Hey friends and anime fans,
I’m not having such a good time right now. I wonder how many of you are feeling the same right now. Everything feels like it sucks and nothing is going to get better.
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 told the other board members I thought they needed to get laid (they were dragging their feet and generally being obstinate to new things), and I wound up running the convention myself. Accidentally said something meant to be silly and made enemies instead.
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. All the content is generated by AI and the only posts that I make that get comments are from Russian bots arguing that Trump is doing a great job.
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 feel like they suck now. 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 it is a very illegal thing done by an anime con listing website that refuses to list my conventions – people don’t even realize they exist even when they want to attend, people aren’t given that choice for themselves – but laws about slander and business interference don’t mean anything in a country where you need a million dollars to sue someone to enforce them.
Ticket sales directly affect my personal wealth. Well I’ll tell you what, I’m probably worth less money than you are. I took big loans from the government during COVID to keep business going. Well we have to pay those back. All in all, if I sold everything I own, I might be close to zero, or less. And that’s sad, after working hard for fifteen years on building something for people I cared about.
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 left me broken, both financially and mentally. 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 been borrowing money at ridiculous interest rates to keep afloat. The banks aren’t loaning me more money now though. The sketchy companies aren’t loaning me more money now either.
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.
My fiance? was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease. She’s got hypermobility, which sounds like an awesome super power but it’s actually terrible. Her tendons slip into the wrong place and cause excruciating pain. And I was too sad, felt too busy, work felt too important, to go to all her doctors appointments. She felt sad and lonely. I was the only person here in Iowa for her. She needed to go back to Minnesota.
I couldn’t take being alone in my creaking old house. I had to get the peck out. 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.
But she’s my fiance? because I don’t even know exactly where we stand right now. We definitely seem to love each other. But recent stuff has hurt us both really bad. Being poor. Being lonely. Being frustrated and scared with the government.
The government is another big frustrating thing. I wanted to run for governor of Iowa. Obviously I knew I couldn’t, not for real. I’m not rich. Only rich or connected people can do politics. 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.
Man I could have won the election with even one million dollars. But my campaign budget was zero dollars. I updated my website. Made it prettier and more political. Featured things I care about.
The guy who’s the Democratic nominee now? Rob Sand? I think he’s going to lose. He keeps posting about how proud he is to have all these Republicans endorse him. What garbage. He doesn’t have any positions. No “let’s make Iowa better at education”. No “let’s focus on roads”. Just “Rob Sand for ALL”. What the hell does that even mean.
Mamdani in New York has proven that people want candidates to actually stand for something. So many Democrats run on “not Trump”. That might actually work now if people start to realize how crazy the guy is, how much of a grifter he is, but courting Republicans is often a fools errand. They vote for hyper religious conservative candidates because that’s what they want. They want to oppress people who don’t look like them. They want to feel moral superiority.
So I think Rob is going to lose and Iowa is probably going to have a Republican governor even longer. It’s stupid because they’re so bad for the economy. They act like they’re good for it, but then they pass voucher programs that take money from public schools to go towards private schools – schools only rich people can attend and afford.
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.
Most of the Internet is AI now. It’s all bots. It’s really hard to genuinely talk to real humans. Even in local Facebook groups, most of those people are not really your neighbors.
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 is that I don’t intend to leave my community high and dry. I will borrow every dime I might need to in order to put on a great convention. 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?