It is definitely worth going if you can! I went a few years ago (pre-pandemic) when it was in Kansas City, and it was pretty fantastic. (I hadn’t expected Nobuo Uematsu himself to be there but he was!)

Ahhh, I wasn’t even thinking about private loans; yeah, that makes sense!

“ student loans (25.5%)”

This seems odd to me because bankruptcy doesn’t currently get rid of student loans (which is completely wtf, but that’s another issue); maybe the student loan payments got so onerous that they got into other debt?

What the heck, really? I just remember him always mentioning it in his author’s notes at the end of his books (and for a while there I think there was also a 1-800-HI-PIERS phone number or something?). I remember as a kid wanting to subscribe to the newsletter, but I’m glad in retrospect I didn’t, yikes.

Ugh, Piers Anthony. I remember absolutely LOVING Piers Anthony’s books as a kid; I went back a while back to reread them as an adult (and read the ones I hadn’t read before) and good god, but I could not do it. Even beyond the terrible puns (not as fun when you’re not like ten years old) and the really regressive ideas of gender roles, after the third book with a young teen girl seducing a virtuous middle-aged man because he was the only one who truly loved her, I was just staring at my old books in horror.

(A few years back someone linked me to his Hi Piers newsletter, which moved to the Internet a while back. I got as far as seeing him talking about the sexual attractiveness of girls at menarche - their first period, which can be as young as 9 - and I had to stop because of the full-body shudders.)