The Public Life of a Public Librarian

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This is a brief clip of the dance, alot more flourescense than I see at SF cons.

So I made it to Saturday night at Youmacon. I made it to the dealer's room, I bought one DVD a Ghost in the Shell 2nd GIG episode where the first meeting of the two main characters is described. The room could have been larger.

There was an alley of artists outside producing art work all weekend but no art show per say.

Many of the fans were unfamiliar with the concept that the consuite was giving away food and drink, until Saturday night when they discovered the soda, ramen noodles were also popular.

The fans are younger and anime fandom agewise is about where SF fandom was in the early forties, except there are many more of them. The stories they told remind me of the ones my friends and I used tell about SF fandom in the 80's. I even met a group from Bowling Green State University, something I have not done since the early 90's, they were into costumes back then too, but SF not anime.

There were older fans too. I talked with a group from Indianoplis who were deeper into anime than I am into SF. They won the Friday cosplay award so I would almost call them anime medium name fans. I was able to talk with them about early anime like Speed Racer, Kimba and Astro Boy. None watch TV, except the youngest who watches Battlestar Galactica with her dad, they down load and watch on computers.

I was talking with Ken about being old enough to be the parent of most of the fans and he mentioned being the consuite on Friday and being the oldest one in the room. Ken is 16 years my junior I think.

Anime fans seem to be into Mountain Dew, pizza and hugs and seem to have at least 3 different costumes to wear over the course of the weekend.

I left around 2:30 AM and made it home alright but I was stiff and sore the next day from all the standing.

All in all I enjoyed myself, it was interesting talking about what I had in common with the anime fans and learning about what I did not know. This is a similar fandom but not an exclusively SF fandom, some fans are into ballet and tennis based anime. I tend to only read and watch the SF material some of which is very interesting and very different from what you see in more mainstream SF media.

I will definitely try and check it out next year.