Rhapsodies

I must admit I haven’t done Sakura-Con for a while. I used to, in fact I was the official photographer for the first three years back when it was still called Baka-con. I’d spend the whole weekend there and when I say that I mean the WHOLE weekend doing a totally masochistic marathon mastering the art of sleeping in film rooms (Sit near the projector that way security is less likely to notice things provided you sit up straight and change rooms frequently) But gradually I stopped.

There were several reasons the fact that they started having it on the same weekend as Norwescon and with Youtube and anime going mainstream. I no longer was dependent on it for discovering all of those hard to find titles. On a more embarrassing level all of the cosplayers started triggering an instant midlife crisis for me. While I’m not so pathetic as to go to a con to find love at the same time realizing that you’re probably going to have to ask anyone you talk to for ID begins to get to you after a while. After a while I’d find that the only reason I’d really want to go was to look for hard to find art books in the dealer room and I refuse to pay for the privilege of shopping.

However it was a nice day and it occurred to me it was a nice day and I could probably zip downtown and do a little bit of people watching and maybe get in some extreme sketching in. If it didn’t work out there’s lots of other things to do on a nice day in downtown Seattle. Turned it worked out pretty well there were lots of cosplayers hanging out in the Freeway Park behind the convention center and I was able to get at least three pages in.