Conventional Wisdom

Well now, this sure took longer than expected, didn’t it?  Yeah, this is pretty embarrassing, to the point that there’s probably gonna be a comic specifically about it later on.  Suffice to say, I’m gonna need to start being a lot more strict about not doing convention stuff anywhere NEAR the holiday season.  That or, like, get all of my Christmas stuff done in August or something.

Anyway, to elaborate on what I was saying a million years ago, the hotel staff were definitely over-aggressive at trying to maintain order, but at the same time I’ve been around this crowd too long to not have at least SOME sympathy for them.  Because yeah, I’m exaggerating the details here for comedic effect, but the bit about hotel staff literally RUNNING up to a group of revelers to keep them from making a racket in the lobby is one hundred percent real.  And while it doesn’t really come across in this context, you need to understand that the Waverly is one of those hotels that’s basically a giant box.  The hotel lobby is a big empty space on the bottom floor, and all the rooms are lining the walls up to the top.  So if you make a racket in the lobby, you’re basically making a racket right outside the door of every single room in the place.  I can remember well in previous years hearing the booming sounds of full on dance parties deep into Saturday night, so I’m all for the hotel trying to keep things less crazy this time around,  I just with they had a better way of going about it.  (Also, I have a whole second theory about the state of the hotel that’s already been hinted at, but it deserves a whole comic unto itself… which hopefully will take less time than this one did).

Oh, and if you’re wondering what the heck “Aiko Invention Playtime” is, don’t worry, you’re not going nuts (yet).  That’s one of the made-up anime I’ve been concocting for those Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes blogs I do for Patreon (a new one will be up by the end of the month!). The ACTUAL thing the staff shut down was just a conga line of people chanting “BUC-EE’S! BUC-EE’S” while fully decked out in branded merch… and can I just say that I had NO idea Buc-ee’s was such a THING until this weekend?  Like, I’ve been aware the chain existed for a while, but we don’t have any here in NC (yet) so it wasn’t until I was back in Georgia for the first time in a while that I actually got to see the cult in action.  It’s just funny that, during a while week at an anime convention, the most rabid fandom I encountered was for a gas station.