Setsucon was a success by backcountry one-day event standards. Lots of kids in costume, with a dusting of college-age kids & parents keeping an eye on the herd. I ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with the Duartes from the Con, who were taking out the traveling cosplay photography suite for a test-drive at a local convention, since they live in State College, doing postgrad studies in their respective fields. That seemed to be more of a success than I would have predicted - perhaps that particular budget item *won't* be the dead loss I thought it would be. I ended up getting the "elder statesman" treatment by a few of the staffers, which was kind of peculiar. Oh, well. I've spent worse Saturdays. I expect they'll run another one next year - perhaps they'll be able to get the hotel rooms to support a full weekend next time, assuming they can find a weekend without some sort of athletic event soaking up all the loose hotel space in town.

There's going to be a one-day anime minicon in State College tomorrow, something called Setsucon, run by the anime club on campus. It doesn't seem to be much of a muchness, but I wasn't going to be doing anything this weekend but playing Campaign: Vicksburg, reading Basara, and watching DVDs, so what the heck. At-door registration is $15, and they are running in the Days Inn Penn State, which was the location of the first anime con on the east coast back in '94. So: nostalgia time!

The Days Inn has gentrified a bit since the period when it was the typical venue for comic cons and similar planned, fannish affairs. It was quite posh the last time I stopped in. I had heard that they didn't "do" fan cons anymore, but the anime club people talked their way in - at least in part by agreeing to not run a con suite, if I understand correctly. So be prepared to feed yourself without aid of free con-provided potato chips and soda. The time I ran a con there, we got too much of the stuff and ended up grazing off of the leftovers for two or three months afterwards... the days when you could actually run con suites for anime cons has been long gone, at least for my crowd. Oh, well.

Don't expect any sort of extravaganza, and I doubt there'll be all that many people from outside of the county, knowing the current anime scene. But if you're in town, I'll be around. Look for the heavily-bearded guy in flannel and jeans. If the clutch of cosplayers who seem to be planning to come show, I should stand out by failing to stand out. Like a big ol' blotch of grey in the middle of a Jackson Pollack.

Man, Skip Beat rocks. I started reading the fourth volume over breakfast and was almost late to work because I sat & read it all the way through. The "Secret Language of Angels" story wrapped up about like I expected, if a bit more upbeat than it could have gone. The rest of it was fun with variety show chaos, which isn't something to spit on, really. Who can hate Japanese variety show wackiness?