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Sugoi Con Author's Notes 2004 Notes finished the morning after the convention finished: The fun memory of the weekend was the Friday night Swek concert. The Chicago anime cover band jumped back to some dance-band roots at that event. All weekend, the second event hall at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center had a dance floor laid down, and the bank gradually coaxed fans to use that floor on Friday night. After a few minutes' playing, there were a couple of dozen fans on that floor, improvising a circle dance and managing to stay upright most of the time. The key moment in getting the dance to started came when the very young son of the Swek drummer toddled onto the dance floor, and the drummer challenged the rest of the audience to join him. "Are you going to let a one-year-old outrock you?" the drummer said, and the fans finally got out of their seats. Swek definitely had the best music of the convention weekend. This site's author watched Sugoi Con from the perspective of an artists' alley picture and book sales location at the far end of the main concourse. Convention staff was kind enough to let the author move his setup to a roomier location when the convention center's food stand made a last-minute switch from the end of the concourse to the event hall where the concert and dance was held. The pre-packaged chef salads were the best food of the weekend. At one point, trying to drum up business for the food stand, one of the convention volunteers scribbled a large "Buy Food" sign, and it worked. The picture sales operation got its highest compliment of the weekend on Saturday morning. The author got to the convention center at 8:30 a.m., which seemed early at the time. He had just set out the three thick sample binders full of pictures and laid out the printer, power cords and lighting when a costumer noticed and asked for a picture. That began an all-but-nonstop 14-hour day of pictures and printing, interrupted only by short trips down the hall for guest of honor panels. Late in the afternoon, the author picked up the light stands, umbrellas and strobes still mounted, and moved them to the other side of the center to get pictures of the costume contest entrants. Sugoi Con still holds to its practice of not having a stage show; they send the participants in front of a panel of judges, then deliberate and announce the winners in the Karaoke and dance hall. The judges chose what had to be the youngest costume contest winner of all time, a one-month-old boy swaddled in a kuroneko Trigun jumper. One of those judges was actor Greg Ayres, who was pumped up with the news that he and fellow actor Chris Patton would be switching the role of Riffraff in a Houston stage production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Ayres added that Monica Rial was going to get a role made famous by Meat Loaf's stage performances, and he and Patton would trade off on doing interesting things to her on stage with a knife. Patton was scheduled to spend the Sugoi Con weekend at the inaugural Anime Sound and Vision event in Rosemont, Ill. Also scheduled for the same weekend were the eNerGy Anime and Game Festival  in New York and the first-time Tsubasacon in Charleston, West Virginia. Writer Gerry Poulos was supposed to be a guest of honor at the West Virginia event, but he still showed up at Sugoi Con on Friday. Sugoi Con received some advance attention from the Cincinnati Enquirer, which ran an anime story the day before the convention began. The article emphasized the youth of anime fans, picturing a group of 13-year-old costumers. That's the age of the newest fans that have driven the growth of the medium in the 21st century. It was a clean, sympathetic story with a big flaw: the article listed the wrong address for the convention's web site. Anime fans had competition from a more intense brand of fans on the Sugoi Con weekend. Paul Brown Stadium, used by the NFL Cincinnati Bengals, is a short distance north of the convention center and hotel, and Nov. 21 was the date for a Bengals' home game. More importantly, it was a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not only is Pittsburgh a relatively short drive from Cincinnati, but the Steelers were the hottest thing in football at the time of Sugoi Con. On top of that, the Steelers were led by rookie quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who played his college ball at Miami of Ohio, only 30 miles north of Cincinnati. So there were Bengals fans, Roethlisberger fans, Miami alumni and intensely enthusiastic (and there's an understatement) Steelers fans all descending on the Cincinnati area, where anime fans were on hand to "greet" them. It was the first time since 2002, when a New York Giants game was scheduled on the AnimeNEXT weekend in New Jersey, that anime and football fans were in such close proximity. But the Giants fans weren't as intense as Steelers supporters, who have been waiting a quarter-century to cut loose on the league in the way they celebrated when Franco Harris and Joe Greene crushed opponents. The money-saving author spent the weekend in a near-flophouse Days Inn in Northern Kentucky; next to the motel was a sports bar, and the first Steeler fans were on hand on Friday night. "Let them come and improve the economy," was the response of a Bengals fan at the bar. Costumed anime fans didn't like some of their meetings with football fans, but Bengals fans nearly went home happy when their young quarterback, Carson Palmer, threw three touchdown passes in the first half. Unfortunately, one of those passes was to a Steeler defensive back, and the interception return made the difference as Pittsburgh won. The big sports news of the weekend was the Indiana Pacers-Detroit Pistons riot on the convention's Friday night. Ron Artest of the Pacers deserved to be suspended for the season because of his ineffective punching; he had clean shots at several Pistons fans and didn't drop a single one. Back in the days of Bailey Howell, the Boston Celtics' famed hatchet man, when an NBA player punched you, you went down and didn't get up for a while...what's gotten into these young players? The convention's most fervent sports fans was a Bostonian, translator Neil Nadelman. He was fortunate enough to be in Boston during the Red Sox' amazing playoff run that carried them past the Yankees and Cardinals to win the World Series. Nadelman told vivid stories about how Boston fans suffered when the Sox lost the first three games of the Yankee series - and one of Nadelman's acts might have made the difference. After New York won that third game against Boston, Nadelman took a Yankees hat he'd been given as a gag gift, went out on the beach near his home and burned the hat. And as if the flaming cap was an omen of things to come, a fit and true sacrifice to the gods of baseball, the Red Sox went on their eight-game streak to win the two series. It doesn't take sharp eyes to notice that this site sprouted Funimation advertising banners in the days following Nekocon. That agreement had been in the works for a couple of months, and the deal was finalized on the day before Veterans' Day. The steady flow of convention material on this site means a steady flow of visitors (around 100,000 sessions a month in 2004), and Funimation wants to reach you with their new releases. The financial assistance is a good start toward keeping this site going in 2005. Sugoi Con Main Page