The magical, the mystical, the manga… This weekend, fanatics and creators come together to revel in one of Japan’s greatest gifts to the world. FanimeCon features a 24-hour gaming hall for early birds and night owls, vendors selling memorabilia, creative cosplay and more. Guests include YouTubers from The Dex, in-character cosplayer VampyBitMe and bouncy musical group The Beat Garden. The convention features everything from speed dating to dance—including K-Pop, to Anime-core to ballroom—and a highly anticipated music video showcase. The festivities continue through Monday, May 27.

FanimeCon
Fri, 8am, $50+
San Jose McEnery Convention Center

“It’s a tough match-up for sure,” Drew types to me via text message. The match-up he is referring to is between a bird dressed like Han Solo, and a princess, wearing a sparkling tiara and wielding a parasol. The bird is Falco, a character from Nintendo’s Star Fox video game franchise. The princess is Peach—née Toadstool—Super Mario’s raison d’etre.

Drew Satterlund plays drums in the San Jose punk band Great Hart. He competed in this weekend’s Genesis 3 event—a Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament held at the McEnery Convention Center. “Oldjokes,” his gamer tag, comes from a friend’s D&D character, a pun-oriented wizard high on charisma (Editor’s note: been there). Drew is legally blind in his left eye, which is partially what led him to both music and video games.

“For video games you don’t need depth perception at all,” he explains, sounding almost Baudrillardian, “there’s no depth: it’s just right there.”

By the time I get to the Convention Center on Friday, Drew has already been knocked out of the tournament. After a close first round, and he tells me that he ended up in the loser’s circle, where he lost again to a guy who played as Luigi, Mario’s darkhorse brother in green.

Photo: Greg Ramar

When I arrive, Drew is out front with his friend Alec, who he met at Growing Up is Done, a DIY punk festival in Pomona, Calif. Alec (gamer tag: caives) has come up from Huntington Beach for the competition. We soon run into Michael (gamer tag: toomanyboxes), another player from San Jose who has recently been knocked out of the tournament. With parking at $12 losing can sting, but everyone is staying positive.

“When you lose a stock [life] just keep smiling,” Drew says.

Michael agrees. “I don’t want to be that salty kid.”

I haven’t been able to secure a press pass for the event, so we stand at the edge of the action, talking shop. Genesis is a huge competition, drawing people from all over the world. The Luigi that felled Drew was from Chicago. Out on Santa Clara, we see the No. 1 rated Nintendo 64 player in the world.

“I think he’s from Chile…” Michael says.

Photo: Greg Ramar

The conversation turns to lore about famous players, and the larger culture of the game. It goes deep. Before arriving, I watch some of a four-hour documentary on Smash Bros. There is a massive amount of lingo to learn, and endless sublevels to the gameplay. Something about the near pathological obsession with inane details resonates deeply in my mind with San Jose as a city.

As we were talking, a dude comes up the escalator carrying an old, bulky television, like he had just finished rolling somebody 15 years ago. For Melee players, CRT (cathode ray tube) TVs are the preferred format. Modern HD TVs mess up the frame rate, and at the competitive level every frame matters.

“There’s virtually no lag,” Alec says, “CRTs are just analog to analog.”

These days, everything reminds me of Videodrome.

While we were standing on the event level, Michael points out Isai, a San Jose native who is perhaps the most legendary player in all of competitive Smash Bros. As a fellow San Josean, some of the things Isai said about growing up here in the documentary haunted me. He seemed to have a deep understanding of the special kind of loneliness I have often felt while living in this city—a certain wireless disconnection. Standing by himself on the first floor, waiting for no one, Isai had an aura of quantum indecision. I never even saw his face.

Photo: Greg Ramar

Around 1:30pm, Alec checks the online listings to strategize for his first match.

“I’m playing a guy named ‘butt’ in the first round,” he said.

Drew nods, clearly thinking. “Look up ‘butt smash’ on Google,” he suggests.

As we were walking to Angelou’s, Alec spots Mango, one of the game’s major celebrities, just across the street. Mango plays a pivotal role in The Smash Bros. documentary and is one of the most storied gamers in all of e-sports. To many, he is an inspiration. In his career, Mango has earned almost $100,000 from tournaments.

As we walked on, Drew looks at the Subway next to Pita Pit.

“There’s like 10 Subways downtown,” he said, “but this one is the best.”

For the full gallery of photos taken by Greg Ramar, click here.

“It’s not wholesome!” a middle-aged mom shouted as she shut the trunk of her SUV. Was she talking about the stoners at HempCon or the costumed masses at FurCon? I didn’t get a chance to ask, as she hopped in the driver seat and sped off the scene of San Jose’s annual set-up for a joke.

Or maybe it’s more of an anti-joke.

Q: What happens when bunch of animal-suited fanatics, stoners and high-school volleyball girls walk into the McEnery Convention Center?

A: Everyone’s super chill about it and gets along pretty well.

At the time, Concerned Mom was loading whatever parents concerned with wholesomeness load into their trunks, I’d been asking a couple other volleyball parents what they thought of having a medical marijuana trade show and furry festival so close to their impressionable youth.

“Is that what they’re doing in there?” one asked, referring to the South Hall currently being hotboxed by HempCon. “They’re keeping it separate. We’re used to the cat convention [FurCon] by now. The girls think it’s funny.”

PHOTOS: FurCon photo gallery

The odd confluence has been going on for a couple years now. Bruce Newman wrote about it for the Mercury News in 2012, when the concerned parent contingent seemed to be significantly larger.

Key quotes from the article: “It’s just a bunch of degenerates who use medical marijuana as an excuse to do whatever they want to do,” says one parent. The same parent, regarding furries: “’Some of the other parents told me they had checked into it and found things that made it out to be basically a porn fetish convention.” He then “conceded his knowledge of furries is based on an episode of television’s ‘CSI.’”

So either the volleyball folks have gotten used to it, or “Freaky Stuff Scaring Middle Class White Folks” makes for a more exciting article than “Everyone Is Doing All Right.” Conflict makes for an easy hook. Emotions are high! People are fighting! Look! Look! So as a reporter, one might dig around a bit to find it. I asked each contingent what they thought of the others, and responses for the most part ranged from ignorance to unconcern.

The stoners, holed up in their big blue tent, hardly knew what was going on in the outside world. HempCon offered more than enough to occupy the average toker. The line for medical marijuana evaluations made a lengthy snake throughout the hall all day. In exchange for $60 and a chat with a doctor, one could enter the back half of the hall where South Bay dispensaries were selling weed and handing out free samples of all sorts of edibles: “Taste the food, not the medicine!”

PHOTOS: HemCon photo gallery

Most of HempCon’s rhetoric still focuses around the useful fiction that everyone is here for the medicinal value of weed. While some definitely are, talking about weed as medicine sounds a lot better than saying that sometimes one just wants to get blazed and eat a family-sized bag of Doritos sans other family members.

Other highlights of HempCon that this reporter witnessed included a six-foot bamboo bong (“King Bong”) poached from a century-old bamboo patch by the Rose Bowl, an “herbonomically correct” weed trimming station complete with iPhone holder and “kief cling texture” and a booth holding a wide variety of polished rocks and crystals.

“Do stoners like crystals?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, they’re shiny, but they don’t emit their own light so it doesn’t hurt their eyes.” Makes sense.

As far as the furries go, they’re much less weird than they might first appear. Anyone who’s ever been to a sci-fi or comic book festival knows exactly the type: maybe a little more skittish than most, but friendly enough and passionate about very specific things. In this case, dressing up in full body fursuits and pretending to be various creatures.

According to Shawna Snopeck, a con-goer wearing a fuzzy white eared hat, the attractions of the furry fandom lies in it being “a way to express yourself other than who you are.” She traveled from New Jersey to go to the event with her “mate,” Adam Wolf.

When asked about the volleyball girls and the stoners, they hadn’t heard about any conflicts or bad vibes. I told them about Concerned Mom in the parking lot, and Philip, another guy listening in, told me, “This is wholesome for me!”

Later, Philip would get in an argument with another guy about the relative anthropomorphism of the rabbits in Watership Down and whether they used doors or not.

“There’s no doors in Watership Down.”

“Yes there are. Maybe you haven’t read it in a while.”

“Well I’ve read it many times and I don’t think there are any doors.”

“Yeah there is…well they went through a gate in the garden…”

On my way out, furries Kevin and Kat told me how heartbreaking it was to leave FurCon. In a fandom found mostly online, cons are a place to meet Internet friends in real life, at least for a weekend.

In the lobby of the convention center, I chatted with a couple more volleyball people. As we watched their daughters practice while fur-suited folks walked by, one mom told me, “The more the merrier.”

Outside on the street, a guy in big purple fuzzy feet and ears was talking to a member of a dispensary street team. “So, if I live in Oregon, can I get my medical evaluation in California?”

Despite federal raids and local land-use fights plaguing marijuana dispensaries, the industry will soon go from medicinal to outright legal, says Freddy Sayegh, an activist and criminal defense attorney. California will join the ranks of Colorado and Washington, he says, and it’s only a matter of time before the federal government reclassifies the drug from a Schedule I controlled substance, deemed to have no medical benefit, to a Schedule II, which recognizes clinical properties and allows researchers to legally study the plant.

“That’s a future we should all prepare for,” says Sayegh, the keynote speaker at HempCon in San Jose this week. “Things will change drastically. This will move from a non-profit to a for-profit market, a competitive market opened up to recreational uses. I believe 2014 is the year to talk about what future distribution models will look like and look back at what we can learn from other states that have legalized it already.”

Sayegh will join a host of other speakers and about 10,000 attendees at the fifth annual HempCon, which kicks off a four-city tour Friday at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

The convention runs through Sunday, and it is both festival and educational event, showcasing the latest in smoking accessories and hydroponics.

On the educational side, there are workshops and lectures on topics ranging from starting a delivery business to making THC-based lotions and elixirs. On Friday, cannabis consultant Ralf Rainer will talk about patient dispensary management, Cannabis Career Institute’s Robert Calkin will discuss legal compliance in California and hemp historian Gary Maciel will explore the weird past of the psychoactive plant. Weekend workshops include Sayegh’s keynote speech and more lectures from the Cannabis Career Institute on advanced cultivation, dispensary management, growing opportunities and investing in the marijuana industry.

Sayegh encourages attendees to learn about the laws surrounding THC wax, the super-concentrated butane hash oil, which is legal to possess with a cannabis card but illegal to manufacture.

“There have been a lot of new cases and arrests from people trying to make wax out of butane,” he says. “There’s so much vagueness in the law around concentrates in terms of what’s lawful to possess. But I’m fighting some big cases where people are facing up to six years in state prison for manufacturing butane-based concentrated cannabis. A lot of people don’t know the risk.”

Among the 90-plus vendors registered for the event, physicians from San Jose 420 Evaluations will conduct cannabis consultations on site. Attendees can find options for local treatment, learn about new ways to ingest the plant and ask for legal advice from several attorneys on hand.

Of course, HempCon is as much a haven for medicinal users as it is a celebration of marijuana culture, with clothing, souvenirs, scantily clad booth babes and live performances. Entertainment will range from a standup comedy lineup and THC oil cooking demo to a variety show and musical acts starring Addey Lance and Sour Diesel.

Fanime Con 2013, one of the the largest Northern California events for fans of anime and cosplay (short for costume play), took over San Jose McEnery Convention Center and the streets of San Jose for four days over the holiday weekend.

There was no shortage of great costumes, and Metro photographer Geoffrey Smith caught some of the best.