Otakon: Convention of Convention Generation: The changing state of the anime con

I have actually had the pleasure of going to Otakon in Baltimore MD a few times, and the photo above, is a personal one from this year's Otakon 2009 "Who are ya gonna call?" (hint: not ghostbusters!). - arcticspirit

Here's the article:
The economy may be in the dumps, but with over 26,000 people having attending Otakon 2009 you sure wouldn’t know it. Granted, that’s roughly the same as 2008, but to just hold steady demonstrates that even though money is tight, people will still come out for the big show, and on the East Coast it’s the self-proclaimed “Convention for Otaku Generation.”


Otakon is so big that you have to book your hotel roughly a year in advance just to get a spot. Why, by the time you read this, the Days Inn is probably already booked solid! The downside to this is that you have to commit to attending the convention long before any guests, events, or programming schedules are confirmed. And unlike every other convention ever, you are not permitted to cancel your hotel room reservation up to 24 hours prior to check-in. So even though Otakon overall held roughly the same attendance, the addition of an entirely new hotel meant those same people were now spread out across more rooms. An awful lot of people ended up paying way, way more for their hotel rooms as they would have liked because of this.


Otakon2009-BigO-2-mA collective sigh was breathed mere weeks before, as it wasn’t until the deadline to cancel one’s hotel reservation had already passed that most of the major guest list was confirmed. Lots of fans turn out for the voice actor guests—Otakon has both English and Japanese ones—as well as the musical acts, but I didn’t bother to see a single one of these people.
Of all the non-musical act Japanese guests, the one most fans were likely to be interested in was Yutaka Yamamoto, the director of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Kannagi. I find it fascinating how he can so vociferously lament the state of anime and express such disdain for choreographed dance sequence OP/EDs when he himself is the one who conjured forth that beast. Does he not realize that was never a factor until HE made it one? That guy needs to take some responsibility for his crimes! Also, Kannagi is extremely average even by moe show standards, so we didn’t bother to interview him. Instead, look forward to our [brief] interview with the fascinating Fred Schodt (pronounced the same as “shot”), and perhaps the highlights of the group press conference with Masao Maruyama, Noboru Ishiguro, Yukio Kikukawa, and Hidenori Matsubara in the near future!

While many con guests tend to vanish from the grounds during the times they’re not scheduled to be doing something, Maruyama and Ishiguro were both quite content to just walk around the convention by themselves, without any special badges or security escort or anything. Hey, they’re old Japanese men. They know that fans won’t recognize them.

From Arcticspirit:
At-con registration will be available all three days of the convention. The price of a membership is $65 if purchased at the convention. A membership allows you to attend all convention functions from the time of purchase till the end of the convention.

In the past years, You could purchase membership online early in the year and get get a small discount. I didn't see info about that on their page today, as the con has just happened.