Part One | Part Two
With the masquerade pretty much over, I had about three hours to kill until the mixer/dance/whatever they were calling it this year. That meant dinner. Again, my usual group was still on State Street, leaving doubts about whether they attended the convention at all. Before getting in touch with them, however, Nick and I made one last romp through the building to see who we could see.
We saw Reanna and Af Mas, a couple of No Brand friends who, along with Nick, recently moved to Madison. So we all caught up for a bit. Amusingly, within minutes the conversation split into two, with Reanna and I talking about our online writing ventures and Affy and Nick going off in their own world.
Coming between us, someone from the Ministry of Silly Walks.
After that, and checking on Nick's computer in the LAN room, we attempted to meet up with my posse on State Street. This proved to be more difficult than expected as we couldn't think of a good meeting place. The "you walk west, we'll walk east and we'll meet halfway" proved disastrous when we didn't see each other. Nick and I ended up just a couple blocks from the capitol before backtracking. Eventually, we found them and headed to Pizzeria Uno.
Whitewater Nick is formally introduced to the No Brand gang while we figure out how to order pizza at this place. Great food, but the sizes and portions aren't delineated very well, plus when they say deep dish, they don't joke around. Tyler, Jasmine, Tiffany and Nick followed my warning about honest Chicago deep dish pizza. Theresa didn't and barely survived. Spencer folded and went with a salad.
Back at the con and killing time until the mixer, I ran into Spittin' Wheelie and the rest of the Daisho Con gang. The con's only a month away and I know most of these guys from the forums, so we killed the hour chatting about how the inner workings of that convention. Quick, get Lynn and KORfan up here so we can chat about ACen and Iowa.
Incidentally, many No Brand elements that I helped introduce, including Name That Anime Opening and the arbitrary touch football game, are in the hopper at Daisho. I'm also being encouraged to throw a room party. At this rate, it'll be a hell of a recap come Thanksgiving.
We all headed to the courtyard for the mixer and found a DJ setting up an actual turntable. At this point, I wasn't sure if this was good or bad. Last year, as you may recall, was all anime/J-Pop music, but noise regulations and an unreceptive crowd made it kind of a dud. Judging by the sound check, the noise would be plentiful, but the record scratching suggested more of a techno theme. Rather than go into my anti-Ayres rant that I would have repeated at Anime Iowa had Greg not been so awesome, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. Remember- this is a general sci-fi geek convention instead of an anime convention. Japanese music should not be required.
In truth, I was thinking about none of this at the time. The intermittent scratching noises from the DJ led to an impromptu game of Red Light/Green Light among the Daisho guys.
For the first half hour, that looked like the most fun we'd be having that night.
Pictured: Daisho Con pretending to get into the groove. Really, they were just acting for one of their videos, ignoring the fairly slow and dull opening music.
Gradually, though, it got better. The music got faster, louder, and threw in some strange remixes of Speed Racer, San Francisco and a fusion of Snoop Dogg and Green Greens from Kirby.
Eventually, even Jasmine had to give in and acknowledge that some good stuff was being played.
While inconsistent, there was enough stuff to keep most of the crowd engaged most of the time. I danced for most of it, but paced myself for the posted time of an hour. When it continued past then, my feet were pretty much spent. Seemed to be the case throughout, as toward the end there were a lot of wallflowers but not many dancers. Theresa made a simple request to fix that.
I don't know what was scarier- the fact that you could actually hear the whoosh of people rushing in to do Caramelldansen or the fact that Theresa needed to request it. It salvaged the whole damn thing.
About a half hour past the listed ending time, the DJ finally wrapped things up and me and my sore ankles could get out of there. We limped back to the car and headed for home. It was only midnight when we returned, so we popped in four eps of Fumoffu and called it a night.
I'd insert a big "SUNDAY" header here, but there wasn't enough to warrant it.
Part of the reason for that was a major miscalculation on the scheduling for the DDR tournament. The program book was particularly skimpy, relying mostly on the website for guidance on scheduling video game tournaments. So I accidentally forgot to carry the one- the tournament was at 12:00 instead of 2:00. We got there at 12:15 and went straight to Subway for lunch.
So much for defending my title.
But by the time we got there, everything was cleared out and we got some free play in.
Eventually, Nick and I left the pads to Tyler and Theresa and went out to catch up on some things while watching some foam sword fighters in the courtyard.
This was probably where we should have been sitting. Instead, we were on one of those benches down there and constantly avoiding errant swipes.
It was another one of those massive conversations, punctuated only by the dualists and a rare recap appearance by Heather (one of those rare cameos only you die-hard recap readers will appreciate). At least I had more to say this time, thanks to the news that Nick's interested in following suit in the webnovel business.
Once Tyler had sufficiently gotten his DDR on, I successfully tagged along with the group *before* they headed out to State Street. Tiffany wasn't so fortunate. We hit Coldstone one last time before calling it a day. Once back in B-Dam, we hit Applebee's before sending them back home.
In all, the convention was about the same as last year, granted the extra presence of friends from No Brand and Whitewater kept me on the grounds a little more. The dance was improved, the vendor set-up expanded, and the video game room remote but kicking. Marginal improvements compared to what could happen if they got off campus. So yeah- same deal as last year. Nothing wrong with that.
Now bring on Daisho.