Anime Expo 2026
July 2-5, 2026
Los Angeles Convention Center
Los Angeles, CA
Monday, June 15
Sitting on the side deck around noon on the final day of badges being mailed. It's a steamy 85 degrees and I don't have a hat, but patchy cloud coverage is providing some small mercy from the direct sun. I bought my badge in February but I've been on the fence about actually going; over the past few days I've weighed the pros and cons and I've begun to converge. I open my phone and pop off a LINE message to the group chat:"I'm very conflicted for obvious reasons but regardless of me
I think you two should go to AX
And I think I'm leaning towards it as well."
It might be good to leave, just to be anywhere but here for a few days. Two and a half weeks is not so long for planning a five day trip to LA, but it's an eternity compared to last year's day -1 booking.
Wednesday, June 24
My brain has not been working properly lately so I want to do everything I can to ensure this trip goes off without any issues. Today I packed in advance to abstract the preparation stages. I don't have access to most of my things, and I only have a subset of what I had packed a few months ago for Sakura-Con; digging through my sparse bags yielded my badge and lanyard. This time I'm doubly-securing the badge to the clip, so it can't abandon me. No "accidents" are allowed anymore.
In the process of preparing I backed up everything on my phone to an external drive and started with a clean photo directory. I tend to do this every six months or so to prevent data loss (I do not let things pass through "The Cloud"). Besides, this is a time to go on new adventures, not get locked into the old ones on repeat for another decade.
In honor of this mood, I spent the afternoon making homemade business cards featuring anime girls in Bosch's hell. Limited run, only 30 bootleg cards this time, as opposed to the 500 that were accidentally ordered in 2015 and which I was stuck with for many years. I probably won't hand this batch out to people I already know. Act fast!
Tuesday, June 30: Day -1
I have an important choice to make by the end of the day. Should I stay at home tonight, sleep on a bed, and wake up at 0400 to head to the airport? Or should I drive to Clay's tonight, sleep on his futon, and wake up at 0445 to be ready? After driving around town and experiencing a streak of bummer shopping stops, I decided that being outdoors was cursed for the day and that I had better sleep at home. I will therefore pack early, set tomorrow's outfit aside, and get ready to RISE at 0400 to make a large breakfast before I head to the barren food wasteland that is L.A. Live.
I don't have many costumes, and I have none of my usual party decorations. What I do have is my blutuf speaker and an undiminished capacity for singing along, so that will have to do the heavy lifting this time around. I'm sorry, iM@S and K-On! banners, this is my fault. I will not let you down again.
Wednesday, July 01: Day 0
My "today is going to suck but there's no way around it" alarm goes off and it's time to GET AFTER IT. 0400 in the summer is still chilly. California as my destination or not, I'm putting on my beanie for a few hours.
There's no time to dawdle. I woke up with a start at 0240 to a knock on the door (a dream? A branch falling in the night? The ghost of a small white mouse scuttling across the roof? Your guess is as good as mine) and it took a while to drift back to sleep. I have to take a shower, make breakfast, make a coffee, brush my teeth, make the bed, etc etc and there's no one but me to blame if it doesn't get done!
Having a final meal before deployment to a hostile enemy food environment means something else: the legendary Six Egg Breakfast. One coffee. It's going to be a rough day of travel on little sleep but I only need to physically navigate a 15 minute drive and TSA. Other than that, whether it's car, metro, or airplane,
Mmmm I'm your passengerrrrr
TSA takes forever as usual, and they were very grumpy this morning. I don't think the girl in line with a "Very Hungry Caterpillar" tote bag is on the way to the Animation Exposition. I did get to watch a guy wearing an outfit I can only describe as "Kingdom Hearts core" try to walk through the scanner. TSA-san looked at the eight belts the guy had on his arms and abdomen and waist as if a schizo had just wandered into the White House wearing nothing but a swimsuit and an inner tube...
Point of failure this morning: I didn't leave myself enough time to floss after eating, so I went to do it in the airport bathroom. There was something grosser about doing this than not doing it at all. I need to wake up earlier next time if this is the alternative.
All my years of convention travel have conditioned me to pop off a LINE message before takeoff announcing that I'm activating airplane mode, but right now everyone who might read my message is on the flight with me. I had hoped to get some reading done on the plane, but four hours into my day and I can no longer process my book. This isn't the first night of bad sleep I've had this week / month / year. We're about to take off and I'm fading in and out, my hearing steady but the other senses bobbing up and down in the wave pool.
By 0845 (I've been awake for five hours?!) I'm barely able to keep a sustained thought and I need to close my eyes and try drifting away, even if only for a moment. The problem is, once the noise of waking life is gone (and boy is it noisy right now), the subconscious fills the space itself. Right now that content is rotten, and I'd rather be awake and reading. But I have no bandwidth for being awake!!! And so I oscillate until 0902, when the screen on the back of the seat shows that we've left Washington and are just over Portland. This jolts me awake and now I think I'm unlikely to fall asleep again. Upside: the snack cart is on its way, and now I can find out how bad their "stinky bean juice" is. If this is how strung out I am before coffee #2, I don't think I'm going to be able to keep count on my caffeine intake for the weekend.
"Pretzels, chocolate, or stroopwafel?"
I probably won't even eat the stroopwafel, but I have a deeply programmed directive to save and bring home the most exciting snacks from my flights. As for the coffee... it was coffee. (Get used to it, sucker!) The closer I get to LA the further I get from anything but burnt americanos and overextracted drips, unless Serj Tankian himself shows up in my room with a cezve and a primus.
Despite it all I nearly dozed off, but alas, just before 1000 I violently shot awake, eyes and all, after one of those bleak, bottomless fractions of a second I used to get when hungover on airplanes (I unfortunately have a very good suspicion what Cormac meant by the "Judas Hole"). It's not things existing on their own terms that makes me anxious; the helplessness of not being able to know is what's chilling. My hair is in my eyes so I go to adjust my beanie and only now do I realize I never put it back on after tucking it in my duffel before TSA. That's probably for the best, given the weather I'm headed towards.
1023 - oh yes, I've forgotten the importance of sleep in not being neurotic. A little 20 minute trance did wonders. I'm still not all there, but someone might actually be able to read and understand the sentence I just wrote! Steel yourself, Ryan, let Jupiter eclipse Saturn for a weekend. Perhaps I'll actually make it to the hotel now... This sort of forward looking is an improvement on April.
It's just before 1100 when we begin unboarding. I can't help but watch this guy with his hood on in the row ahead of me comment on political articles before he's had time to read any of the text. He also lingered a very long time on a clickbait AI image. I do not remotely miss Facebook; I left social media in 2017, and I can only imagine how much more dire it became after 2020, 2021, 2024...
The Aerial Blutuf Speaker
In-flight messaging is getting worse by the year. Imagine if every time a website asked you to accept cookies, a video popped up and you had to watch aspiring actors read the legal text for ten minutes before the site auto accepted for you. That's what flying is like today. Even worse, United now starts the flight with ADVERTISEMENTS. Not just on the back of the seat TV that you can't turn off, but with audio on the overhead speakers, cabin-wide.
As bad as that is, it's at least constrained to the time before and during takeoff. Two amazing, compounding developments in the world have tainted the rest of the flight: the ability to AI generate a long script given a short prompt, and the ability have AI audibly READ that script. The intercom now vomits a two minute rant on the overhead speakers at least six times during the flight, and it's mostly the same templated information regardless of the context. I understand that there is turbulence; how many times do you need to tell me not to put my VAPE in the overhead bin? I'm not going to put my VAPE in the overhead bin. Stop telling me not to put my VAPE in the overhead bin.
It took someone 5 seconds to generate this messaging, which every passenger has to hear for two minutes, six times per flight, for however many flights there are per day. In 2013 I calculated that the net YouTube playtime on Gangnam Style was some multiple of the length of human civilization. AI is going to take that wasted time back to the Triassic.
Airplanes are not a luxury experience. They are a necessary evil and stepping foot in one comes with embedded risks that cannot be argued away. We've converged on the airplane being a grimy bus through the sky, and the airline itself has taken over the duty of the unruly passenger blasting their bluetooth speaker for everyone to hear.
Half an hour after landing we have our bags and we're still waiting for the sluggish LAX M shuttle to show up. At just $1.75 the metro is, however, by far the cheapest way to get to L.A. Live, and is safe enough as long as you aren't a 5'2" woman travelling alone. Once at the metro station I can't help but notice that to load your card you have to tap twice: once before you pay, and once after. Maybe the superior single tap is why Seattle's prices are twice as high.
[Narrator: "That is not the reason."]
The usual game: K line to Expo/Crenshaw, transfer to E line, exit at Pico. Except we have a room in the boonies tonight (which will improve tomorrow), so today we'll ride one extra stop, traverse to the room, and reserve the afternoon for pure recharge and reconnaissance ops without a ground-zero FOB. Tonight's room is by far the cheapest of the three we have this weekend. That's an appropriate trade-off for Day 0.
In the pre-Covid days, riding the metro was a guarantee to be solicited to buy headphones or chips or some side hustle. Today it's comparatively empty. O, brave new world! Let's take the little victories where we can. I'm watching the baseball caps because there's nothing better to do (reading on the metro? No, I'll stay alert). I see plenty of the blue L.A. cap, which must be roughly neutral? I assume that any color of any headwear I wore here would get me shot.
Bouncing along these rails is dislodging ancient convention memories. The most recent to emerge is a snapshot of AX 2018, sitting in a ramen shop in Chinatown one sweltering morning and forging the final post of AnotherIdolBot's multi-year tweeting of Crime and Punishment (Garnett translation). That was eight years ago. Covid really did a number on time.
It's just before 1pm and we've nearly made it from the metro to our hotel. I just tripped over a flat surface. When am I going to get my coordination back?! Instead of risking more walking, I'm going to ride up the narrowest escalator ever and cross my fingers that it takes me to the hotel.
Pope Westinus Bonaventurus
Update: It took me to the hotel.
The Westin Bonaventure is visually entertaining. The lobby is refreshingly novel in contrast to the bland minimalism of most hotels, and the water surrounding the bar and cafe seating is a nice touch. It also had exactly at least one bird cruising through it. This hotel would fit Vegas perfectly if it just had four separate copy-and-paste casinos linked to each quadrant of the lobby.
Because everything is round and symmetric and the center of the lobby is an impassable barrier there's a bit of an issue figuring out where you are and which tower you want to reach. Naturally, our tower is the one directly opposite to the check-in counter, and we have to walk the maximum distance to get to the room. A young N cosplayer walks by, and I deserve an award for recognizing him, because he had his natural SHORT CURLY BROWN HAIR, not N's giant, waist-length GREEN ponytail. This is a cosplay that you can't skip the wig on, kid!
Every surface of the hotel is curved until you get into the room, where the cells are vaguely pizza pie-slice shaped (which incidentally are also pizza-slice shaped).
Once we begin to properly inspect room 1021, something far more hilarious (and absurd, and more than a little depressing) appears in the bathroom. I firmly believe that there are certain things that should not be photographed (including toilets, roadkill, excrement, dead bodies), but in this case there's no better way to explain. I made sure to pick the minimum crop necessary.
The lid cannot stay up on its own. At some point in this hotel's history, the bathrooms were refurnished and the counters were made to extend beyond the back of the toilet, so the lid hits the counter before passing its center of gravity. The lid does not stay open on its own. This is drug deal motel-tier stuff and I fully expect Anton Chigurgh to come limping into my room with a sawed off and a Baja Blast to take my duffel and badge from me.
We had a little downtime and recharged after our nine hour transit. Played a few Deftones tracks for Clay and Tyler, because I'm still reeling that I overlooked the band for so long. Drilled some Origa lyrics. It's still early afternoon, and if we can rally there's still a whole day left to experience. Tyler needs to pick up his badge so we will definitely be leaving the room at some point anyway, a good excuse not to lay around too much. Time to do a pass of the battlegrounds.
The first place to check is of course the JW Marriott, the beating heart of the now-dead party scene... and the once-popping bar area is shut down for renovations. The JW Lobby is dead; long live the JW Lobby. L.A. Live is still barricaded up, and probably will be evermore. A shame. I hope the $20 beer garden drinks were worth destroying one of the best vibes of the area!
Smashburger has no line at 1545, and this is an asymmetry to act on immediately. The double-bacon burger has reached $12.99, but it's probably STILL the most cost-effective food in the area. I no longer see avocado as an option, which is a colossal loss.
As much as I'm happy with "burger", it feels like it was missing something (yes, avocado, but more than that) and I'm going to have to inspect the menu more closely before NextBurg. I'm also going to need to eat more if I'm not going to crash and burn tonight... I want to be full and give my body everything it needs to recover so that I have a shot at adventure tomorrow. We'll stop by Ralph's on our way back to the Westin.
1614 - In line to get Ty's badge. Despite a moment of absolute shock when it looked like the line stretched from L.A. Live to the Staples Center, we're wrong; the line is mercifully short. The whole area is exceptionally difficult to navigate right now despite the entire street being blocked off to traffic. I can't find my way around at all; the area around the convention center is skullfuk't with barriers and temporary fences, finding the front entrance is impossible. All I want is to stand in front of North Hall! I hope this is mostly because it's day 0 and logistics are still shaking out. I'll have to check in and compare tomorrow; for today, there doesn't seem to be much to do, so it's back to the room with us for a while. I don't think I've ever been here on day zero so early.
We made a stock-up trip to Ralph's. Last year Clay and I bought a crappy burnt coffee each day from the cafe in the JW, and it was not worth it. (If only I had a water heater in the hotel room, I'd bring my grinder and aeropress kit everywhere!) This year I want to try something different and have us buy a few jugs of cold brew for the room. Each bottle costs the same as one of the [bad] drinks from the cafe, so if these are even passably drinkable this is a certifiable strategy.
Back in the room we were all itching to get some of this Legal Drug into our system. We didn't have enough plastic cups to stage a Hoffmanesque triangle test; instead we all tried a blind tasting. SToK was the unanimous loser by a slim margin (and upon inspection turned out to contain NaTuRaL FlAvOrS). The Kalafina blonde roast is going to be our trusty weekend companion.
We tried giving another go at the convention center and JW lobby but there was nothing to do. We walked around and saw some of the food truck booths as they were setting up for tomorrow, and looped around "The Crypt". The whole area seems choked out by the overzealous fencing, and we're already wiped out. I figure it's time to return to the room for the night and get some extra sleep before the chaos begins. Halfway back to the hotel, looking down a random parking garage... I find myself staring down Menchi.
I thought random encounters at these things were dead!!!!
Turning down a chance to sync with a friend on this late date would be foolish, so we head back and visit Menchi's room [JW 1367; I can write the room numbers! Just try to crash our rooms now!]. The whiskey line-up of the 2018 era is long gone, but his priorities have shifted to jungle juice for catering to the outdoor chess crowd. It's the smart move. Tessio was always smarter.
We sat around and chatted with Menchi and Gunzo for a while. One of the roommates was playing the new Rhythm Heaven. It turns out Stroh still exists (a cursed drink I thought disappeared behind a 2019 event horizon). Personally I am anticipating my body crashing and I want to sleep as long as I can, so I made early moves to head back and the group agreed. We were back and in bed by 0100, but unfortunately Clio slapped me around and I had to type at the laptop for another hour. Soon, sleep. Soon...
Thursday, July 02: Day 1
0745 - Been forcing myself to keep laying down for a long time. Tired but unable to sleep. Very different than the old days, where nine hours was never enough.
0830 - Dozed a little longer, but now there's nothing for it Mr. Frodo. I was up four hours ago yesterday, and the body is bad at forgetting.
How did I go so many years to these shivarees without earplugs? Police sirens, bangs in the night, people in hallways. (Answer: a lot of booze.) Earplugs were the way.
The Westin readily gives us late checkout which suits us fine, because we probably can't check into our thug mansion until after noon. This gives us the opportunity to pack casually and relax while killing the inferior cold brew. I feel grimy after the 22 hour day of travel but there's no way I'm showering in this motel bathtub when the Ritz and its mirror television bathroom is in my immediate future.
The final song of the Westin was dedicated to the friend who booked it. No one else here properly appreciates DJ Billybool!
Some final thoughts on the Westin Bonaventure: this is not the place to stay for the full weekend, being too far away from the action and also janky in unexpected ways, but it was a fine day <1 hotel. The bathroom is motel-coded, and the toilet bumping into the retrofitted counter is unhinged, but as a place to hunker down for a few hours with no excessive street noise it did its job.
The shuttle from the Westin to the JW runs every twenty minutes, so after checkout we have an easy trip to the next destination. Goodbye, Westin! I hope for square walls and cubic time at the next destination!
Now it's time for the Ritz upgrade. We get two days here, so we can move in more comfortably. I've never been here in a one-bed room, and I have to say it's spacious. I'll be sleeping on the more than generously long couch (and I'm tall, so that's a big deal!). It also gives me my own little cubby, which is something I appreciate. I've been under severe constraints for a long time; any chance I get at having a little stable habitat of my own is one I want to act on.
As we shuttled in we saw what we can only assume is the line for the convention center, and the sight was horrifying enough that it dissuaded us from rushing out. We unpacked and lounged a while (I also took my de luxe shower).
By 2pm the JW lobby is looking much healthier. They put up a temporary bar and the (still downsized) seating is fully occupied. It's good to see some life here, but I don't see much room to expand. The hotel also spirited away all of the lobby's couches in the night, so there's nowhere for people to sit. I already see groups beginning to crash on the lobby floor, so I don't know what benefit there was to removing the more comfortable seating.
Hitting the streets and thank God, the monster line we saw is for badge pickup, not for getting into the convention center. Good thing we had yesterday free! The line getting into the North Hall entrance takes about ten minutes but moves fairly fast.
This convention center is loaded with years of memories. Two in particular come back to me on this walk: AWL and I walking in the upper hallway, around 2014, in Vampire Girl Kyun outfits, getting stopped every two steps... and meeting a Miki cosplayer who turned out to be a Panty cosplayer who turned out to want to cosplay Miki who turned out to live 20 minutes from us in Washington. Cosmic coincidences deserve to be preserved with reverence.
The first pass through the exhibit halls are traditionally for data collection but I'm a bit too deeply sucked into my phone today (writing more than just notes for this travelogue), and I did not pay as much attention as much as I should have. The best thing we saw was a t-shirt with a fantastic Miku print, and Tyler was interested enough to ask how much it was.
"Seventy-five dollars."
"Oookay then."
He put it back so fast that if they were actual humans pricing the merch they would have felt like they had been given the middle finger. But these will be sold out by the end of the weekend, without a doubt. Not to us though.
There's a horsegirls "concert" and I'm chuckling that there's a no photo policy being enforced by a line of sub-6ft tall handlers. It's just footage of a fucking video game a la Cinderella Girls. What a load of horseshit.
There are some convention exclusives at Goodsmile and they're actually priced appropriately... How long ago was the Anime Expo where the exclusive figure was kimono Miku and Madoka? 2014? Those were excellent... Speaking of Madoka, where is the Aniplex booth? IP quality aside, the booth last year was technologically impressive, with a 20 ft tall screen displaying the key art to every major show from the past fifteen years. I'd like to see what they followed that up with this year; surely they're here somewhere... (They are, and the display is lame. I must have walked by it twice before finally registering its presence.)
After some deliberation we end up in line at Goodsmile. I'm buying my convention souvenir on day 1, before it's sold out and before I run out of time to stand in line for half an hour. From the distance I see a pair of googley-eyes on... a straw bucket hat?! Suwako is headed our way?! But no, it's just a guy in civilian clothes sullying that hat. False alarm. Everyone back to your posts.
Also in line is a guy with a Frieren advertisement on his AX lanyard. He has a vacant look and I can tell this gag isn't going to land before I try, but I indicate that I have something to say.
"Hey, not to bother you but I will buy that Frieren off of your badge for one million dollars."
I pull out a crisp million dollar bill and he stares at me, confused. The girl he's with says something like "wow, seriously?" and he sheepishly smiles and turns away from me. Two dudes behind him are losing their shit that they just saw a million dollar bill.
"Same offer applies to you two... do you have Frieren as your badge advertisement?"
The Apothecary Diaries cardboards dangling from their necks already betray their negative response. At slight odds with how I would have acted pre-Covid, I feel a little bad that they're so excited about the million dollars and am looking for anything low value that they have on them as an excuse to give them a bill. Nothing stands out, and I have to stick to my private code... Sorry guys, but you're staying in the same tax bracket today. I'll get one of those Frieren cardboards from the AX lanyard booth at some point this weekend. While I'm at it, I'm going to keep constant vigilance so that I can find the perfect Frieren.
On the way back to the hotel I almost rammed into a concrete barrier wearing shorts and flip-flops. The last thing I need is a repeat of Otakon 2017's toe-smashing incident, and I've been transformed into a klutz the past few months. Vroom, up I jump the barrier! Down I step! I win this round, archon. This would not have been a problem at all if the organizers hadn't turned a parking garage into the main footpath between the North Hall and the JW complex... The spiritual poverty of BucketCon 2012 is evergreen.
SMASHBURGER LIFEHACK: ordering online reveals that the restaurant has a hidden "lettuce bun" option! It's buried behind unintuitive drop-down menus; click "substitute classic bun" (which makes it sound like they're offering a new Oppenheimer bun by default and allowing you to ask for the classic bun), and the check box for a lettuce bun will appear. This meal is improving.
After burgin' the three of us grab extra groceries at Ralph's, but midway I feel my lip tingle and I realize I have to run back to the room ASAP. Once back and after having contained the contamination zone, Clay tells me that the fridge doesn't work. He calls the front desk for maintenance and gets... India.
Ritz Carlton, come the fuck on.
At the same time we also asked for more coffee pods for the room's Nespresso. We slowly transition into costumes while waiting for either of these requests to come through, which of course never happens. Tyler's been suited up and ready for a while and we finally decide to call it and leave the room. The fridge will not be fixed, and we'll stop by the front desk on our way back in to ask for coffee pods. They can't ignore us in meatspace, can they?
Costume shift: Akari returns!
We head to the convention center and head up the main escalators. Tyler ducks into the bathroom and I turn around to see...
Jesus Christ. You couldn't invent this kind of encounter.
Steve. After all these years he finds us in California of all places. BALD Steve and he's wearing a hat.
"Yeah, I'm a hat man now."
Chapeau, Steve!!!
He and his girlfriendwife wandered with us for a while (Erika still does not love my shit) until Clay and I accidentally ran down the wrong hallway. Hang in there, Tyler... We ended up at a dead end past the 21+ lounge. The security woman whimsically tells us to get lost:
"Just don't want you to waste your time walking any further!"
"Ah, we went down the wrong hallway. I should have known better, rookie mistake."
"Yeah, nothing down here! Unless you want to use
the wheelchair elevator to get up to the real hallway, haha."
"....... Yes, we would very much like to do that."
"Alright, follow me!"
We run into Tyler and Steve again but the latter blasts past us without saying much. Very similar to last time I saw him, which I fully expected to be our final encounter in life. A few minutes later, Tyler runs off to take a picture of a guy in a Fabulous cosplay I don't recognize. The guy sees us standing off to the side, looks at me, and....
"Hey man... were you here in 2019?"
He fucking recognizes me from seven years ago in a DIFFERENT COSTUME (he also informs me that I have a "long face"). And he IMMEDIATELY scrolls back on his feed to a picture we took together. Damn! I should have asked for the photo.
The crowds in the con center are thinning out so we charted a course back to the room and along with us came a host of people from the past. Every corner I passed, another random encounter repeated, old friends and strangers, back when randos would come in asking for a drink. Cincinnatus poured drinks for everyone who visited, and took requests for the next song that everyone would sing along to, queueing up the highest energy tracks and gently sidestepping songs that were too obscure or quiet for a room party. Cincinnatus did not do this.
Another pezzonovante.
Even throwing on the hotel robe as a gag immediately sent me back to Famime 2016, my hair is shorter my face has fewer lines and Vici is there fresh from the MySpace forums. I don't even think I had a costume on, just the robe! That's a con I could handle seeing one more time before retiring all of this.
This then is the danger of age. Not of being unable to do the things you used to enjoy, and not of growing to where you don't like the content or the people. It's that you no longer exist as a clean sheet of paper on which to draw a new version of yourself and others. The past is written, the indents of drawings of years past pull your pen into contours you didn't intend, harder lines from previous drawings appear superimposed over the current work. At 22 I didn't wander the Staples Center and see the impressions of eight previous adventures, nor did I see the shade of over a decade of acquaintances and friends, some surviving and some lost forever, around every corner and in every mirror.
Another blue Dodgers cap spotted in the convention center. Aren't all primary colors GANG colors in L.A.? More importantly, because baseball caps aren't even the kind of hats I like, the con center is open past midnight?
We "sneak" into the South Hall long after it's closed using an advanced tactical maneuver that I will freely reveal: the door was propped wide open. (In 2025 I had to be let in by a security guard (?) who didn't speak English and was confused about the credentials I flashed.) This year's security guard wants us gone.
"Hi. Are you guys looking for the garage?"
"No, just the exit."
"Ah. Here. Follow me. You can exit right down there where all those people are."
"Ok, thanks."
He points down the hall to the window where "all those people are"; I squint and I'm looking at the man in the mirror. It's a reflecting window. Cincinnatus' beings akin to him turn out to be the reflection of three grown ass men wearing skirts and wigs, trying to break soft trespassing rules deep into their thirties. I always am where I am.
"Today is what it is, but only because yesterday was what it was."
ANYWAY, after another lap around the con center we did the unfortunately needful and scoped out the staircase Jenga tournament. There are a few lingering faces from the old days still going strong (troopers!) and chatting with them is nice, but we had the strange experience of being boxed in by LAPD partway through the night. I think the police eventually realized the dork Katamari wasn't worth getting after, and after an hour or so they took off for the night.
Bedtime turns out to be 0300 going on 0340. We have three people, a king bed, and a couch. I've volunteered for the couch; I consider the physical comfort downgrade worth the tradeoff for the mental upgrade (I'm a poor sleeper and toss about a lot, and I'm always conscious of bothering others). The couch in the Ritz is exceptionally long and fairly comfortable for what it is, but I can't say I have enough blankets. The front desk solemnly told me they were "all out of blankets" which I think is a euphemism for "we don't want to reward couch surfing peasants". I'm a little old to be using a hotel robe as an extra layer...
I need to use the restroom but it's occupied, which is frustrating. I desperately need to recharge my batteries because I've got big plans for tomorrow, and it's basically the main factor that tipped the scales in favor of me coming to L.A. this year. I'll lay down and try to rest up as much as I can. Tomorrow should be a good day.
Friday, July 03: Day 2
Woke up at 0540 and had to make sure an unpleasant situation didn't get worse. Everything seems fine. I was half asleep fretting that I was going to get stuck revisiting the final night of Otakon 2019, in which I had the chance to observe that projectile vomiting is not a movie gag but very real (are you still alive, Master Miller? Hi! You should be closing in on thirty now; I hope you never drank that much again!)
By the time I look at my phone at 0923 I know it's time to stop hitting snooze... I need to shower before heading to a very long metro ride and there's prep work to do. Slam some of this cold brew and get going. I've not yet figured out how to make clocks run in reverse and time is no longer on my side, so today I'm going off-campus for something I've wanted to do for many years.
Anime can wait—it's time to visit the Getty Villa.
Villa Palisada
This trip was too rich for everything that I saw to be conveyed here. I may end up with more pictures of the villa uploaded elsewhere in the future.
Out of the room around 10. A little later than we wanted but we'll make it. Only a party of two. I will have to find Frieren a different day.
I went through a number of outfit iterations before settling for my dirty Chuck Taylors. On paper my other shoes worked with my clothes but it never seemed natural once I had them on... My rough clothing rule: if it feels wrong, it is. Clay comments on this on our walk to the Pico station.
"I've thought that about hats. I don't really like baseball hats, but what if I need a hat anyway? And then last night we saw your friend who always wears a flat top cap and I thought 'you know, I don't think that's going to be my style.'"
I agree. Those aren't the kind of hats I'm interested in either.
Our vague plan is to hop on the metro and take it to Santa Monica, then grab an Uber to the villa. From a brief investigation, leaving the downtown area was enough to change the Uber price from $50 to $25, and for two people on a budget that's worth the time difference. Because of my interrupted sleep, I'm feeling stretched thin this morning (and of course missing my usual egg feast), but that's life abroad and I can make up for it in a few days. Public transport did not treat me well back in the hard partying years, and although I've eased the chemical throttle I'm still keeping the same party hours, and I'm feeling the old sweat around the brow right now. I'm not "solid" in my core in this regard; Ryan was always a sensitive system in vehicles, and even though the tightrope is better secured today, it still wobbles from time to time and there's always some distance to fall, circus net or no.
Eyes closed until Santa Monica.
Actually, we jumped off two stops early to try to make a little time; I grabbed villa tickets for 1100 when I booked them a few weeks ago, and it's already nearly 1120 with a 20-minute Uber ahead of us. Once we get in the ride I'm struck by the geology of the beachline; we're headed along the ocean heading north, so why is there a cliff-face a block east of the beach, across the highway?
It turns out the beach is artificially widened, which is nuts. Pictures exist of Santa Monica in 1902, but the photos I saw were either upscaled or colorized, and I don't want to share such things. The rest has something to do with plate tectonics. I couldn't find a slam-dunk explanation.
The Getty Villa turned out to be everything I wanted it to be and more. I had planned on keeping about five hours for myself to linger over everything here, and thank goodness I did, because I needed every minute of that time. We spent the first hour in the garden looking at papyrus and fennel and gawking at the reproduction bronze statues peppered across the perimeter of the peristyle. I couldn't help but notice that a Polish company was touching up the outdoor murals, and I wonder if there's any deep connection (like the discovery that LA has an enormous Armenian community making SOAD seem inevitable) but a few Google searches make it seem like they have simply been the right local group for the job.
What turned me on to this quest was seeing an image of the peristyle and pool, reading about the Villa of the Papyri, and J. Paul Getty's frustrations in not being able to see the (non) excavation of the site. I knew the villa had some exhibits and statues inside but after I made my concrete decision to go I deliberately didn't do any more research, so that I'd be as pleasantly surprised as possible. I had no clue how much there actually was.
Rather than turn into a vulgar Wikipedia article, let me say that I used every minute I could to look at every one of the hundreds of artifacts that were on display. These ranged from shards of pottery jammed next to old necklaces, to life-sized statues in their own private rooms. I knew I'd appreciate the marble, but I underestimated how much I'd like it. I did not realize that I would also find the late Roman mosaics as fascinating as I did. This is useful data about myself!
On the other hand, something I did already suspect... the most ancient of the ancient things, arrowheads and janky fertility talismans from 12,000 B.C., just after the fall of the Kingdom of Zeal, do not interest me at all. I found myself appreciating the herringbone texture on some old pottery but for the most part it's 500 B.C. and on or bust. Once a coherent body of mythology and iconography begins to emerge, you can't keep me away.
I took something like 700 pictures so I could do more "research" later, and I almost bought the handbook for the collection at the gift shop before seeing that it was half the price on AbeNana books.
And then my phone died. Goodbye for now, writing!
Leaving the Getty Villa turned out to be harder than getting to it. Our Uber driver in the morning knew exactly what she was doing; once parking staff explained to her how to get to the drop-off point, she said to us
"He could have saved himself a whole lot of breath by just lifting up the gate for me."
Alright, you've done this before! However, Sheilah clearly had not, because she missed her right turn to get into the villa from the south, then cancelled our ride after turning down a side street. Moo, however, came through for us... despite also missing the same turn from the same direction. She turned out to be willing to make a gutsy U-turn. Anyway, we got in the Uber and headed to our destination, which was not the convention center.
Something amazing happened and Clay had his own goal for the journey, to see the Santa Monica pier and do the boardwalk. This knocked out two goals at once; we got out of the Uber, explored the boardwalk, and then walked to the metro station to catch the E-line back to Pico. Santa Monica was a close experience to my visit to Huntington beach in 2023, but less "clean". This was all crowds and polemical street hustlers and cult evangelists playing recordings of newscasters talking about how brain planted microchips were taking over society. Basically, the pier is a microcosm of California.
The light rail back is an exercise in the futility of trying to sleep on public transport. We got back to the room a bit before 1900, I started charging, by 1904 I turned on the phone to find texts from Citizen F. asking if I'm around... timestamped 2pm. Only now do I realize that, even when my phone had a charge, it did not have service at the villa. I was too sucked into the exhibits to notice! He's still around so I make a hasty plan to meet up with his crew after a grocery run and a burger. Tyler is looking for us; he's been locked out of the room for hours because his key card demagnetized. The whole day. We could have tried to do something like get his name on the room from a distance... at least he has rallied, all will be well.
We're starting to master the burger strategy. Ordered Smashburgers online with about eleven minutes to spare, ran downstairs, got Smashburgers, smashed burgers back, ran to Target to meet Citizen F. Grabbed some Squirt, a spare Sprite, completely forgot cups again, got in the checkout line and—
UGH, Target sells gacha novels now. Their appearance in the public library back in 2023 made me sad enough, but this is a retail outlet telling you that you shouldn't have any input in what media you consume. Has a shuffle button appeared on Netflix yet?
Eyes on the prize, Ryan. There's a chance of making a whole second day out of this still. We had our new party materials so we rushed back to the room to begin the pregame, costume transformation, and actual game prep all at once. Fa... er, Citizen F. bought two packs of "BTS Oreos" and I am ashamed to say that they were difficult not to eat. Original Oreos should give up. It's over for them.
We didn't get out of the room again until after 10pm. In my opinion, that's pretty good, considering I decided long before booking my plane tickets that anything unrelated to the Getty Villa today was an optional stretch goal. And if I'm in a costume now, I'm very unlikely to get out of it for at least four hours.
Costume shift: Summer uniform Yui
F's crew headed home once we were in our full regalia; none of them are formally attending the convention this year. We might see their leader once more on Sunday but otherwise, so long! 2011 was a long time ago, Other Ryan! Please don't drive on the fourth of July!
The convention center is easy to navigate at night and there aren't too many people around; we sweep the place and con staff guy fistbumps me after correctly identifying the version of Rollin' I'm playing. Around 2330 we loop to the Katamari and it's stripped of anyone we know, just the other "events" already solidifying. This thing has become autonomous. Rockband "karaoke" where an entire crowd sings over the current player and a four hour queue. New to the event lineup this year (unless I wasn't paying attention last year, which is very possible, because this is emphatically not my vibe) is the addition of a bartending group working a table and another taking orders for... grilled cheese sandwiches.
I get it, you want to be quirky and have your gag "thing" at the event. You have to be distinct in a niche group to farm retweets. But you chose that gag to be the service industry... Meanwhile, the actual (now licensed) Danger Dog street vendors have moved right into the middle of the stairs. D-list anime is streaming on a portable projector screen and a few dozen people are sitting on the stairs watching like it's documentary day in gym class. This is getting out of hand.
"No one" is here so I can't extract any worthies to the room. On the walk back to the hotel we run into Menchi et al heading to set up their baccarat tables. I can't kidnap anyone who just arrived, maybe I'll come back in an hour.
Flash forward. Just as I'm thinking it might be time to try finding people again, Mars ticks above the horizon and I receive an omen of war: Ginko messages me asking if I've "retired for the night".
I have not.
I run down to the Katamari to grab Ginko and float around some other circles at the same time, looking for people who might want a smaller and more intimate party. From across the field of double-elimination Plinko tables Clay espies Makoto, whom I last saw night one of Sakura-Con when he threw a nice bag of coffee beans at me (which I was unable to brew at the time). I miss the days when I saw him more often! Menchi and the other big players from the old days feel responsible for the street mob and I doubt they will leave their scene, so I pull out a chloroform rag and my crew begins to drag Ginko, his goons, and Makoto to the room.
This is a decent group. Let's get to the room and make a proper Ryan Ice this year. Ginko has to make a brief stop in the lobby to help an old friend of his unpack. Once they arrive I get a dose of the forgotten past reaching forward for my present, yet again:
"Woah, Ryan! I haven't seen you in years! Did you get thinner?"
This one's not a ghost. Sheesh, I talked to everyone back then! I don't know what happened!
[Narrator: "He knows exactly what happened."]
As we take him up to his JW room, Ginko opens a different door to the suite on the ninth floor and quickly turns around at the doorway. Well, that doesn't seem very exciting to me; I don't know who these people are but he's friendly with them so I push the door open and barge into the party, which has a DJ and gamer lights and people lounging sloshed on the bed.
I don't know ANY of these people, even remotely, and the room immediately cools at my presence. That's alright! I can handle this. I introduce myself around and am trying to scope out this crowd's credentials with no real luck when I turn around and realize my entire group has also entered the room. I think they saw me make a strong move and figured there was a plan.
Nice.
I can tell there's an undercurrent of "what's happening?" with at least one of this room's core members and my questions could NOT reveal whose room the place actually was. Never a good sign, and no chance to introduce myself to the real power broker involved and negotiate a peace. Also a bad sign of there being any autonomy to the room at all. As my friends tread deeper, I drift casually towards the entryway. Makoto, who isn't a party crasher type, is politely lingering in the foyer.
"Who do we know in this room?"
"Absolutely nobody. I didn't expect you all to follow me!"
Tyler notices that I'm staging a retreat and we all exit together. Ginko is now standing in front of his own door and ready to head to the Ritz. His friend is very concerned and turns to me again.
"Hey, you do know you know me, right?"
Yes Sohrab, I did know this but it was a hazy sort of seven year, drunken memory knowledge. I'm glad his memory is CONCRETE, which gives me a lot more confidence. The group is locked in, it's finally time for me to pour some drinks.
It's worth mentioning after last year's lapse that the key ingredient to the Ryan Ice is ICE, and that the Ritz does indeed have an Ice Machine on the Twenty-Third Floor. We're back.
RYAN ICE:
A drink I invented to own Pyotr Arsenyevich, whose ingredients did not meet my ice standards, in 2018.
- Ice
- two shots of vodka
- Squirt (NOT SPRITE) to taste
- Ryan should be present, toasted to, or making them if possible
The better part of an hour cruises by and I tell Clay I'm going down for a quick recon sweep: can I manage to find anyone else? I don't want to leave the room and allow the party to die early but our hotel is pretty close to the action. I couldn't find too many people but Mike was looking for a place to sit and a drink, and golly gee, I can provide both of those things! It's 2am, and at this point I think we're on the downhill. 8-10 people in one hotel room isn't so bad for these latter days, but I'm not getting any noise complaints so I'm personally disappointed.
After an hour of Ryan Ices, stupid songs, questionable thermal printer stickers and a Minecraft Steve action figure appearing on my table (???), some of the group is moving to return to the Uno Attack scene before the night ends. It's well past 2am, and I think it's an appropriate time to start allowing the room to transition into a sleeping space. We all head out together.
We're not out there very long before something odd happens. Ginko leaves without saying goodbye and a few groups I don't recognize are screaming "Fuck Off!" at him. To my mind we just got down here maybe fifteen minutes ago (though admittedly time stops being linear after 1am). I can't fathom what might have happened, if they were even yelling at him at all; I'll be sure to reach out to him tomorrow night.
0338 - Makoto, Clay, Tyler and I are still outside and chatting. A hometown reunion abroad. But I know there's another day of this and a room transfer in our near future, so I say good-night and the long convention day ends. I considered anything happening after the Getty Villa an unexpected bonus, and I got over eight hours of it in the end. Sleep will have to suffer.
Well.. it's because his tie is crossed into an A...
A....... X......
I learned this by reading the placard at the Getty Villa.
Saturday, July 04: Day 3
HAPPY 250 AMERICA!!!
This fourth of July falling on a Saturday means today is truly the 11th anniversary of my getting stuck on the roof of this very building while wearing my Ononoki costume. A cherished, very stupid, and nearly disastrous convention memory. Let's make some new ones.
Just as we're getting into a rhythm, it's time to pack up and check into a new room. This transfer is from the Ritz to the JW, so we don't need to leave the building, but we will be stateless citizens for a while. Late checkout for noon will help a bit, but we have no guaranteed check-in time for the next room, and so the current plan is to relax and tidy up the room here as long as possible. We also have a stack of Nespresso pods to pound through, and that poor machine is going to be running continuously for the next two hours. Before going to bed last night, The Quizzler passed out some unflavored spicy water to each of us and we have one left. Since we're in the business of lightening our load before the room swap, I start pondering...
CHEMISTRY EXPERIMENT: What happens if I make a Nespresso shot and add some seltzer water to it? Surely this is a drink some barista has invented and named already.
Answer: The espresso foams up to 300% its original volume. It becomes something to eat with a spoon instead of a cup, like a root beer float, without the sugar or fat. The seltzer immediately warms up and settles to the bottom of the cup without mixing. Sipping yields espresso foam and warm seltzer, separately, each arriving in your mouth at different times. This is disgusting.
We finally said goodbye to our luxury room and headed for the JW front desk. There's some confusion about names and who is actually on the room and they won't let us get our stuff into bag check and it's very stupid. After some bickering our bags are stored and we're waiting for the room, and I doubt we'll be getting expedited service after all that... They did not give us a timeframe and we're homeless for a few hours. In the interim we'll do some laps around the convention center.
I noticed the past two days that the exhibition hall seemed particularly industry-heavy (even for Anime Expo), but I didn't realize until I entered Kentia [pronounced KEN-sha] Hall for a novelty sweep what was missing—ALL of the miscellaneous merch booths with their legions of prize figures, smaller booths like Copic (no free wheel to spin this year, sadly), indie-adjacent media names and so on. They've all been moved into the first half of what used to be the artist alley, which itself has been drastically downsized to the back-left quadrant of the hall (I dare not mention what now occupies the back-right). All of this reshuffling is downstream of the construction in the con center, no doubt, but very confusing.
Doing rounds about the massive convention center takes time and we've been at it for about an hour now. Tyler wants food and Ryan wants his bags and the room, so at 2pm we return to the JW to see if we can move up yet (and the answer is no, lol. They're going to bleed us). I'm frustrated because the day can't fully begin until we have our operations base, but it's out of our hands for now. Tyler has had enough of the burger ritual so he and Clay are getting delivery curry; I'll wait until later and order my scheduled MRE as usual.
Sitting by the JW waiting for Tyler's food, I flip open my phone and read some of the fallout online over what is increasingly being called "StairCon" and the *checks notes* Feet Juice Incident. Whether I've drawn the line too harshly over the years or not, here's a lemma: lack of social hygiene in friendly spaces (perceived benign or not) inevitably converges on Feet Juice Incidents™ (and risk of backfire with permanent consequences). I'll have to think about this more.
FINALLY, OUR ROOM. The second we get the call I haul ass to the counter with Clay so we can get the goddamn day started. Once we have our bags and our keys it's off to a junior suite: JW 1042. Of course, duplicitous Gemini, Tyler gets his Uber eats phone call the moment we get in the elevator. He dumps his bags at the door and turns around to grab the order. While my roommates eat I unpack and suit up; my planned gag outfit isn't going to work out because the silly t-shirt is the same color as Yui's skirt, and I think it looks tacky. Even with a joke cosplay, if it feels wrong, it is.
Costume shift: HTT T-shirt Yui
I have an idea for a joke photo that I'm eager to send to an old friend but it means I need to get to Kentia Hall in costume before closing, so I'm rearing to get going. [VHS streaks, little blinking fast forward arrow: the picture didn't work out, the friend was not contacted, and 2027 is still half a year away.]
Give us this day our daily burger. And on this final full day of the convention I am going to make a Strong Move and exercise my autonomy by ordering a goddamn milkshake.
As we left Smashburger I noticed some people I know and invited them to the room. Thus began a few hours of popping around our room and Menchi's room (recall that he's in a junior suite just three floors away!), hanging with The Quizzler, singing with Sohrab, and repurposing Owl's cane as a Cherry Sunburst Gibson Les Paul. I miss the days when we might accidentally get placed close enough to use the stairs. Aren't there accessible stairs in this hotel?
At some point in the madness one of Menchi's roommates points out that all of AJURIKA's iM@S songs begin with "N". I'm a big fan of that composer's work and that can't be true. I can prove it: Nebula Sky, Natsu Koi...
Hold on. Nation Blue? Um... Next Life.....
..................
KCP ends up in my room for a while to grab a Ryan Ice and play with my camera. I developed his photos before he had to leave to begin his daily mancala prep session. Sounds like there's an industry member who wants to play a private game and that's a good reason for them not to go to the stairs, especially after last night. From what I've seen online, "The Talent" have been gently notified that they should steer clear of the Katamari, just in case. I have no such restriction, and so I go to do some information gathering; things are changing fast for that scene.
Katamari escaliers
Originally I wasn't going to write about this, but once the New York Post reports on something, it's too big to ignore. After Covid, some friends started going back to conventions and began an "outdoor mahjong and liquor" gang. I'm not going to pretend to understand why they chose that game instead of the hit 1994 action board game Crossfire, but they seemed to be having fun.
The following year led to the accumulation of more tables, and expansion beyond mahjong. Fighting games and Rock Band gained little footholds in the ecosystem, and the Katamari began to accumulate mass. Once the group became large enough it also became self organizing. By Friday night of 2026 it was operating without any mahjong tables present. There are no founding members to a group without membership.
As far as I can tell, this is what led to the "Feet Juice Incident™". An unchecked group converged on performative clout-chasing (read: women pouring liquor down their feet and "men" paying to suck their toes). There are a few things here that I'm not going to comment on, and fear of police interference was very realistic. But no one inside a mob has authority over it, and misunderstanding that nearly led to a nasty outcome that could have carried real-world consequences (doxxing, career interference, etc).
This stuff was probably happening ten years ago, behind closed doors and whispered about as something to avoid. Now it's on the street with crowbar access to every room. Everyone with a shred of consciousness seems to be vaguely aware that this was a bad development.
While I'm on this tangent, let me try to solidify one more feeling I've had gestating for years.
I despise the term "normies". "Normie" requires an in-group and an out-group; it's adversarial by default and implicitly self-deprecating. Classifying in terms of "normies" means no longer dealing in terms of personal interests; it converges on the same performative tribalism in a different costume.
I want to deal with individuals, not categories. And I want to be able to turn away Hazukaris at the door. I've made some wrong calls in the past but I stand by the core attitude. That's all.
A while after midnight Tone comes up to the room for a drink, and he voices wistful nostalgia for the old room party scene. This is the shift I have been waiting for. All I hope is that some of my mahjong-adjacent friends will be receptive to more selective parties in the future.
Deep into the night another shade from the past finally materializes, and to judge by the aroma this one's very real! Curt Kobane comes drifting through the crowd, smelling like a college bar just before closing, sloshed, slurring. I knew I'd see him if I kept the faith, and apparently he felt the same, because this year it was him who approached me.
"its so good to see you man because in these days you cant trust anyone you know what i mean. no one is on your side and everyones fake so these days so its good to see people you know and trust and you guys are good guys [because we keep coming back????]"
Good luck, soldier. Sounds like you've been deployed on some tough missions lately.
For some reason I'm wearing the JW bathrobe and the wrong t-shirt. We must have gone to the room for a tune-up at some point, or maybe you can swap outfits from the main menu anywhere in this sequel? I run to the top of the stairs and grab the highest aerial view possible, and see Makoto wearing my Frederica happi (it seems he got a costume swap as well!), and send him a photo of himself. He then does the same to me.
It's late and entirely appropriate to go to bed at this point, but I don't want to! I suggest we head back up for a nightcap and to de-costume before optionally heading back down again. Clay's turning in for the night and I fully acknowledge that he might be making the wise choice but Tyler and I head down to walk Makoto to his hotel (the A.C.). Walking there means navigating the hamster maze the convention replaced the road with, and as we approach his hotel we have to pass the sketchiest corner of vagrants singing and yelling that I have experienced the entire weekend. I think if I had been in that hotel I would have had to self-enforce a 2am curfew.
Makoto is staying an extra day like the wise man he is. I wish I were doing the same so I could sleep in, but tomorrow we head home. Hopefully we meet again.
Tyler's taking the fold-out bed tonight and I'm getting a heavy blanket for the first time since Wednesday. Up too late, zero Frierens, but no real problems today. The room is already clean, so I have clearance to close my eyes... but not for long enough.
Sunday, July 05: Day 4
0900 - I don't want to wake up but I don't think we can get late checkout this time. The JW knows exactly who they are dealing with. Prepare, body. Steel, mind. I spend about twenty minutes lying to myself about falling asleep a little longer, refusing to take out the earplugs, until finally getting out of bed. A week of sleeping four hours a night has finally caught up to me... if there were any more days on this trip, I would keep sleeping until 11am today. No such luxury! Half a glass of the cold brew remains, so I slam it back and hope for a miracle that never occurs.
0952 - I can't put anything off anymore, I need to take my shower and finish packing. I'm going to throw on Hatsune Miku Orchestra for the room. By the time I hear the outro, I need to be prepared to exit the room / convention / state / simulation. Before I get in the shower though, Clay and I hash out what to do about the "hotel destination fee".
Hotel Destination Fee
A few years ago hotels realized that they could add another fee on top of the base room price, upholstered as a Great Deal, and that people would overpay and forget to use it anyway. The idea is that you are a tourist LARPing as the lower-middle class idea of a "fancy person" and that you will want to do luxury fancy person things like ordering room service, wine tasting, yoga, and... uh, bowling. Everything comes with a flat fee, and the benefits the fee gives you are either things you don't give a shit about or worth less than the fee itself.
The "travel fee" is a mandatory $50.00 charge at the time of booking that comes with $25.00 credit at the hotel cafe / restaurant. Be assured that everything will be priced so that you will only be able to afford a single egg, or so that after room service fees, delivery fees, upgrade from a plastic fork fees, you will be paying twice as much as your credit. Every reasonable menu item will come out to $26.00 minimum.
Why listen to me when you can read the below excerpt from the pamphlet that came with my room key?
Enhance your Los Angeles experience with the following amenities, each included with our daily $50 destination fee.
- Daily food and beverage credit ($25 value)
- Enhanced in-room Wi-Fi ($18.95 value)
- Morning yoga class ($45 value)
- Daily sucker tax exemption ($420.69 value)
- Small popcorn at Regal Cinemas L.A. LIVE ($14 value)
- Bowling at Lucky Strike ($72 value)
I don't even know why I added a fake bullet point when fucking bowling is valued at SEVENTY-TWO DOLLARS. Show me the breakdown for that one. I dare you. Don't miss the extra text though:
Please note that unused daily amenities or portions thereof may not be carried over, and have no monetary value. All amenities are based on availability.
You can't even roll the fee over to the next day of a longer stay to get a full breakfast one morning. They want you making as many fractional transactions as possible to keep you from using the fee efficiently. Do try asking for them to take this off the bill; sometimes they will, and I haven't figured out which situations those are.
Once I'm out of the shower I see that Clay has returned from a trip to the lobby with three cold brew coffees. It turns out the destination fee was applicable to the cafe in the JW lobby, and one coffee for each of us was only a dollar or so over the daily $25.00 credit we had. So we paid $50.00 for $25.00 of coffee, and still had to put in a little extra money to use it. I think he landed on the best option that was available to us, but it still pisses me off that we're being abused this way.
The coffee helps but I hear HMO building up to its final track so I have to finalize our exit. Tyler leaves the room with confidence and almost forgets his suitcase in the process (presumably because he has gotten used to checking a bag at the airport). HMO ends, and so does our stay at the JW. The junior suite has an enormous amount of space and a completely valid pull-out couch bed. This would have been a fine option for the weekend if it had popped up on room roulette.
Bag check is easy today because it's the day everyone leaves. Third floor, room Olympic III. I slip the bag check ticket in my wallet and we head back out to the convention center and do a lap. As always on the final day, every trip to the building might be our last one (not just of this year)... I'm always aware of this, but in contrast to the previous nights, the Staples Center at half past noon seems to be ghost-free and I am instead thinking of what's ahead of me on the other side of the airplane.
When I said operating without sleep had finally caught up to me, I meant it. By 1330 we're at the Sunday Smash burger service, and I'm too tired to even order. I sink into a seat at an empty table and fall into a half-sleep trance while the others get and eat their meals.
That gave me the energy of maybe a half-power nap and we still have hours until we need to start heading to the metro. We walk outside to the South Hall entrance and go into the cosplay photoshoot zone to see what we can see. And to my left I finally see a white wig and the long twintails I've been looking for, but........
I wanted to see a good-looking Frieren cosplayer, not BIMBO Frieren. She's probably pregaming for her OnlyFans... Frimbo, you have soured my day.
But then in the exhibition hall I see a sight that cheers me up. As far as I can tell, a young couple cosplaying Stark and Fern together, beaming big smiles. Younger and less burdened by prior context; just happy to be exploring the convention together. Maybe they'll never have to think about these things. My fingers are crossed for them.
I know that 1427 was the final time I laid eyes on the convention center this year. I had already said my goodbyes; this time I stormed out of the North entrance to inhale my final burger for the trip. I found plenty of merchandise, but I never saw the perfect Frieren and never met Himmel the hero at all. Such a shame. Perhaps they will be at the next con.
BURGERNOMICS
My Sunday Smashburger was the perfection of the system we ran through the weekend. In the upper hallways at just past 1420 I hit the order button on my phone and knew that I had about 11 minutes to be in the "Online Order" line at the restaurant.
The options are easy. From the website, click "Smashburgers", and go for the option with the most meat, which is the double bacon smash. Add lettuce add pickles add onion add tomato add mustard. Go to the bun, click "substitute classic bun" to unlock the secret level select menu, and toggle the "lettuce bun" option. Boom. This is the fastest and most cost-effective way to get calories that include meat and veggies in the vicinity of L.A. Live.
This is the move. All weekend.
One sidequest we dropped this trip was poolside time. The weekend was jam-packed, so I don't regret this directly, but I would like to see the JW pool at least this once. We have just enough time to quickly sneak into the recreational area on our way to bag check.
All of the windows surrounding the pool on the 4th floor are mirrored with an aquamarine dream filter and while passing through the little garden I peek into the back deck of the room we had in 2018, the year of 115 degree weather, when we hardly went to the convention at all and instead smuggled drinks into the pool and hot tub for nearly anyone over 21 and made friends with the entire floor (and enemies of some of their girlfriends). Eight years ago. I sat in that chair and poured dozens of drinks a night and it's just three steps away. Eight years and three steps.
By 1518 we have our bags and are about to head to the metro. Присядем на дорожку. Convention. Burger passing through my face and powering me again. Before returning to concrete zero. Let's leave the baggage behind.
I stand up and extend the handle to my suitcase. It's time to head back. If I do this again, it will probably be the last time. I think I'll mentally bookmark a taxi to and from the airport if so.
This metro trip was uneventful. The doofus across from me is also headed to the airport from the convention but he has an oversized bag they were handing out in the dealer's hall and I do not like that children are being casually exposed to this fetish shit. There's a difference between prudery and revulsion at the grotesque.
I got off on the wrong escalator at the metro / LAX shuttle station and had to walk three blocks while Clay and Tyler, wise men, took the correct escalator and comfortably waited next to the bus for me. I made it in time but I easily could have caused a problem. I am once more a passenger until we reach Terminal 7.
Standing next to me at TSA is something I've never seen before. Someone else is waiting for a screening, and it's a Europotato! (Wow!) She indicates that she's avoiding the machine because she's pregnant, which makes complete sense to me. Once he pulls me aside the male TSA agent mistakes her for my wife and I don't correct him.
We've got an hour before boarding but if I sit down I'm toast. I grab the first crummy americano of the weekend and do laps around the terminal to keep myself on my feet. I'm not going to be able to sleep on the plane, but I can at least stabilize myself as much as possible, since I do have to survive a short drive without crashing before the night ends. They want to gate check my bag, thank goodness, so I quickly repack into three smaller bags and prepare for the final stretch and the end of the journey.
If I was too tired to read my book on the flight to Los Angeles, I'm too tired to sleep on the flight back. Instead I survey the televisions on the back of everyone's seats, and after filtering out the pure noise I settle on hopping back and forth between two movies.
Movies Done Quick
On the middle seat of the row directly in front of me, a Michael Jackson biopic. It traces Michael's growth from the Jackson 5 days to the very end of the 1980s. I don't have audio so I can only judge plot, visual direction like cinematography and choreography, the actors, and so on. If the movie was intended to be a pastiche exercise in prosthetics and choreographic mimicry, mission accomplished. They made an actor go through Jackson's surgeries and he did a good job dancing. They remade the music videos, amazing. There is nothing here worth watching, nothing that wouldn't come across just as clearly by opening the actual music videos on YouTube. It's obvious that they had to cut off the hagiopic at 1988 because the actor would have had to become white at that point... these are the sort of film constraints that even a weak writing lens strips bare.
And on the seat across the aisle to my left and one row in front, The Devil Wears Prada 2. Anne Hathaway still looks good at 42, wildly gesticulating in every scene. I basically get to watch her cycle through outfits the whole flight, and without sound it's pretty clear that's the only point of the movie anyway. I thought the original film was about a fashion designer (because I've never seen it)... It turns out it's about JOURNALISTS (crypto-Anna Wintour of Vogue). This silent movie is full of off-putting scene cuts and abrupt transitions designed for Tik-Tok brain, and the cinematography feels cheap compared to the wardrobe. Since I don't watch new movies I'm hyper-sensitive to these trends. (What was the last New Movie I watched while it was still new? Phantom Thread? The completely factual Weird Al biopic?)
[After landing I skimmed the wiki; the writing is contrived. "Yes I am the rich man and I will help you solve your problem tomorrow OOPS I DIED AT MY BIRTHDAY PARTY my son will be taking over the business and he's not interested in helping", high quality stuff.]
I speedran pop culture so I'm all caught up for the year. Back into my bubble.
There are things I would like to have done differently, but given my recent battles this journey turned out to be a dose of much needed medicine. Some of my goals were met, though my hunt for Frieren and Himmel ultimately failed. The Getty Villa was enough of an eye-opener that I've already talked to one friend who wasn't here, who asked me if it was a one-time visit or something I'd return to. I think it's something that will change and gain significance as I continue to grow. I'm going to need to make a trip to my private library soon. The Katamari has gained both sentience and autonomy, so I no longer think that it will fall, but the higher functioning attendees might be much more receptive to recreating the room party scene in the future. Perhaps I will risk retracing these threads once more, careful not to let nostalgia overpower my competing urge to make new memories. This particular year, I think I was successful (I have J. Paul Getty to thank for that). And if I succeeded this year, I can probably succeed any year.
We're ahead of schedule and sleep is no longer feeling like a far-off dream. We need to get to the parking lot but no one called a shuttle, so we'll be standing around for a while. But some aeon must have finally felt a little mercy for me; just as we make it to the pick-up zone, up rolls precisely the B-shuttle we were about to call.
Clay drives most of the way and I close my eyes just enough that I know I won't crash on my short fifteen minute drive home from his house. I pull my beanie over my ears and roll the window down to feel the cool night air.
Back in the house before midnight. My teeth are brushed and I've got three layers of blankets on. It's finally time for bed.
The end.
Wait a minute. A brief memory just floated up from the wreckage of leaving the weekend behind. I met Himmel the Hero at the Katamari on Saturday night (but where was Frieren?). I gave him a million dollar bill and told him to treat his party nicely in the next town.
I hope they make it.
06.15.2026 – 07.14.2026
