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Cat-Aclysm 2017 : Cat Themed Gathering
This Gathering Includes :  The theme for the gathering is "cats". So all cat characters and characters noted for being cat lovers (e.g. Sebastian from Black Butler).

Day : Friday
Time : 5 PM
Meeting Place (MP) : G3 (Tiered Platform 1st floor lobby by West stairs)
Location (L) : G3

Cosplayers :
SquishyK - Pusheen
Nili - Litten
Christy - Nyan Cat

Legal Statement-Fanime will be taking group pictures during the Gathering/Event this year. If you do not want to be included in those pictures please step aside for those photos. By remaining with the group when the pictures are being taken you give your consent to be photographed.

Photo Order :
I'm not quite sure what the photo order will be. It will greatly depend on who shows I guess, but I'm open to suggestions.
My general idea was something like:
- all cosplayers
- cats
- cat lovers
- video game characters
- anime characters
- comic book characters
- meme cats
- hero characters?
- evil characters?

Link to Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/895714767236815/
Link to other gathering relevent things : (I will probably make a cosplay.com a gathering and fill it in here)
News of the gathering : (if an update happens, or if you want to confirm something with your cosplayers, post here, or your next post in your thread)

Will it be a prrr-fect success or a cat-tastrophy?? Who knows!

(Disclaimer: I can't take full responsibility for this idea. It was actually inspired by a piece of art I saw at artist's ally this year. But the bad cat puns are all me.)

I realize that the organizers for Artist Alley are put under a great deal of strain and scrutiny each year. It is impossible to have a system that makes everyone happy. They have a limited number of tables available but don't want to artificially inflate the prices just to weed out Artists who aren't serious/committed. Then it is a struggle to get registration to open at a time that won't conflict with other cons, school finals, random power outages, and so on and so forth AND early enough that people aren't paying top dollar for their weekend badges.

Last year they implemented a jury system in which they allowed a week or so to register and then looked at every entry and selected the "cream of the crop". Of course this solved some issues but, as I said, no system is perfect so it created a slew of others. Artists were under a great deal of anxiety wondering if they will make the cut, were incredibly discouraged if they didn't, and variety in AA was notably muted (by this I meant that artistic excellence was preferred over creativity with the vast majority of offerings being prints/drawn commissions and most of the limited crafts consisting of Pixel Bead Art).

I'm not saying this as a scorned artist who didn't make the cut. I didn't even apply for a table last year and I will be missing Fanime all together next year TT_TT. I say this as someone who has been attending Fanime for 9 years and I absolutely love it to pieces! I'll admit I am entirely biased in my opinion of last year's system but instead of simply stating my case and disregarding other input I though I would open this up to the community. I'm sure there are many different opinions and views on how things went and I'm interested in how others within the community feel about it (both artists and other attendees). So I opened a poll with some different options for how AA could work and I invite anyone to post feedback here. Note, this is NOT an official AA thread I am but a lowly con attendee. Last year someone from the community posted an entire survey (and I've seen many "what did you think of..." threads) with multiple fields on how things went in South Hall and then posted the info in graphs and such... I'm not going quite that far. The poll will be open for 30 days at which time the results will be revealed automatically (this is to discourage "ballet stuffing"). Please be respectful of others and their opinions. As I said, there really is no perfect solution unless there happened to be exactly the same number of people interested in AA spaces as there were spaces available and then pigs would fly and unicorns would prance through the streets.

For further clarification on "XX% First Come First Served, XX% Reserved for Jury System" the idea is that some percentage of applicants (probably between 50 - 80 percent) would automatically get in on a first come first served basis (pending review of content for adhesion to the rules of AA). And the rest of the applicants would go into a pool from which the remaining percentage of tables would be assigned on a jury basis. The advantage of this system is some quality control but at the same time everyone at least has a shot. Also, those who couldn't get a jump on applying for one reason or another aren't S.O.L. And ideally nobody would know for sure if someone did or didn't get in based on being fast enough or based on the jury. I don't know of any Con that actually implements a system like this but who knows, maybe Fanime will be the first.

The "First Come First Served with 'Quality Filter'" works on a similar principle of people ideally being unaware if they were cut because the jury or because all spots filled up before the jury got to them in the queue.

(disclaimer: I posted all the options for selection that I could think of regardless of whether I personally support the use of each system. This was intended to give the greatest range of options. If there are any options that I did not consider feel free to post them on this thread. And again, this is NOT an official AA feedback thread.)