Anime Central 2008

At my grandparent's house, I had linguine and chicken alfredo for dinner. I slept in my own (hide-a-)bed and woke up at nine to the smell of bacon and eggs. After a leisurely breakfast, I left a little after ten. Now that's a way to start off a con.

Naturally, it was all downhill from there.

Getcha Anime! Red Hot Anime!
All Play And No Work Makes Adam Bored To Death

The convention center parking lot which I had frequented the last two years had become a pay-per-day deal, which was a downer after getting spoiled with "11 bucks if you don't move it." In protest, I did move it... nudging it a little closer to my hotel Friday night. But no matter- armed with my Wahlgren-approved convention bag, it was time to figure out what the hell was going on Friday afternoon.

As always, the popular activity at ACen Friday afternoon was waiting in line. Having already done that the night before, I wasn't interested in going on that ride again... at least not now. But with no major activities going on, I sat down and pored over my schedule, looking forward to future activities.

Someone nearby noticed my No Brand shirt. Sweet! A No Brander!

He recognized me as a nice bystander that took a picture of him and one of the guests. Sweet! We've met!

He also asked me if I had an AMV in the contest. When I said I did, he said it was his favorite of the field. Super sweet! A fan!

He asked if he could get a copy, and I happened to have the file on the flash drive I keep with my keys. While his friend ran up to his room to get a laptop, we shot the breeze for a bit. Since I haven't gotten off my butt and formatted the video into something that wasn't an monstrous mpeg file, he became the first person outside No Brand staff to get his own copy of "Villainous Imagination." We played the video through once and I kicked off the con with a great ego trip!

My fortune continued when I headed to the Vendor's Room to find the registration line stretching far, far out the convention center doors. Lucky I put up with my two hours of punishment because the usual incompetence plus reports of hackers attacking the registration system left people with waits of up to ten hours. Granted, if I wasn't coming down Thursday I would have taken my chances with the mailing again. Amusingly, the badge mailing process was much improved and went off without a hitch this year.

Sick of waiting for my local library to stock the last volume of Genshiken, I picked it up from John myself. I now have the first volume and the last volume... and nothing in-between. By now, I've become pretty good friends with John and Fast Food Anime, so we chatted for a bit and I mentioned that nothing interesting was going on. Him being the good vendor and always on the lookout for cheap labor, he asked me to help out with the booth.

Yes, I was that bored. Besides, for all the conventions I go to, I do very little on the service and staffing end and was interested in experiencing things from the other side. So it was cool talking to new people and even seeing some old faces stop by, including a Whitewater grad I hadn't seen in years.

Best of all, instead of roaming the convention, the convention came to us. With things like this walking by, why leave?

Incidentally, I'm doing something different this year. With apologies to Haruhi-ism fundamentalists, I'm sticking to chronological order with these pictures. Among other things, this year's convention will be known as the con where I rediscovered my appreciation for awesome cosplay. As such, my cosplay pictures for once outnumbered my plot-related pics, and in many cases accented my personal plotline.

Such as the case with the extremely cute Ash and Pikachu, whom I saw while chatting with the No Branders earlier but couldn't catch for a picture. They happened to swing by the Fast Food Anime booth while I was working.

Naturally, I wasn't working forever. Even if there wasn't anything major going on, I still had things to attend to- namely hunting down Nick K and getting my room assignment. I punched out, left the dealer's room and gave him a call. He answered and explained where he was, but my mind was wavering as I faced a moral dilemma. On my way out I encountered an honest-to-God Eyeshield 21 cosplayer. No short bus or nothing.

So what do I do? Tell Nick I'll call him back and risk getting stuck with a bad connection and no room information... or let an Eyeshield cosplay sneak by.

The answer?

Take a picture while on the phone. How's that for light speed impulse?

Nick was at a panel in the Hyatt, and one skywalk trip later I had my card and my room number.

Even acquired a Bonta-kun along the way. Fumoffu!

While I've had good experiences with the fanfiction panels at Iowa and Ohayocon, I've always found the ACen recaps a bit rigid by comparison. It's normally the same group answering the same questions, often with little tolerance for the chaotic populism that pretty much defines fanfic, with little input from the audience. As I'm wrapping up a ten year career in fanfic, I had no incentive to attend.

Yet somehow I ended up as an alternate to actually serve on the panel. This meant I could give my input on things. We were meeting at six to discuss our strategy for the panel, despite all of us knowing full well that it would be the same thing as last year and the year before.

Before that, however, I decided to scope out the "competition" in the form of a panel on avoiding Mary Sues. Yes, the fanfic panelists consider that competition. I don't know why.

If it was competition, we had little to worry about- the Mary Sue panelists (one ironically dressed as Miaka from Fushigi Yuugi) were a bit strict in declaring what shouldn't be done, but were good about opening the floor up to entertaining examples and potential rebuttals. I piped in several times- once to accentuate a point about characters not revealing their full history upon introduction ("Hi, I'm Mary, ninjas killed my parents!"), and another using Tareshi from Odaiba Memorial Day to demonstrate a case where it's okay to have an original character paired with a series character from the onset.

I still own Niea Under 7 and I still plan to watch it. Really, I mean it.

Back at Artist's Alley, squeezing past the line still crowding the sidewalk, I met up with the fanfic panel, recognizing several of the faces from prior years. We trekked back to a hotel suite and guess who was waiting for us...

At this rate, that giant plushie's going to be up there with Tiffany Grant and Johnny Depp. This time, he's with a fellow authoritarian father. Eat your tomatoes, Shinji.

As expected, we did nothing but eat pizza and watch AMVs, quickly admitting that the panel would be the same thing as last year and the year before. Since I really didn't give a damn about the panel, it was a lot of fun.

When we finally adjourned, I saw the line for Anime Hell stretching out the door, thankfully a good distance from the registration line, and karaoke was already packed. That made this a great time to head back to the room. Unfortunately, someone got a jump on the Saturday night partying and the EMTs and police officers were occupying the nearest exits. So I detoured to the skywalk and ran into Nick and Scott. Nick was outside panel ops not engaged in anything (someone wasn't listening to Lynn!). Scott was there for a photo op with his combination Team Fortress/Blood+ cosplay.

While chilling with Nick and Scott, Megan stopped by and convinced me to go to the Q&J panel Saturday morning. Key selling point- the J stands for Jeff Nimoy, head writer for seasons one, two and five of Digimon. We could also plan our meetup for the masquerade there. Reason enough for me.

This is neither Megan, Scott, nor Nick. It is Mikuru, however, and that warrants inclusion.

After that pleasant interlude, I finally made it back to the room for a shower, the Cubs score and, being too cheap to pay for the hotel wifi, a couple paragraphs of MST. It left me refreshed enough to check out the Guest of Honor Improv event, which scored high marks from friends who attended it last year.

A sign of the space crunch ACen's been dealing with, the convention was sprawled out over four venues. Two of them, the masquerade ball at the Embassy Suites and Main Programming B at the Sofitel, I didn't bother with. But holding three live programming rooms at the convention center next to the dealer's room posed some problems. Namely that the dealer's room closed at ten, necessitating a secret entrance on the Hyatt side. Rather than look for it, I went to Anime Hell.

It's like comfort food for masochists!

Hey! I don't care how good the interlude music is, there's no rushing the stage! This isn't No Brand!!

At some point during Hell, Scott found me (a miracle considering the room sat a few thousand) and we sat through the end of Hell and the beginning of Nescaflowne, a classic fan parody that loses a bit of luster in the post-Redeath era. It was my first time watching it- entertaining but very slow at times. That was good enough for me at Midnight Madness; I went back up to the room and clocked out at 2:00, wrapping up a fairly solid day.

Good thing Friday was solid, because Saturday was anything but.