There’s no easy way to say this, Nick has stepped down from Nebkon Abridged. With my position of Vice Con Chair, I will be taking the mantle of the Con Chair. At this time, I do not have a Vice Con Chair, nor do I have one in mind for selection. I imagine that will be done in the near future.
My vision of Nebkon Abridged is this: A night away from the kids.
Adults my age who are convention veterans will remember a smaller, more intimate, but still very passionate time, where we would go to a con when anime wasn’t popular. At the heart of it all, we could still be ourselves. Sometimes that meant we could flirt more openly, because we knew their cosplay told us they had a shared interest. Sometimes it meant we could game for hours on end like we always wanted to. It meant we could drink with friends without worrying about tomorrow. Along the way, we did get older. We did change our titles, our roles, our relationships, but we never really stopped being a fan of anime and video games and all the things that got us called nerds.
I miss those days. Being a parent with a mortgage is nice in a lot of ways, but sometimes I miss the days I was broke, single, and barely got to choose what anime I could buy because that technically was gas and food money.
Conventions have changed too. So many anime conventions, rightly so, saw anime as popular. The demographics got older. They have jobs now. They have kids, careers, and a better sense of who they are now. The shows then changed to be family friendly. There was a nightlife but it felt sectioned off. It felt like we lost some of the identity anime cons had as a more exciting environment.
To that end, Nebkon Abridged is like any abridged series. We take what we love about the main show and use the lense of our fandom to praise the great and riff on the regrettable. To see what it was like through the lense of today. To share with a new generation that might not have grown up with it otherwise.
There are going to be a lot of challenges to be done in less than a hundred days to the convention. I want this one to be the best show we’ve made so far. There’s also only been like two and one of them was basically a wake for a building. So I know we can do this better. It is my goal to get this show done and done right. I will be relying on all of you to get this. I believe in all of you. So let’s make this happen and make it even better for 2025.
Sincerely,
Andrew Montz “Professor Shinobi”, Convention Chairman of Nebkon Abridged