I think of audiences that we would love to have in museums and when you go to Chuck E Cheese, if any of you have spent time at Chuck E Cheese, it's a wildly diverse audience that's throwing money around like crazy, like a kiddy casino, and they're providing a service and a venue for something that people find very valuable and very diverse audiences find very valuable. I saw that same kind of audience and that same kind of, "Oh my god, these people are having a great time and they're putting resources into this." Paying the admission is nothing compared to what people put into these costumes. Even if you buy an off the shelf Spider-Man costume you're putting a lot of cash into this, so there's an investment already being made and it's just a very compatible audience. I think you just make all the hey you can with this because it's a premade match and that was really surprising to me, and delightful and really exciting.

I felt very welcome there. People felt like it was their place, and I don't have a specific anecdote or something that I overheard as part of that but whether you were in costume or whether you weren't, didn't really matter. It was all this congenial scene and people were having fun and they were learning things, and so this is a fantastic environment for people to learn in on their own terms, and that's what the whole informal thing is about, and it just is so ripe for that and I saw so many people learning things that were interesting to them, and they were driving that learning and providing more opportunities for that that are fun, and some of it was poignant. Some of the sessions that you guys did with the LGBTQ focus and the women's focus, those were awesome. Not being an active member of either of those communities but living with them and around them, I was welcomed there too. It was super cool. I think that it's a pretty big tent at this place and we need to take advantage of it, not just in Long Beach but as a typology and I'll be really interested to see what you guys find out from Dragon Con in a totally different part of the country and whether it had the same kind of vibe to it.

we were talking about the replicability of this program and that's one of the things that I worry about, is the best programs, you're really dependent on actually having someone who is authentically part of both of these communities and that's not easily replicable.

It was a wildly diverse crowd. If we had that kind of diverse crowd in museums we'd be really happy. That's the overall reaction, is that this is an audience to an event that you could make some really... It's got great potential for making connections to this audience to the STEM content and the connections to audiences that the National Science Foundation and other agencies and foundations would love to do. So it seemed really primed

one thing that came out through several conversations throughout the event is very much that we're in someone else's community or communities that have their own rules, and values and concerns, and geek culture in particular has a long history of trauma, and social isolation, and anxiety and otherwise being marginalized, and these are a bunch of people who, especially the cosplayer, are in a position of being exposed and vulnerable. And so there's definitely a lot of landmines for institutions participating in a Comic-Con when it comes to that kind of cultural environment.

I think the biggest risk to me is that integrating science into that experience, you attempt that push and it fails, and you end up triggering the opposite feeling that you wanted, where if you do it wrong, you go into this community and you try and inject your agenda and they recognize it as you injecting your agenda, and that can backfire. So that's the main area that I have concerns.

So my takeaway for the expo is I would really encourage building up relationships and conversations with the people who participate in the con, the expo vendors, the cosplayers, and really step one is just really listening to what they think is a better, more engaging experience and really trying to imitate those qualities or find people in this community that you can empower to do stuff. I was looking at a lot of the merch and there's this process of taking objects or characters and really cute-ifying them and turning them into anime plushes or that sort of thing, and this is really popular and I'm like, "Why is there not a super adorable plush Mars rover, or satellite or something like that that trades on this enthusiasm for merch and collectibility that clearly is there. So I think the important take away there is looking at what the rest of the expo is all about and trying to capture some of that.

So I think I'm going to get a little bit real for a second. I think I'm among the generation where being a nerd wasn't socially acceptable. Being a science enthusiast meant Dungeons & Dragons kit and all of that sort of stuff. There was this real ostracism and trauma associated with that, and to walk into this community with overt celebration of education and pop culture all in one place was actually powerful for me, and to hear people talk directly about what this meant to them, and having body issues, or esteem issues or anxiety and saying like, "This community makes me feel good about myself," that was a real moment for me. So I was actually touched.

A couple of cool quotes I took were, one was from a woman who ended up winning a prize for technical work, she was in this Victorian era Captain America costume and she said, "I work in clinical trials, and cosplay and knitting and lace making is a lot like that. It feels to me like a puzzle." There's this iterative process of testing and problem solving and that she loves it for the challenge, and that felt interesting to me. And then other people had a lot of technology built into their costumes, and they talked about they were doing it for the tech, that this allowed them to take their technical skills and be creative with them, that this was how they could express themself. And they talked a lot about the soldering and programming and all this other stuff, and that felt like yeah, this maker STEM aspect felt stronger to me.

An example of how this stuff fit in ways that I didn't expect, so there's a table there that's just NASA stickers and Europa Mission stickers, and I took a photo of this because I'm like, pardon my French, "Bullshit." A table of stickers and logos I thought was super underwhelming, and I was 100% wrong about that because I went back like two hours later and that table was ransacked. And this idea that science fandom could be in here and that merch could be this essential part of it, or schwag, was really driven home for me by that experience.

The actual cosplay contest itself is like the tip of the spear. There's this huge pipeline of stuff that leads up to this moment and the judging itself was interesting because these people queue up, they get in front of the judges, they explain their costume, again, as Paul mentioned they're really focused on the craft. The baseline things that I associate with cosplay which is identity and enthusiasm and community, all that stuff they take for granted. By the time you get in front of a judge, they assume all of that. All they really want to care about is their craft and how it affects their community. And that really spoke to me about how we need to think about integrating with that program. We need to look at that complete pipeline between when people start building their costume a year before the show and the hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars that go into it and what it takes for them to make that commitment, and then what are the incentives for them to participate, and then what are they actually getting judged on and understand all that and then fold in a science component appropriately.

So for me this was an entirely new experience. I had never actually been to a Comic-Con before and I'm nerd culture-adjacent, this was a little bit out of my wheelhouse so I was really excited and I got there first thing on Saturday and stood in line and there was a line of people outside the door and lots of jostling, and that was fun just to absorb the energy of the people who were there, especially that first wave has got to be pretty hardcore.

It's like going over the top with this, or having things be bolder, and louder and bigger is super cool in this kind of a venue. It's so visually loud from all the individuals coming in the door primarily through what's some of the spectacle that's there already, so I could just raise that up. And that being part of the creative process for the Space Center to take on, and I immediately thought of here are some grant opportunities that they could pursue that would allow them to do this in a venue that is primed for... You've got literally thousands and thousands of people who love this content or who would love this content if they were to engage in it more, so it's grabbing more people.

Yeah. I think having a bigger presence on the exhibit hall too, the planetarium and some of these little booth things were good and the tabling activities, but just ramp that up, you see the potential of being able to get more people engaged. And as Bart says, it's a good base there but if you doubled or tripled the resources that went into it, you'd get at least double or triple, you'd probably get five or six times the number of people engaged.

For me, I just want to say the experience was awesome. There's a couple of different things that are going on here. One is looking at the con overall and the science content, one looking at the cosplay components specifically, and there's this idea of just being able to go someplace and do peer observations and peer reviews for a day and a half, was such a wonderful luxury. I don't get to do that very often, have just dedicated watching and thinking time so just participating in this was great.