5

At 1 a.m., Everything Becomes Miserable

Antonio_Diaz/iStock/Getty Images

By the end of the day, your phone is almost dead, you still have to catch an Uber back to the hotel, and you've spent the last 14 hours walking from a conference room to an escalator to a hall crammed with sleep-deprived, shuffling people, and back. You decide to shoot yourself in the head with one last caffeine bullet in a partially vain attempt to tell your body, "NO. THE MEGA MAN THEMES COVER BAND IS IMPORTANT, GODDAMMIT," and instead of pushing you forward, it simply meets the salty hotel snacks/food-truck morsels that you've been absorbing all day. It slams headlong into that mix of chicken tenders and Mountain Dew, and a gang fight breaks out in your large intestine, like the poop version of West Side Story.

The food that you're handed at conventions is 98 percent sodium and 2 percent fried bread. If you gave it to a Civil War soldier, that soldier would toss it and just stick with the dysentery. It contains such little nutritional value that you'd be better off eating your registration badge. At the most recent convention that I went to, chicken strips made up three of the blocks of the food pyramid, with the two remaining blocks being the coffee that I guzzled that morning in my hotel lobby.

crossstudio/iStock/Getty Images
It's the only known food pyramid where every single block is "use sparingly."

While the building where the event took place was massive, they had not constructed it with a thousand hungry people in mind, who had all heard the rumor about there being chicken strips at once. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that they imagined that 10 people would hear about the chicken strips and the other 990 would dissolve into thin air. People waited for an hour to get a tiny cup with three chicken strips shoved into it. I don't know the name of the dystopian novel that I lived in that weekend, but it most certainly ended with me finding out that chicken strips were people.

ClaudioVentrella/iStock/Getty Images
And the fries were how they recycled our skin.

4

Your Niche Hobbies Become Even More Niche

New Japan Pro Wrestling

When you have a niche interest that you like a lot, you sometimes gain a kind of "me against the world" mentality. The Earth doesn't like you or your Charizard hoodie, so you spend your life swinging your fists in the direction of anyone who might even whisper an acknowledgment that sports exist. I did. And on my way to a recent convention, I assumed that others would share in my fervor. And they totally did. But in ways that I didn't initially expect.

Cuituremind
"Charizard hoodie guy, no one chooses you!"

I'm into professional wrestling. I understand that there are a ton of people ready and eager to tell me about why I'm a fool for enjoying nicknamed bodybuilders and their intricate punch ballets, but I've already listened to those same people's long-winded explanations of their agnosticism in college, so I've learned to tune them out. Some people shared in my enthusiasm. When you can have a two-hour conversation about Shinsuke Nakamura, a genetic experiment meant to blend the best of Prince with the best of kicks, you're doing something that transcends personality differences. But there were far more people that seemed to approach it from a negative standpoint. You could ask who their favorite of all time was, and they'd spend an hour criticizing everyone else before they spit out, "Jake 'The Snake' Roberts was pretty cool. Really cool. It all just sucks though. Sucks so bad. I love wrestling."

New Japan Pro Wrestling
"Everybody looks the same. It's so boring. Why can't anyone be weird and entertaining anymore?"

3

You Learn That Most People Don't Take Care Of Their Things

Roberto Palmas/Hemera/Getty Images

I've had a lot of friends over the years complain to me about their video games not working correctly. Or we'd go to watch a DVD they own and it skips so much that you'd swear the player was filled with tiny goblins dry-humping the disc. And for years, I would wonder why all of their electronics rebelled whenever we wanted to enjoy them. Then I started watching how these friends treated their stuff.

Video game conventions feature this abuse of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft products, multiplied by a hundred. The only thing that drowned out the sea of yelling about broken equipment was the ceaseless roar of controllers being slammed down, discs being pushed in, and cords being ripped out and thrust into ports where they didn't belong. Everyone had broken out their finest Mr. Magoo cosplays and together they were convinced that video games work best when you handle them like you would a medieval torture victim.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images News/Getty Images
"Are you going to cough up another achievement, or am I breaking out
the hot coals again, Mr. Controller?"

2

Drinking Becomes Special Again

Chris Clinton/Photodisc/Getty Images

After playing Mario Kart with a few strangers, one lingered to tell me that he was now going to go find his friends. It was sweet. He seemed like a cool guy, and I generally hope that cool people don't leave conversations with me to crawl back into the ocean where they'll continue to live a cold, companion-less existence. He then restated his plans, but added that he and his friends were going to be drinking beer. And not just any kind of beer. The kind of beer that's the emphasis of a sentence. The kind of "my parents aren't here and I'm surrounded by my friends and WOO" beer that a lot of people stop drinking when they graduate high school and discover that it's going to be harder to not drink beer than it is to acquire it.

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"Turns out, those drunken frat-boy assholes had a point after all!"

1

You Realize That Fandom Doesn't Belong To You

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

As I wrote earlier, we all enjoy things in different ways. The show that I'm watching right now is currently being watched by someone who has their dick out. But there's always the pressure to become King Nerd. You never want to be told that you don't know as much, or that you aren't as enthusiastic about a subject, as someone else is.

Attempting to crown yourself King Nerd is a natural response to suddenly being thrown into a giant group after spending a long time entrenched in the solitude of your interests. We have a desire to make ourselves stand out from others. We want to either possess the most knowledge or have the funniest insights or create some kind of lasting impression that people will think about on their drive back home. "I met a lot of people who dug One Punch Man over the weekend, but that Daniel, he was the One Punch Maniest."

Madhouse
And after a few rounds of WOO beer, I was the One Punch-Drunk Man.

But the fandom doesn't really belong to you. It doesn't belong to the people who bought more expensive passes than you, and it doesn't belong to the guests that people line up to see. Technically, it belongs to the people who own the copyright, but I'm not going to end this thing with a death by natural causes. The fandom doesn't belong to anyone. And I think that's what helps you to kind of forget that you're going to be ingesting chicken strips until your poop starts to resemble them, and that you're accidentally knocking into people with every third step. It's a shared thing.

Conventions are overly commercialized to the point that San Diego Comic-Con would benefit with a name change to "AMC'S THE WALKING DEADSTRAVAGANZA (And Whatever New Batman Thing Too, We Guess.)" But there's still something intangible that keeps people going there, and to things like it. For me, it was hearing the applause after John Carpenter, director of Escape From New York and The Thing, answered a question at a panel a few years ago. I don't remember the question or the reply, but I do remember clapping with everyone else and thinking to myself, "Oh thank god. It's not just me."

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
Both because he's John Fucking Carpenter and because he had nothing to do with goddamn zombies.

Talk to Daniel about wrestling and Batman on his dumb Twitter.

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See why even the spookiest conventions can have sane members in 5 Things I Learned Infiltrating A Paranormal Convention, and check out the conventions that put Star Trek to shame in PathetiCon: 8 Geek Conventions God Never Intended.

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