ConnectiCon 2026 Part 2
The afternoon rain on Saturday at ConnectiCon 2026 only lasted about an hour, and you can see in the photos in the gallery linked below that the crowds behind the cosplayers are smaller again as people went back outside onto the plaza.
In fact, at one point it had slowed down enough that the line to buy food and drink from the cafe stand on the mezzanine level was only a dozen or so deep, so I grabbed a wrap and soda for a late lunch. It wasn’t until I was home many hours later that I realized the turkey wrap contained a lot of lettuce. No explosions of any kind, thankfully.
As was the case the last time I was at the convention in 2023, both the Connecticut Convention Center staff and the volunteer ConnectiCon staff seemed to be much better at handling problems than they were pre-pandemic. One example — not long after the rain stopped, I watched a staffer whose job was to check badges of people coming in the doors off to my left, run in to check a bunch of people he missed for some reason. He sort of power walked-trotted in and seeing badges he would mutter, “You’re good. You’re good.” He then reached a pair of cosplayers and didn’t shout or put hands on them (as I’ve seen happen in the past) but just pleasantly but insistently said “Excuse me” until he got their attention and then said he needed to see their badges, which they sheepishly pulled out of pockets and packs where they had stored them.
This is so much better than the early to mid 2010s, when it was so bad that I have cosplayer friends who will still not return, despite hearing that things have improved. Keep it up, ConnectiCon.
We left about 6:30, and bad_phoenix_wolf had the great idea to stop for dinner at the Vernon Diner in Vernon, Conn., when our driver Adventures of Clever was less than a mile from the exit we would need. It serves breakfast all day, and I really enjoyed the pulled pork breakfast burrito.
Finally, thumbs up to Clever for identifying so many gatcha game cosplayers, because I don’t know my Genshins from my Honkais. And thumbs down to whoever gave me this head cold.
Among the cosplayers in this second and final gallery are iadontknow, miaezlay, ominousfarting, therosalieivy, hector_cosplays, zimmermanjoe21, bombshellbeckie, jigalazy.cos, emily._church._, kevin._calvillo, luminacosplays, moecifer.cos, lytecos, kittenmusk, wolfthrown, jpurdue21, quinngrey, taymmars, etherealamberr, samurai_mike0, kenneth_pereira, and many more.
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