I live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and recently started helping a good friend of mine and his wife who have a small side business selling vintage toys and comic books at small conventions. I had stopped going to most Conventions for a while. A couple of years back the guy who ran the major ones in this area sold to Fan Expo and it wasn't as fun as it once was. I am loving going to the small conventions because you get to interact with legit fans and talk about sci-fi/fantasy or comic books.
I used to have it on my bucket list to one day go to the San Diego con or the annual Star Trek convention in Vegas but they seem to (like so many others) have stopped catering to actual fans and are more interested in the woke garbage. Panels about more diversity/women in gaming or how evil nerd culture is doesn't cut it for me.
Kind of reminds me of my beloved Sci-Fi channel. It came out when I was 10 or 11 and I loved it because as a sci-fi nerd, it seemed to be a channel for people who liked sci-fi. Now like so many other nerd sites it has turned into the usual fake geek hangout. I stopped going on the syfy channel website when the lady reviewing Brightburn complained about white supremacy and the evil white male nonsense.
I've seen some footage of comic conventions online which makes me think that at certain ones have attendance is down (though maybe people are raring to go to certain ones?) so i don't know how economically profitable these places are at the moment, but getting out and meeting fans would probably be fun. People who are more hardcore fans seem to like the more personal, smaller ones, as the bigger ones are more, uh, "corporate". Also the mask mandates have caused some drama. I would like to go to conventions in the future but have to find a good fit. Don't think i could go now being unvaccinated, but maybe in the future.
Luckily I live in Texas so there are no mandates. I’ve met a lot of cool people at the small ones