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.
By an absolute miracle I was able to attend SDCC in 2006. Got to see some of the webcartoonists I used to follow who've all since gone woke. Had some giant Snakes on a Plane promo thing since that was the meme of the time.
Was glad I went the one time I was able, but it's not something I needed to do again; and I don't understand the people who go year after year.
Also gone to a couple auto shows which can be interesting to see the concept cars and do the test drives. I think the last one I went to was the year all the VW/Audi diesels got yeeted, so there was a lot of empty space in their exhibitions where those cars would have been. Those are fun to attend about once per decade: long enough to see the production versions of the concepts you saw at the last show.