Review: SNAFU Con – Year 2
Last year, I went to SNAFU Con and found it to be fun and worth the price of admission, which is why I went ahead and prepaid for this year’s con, with the assumption that the date would be the same (weekend toward the end of October). Well, the date changed and it was actually Friday September 9 – Sunday September 11, 2011 instead. This was a bit problematic as we had other events planned for the weekend, so instead of staying at the hotel for the weekend, we stayed home and visited Friday night after work, and then again on Sunday afternoon.
The con is now more spread out, rather than just being crammed into one room, with some partitions for the video and panel rooms. This sounds like a good thing, but it didn’t really feel like it when we were there. Having it more spread out seemed to cause some chaos and made it much harder to find people.
It was great getting to see Lynn Hardy again, however her event was so late in the evening that we didn’t feel like staying just for it. She did say that they are working on making a movie out of the books, the audio book had recently been finished, and there was manga in the pipeline.
The dealer’s hall was filled with overpriced merchandise. I realized this wasn’t Fanime, and there weren’t going to be a dozen vendors selling Pocky, but $3.50 a box was a bit ridiculous.
Overall, we felt the con itself was a bust. I realize they are still trying to figure things out, but they majorly failed in not getting a schedule out until less than a week before the con started. I don’t know if I will bother going next year. I didn’t prepay for next year, wouldn’t have known where to go if I had wanted to, because just like last year there was no information about it (#FAIL).
If it looks like they get their act together for next year, I will happily return, but at this point, that seems doubtful.
