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On Tuesday, Anime Matsuri posted a statement on their web site announcing that Marc Perez, former Chairman and CEO for Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation (SPJA), the parent company for Anime Expo, has been hired as Chief Operating Officer of Anime Matsuri.

As Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Perez will oversee several department divisions and report directly to Anime Matsuri's convention chairman, Deneice Leigh.

FanimeCon announced their schedule for their 2016 Masquerade Cosplay Contest on their web site. It's scheduled to start at 6pm and the award announcements will begin around 10:30pm. That means the entire event (not including seating) will last approximately five hours for just 55 entries.

Here's the program as posted:

5:30 p.m. - Doors open on Sunday May 29th at the San Jose Civic Auditorium 6:00 p.m. - Opening announcements and introductions 6:15 p.m. - Karaoke winner's star performance 6:20 p.m. - First half: entries 1-25 7:30 p.m. - Intermission: 15 minute break to get up, stretch your legs and get ready for the second half 7:45 p.m. - Second half: entries 26-55 9:00 p.m. - Exposition performances 9:30 p.m. - Extravaganza's game show ~10:30 p.m. - AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT

Why is the event so long? Let's take a look...

They've given themselves 30 minutes for seating. That's fine.

There's 15 minutes for opening announcements and introductions. That seems rather excessive. Five minutes should be more than enough time to welcome everyone, introduce the emcee, introduce a handful of judges, go over some rules, and get started. What's happening for the other 10 minutes? Is it extra padding in case seating takes longer or people aren't actually ready on time?

The karaoke winner gets 5 minutes to perform. That's a reasonable amount of time to sing a song, but why is this even here? Get the show started and have the karaoke winner perform later while judges are making their decisions.

The first 25 entries are scheduled for 70 minutes. That's 2.8 minutes per entry. Some of these will be "walk on" entries, meaning that they walk on the stage, strike a few poses, and walk off. These are easily under a minute each (although the rules state a limit of 90 seconds), leaving more time for skit entries. Skit entries are allowed up to 2.5 minutes each. Even if all 25 entries were skits and all of them ran the full 2.5 minutes, that would only occupy 62.5 minutes. Factoring in the emcee's introductions, it's mathematically possible this could run over 70 minutes, but extremely unlikely.

After a 15 minute intermission (because the show is so long), the second half has 75 minutes for 30 entries. That's an average of 2.5 minutes per entry. Worst case scenario, they're all skits that run the maximum time, this could run over when you factor in the emcee's introductions.

Of course, there are two very obvious choices that could be made to reduce the running time of the skits: cut down the number of skits and/or reduce the maximum time for each entry. Using the same worst-scenario time estimate, a reduction of skit entries to just 2 minutes each would save up to nearly half an hour. What story can you tell in 2.5 minutes that you can't tell in 2? Keep the performance times short to keep things moving. Nothing drags down the excitement of a costume contest like a poor skit that seems like it never ends.

Why do walk-ons get 90 seconds? Some costume contests even restrict skits to 60 seconds, so cutting back the walk-ons should be a no-brainer. They walk on, strike some poses, walk off. If someone's using up the full minute-and-a-half, they've never heard the saying "Always leave them wanting more."

After the entries have finished, there is 30 minutes of exposition performances planned. Yes, these can be amazing to watch because they're often professionals with incredible performances. 30 minutes seems rather excessive though. Still, that's 30 minutes that can be used by judges to make award decisions.

Following the exposition performances, there's "Extravaganza's game show" planned for an hour. This appears to be the biggest cause for the length of the contest. I don't know what this game show entails, but I have to wonder why it's here. It should be scheduled after the awards or at another time or in another location.

The event ends with the presentation of awards. The judges have an excessive 90 minutes to decide on 12 performance awards, 4 craftsmanship awards (which should have already been decided during pre-judging), and a judge's award from each judge. If these judges are keeping score and halfway decent notes during the competition, the decision making process should not last more than 30 minutes for these dozen performance awards.

Five hours is unbearably long for this event. Here's a proposed improved schedule (with the number of skits reduced to a nice round 50, walk-ons limited to 60 seconds, and skits limited to 2 minutes):

5:30 pm - Doors open for seating 6:00 pm - Opening announcements and introductions 6:05 pm - First half: entries 1-25 6:55 pm - Intermission: 15 minute break to get up, stretch your legs and get ready for the second half 7:10 pm - Second half: entries 26-50 8:00 pm - Exposition performances 8:30 pm - Karaoke winner's star performance 8:35 pm - Award Announcements 9:00 pm - END

By simply moving the game show, cutting out 5 skits, slightly reducing stage time, and cutting back on opening announcements, two hours have been trimmed! If we cut the skits back to a maximum of 1.5 minutes, we could probably do without the intermission and save another 40 minutes!

The point is that five hours is not necessary for a costume contest with this many entries. The contest was already excessively long last year thanks to countless technical delays. (FanimeCon 2015's masquerade was over 2 hours long just counting the competing entries and awards. Tadao, the emcee, admitted that he had stalled so much that he ran out of material!)

Anime Southwest, has announced the cancellations of seven guests: Horsedeer Productions, Laura Post, Lisle Wilkerson, Marissa Floro, Martin Billany, Warky T. Chocobo, and Warumono. The convention's own "Guests" page does not cite a reason, but states "Due to unfortunate circumstances, the following previously announced guests will no longer be attending Anime Southwest this year. Each previously announced guest extends their apologies to their fans who were anxious to see them."

The convention had been promoting some of these guests as recently as two days ago.

Martin Billany, Marissa Floro, and Warumono also announced their cancellations on social media.

I am sad to announce that I have had to cancel my appearance at Anime Southwest at the end of the month. Sorry to the staff and attendees!— LittleKuriboh (@yugiohtas) April 9, 2016

Hi hi everyone, Huge unfortunate news I will be withdrawing from Anime Southwest. I'm so sorry for all my... https://t.co/ecgaW5pr9s— Marissa Floro (@CelesteOrchid) April 8, 2016

This news comes one week after a new venue was announced for the convention. Originally scheduled at the Radisson Hotel Denver Southeast in Aurora, Colorado, Anime Southwest announced in mid-March that the hotel had cancelled the event. On April 1st, the convention announced that it had found a new location at the Ramada Plaza Northglenn/Denver North in Northglenn. The new location is 25 miles from the former location.

Anime Southwest is run by the same organization that runs Sukoshicon conventions in the South. They entered the Denver market last year when they took over Animeland Wasabi 2015. However, they split off for their 2016 convention and Animeland Wasabi 2016 was not organized by Sukoshicon.

After cancelling ten conventions in the last two months, YourMiniCon has now cancelled their event in Portland, Maine (also known as "Super Sentai Ranger Con"), the only remaining event other than their original Connecticut location.

YourMiniCon posted on Facebook stating:

To address concerns expressed by our fans about the status of our event in Maine, we would like to explain what is going on. We had contracted all of the guests through a single agency that asked for exclusive rights to represent any guests at the event. We signed contracts, and outlined a marketing plan for promotion almost a year ago.

We allotted a four month period of promotion before any deposits were due on those guests, and proceeded to announce the guests and push the event back in November of 2015. A decent amount of interest was generated, and we had recently been to the Portland, ME area in October to put up simple flyers at local comic and gaming shops.

In January, Groupon reached out to us about our events and we launched several deals for our events. To date, four Groupon vouchers for Maine have been purchased. Four out of an allotted eight thousand.

We printed 11x17 posters up featuring the guest list, some of the specialized vendors and artists, and all of the event information at the beginning of February. We had plans to distribute them around the New England area along with talking with shop owners and fans in the region.

Since early sales were not quite where we had estimated they would be, the agency representing our guests pulled their active support and contacted their guest list. They informed each of their guests that they are welcome to attend, and if still interested to contact us. However, they did not give any contact information to those guests.

We have since been in communication with other agencies who represent the guests we had listed to negotiate new contracts for appearance. However, it seems that somehow the information was made public before we had a chance to clear up any contract issues.

While we knew that a few had indicated they would no longer attend, we wanted to try and negotiate new terms for their appearance before pulling them from the website.

With Lexington Toy Con having passed and several of the guests who had withdrawn from our event indicating to fans of our event that they were not currently attending anymore, we feel that we had to address the issue.

As of today, 63 days out from the event, we are cancelling Super Sentai Ranger Con. We will contact anyone due a refund with an estimate on when those refunds will be issued. I want to thank the few fans and vendors who signed up for their support, but we had misgivings months ago with low sales and we should have cancelled it then.

In January 2015, YourMiniCon held its first event in Connecticut. By late 2015, they had planned to expand to a dozen events across the United States. In January 2016, they announced that six of those conventions would be cancelled. A month later, four more were cancelled.

After the last round of cancellations, YourMiniCon's William Case told Nerd & Tie that they were attempting to refocus on the East Coast and they had realized they tried to expand too quickly after the Nevada show had "practically nonexistent sales".

As with previous cancellations from YourMiniCon, it is expected that refunds will be issued if you were one of the few people that pre-registered.

Greggo of Greggo's Game Shows has indelibly left his mark on the anime convention scene, and for that and his continued con work we are better off as a con community. But who is this man of mystery? Well step right up and try your luck to learn more about Greggo as you watch AnimeCons.com interview with our returning guest. :D

- Anime Blast Chattanooga 2013