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111

Anime NYC 2026

Aug 20 – Nov 22, 2026 From $175 Javits Center, New York, NY 10001

The East Coast doesn't have Anime Expo. It built Anime NYC — and for the community on the right side of the country, that distinction matters. Javits Center, November 20-22, 2026. Three days, one convention floor, and the crowd that traveled 400 miles to be in the same room as guests who shaped the shows they grew up on. Panels, artist alley, industry announcements, the con floor energy that only happens when this many people are this invested. The guest roster pulls from English and Japanese voice acting, manga artists, and industry figures who don't appear at US conventions often. Artist Alley is one of the larger ones on the East Coast circuit. The show floor runs exhibitors across the full range — merchandise, media, collectibles. Badges from $175. New York City is the venue around the venue — the community migrates through Midtown after hours. The East Coast convention that became its own thing.

Happening Now

Pacific Airshow 2026 — Huntington Beach

Oct 2 – Oct 4, 2026 Huntington Beach Pier, Huntington …

The sound arrives after the airplane does. That is the part nobody warns you about — a shape crosses the water in total silence, and a full beat later the noise catches up and hits you in the chest like a door slamming somewhere in the house. There is no stadium here and no bleachers between you and any of it. You stand on sand with the Pacific at your back while aircraft come down the shoreline low enough to read the markings, and a couple of million people up and down the coast lose their minds at the same instant. For something at this scale to happen over a public beach, free, open to whoever walks up, is genuinely unusual. Three days each October. The sand fills early on the main days, the premium viewing areas are ticketed and go fast, and the pier is the best free vantage point there is. Bring the kid who looks up every single time something flies over the house.

Studio Ghibli PONYO Exhibition -- Academy Museum Los Angeles

Daily

55 Gathering

4h away

Studio Ghibli PONYO Exhibition -- Academy Museum Los Angeles

Every day · Next Oct 3 6067 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, C…

You were five, and the ocean was the biggest thing you had ever seen, and nobody had to explain to you that it was alive. Walking into this gallery reopens that exact file, except now you are an adult and still cannot account for why Miyazaki makes you cry. More than a hundred pieces, hand-picked by the studio: original drawings in Miyazaki's own hand, art boards laying out the frame-by-frame labor behind every wave that rolled across the screen, posters from the original Japanese release. Some of it has never been shown anywhere in North America. There is a table where you build your own stop-motion sequence out of paper sea creatures, which is the room where the children go still and the parents quietly take over. Wilshire Boulevard at the Academy Museum, timed admission, closed Tuesdays. Take the kid. Then notice which one of you refuses to leave the drawings.

We Touch Grass: Los Angeles Anime Rave 2026

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15h away

We Touch Grass: Los Angeles Anime Rave 2026

Today · Oct 3 – Oct 4 TBA Catch One, 4067 West Pico Boulevar…

Somewhere around the second hour, a room full of adults in cosplay screams the opening of a show they once cried at, and nobody is embarrassed, and that is the whole product. This is not a convention panel with a speaker in the corner. It is a full-tilt dance floor — breakdowns built off anime openings, EDM edits, bass drops, remixes, and a sea of glowsticks going up the second the right song lands. The crew has run this circuit across North America and Europe, and the San Diego night they threw sold out months ahead, which tells you what the door will look like here. Cosplay is strongly encouraged. Catch One has the rooms and the sound system to hold it. On Pico in Los Angeles, twenty-one and over, and tickets move fast. Send it to the friend who owns the wig and has never once had anywhere to wear it.

Coming Soon

3 days away

Padres NLDS Home Game 3 - Petco Park

In 3 days · Oct 6 ✨ New Limited availability Petco Park, 100 Park Blvd, San Die…

The sound a sold-out Petco Park makes in October is different and everyone who has heard it will tell you so without being asked. Not louder exactly - lower, more like the building itself is involved. This city waited a long time for home playoff baseball to be an ordinary expectation rather than a once-a-decade accident, and this is the night the series comes back from Milwaukee with everything still to decide. The Padres swept the Cubs to get here and then opened this round on the road against the top seed, which means the first pitch downtown lands on a crowd that has spent four days watching on other people's televisions and wants a turn. Gaslamp fills from about four o'clock. The Park at the Park fills with people who never got a ticket and come anyway, which is its own argument about what this team is to this town, and the view from that lawn over the right field wall is better than it has any business being. First pitch is six thirty on a Tuesday. Bring a layer; the marine air comes over the bleachers once the sun drops behind the Western Metal building.

Weekly

4 days away

San Diego Nerd Night — Weekly at Twisted Horn Mead & Cider, Vista

Every Wednesday · Next Oct 7 Twisted Horn Mead & Cider, 1042 La…

Every Wednesday at four o'clock, a meadery in Vista becomes the room you wished existed when you were fourteen. No sign-up. No structure. No one running it. Just a taproom full of people who brought their character sheets, their miniatures, their half-painted Warhammer armies, their Switch, their board games, their cosplay-in-progress, and the specific relief of being somewhere that the word 'nerd' is not a category — it is the atmosphere. Twisted Horn Mead & Cider brews award-winning mead and hard cider in a tasting room that looks like a Viking hall designed by someone who also plays D&D. On Wednesday nights it fills with adults 21 and over who want exactly one thing: a place to nerd out with strangers who already get it. The tables hold campaign maps and Magic decks and laptops running Baldur's Gate and conversations about lore so deep you forget you are in a strip mall in Vista. This is not a scheduled event with a host and a microphone. It is an unorganized, recurring, come-as-you-are gathering that has been running long enough that the regulars have inside jokes and the newcomers are absorbed without introduction. The mead is good. The people are better. Wednesday is the night. Every Wednesday starting at 4:00 PM. Twisted Horn Mead & Cider, 1042 La Mirada Ct, Vista, CA 92081. Ages 21+. Free entry.

Coming Soon

37 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 5 days away

New York Comic Con 2026 — New York, NY

In 5 days · Oct 8 – Oct 11 From $45 (1-day) Jacob K. Javits Convention Center,…

The Javits Center in October, a hundred thousand people in four days, every niche of pop culture in one building — and the streets of Hell's Kitchen turning into something you've never seen on a regular Tuesday. The Javits Center fills with a programmatic density that rewards strategic planning. Main stage panels feature talent from the year's biggest genre properties. The show floor covers hundreds of thousands of square feet of publishers, studios, collectibles vendors, and artist booths. Artist Alley at NYCC skews heavily toward comics — the original fanbase — alongside anime, gaming, and TV, giving it a different character than conventions that have shifted more entirely toward film and streaming. The autograph and photo op schedule is extensive; tickets for specific sessions go on sale in advance and sell out. New York Comic Con in 2026 is celebrating twenty years, and the Coney Island theme suggests organizers are going big on identity and atmosphere. The anniversary edition will likely bring programming and exclusives designed for the occasion. If you have been considering NYCC as a destination event, this is the year to go. The East Coast advantage: NYCC is adjacent to one of the world's great cities. The convention ends at 7pm and New York starts. Restaurants, bars, and attractions are all accessible from the Javits Center. Hotel inventory near the venue is limited; book early and consider Hudson Yards or Hell's Kitchen options within walking distance. Tickets go on sale in June with a Superfan Presale for Popverse members opening before general on-sale. Javits Center, New York City. October 8–11, 2026. New York Comic Con was founded in 2006 and reached 250,000 attendance within its first decade. The 20th anniversary edition in 2026 with the Coney Island theme signals that the organizers are treating this as a milestone year — expect expanded programming, anniversary exclusives, and a level of production that reflects two decades of iteration. If you have been waiting for the right year to make NYCC a destination trip, the 20th anniversary is the obvious choice.

Austin City Limits Music Festival 2026 (Weekend Two) - Austin, TX

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🌎 Nation's Best 6 days away

Austin City Limits Music Festival 2026 (Weekend Two) - Austin, TX

In 6 days · Oct 9 ✨ New 3-day and single-day passes Zilker Park, 2100 Barton Springs R…

Eight bands deep into a Saturday, standing in a flat green bowl with the Austin skyline going gold behind the main stage, you stop keeping track of which set you came for. That is the whole proposition of the Austin City Limits Music Festival 2026 - one of America's defining music weekends, a nine-stage festival held every October in Zilker Park a few minutes from downtown Austin, Texas, drawing well over four hundred thousand people across two consecutive weekends. 2026 is the twenty-fifth anniversary, which matters because ACL began as a local extension of a public television taping and became the event that turned Austin's self-description as the Live Music Capital of the World from a slogan into something defensible. Weekend Two runs Friday October 9 through Sunday October 11. What it actually feels like is a city park that has been temporarily colonised by sound. Zilker is flat, open and enormous, and because the stages ring the perimeter you spend the day walking across a green bowl with music arriving from three directions at once. October in Texas is not autumn; it is eighty-five degrees and humid with very little shade, and the single thing that surprises first-timers most is how physical the day becomes. The crowd is noticeably broader than at a destination desert festival - families with wagons, students from the university up the road, people in their sixties who have been coming since the first year. At dusk the downtown skyline lights up directly behind the main stage, and that image is the one everybody takes home. Is it worth it? If you are the kind of person who would rather see eight bands you half-know than one band you already love, yes, emphatically. This is a discovery festival. It is not for anyone who needs a guaranteed front-row view of a single headliner, and it is not a luxury experience - the ground is dirt and the queues are real. The 2026 bill is deliberately genre-fluid: Charli XCX, Lorde, Twenty One Pilots, Rufus Du Sol and The xx play both weekends, while Kings of Leon are Weekend Two only, alongside Natasha Bedingfield, Houndmouth and Bella Kay. Turnstile, Labrinth, Young Miko, Geese, Bleachers, Sofi Tukker, Parcels, The Chainsmokers and The War On Drugs fill out the middle of the bill, which is where a festival is actually won. What to know before you go: Weekend Two is the locals' weekend. Crowds are slightly thinner, security lines move faster, and hotel rates run ten to twenty per cent below Weekend One - the same lineup for less money and less friction, which is why experienced attendees quietly prefer it. Bring an empty refillable bottle; there are free water stations throughout and dehydration is the most common reason people leave early. Wear closed-toe shoes you do not care about. Check the bag policy before you leave the hotel, because it changes year to year and the walk back is long. And go to an early-afternoon set: the field is half empty, the artists are often better than their slot, and by four o'clock every path is a queue. ACL is on this list because it is the clearest American example of a festival that belongs to its city rather than to a promoter's circuit. Twenty-five years in, the lineup is a reasonable snapshot of what the country is listening to, assembled in a park that residents use the other fifty-one weekends of the year. Tickets for Weekend Two are sold as three-day passes and single days, and they move.

#WeTouchGrass presents: SAN DIEGO Anime Rave

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6 days away

#WeTouchGrass presents: SAN DIEGO Anime Rave

In 6 days · Oct 9 – Oct 10 ✨ New Spin Nightclub, 2028 Hancock St, S…

Loving something loudly in private has a silence all its own. You know the opening eight bars of a song nobody at your job has heard. You have a real opinion about a fight scene you cannot bring up at dinner. Then a room like this opens and the private thing turns out to belong to several hundred people who also stayed up for the simulcast. The remixes are built for exactly this - the DJs cut openings into club edits, so a track you have only ever heard under a title card lands at one in the morning with a floor full of people shouting the Japanese back at it. There is a cosplay catwalk. The cocktails are named after characters. Nobody explains any of it, because nobody needs it explained. Spin Nightclub, 2028 Hancock Street, San Diego. Nine o'clock, twenty-one and over. The same crew runs the Los Angeles room, and the circuit keeps going all year.

Texas Renaissance Festival 2026 — Todd Mission, TX

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43 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 7 days away

Texas Renaissance Festival 2026 — Todd Mission, TX

In 7 days · Oct 10 – Dec 13 21778 FM 1774, Todd Mission, TX 77…

Fifty-five acres in Todd Mission, Texas, eight themed weekends from late September through November. The Texas Renaissance Festival is the largest in the country — and it takes the concept seriously. Each weekend runs a different theme — Celtic Christmas, Halloween/All Hallows Eve, and specialty arts and family weekends — meaning the crowd, entertainment, and atmosphere shift dramatically from week to week. Six stages run simultaneously throughout the day: jousting tournaments, birds of prey demonstrations, fire performers, comedy troupes, and human chess matches. The Turkey Leg is a cultural institution unto itself; the Polonia Restaurant (authentic Polish food on the grounds) has its own dedicated following. Camping on the festival grounds is available and encouraged — staying overnight is its own experience, distinct from the day-visit version. The show closes at 8 PM but the energy runs later. Theme weekends attract different audiences: Celtic Christmas draws costumed annual returners; Halloween weekend brings the largest single-day crowds of the season. If you have attended a Renaissance festival anywhere in the country and thought it could be larger — you haven't seen larger. This is the template that smaller festivals try to replicate, and no other event in the country puts 500,000 people through a 55-acre living history environment across eight consecutive weekends. It is for people who love craft, performance, cosplay, and the kind of community that builds around all three. It is not for people who want to check off an attraction in two hours. The Texas Ren Fest rewards the visitor who stays, explores, and comes back. Buy tickets online in advance — on-site prices are higher and entry lines longer. Arrive at the 9 AM opening to witness the King and Queen gate ceremony; it sets the tone for the day. Bring cash: 00–200 per person is a realistic budget for food and artisan purchases, as card readers are inconsistent. Wear comfortable, closed-toe shoes — 55 acres of uneven ground and dust make anything else a mistake. Approach the grounds from Highway 105 (north) to avoid the worst traffic backup. Pick five or six must-see performances before arriving and let everything else happen organically; first-timers who try to see everything see nothing. The themed-weekend structure means it is functionally eight different festivals. Celtic Christmas, in late November, has its own cultlike following among people who return annually in period costume. The Texas Ren Fest has been operating for over 50 years and still generates the reaction of someone discovering it for the first time. Season opens September 26, 2026. Tickets and theme weekend schedule: texrenfest.com.

SD Who Con 2026 — San Diego's Doctor Who Convention

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13 days away

SD Who Con 2026 — San Diego's Doctor Who Convention

In 13 days · Oct 16 Handlery Hotel, 950 Hotel Circle N…

Somewhere in your memory, a blue box is still spinning. You heard the sound once — that impossible grinding wheeze — and something in your chest shifted. You never fully came back from it. SD Who Con returns to San Diego for a weekend built by the people who understand what that sound means. This is not a corporate franchise activation. It is a volunteer-run gathering at the Handlery Hotel, October 16–18, where the hallways fill with cosplayers who sewed their own scarves, collectors who can date a Dalek by its bumps, and first-timers who just discovered that their obsession has a name and a room. Panels, vendors, an Artist and Author Alley, and guest appearances fill the programming. But the real draw is the recognition — sitting in a room where nobody needs the reference explained. Where someone can say 'reverse the polarity' and fifty people laugh without thinking. If you've ever paused a conversation to explain regeneration to someone who didn't ask, your people are already here. Badges available at sdwhocon.com.

Coming Soon

30 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 13 days away

III Points 2026 — Miami, FL

In 13 days · Oct 16 – Oct 17 $179-$375 Mana Wynwood, 318 NW 23rd St, Miam…

There is a warehouse in Wynwood where the walls still vibrate from last year's bass — and every October, the entire neighborhood surrenders to III Points, the festival that built itself by refusing to choose between underground and unmissable. III Points returns to Mana Wynwood in Miami on October 16–17, 2026, with a lineup that reads like someone raided the playlists of every music nerd you respect and put them all on the same bill. Underworld brings two decades of progressive electronic anthems. Four Tet builds the kind of layered, hypnotic sets that make time stop. Flying Lotus dissolves the boundary between live instrumentation and digital production. Blood Orange turns vulnerability into art you can dance to. And GZA performs Liquid Swords in its entirety — a 1995 masterpiece that most hip-hop heads consider sacred text, performed front to back for the first time in years. The festival sprawls across more than 10 stages, threading through Wynwood's art-district architecture with immersive installations and site-specific design that makes III Points feel less like a festival and more like a city that only exists for two nights. Charlotte de Witte anchors the techno stages. Honey Dijon brings the house. Parcels and Men I Trust hold down the indie flank. The 444 stage features four-hour sets from Floating Points, Seth Troxler, and DJ Harvey — the kind of programming that rewards people who know what they are looking for. If you are the kind of person who scrolls past mainstream lineups looking for the one name that makes you stop — III Points is where those names headline. If you are looking for a festival that plays it safe, this is not it. This is the festival for people who trust the curators more than the algorithm, and it has never let them down. Tickets range from $179 to $375 through iiipoints.com. Miami in October is still warm enough to be outside at midnight without thinking about it, and Wynwood at night, lit up by murals and bass and ten thousand people who chose this over everything else happening in Miami that weekend — that is the experience that makes people plan their next trip before the current lineup drops. VIP+ is new for 2026, with expanded square footage, improved flooring, and dedicated lounge access across the festival grounds. This is the festival that proves Miami has more to offer than pool parties and pop-up DJs — it has a real underground, and III Points is where it surfaces every fall.

Daily

51 Gathering

13 days away

OC Japan Fair 2026 — Fall Edition

Every day · Next Oct 16 OC Fair & Event Center, 88 Fair Dr…

Somewhere between the taiko drums shaking the floor and the takoyaki line that hasn't moved in ten minutes, you'll realize you've been here for four hours and haven't checked your phone once. OC Japan Fair takes over the OC Fair & Event Center every fall with 130+ booths, an estimated 45,000 visitors across three days, and a schedule that runs from J-pop performances and cosplay shows to kimono try-ons and Japanese calligraphy workshops. It is not a food fair with cultural garnish — it's a cultural fair with an absurd amount of food. The ramen vendors alone could fill a separate event. The K-PLAY! crossover means the cosplay crowd, the K-pop crowd, and the otaku crowd all land in the same space at the same time, which creates the kind of energy you don't plan. You just show up and it finds you. October 16–18, 2026. Friday 4–10 PM, Saturday 12–10 PM, Sunday 11 AM–7 PM. OC Fair & Event Center, 88 Fair Dr, Costa Mesa 92626. Tickets $14–$20.

Monthly

117 Gathering

14 days away

117 1 saved

So-Cal Cosplay Shoot — Balboa Park

Monthly · Next Oct 17 Balboa Park, 1549 El Prado, San Di…

Somebody spent six months on a foam pauldron and somebody else bought their costume online last Tuesday, and for one morning in the most photogenic park in San Diego, nobody cares which one you are. That is the whole premise. So-Cal Cosplay Scene runs it as an open call — any fandom, any level of build, no entry requirements, no competition, no hierarchy. The Spanish Colonial Revival facades do the production work for you: a Zelda build photographs against the museum walls like a production still, and a Star Wars costume catches the fountain light in ways that should not be possible from a public park. It starts in the morning, when the light is good and the park is still quiet. Photographers are welcome and encouraged — bring your gear. Follow @socosplayscene for the gathering point. Just come. That is the entire instruction, and it is the only one that has ever mattered here.

Spirited Away 25th Anniversary — Studio Ghibli Fest 2026

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🌎 Nation's Best 14 days away

Spirited Away 25th Anniversary — Studio Ghibli Fest 2026

In 14 days · Oct 17 – Oct 21 Varies by theater Fathom Events Theaters Nationwide …

You have been homesick for twenty-five years for a place that was never real. A bathhouse lit gold over black water. A train that only runs one way, across a flooded world, into the dark. Spirited Away gave you that homesickness the first time you saw it — and this October, for one week only, its 25th anniversary and the finale of Studio Ghibli Fest 2026, Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece comes back to the big screen where the ache belongs. There is a particular silence that falls over a theater full of people who love the same film. The lights drop, Joe Hisaishi's first piano notes land, and a room of strangers stops breathing at the same moment. Ghibli Fest runs both the subtitled original and the English dub, with a piece of surprise content before each show. But the real event is the crowd — parents who were kids when this came out, now holding the hands of kids seeing it for the first time; longtime fans catching a detail they'd missed on every laptop rewatch; someone two rows back crying quietly and not caring who sees. Even if you've seen it a dozen times, you have not seen it like this. If Spirited Away is a film you carry around inside you, this isn't a question — you go. Projected, at scale, with sound that fills the room, is the version it was made for. It's rated PG and open to almost everyone, though No-Face and the spirit world can frighten very small children — parents of under-sevens should know that going in. This is not a movie to leave on in the background. It's two hours built to move you, in a room full of people who came to be moved alongside you. Tickets run through the official Ghibli Fest and participating theater box offices, and the anniversary finale sells out earliest of the whole festival — buy ahead. Choose your format on purpose: the dub is the gentle way in for young kids, the subtitled original is what the purists want. Come early for the pre-show content most latecomers miss. Go on a weekend evening if you can, when the theater fills all the way up and the silence gets deeper. Some films you own and still leave the house for. At twenty-five, Spirited Away is less a movie than a place people keep returning to — and going back together, in the dark, is how you remember why it marked you. One week in October. Then the train pulls away again.

Wuthering Waves Concert Tour: To the New World

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14 days away

Wuthering Waves Concert Tour: To the New World

In 14 days · Oct 17 Peacock Theater, 777 Chick Hearn C…

Loving a game nobody around you plays is a specific kind of lonely. You have four hundred hours in it, you know the soundtrack better than most albums you own, and the people who would understand are all on a Discord server in other time zones. Then a tour announces a North American stop and the server becomes a group of people you can actually stand next to. This is that night. The score for this game is genuinely orchestral - recorded with real ensembles, not a synth patch pretending - and hearing it played live in a two-thousand-seat theater is the closest the medium gets to a symphony hall treating it seriously. Cosplay will be everywhere and nobody will find it remarkable. If you have somebody in your life who has tried to explain this game to you and given up, this is the night to just go with them. This is the North American debut of the tour, which has otherwise only played Asia. Doors well before the eight o'clock downbeat on Saturday the 17th.

Coming Soon

15 days away

AniMarketplace

Oct 18, 2026 Free AniMarketplace, 244 San Pedro St, …

The artist alley is the part you actually remember. Not the panels, not the autograph line - the folding table where someone your age was selling a print of a character you thought only you cared about, and you stood there too long, and they said the show's name back to you like a password. Conventions have gotten expensive enough that a lot of people have quietly stopped going. This is that same feeling without the badge: an outdoor artist alley and vendor market in Little Tokyo, free to walk into, with performances and cosplay and a swap-meet corner where people clear out the figures and doujinshi they have outgrown. Free attendance changes who shows up - you get the teenagers and the people who have been in this since the VHS-fansub era standing at the same table. One real detail: vendor spaces run seventy-five dollars, first come, which is why the mix of sellers is different every year instead of the same corporate booths. Sunday, October 18, noon to eight, 244 San Pedro St, Los Angeles.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby - 7th EVENT WORLD TOUR: THE STAGE in LOS ANGELES

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19 days away

Umamusume: Pretty Derby - 7th EVENT WORLD TOUR: THE STAGE in LOS ANGELES

Oct 22, 2026 Peacock Theater, 777 Chick Hearn C…

For years the only way to see one of these was a livestream at three in the morning with a fan translation scrolling in a second window, and you did it anyway, and you were not alone. That is the part worth saying out loud: a franchise about racehorses reincarnated as schoolgirls became one of the most emotionally devastating things in Japanese media, and the concert-stage events are where its fandom actually cries in public. This is the first time those live musical events have been performed outside Japan, and Los Angeles is one of four cities on earth getting one, alongside London, Seoul and Yokohama. The performers are the seiyuu - the actual voice cast - which is the whole reason this is not a tribute show. Expect a theater where people have travelled for this and know every call-and-response. Thursday October 22 at eight, with a second night Friday.

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