course, I just don’t like events this big in general, but that’s a whole thing unto itself.
I suppose that makes sense…a victim of their own success! Over 42000 this year, darn that’s a lot of people! Like having the entire town of Wake Forest stop by and visit you for the weekend! 🙂
Still, there’s no excuse for having it during the summer…but then again, having lived in the South for 50 years, I feel there’s no excuse for having anything during the summer! 😉
I’m sure it seemed a lot more reasonable back in the days when everything could be stuffed into a single hotel and people could just not go outside for several days straight.