TL;DR: I'm going to my regularly scheduled convention during Memorial Day weekend, and I genuinely forgot that planning everything out ahead of time is pretty much mandatory.
I've been procrastinating a bit and didn't buy the pass until a few days ago, but because of that, I have to juggle some things because while I am not personally cosplaying, which I'll get to later in this post as to why, I still need to generally plan out everything I want to do that weekend: when it comes to parties, hanging out with friends, going to panels, all that sort of stuff.
I already know I want autographs from three people, so I need to bring cash and a notebook to get those autographs, but I need to figure out if I want to get them all on the same day or different days. I also need to figure out what panels are worth doing on specific days, what events I want to go to, overall conventions have something for everyone, and there's so much for me that I need to figure out what I want to do so I don't get overwhelmed.
Back to not cosplaying, it's because my plan was to go as this Obito, and I can't get the contacts in time so I don't want to cosplay an incomplete character. There's just a lot for me to do for the next two weeks in terms of scheduling things out with friends and whatnot, that I actually have to time manage at the convention to make sure I get everything I want out of it.
What conventions are run by decent people?
The only one I know of that is is Anime Matsuri in Houston, because they tried to MeToo the showrunner. He HAS to be good people, otherwise they'd never treat him like a threat. And Vic Mignogna went there recently.
The big thing is realizing how large businesses have taken over the convention scene. If it says Comic Con it is owned by the same people as PAX and E3.
For the Pacific Northwest I would recommend the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show in Tacoma. 400+ arcade games set free to play and lots of people talking about pinball.
The Portland Retro Gaming Expo is awesome. They tend to have 200 arcade games, a large console gaming area, other areas to game in, contests, shows and everything else. Run by locals and a ton of fun to attend.
Momocon (the one I'm going to), is one of the only ones that's still run independently, as I looked into this ages ago and the LLC is owned by a man named Christopher Stuckey.