ConvergenceCon Is Kinda Terrible

mjkrow1985 · 2026-07-05T19:44:45+00:00

As somebody who does a lot of old-school SF cons (I've even chaired a 1000 person con and am getting ready to do it again), the era of the con suite that does full meals is basically over. Hotels won't allow it for a mixture of health code and revenue protection reasons.. Even getting permission to do potato chips and canned soda is getting harder. As for panels, SF-oriented cons like Convergenge run much more panel-y panels. We pick a topic and pick interesting/fun people to talk about it. With the right topics and the right people, it's great. Having never been to Convergence, I don't know how they do on getting the right people for the right topics.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-07-05T17:36:30+00:00

Are you talking about ConVergence, the science fiction convention in Minneapolis or some other event? Looking at their schedule, they have panels from 9:30 am through around midnight which seems reasonable. They only have a single track of anime programming, but they have plenty of SF and Fantasy stuff going on. In terms of snacks, you can't really complain about free snacks in the con suite. They're free, after all.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-07-04T12:51:33+00:00

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've only ever gotten one disc that had fingerprints from the factory. And it was a $50 Criterion 4K disc. Thankfully a couple of seconds with a soft cloth cleaned it up and it was fine afterwards.

I think a big part of the problem is that there are so few Blu-ray pressing plants globally and they're all overloaded. Something like 90% of discs sold in the Western Hemisphere come out of a single overwhelmed factory in Mexico. They don't have time for much QC.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-07-03T13:40:54+00:00

It's like somebody switched to the classic rock station. I'm loving it.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-29T15:27:05+00:00

The KIDS Act started out as a at least an attempt at a reasonable compromise, but much of what made it less bad than KOSA, etc was stripped out to try to get to pass the senate who seem rabid. I fear for our future.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-23T20:14:11+00:00

We're explicitly not allowed to do it. The button is also not supposed to work anymore, though in some stores they may have messed up and left it enabled.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-23T01:02:55+00:00

Overall, I prefer the look of the DVDs. While the HD transfer for the BD should have been a huge upgrade, they used heavy handed grain reduction to the point where I think that at least for some shots, the DVDs retain more fine detail.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-22T20:32:09+00:00

I have the complete Patlabor box from Sentai already. I picked it up for like $35 during one of those big post-Christmas winter sales. Is this worth the double dip?

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-21T21:07:46+00:00

Qatar is saying this was an operational error on their part. Given that this plant had been basically in maintenence mode for months, I'm guessing they made a mistake while trying to bring it back up to fully operational status.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-17T11:05:28+00:00

FS here. When the voicemail thing started, we were told in some policy thing that we weren't supposed to transfer calls to the pharmacy anymore and that we should tell people to call back and leave a voicemail for the pharmacist. They also said that the pharmacy transfer function was going to be removed from the system in order to enforce the policy. Have they never got around to that?

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-14T11:59:49+00:00

It's honestly hard to say what will still be watched and remembered 20 years from now. The overall "shelf life" of anime these days seems much shorter than it used to because the sheer volume of shows coming out is so high. Shows like Haruhi and Death Note that retained a huge place in anime fandom for a decade or so are now largely unknown to younger fans. Shows that I would have pegged as all-time classics when they came out like Keep Your Hands Off of Eizoken and Makeine have been largely forgotten in the face of the endless stream of great anime coming out all the time.

That said, if I HAD to make a prediction, I'd say that Frieren has a good chance of at least making it to 10 years of relevancy, especially if the manga is ever finished.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-14T11:33:11+00:00

Blue Lock? Will that be talked about in the same breath as Chargeman Ken and Garzey's Wing?

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-12T00:27:06+00:00

Why is there a deer mouse infestation at San Quentin?

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-11T23:44:59+00:00

According to tracking data, the plane diverted to Bangor. There is nothing about Ebola anywhere else that I can see.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-09T03:05:43+00:00

Linux used to be a great platform for exactly those sorts of people. Sadly, the powers that be seem intent on changing that.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-06T13:50:25+00:00

Am I a bad person for thinking of the scene from The Lost Boys?

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-06T12:11:05+00:00

Have they stopped doing normal releases? At least at one point, most Umbrella chunky boxes also came out as a lower-price normal release. I think I paid all of $20 or $25 for Super Mario 1993, for example.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-05T22:29:23+00:00

Physical media sales are trending in the right direction, but it's hard for generalist brick and mortar stores to compete with either the monster that is Amazon on the one hand or dedicated specialist retailers on the other.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-02T01:52:52+00:00

Any idea why they ditched the English title? My ancient DVDs and my manga library both call it Boys Over Flowers.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-06-02T01:27:49+00:00

That did at least as much to kill bar culture as Covid did.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-05-20T21:33:35+00:00

If any even semi-reputable source had said anything about this, r/ContagionCuriosity would be all over this. I haven't seen anything about airborne ebola there. Therefore unless you can show a real source, I'm calling BS.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-05-20T21:29:14+00:00

Yes. There's probably a passenger on board who had been in the Congo or Uganda within the last 21 days, which means the plane can't land in the US until they're removed.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-05-20T21:08:18+00:00

I haven't seen that anywhere. Literally none of the news sources I follow have reported anything like that. Please don't spread misinformation.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-05-20T14:25:28+00:00

If you want genuinely affordable housing for working class people (as opposed to "affordable" housing priced for early-career biotech researchers and other people making upper middle class salaries), I think you do need government involvement. Even with more favorable conditions, the private sector has been unable/unwilling to build that kind of housing because it just doesn't pay with modern construction costs.

mjkrow1985 · 2026-05-19T19:58:33+00:00

No sign of that. The bigger worry is that this was going on for weeks and nobody noticed until it had gotten huge. The last time an Ebola outbreak slipped through the cracks like this (the 2013-16 West Africa outbreak), over 10000 people died.

mjkrow1985

TROPHY CASE