Yes – the title of this blog post is tongue in cheek. That said, I did hear that Megacon was well attended and a good time was had by those who went. Kudos to Beth and her team on another successful year.

So why the obviously sarcastic title since (as many of you know) I am not a fan of Anime Sushi nor are they fans of me? It all has to do with this Twitter post:
http://twitter.com/TomCroom/status/7113327753

To get the full impact of the tweet, though, you need the complete story…

WAY BACK IN DECEMBER OF 2008
Everyone makes mistakes. Ask the Wasabi Anime staff and many of us will chuckle about some of our favorite typos and blunders when producing ads/flyers for our events. The one that most immediately comes to mind is the mystical month of “Devember”.  We accidentally misspelled December when 5000 flyers were printed for an event we were working with about three or four years ago.  The Wasabi Anime team passed all the flyers out at local conventions and giggled about it the whole time.  It has since become our unofficial thirteenth month.  As a matter of fact, it is still the year 2009 according to the Wasabi Anime Staff Calendar.

The point being, even we know when to laugh at ourselves.

Well, in December of 2008 I got my Megacon advertising book that gets mailed out each year to everyone on their previous attendee list.  While looking to see if there were any guests of interest, I came across the two page spread for Anime Sushi’s anime events.  I read through their descriptions and noticed that whoever had produced the ad had misspelled Anime Sushi’s website without the “e” – so it read www.animsushi.com.

Not once.  Twice.

Seriously.

I (and many of the Wasabi Anime team) have misspelled some pretty funny things in our time, but if there’s ONE THING we’ve always made sure to get right it’s our website address – especially in print.

After some thought on the matter, I decided to give GoDaddy.com ten dollars and secure www.animsushi.com.  I set up a one page website that told folks that there was a typo, and directed visitors to the correct address for Anime Sushi’s website.  (After about 30 seconds the web page auto forwarded to the correct Anime Sushi site even if you didn’t click the link.)

Problem solved… or so you’d think.

GRAB YOUR TIN FOIL HAT, FOLKS!
Well, it seems that the fine folks at Anime Sushi took this action as an affront to their club and it turned into an OMGDRAMAZ.  I heard this (of course) third hand when it blew up with someone who I had regarded, up until that point, as a casual friend acting like a total douchebag and calling my best friend to bitch about the website, me and Wasabi Anime while said best friend was driving hundreds of miles so see both of us and other friends for a Christmas party.  It was that single “winner” move that pretty much put that person onto my ”don’t talk to me – you fucking annoy me” list.

It should also be noted that this wasn’t the first time I contacted Anime Sushi regarding a mistake.  You know that 468 by 60 Megacon costume contest banner they use?  It’s the same one they’ve used for a few years now.  The first time they posted it, it had the misspelled word CUSTOME instead of COSTUME.  I emailed one of Anime Sushi’s officers (whom I knew) to let them know strictly out of courtesy since I would hope someone would do the same for me in a similar circumstance.

Again – I (and others at Wasabi Anime) have gotten emails about typos in the past.  We giggle at ourselves and correct the problem… and move on.  We also try to avoid the same mistake twice.

WAY BACK IN DECEMBER OF 2009
Last December I got an email from GoDaddy.com letting me know that www.animsushi.com was about to expire.  I had completely forgotten about the domain and seeing no use for it, I chose not to renew.

A week later, I was exploring the Megacon website and took the time to read the anime events page. While hovering over the hyper links for Anime Sushi’s website, I noticed something that left me completely dumbfounded: while the correct address was in the text of the site, the hyper link address for Anime Sushi’s website was spelled incorrectly. Whoever had coded the page had gotten it wrong. How was it spelled? You guessed it:

www.animsushi.com

This bring us back to my Twitter post. I noticed the website mistake on December 28th – and after some thought, I went back and coughed up another ten dollars to buy back the domain.  My initial thought was to try and contact Anime Sushi and offer to transfer the domain to them and tell them of the error.  They obviously just needed to keep it around for (what was appearing to be) a pretty consistent typo.  I then thought about how the key members of Anime Sushi have always reacted to these things in the past… and I decided to save myself the headache of dealing with them.  Instead, I just forward the domain to the Wasabi Anime website.

Only three others shared this secret — my friends the Sorceress, Man-at-Arms, and Orko.  I eventually shared it with a fourth person – but all of them have, at my request, kept this private.  There was debate as to whether or not to go public with it right before or right after Megacon.  There was even discussion about whether or not to go public at all.

It seems, though, that the error WAS finally discovered by SOMEONE.  Last Thursday (the day before Megacon) we tracked our final hits to the Wasabi Anime website from Megacon’s site:

So from December 28th, 2009 to March 11th, 2010 – Anime Sushi and Megacon have been supplying GreenMustard.com with a steady flow of website traffic.

After two years in a row, it’s safe to say that keeping an annual $10 investment for a regular traffic bump for first quarter of the year is probably worth it.

So it goes.