Hey friends and anime fans,
I’m not having such a good time right now, and I wonder how many of you are feeling the same. Lately, a lot of things have felt unusually difficult, and it’s been hard to see when they’ll improve.
Fifteen years ago, I wound up running anime conventions entirely by accident. Some guy announced an anime convention near my hometown and I tried to volunteer. I wanted to help organize it under a nonprofit organization I was part of. Well, one thing led to another. I disagreed pretty strongly with some of the other board members about how slowly things were moving, said something jokingly that I probably shouldn’t have, and eventually wound up running the convention myself.
Things exploded from there and things were nice. We were on an upswing that kept swinging up. I brought the same people with me from that first year. Kassy. Erica. They’ve worked for this organization since the very beginning.
And then Trump was elected the first time. And suddenly immigration and visas were an issue, and we had trouble with our Japan guests not being and to get into the country in 2018 and 2019.
And then COVID shutdown conventions and crashed the economy. I thought it wouldn’t last long. I kept up payroll. We ran some events with limited attendance. And while interest rebounded for a while, things never recovered.
Now the world feels so much different than it did when I first started. There was no TikTok causing people to turn the fun of cosplay into a popularity/likes contest. Facebook was a place to genuinely connect with your friends. To share photos.
Social media advertisements no longer convert or provide value. Social media increasingly feels dominated by automated and AI-generated content, and sometimes the engagement I do receive appears to come from spam or bot accounts rather than people genuinely interested in the events.
I don’t spend time on TikTok so it’s hard to get people’s attention. I don’t know how to hire Instagram models to promote my events.
And conventions themselves have become much harder and more expensive to run. The Hyatt Regency O’Hare bumped their parking rate to a freaking $50 a day. My tickets cost less than the price of an empty square of concrete space.
Guests used to come to conventions because they were nerds like us. Very few still do. Greg comes because he can nerd out about music and anime with everyone. He doesn’t charge for autographs. But for everyone else, charging big money for autographs is a priority.
And I understand why. Voice actors have rent and mortgages to pay. Everything is getting more expensive for them too. It’s almost like this world has been explicitly designed to be unaffordable.
I’ve been sad about the way AI is affecting the world and my events, and the changes in the world have affected my personal relationships.
Ticket sales at recent conventions have been poor. Part of the problem is visibility. One major anime convention listing website doesn’t list my events, which makes it considerably harder for potential attendees to discover them. I’ve found it frustrating how difficult and expensive it can be for a small business to address disputes that materially affect it.
Ticket sales directly affect the financial health of the business and my own finances. During COVID, I took on substantial debt to keep the company operating and our people paid. Like many small businesses, we’re still dealing with the long-term financial consequences of that decision.
Anime conventions didn’t become my job because I wanted to get rich. I started them because I had so much fun at my first convention that it changed my life. Everyone in high school bullied me for being such a nerd, for liking anime and videogames. Anime cons were the first place I felt safe. That’s how I imagine cons are for many members of our lgbt community. I want to build spaces that make people feel safe.
But low attendance has taken a significant financial and personal toll on me. I don’t even need a lot of money to be happy. I book the cheapest AirBnbs when I travel. I specifically chose to live in Iowa because of how cheap it is. I bought my house for $50k. I had to put a ton of hard work into it myself.
But money has been awful lately. We’ve had to cut some of the most important people to me from our payroll. I can’t afford to keep paying them. I’ve also had to rely on increasingly expensive financing to keep things operating, and access to additional financing has become much more limited.
So even people like Erica, who’ve been here since the beginning, I can’t afford to keep paying her.
But being sad about attendance, sad about loss of opportunities to make friends, and sad about not getting to keep my friends together, has made me neglect my own personal relationships too.
At the same time, my fiancée was dealing with serious health issues. I became too consumed with work and my own stress and wasn’t as present for her as I should have been. Eventually, she needed to return to Minnesota to be closer to her support system.
I realized that being alone in my old house wasn’t helping me either, so I went to Minnesota too. I was blessed to know a friend with a safe place to stay. I’ve spent the last two weeks living in a place with no walls and filled with sawdust. There was no running water, I showered occasionally at a truck stop a half hour away. It makes you appreciate the convenience of a big bathtub in your own house.
I’ve always wanted to do great things for people. I want to make life easier for people. When AI came, I too expected it to fold laundry and vacuum, not to replace art and music. I had visions of making robots to help people. I’m a licensed electrician, I have a bachelor’s in computer science, and I have a giant 2,000 watt laser to cut metal.
But just as all these things started to come together, just as I almost had the tools to build robots and make something cool and help people, everything starts to fall apart. My “fun money” to work on projects like this came from ticket sales. I never paid myself extravagantly. All the fun money spent in projects or side businesses was meant to make more money to put back into the conventions. To give people really cool experiences.
So when I bought my big laser the first thing I did was build registration kiosks. One of the first anime con problems that I hated was when conventions had registration lines that lasted hours. I always wanted to solve that.
One year I really failed at it. My registration software was going too slow and we didn’t have enough volunteers. In fact, a musician named demonicronic made a rap song about the convention. The hook was “Anime Midwest: Lines for Days!”
Apparently he died. I will never be able to find or hear that song again. It was definitely a diss track towards the convention, but I still loved it. I feel really bad that he died. I’m sure he was gone far too young. I don’t know anything about him other than the song.
So I wanted to make registration great and so I built some kiosks with my laser. My fiance? has helped a ton with building them. She’s very useful with stuff like that. She doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty.
Our relationship has been strained by everything we’ve been dealing with: financial pressure, loneliness, uncertainty, and major changes in our lives. We care deeply about each other, but it’s been a difficult period for both of us.
Politics has been another source of frustration for me. I considered running for governor of Iowa, even though I knew mounting a serious statewide campaign without substantial funding or an established political network would be extremely difficult. Maybe if I started smaller, like a city, first.
The guy who won the Democratic nomination, his wife gave his campaign $14 million dollars. I’ve never had 14 million of anything.
Even a relatively modest campaign budget would have given me opportunities that simply weren’t possible with essentially no campaign funding. I updated my website. Made it prettier and more political. Featured things I care about.
I’ve also been frustrated by political campaigns that emphasize broad coalition-building more than the specific policy proposals I care about. I’d personally rather hear detailed plans about education, infrastructure, economic development, and other concrete issues affecting Iowa.
One thing I appreciate in political candidates is a willingness to clearly explain what they actually want to accomplish. Campaigns focused primarily on opposing another politician don’t appeal to me nearly as much as campaigns built around specific proposals. I’d like to see more candidates make a direct case for what they would change and why.
I disagree with a number of policies adopted by Iowa’s Republican leadership, particularly the state’s approach to funding private-school tuition assistance. I would rather see more resources directed toward strengthening Iowa’s public schools.
Iowa used to have great schools. Used to.
I’m proud of a lot of the things I’ve done. I started an anime dating website almost twenty years ago. People have come up to me and told me they’ve gotten married because of my website. People have also gotten married because of my conventions. I’ve brought a lot of people joy.
I think things are going to be hard for any kind of small business in the future. Big corporations can get away with anything they want to do. There’s no inexpensive way to advertise anymore.
I launched a new social media platform recently. It’s still a work in progress. Basically I rewrote Ani(dot)me to be a social media platform written in Rust. I’m trying to find ways to make it so we can detect bots and only promote the posts of real people. It’s going to be an uphill battle.
The Internet increasingly feels saturated with AI-generated material, spam, and automated accounts. That makes it harder to know when you’re having a genuine interaction with another person, even in supposedly local online communities.
I’ve got several ideas for it. I’ve built in a scoring system that can detect bots, but to make it work I need more signals and data than I can process myself right now. For example, maybe we’ll require people’s IDs proving they’re a real person. Or we could physically mail them a code that they can enter to verify they’re actually in the location they say they are.
It’s so easy for scammers and spammers to fake their location, to fake who they are.
I’m sure for a while it’s gonna be just bots though. We’ll see if I can turn it into a real community.
Right now I’m doing my absolute best. I’ve just scheduled fifty social media posts for Anime Midwest. I’m paying for thousands of dollars in advertisements. I’ve asked the city to put up our street banners as early as possible.
One thing I’ve always been certain about is that I don’t intend to leave my community high and dry. I’m committed to doing everything reasonably possible to make sure our conventions deliver the experience attendees and vendors expect. I know many vendors and attendees are struggling too.
If you see me at the convention I’m reversing an old rule. I used to tell people that I don’t want any more owls. That I have enough.
But I don’t. If you want to give me owls to cheer me up, you can. Give me all the owls you can find. I’d like the con to be a hoot.
So I’ve told you how I’ve been doing… How are you doing right now?