This series is my occasional countdown to Anime Weekend Atlanta. I’ve done it two or three times with varying levels of success, and I am once again embarking on a quest to spend 100 days writing 100 posts about anime, manga, animation, comics, film, and conventions. We’ll see what happens.
100 Days of Anime 2026
Day 010/100
Theme of the Day: “Tank!” by SEATBELTS from Cowboy Bebop (1998)
Currently Watching: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
I still haven’t found some magic, scalable but still valuable blog variant to post for this challenge on days when I’m busy. Instead, we’ll revisit the Cobb Galleria Center.
The former home of Anime Weekend Atlanta is now the Cobb Convention Center, which I think lacks a bit of the charm of the Galleria in terms of name, but it’s certainly straight to the point. The venue is undergoing (much needed) renovations, and it will be forever transformed from the place I spent many happy convention weekends.
I’ve found new joy at the World Congress Center, but it’s not quite the same. The relative bubble of AWA at the Galleria was a unique thing.
When I first started attending, Thursday nights were a quiet time. The convention was still unpacking itself, ready to get into full swing the next day then by the time we left on Sunday it was ebbing to a close.
Eventually, Thursdays got busy, we started arriving on Wednesdays and leaving on Mondays, and things changed. But an essential rhythm was still there. AWA being a 24-hour-a-day event meant that for a few days each fall, we were living in a sleepless nerd city that grew up around us on Wednesdays and Thursdays and then collapsed into boxes and trucks and trash bags twice as fast.
I valued those transition times, watching the quiet, empty Specialty Shoppes and the cavernous convention ballrooms and the towering hotel lobby come alive and then ease back into silence both from Thursday through Sunday and over the course of each day.
Somehow, on a con weekend my friends and I manage to be among the early birds and the night owls. I tend to be the first or second person ready for the day, and at AWA, I’d leave our Renaissance hotel room and do circuits around the venue as folks stumble out of late-late panels and vendors return to open shop again. Then at night, we’d people watch from the upper floors of the hotel atrium.
Given time, we’ll find new rhythms at the World Congress Center, but it’ll never quite be the bubble world at the Galleria.
Until next time.
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