1997 - Well, I started out the year unemployed, though still on #anime! despite my fragile emotional state at the time. There were a few get-togethers with #anime! folks occuring, mainly karaoke outings at San Francisco's Japantown area. Things improved with the beginning of a new job with California Relay Service. (Initially operated by Relay America!, then GC Services, both contractors of MCI, which now directly manages our center.) This marked the next stage of online and public fandom for me, as some ties were broken, and some new ones began...

I attended Fanime Con '97, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the release of Gainax's first animated motion picture, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise. This year was a lean year, as scheduling after Fanime Con until the end of summer left no weekends available for club-related outings, but occasional shopping trips to San Jose and surrounding area occurred, continuing the massive expansion of my anime collection. Regular anime club attendance resumeed after August 1997. (Building up enough seniority to get weekends off is a great thing, indeed. ^_^;)

1998 - I joined the staff of Anime Central in their inaugural year, working in Convention Operations, a post I served in until the end of the 2003 con year. Fanime Con '98 became a two-day, two location event, with events at Foothill College, and at a hotel in the Sunnyvale area. Things gradually returned to normal, though I more or less stopped drawing anime/manga artwork since late 1996. (I'm still trying to get back into it, but time is still a luxury for that.)

1999 - The beginning of a noble experiment - The “Triple Crown” anime con challenge. My effort kicked off in early 1999 with attendance at Fanime Con 1999 (pre-registered, even), though most of Saturday morning and afternoon's events were missed, due to several reconstruction of Ami-chan, the my primary multimedia/internet PC, as Windows 98 was severely shredded by a faulty Internet Explorer installation. However, all was not lost, as there were several evening events, including the cosplay (all the way across town in Santa Clara's convention center, current home of Fanime Con), and all-night karaoke ^_^; Ami-chan, the computer that served me since late 1995, was retired at the end of 1999, due to being non-Y2K compliant.

I returned to Anime Central for Year Two, where I caught a very interesting picture of Amanda Winn-Lee at the masquerade contest (Which only one person has been promised a copy of. I still owe Steve Bennett a copy. ^_^;) 1999 was the year of the hotel labyrinth that was the Ramada Inn near O'Hare, a stupid last day stunt involving a fire alarm triggering, and a Monday morning city walk that took me into the neighboring suburb of Des Plaines, and to the 1000th McDonald's, but that's another story... (Hey, I had time to kill before my flight home.)

The great return trip to Anime Expo happened in Summer of 1999, with the Raider3-Alpha, the vehicle that replaced the Red Raider3 Mk. III, having been retired due to age, and failure of the transmission. The drive to Anaheim and back to Modesto was an adventure in itself, with my staying off-site at a nearby inn. Costs were cut in order to provide enough funding for purchasing merchandise.

I also entered the DVD era, with the acquisition of a DVD player on the way back from AX '99, as well as my first anime DVD - Serial Experiments Lain, volume 1. The DVD library continued to grow, as DVD becomes the preferred format at Raider3 Cinema.

In retrospect, the anime con Triple Crown was more or less a success, but quite taxing on financial resources. I vowed not to repeat such an event, but of course, knowing me, that vow didn't last too long (Keep reading)... Fanime Con and Anime Central became the primary events for me after 1999.

Fandom on a local level started that year, with the discovery of other anime fans at my workplace, primarily “Megumi,” and a few others. She would go on to do anime-con trips to AX in the next few years, and other local anime fandom efforts were around the corner... (On to page 4!)

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