The Westin Hotel is now full. We may be able to squeeze a few more rooms out, but that will not be able to be settled until after everyone is back from the New Year holiday. There are still plenty of rooms available at the Doubletree.

The Anthrocon Board will soon be deciding on the Charity to support for 2009. If you know of a charitable organization that you would like to recommend be added to the current candidate list, please suggest it here by January 18th (sorry for the short notice).

Criteria for candidacy:
- Must be animal-related
- Must be 501(c)3
- Must be within approximately 60 miles of the Pittsburgh, PA metropolitan area
- Must be incorporated in Pennsylvania (can't be in Ohio or West Virginia)

Remember Underdog? Tennessee Tuxedo? Commander McBragg? Total Television Productions gave us many of the most enduring cartoon figures in history, and Anthrocon is pleased to welcome one of the men who launched Total Television, the man whose drawing pen first gave us many of those characters we grew up with: Mr. Joe Harris

As of December 22, we are about 90% full at the Westin. There are still lots of rooms at the Doubletree.

If you should try to reserve at the Westin and find that it is full, please wait until after January 4 before making alternative arrangements. We may be able to add some more rooms at the Westin, but everyone who can make that decision for us is out on a well-deserved Christmas holiday, so we'll have to wait until after the New Year to see if we can fit a few more rooms in.

Remember: the hotels are not full until we announce that they are full.

The Doubletree still has an ample supply of rooms as of this posting. The Westin has sold all of the double rooms that are available on Friday and Saturday nights. That means that if you try to reserve a double room across either of those days, the web site will return a "sold out" message. You can easily fix that by requesting a king-bed room.

Please refer to our FAQ before you panic, and watch the hotel page for updated status on both hotels.

The Westin reports that the double rooms in the hotel are all spoken for on Friday and Saturday nights. There are still plenty of king rooms left, though.

We're still in need of submissions for future deadlines!

Gallery: http://www.anthrocon.org/promote
Submission Guidelines: http://www.anthrocon.org/promote/submission-guidelines
Release Form: http://www.anthrocon.org/promote/release-form

Anthrocon now has an official presence on Youtube! Check out http://youtube.com/user/anthrocon to find videos of past conventions, as well as new footage we'll be putting up in the days and weeks to follow.

Currently we are in the process of uploading highlights from past years. Keep those eyes peeled for new videos soon!

And the weekend computer glitch that made it look like our room block was sold out has been fixed.