more on otakon
Long and photo-heavy, so have a gander after the jump.
It started with a business trip to St. Louis. Not too much to say about that-- corporate training, it all went fine. I rode in a stretch Hummer (awful, but kind of hilarious), saw the arches, and my co-workers took to calling me "Puddy." I can't imagine why.
That wrapped on Friday, which meant the first day of Otakon was off the table. I was OK with that, as my stuff wasn't going on until Saturday anyway.
I can't quite explain why I'm so fond of Otakon. I've actually only been four times. I went in 1998, and actually road-tripped down with translator extraordinaire Neil Nadelman. I was new to attending the things as a journalist, and still fairly new to conventions. It was a memorable affair; everyone seemed remarkably approachable, whether it was the dudes who dubbed Evangelion or Macross director Shoji Kawamori. My goofy, only mildly embarrassing thoughts written in the wake of the con are here.
2000 was when I went back, and it was even better-- I scored a really good interview with the guys behind SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN that drove a ton of traffic to Anime Jump, and forged friendships that lasted remarkably long, with the likes of Chad Kime of Pioneer (Chad would later tap me to work for Pioneer). I spent Saturday evening at a Korean-run Japanese restaurant, swapping stories with then-Bandai producer Nobu Yamamoto about the antics of Berklee students, since I lived nearby and he attended the place. He'd gotten a degree in music production. "It is bullshit degree," remarked Nobu proudly. A couple of years down the road, he'd head up Geneon's valiant but too-late soundtracks division, so maybe it wasn't a bullshit degree!
I didn't go back to Otakon until last year. I ran a couple of panels, but registered as an attendee, intent on not worrying about interviewing guests or anything like that. I had a great time, so naturally I went back. And so it was that I found myself sitting at the airport in St. Louis, fretting and waiting for my connector flight to Milwaukee to show up.
Somehow the flights magically connected despite a 45-minute delay on a very tight connection in Milwaukee; after watching Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE on my phone during the flight (fucking awesome, I'm getting the blu-ray) I rolled into town on Friday evening. It was stupid o'clock; people everywhere, in all kinds of ridiculous clothes, doing all sorts of ridiculous shit. Everyone I gabbed at on the phone was either eating or enjoying late-night festivities, so still badgeless and therefore unable to partake, I retired to the room to finish up on organizing panel stuff. I was soon joined by my roomates, Professor Daryl Surat, Gerald, Clarissa, and Tyler. Rooming with four people in a double room was a nostalgic experience. That's kind of the thing to do if you're a poor college student (actually, let's be honest: if you're a poor college student, you've got two people on each bed, a guy on the easy chair, three people on the floor, someone in the closet, and one more person in the bathtub, using the towels as bed linens) but I hadn't done it in something like ten years. Somehow, my back didn't mind using the easy chair, ottoman, and office chair as a makeshift bed. One happy accident: turns out my sweet Sony noise-canceling earbuds do a fine job blocking out snoring, and snoring is inevitable in a room with 5 people sleeping at the same time.
Anyway: Saturday. Saturday was all about my favorite bit about conventions, and that's the fan panels. Otakon has plenty of them, and plenty of attendees, which means a chance to learn all about the stuff with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of other enthusiastic folks. Daryl had previously pulled an even larger crowd for his "Anime's Craziest Deaths" panel, but a spot of controversy led to the event getting shut down after just 15 minutes. The full explanation is here. Needless to say, this has only resulted in an already entertaining panel gaining a big spot of notoriety; and despite the shutdown, Otakon's panel staff reacted positively to the idea of making the show an 18+ event next year. In the meantime, we hustled over to panel operations to go about censoring the decidedly NSFW images of 70s shonen comics for his next panel: The Neo-Shonen Revolution, all about how very crude, gnarly boys' comics (tits! explosions! macho-ness! more tits!) have evolved into exciting but benign hits of today like One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach.
It's kind of neat that you can pull a crowd like this, even if you're lecturing about the relatively dry topic of the evolution of boys' manga.
I had panels, too. My first? The Melancholy of Yoshinobu Nishizaki - an examination of the storied SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO producer that I came up with after hearing the title used as a joke on an Anime World Order episode. Daryl took care of ODIN footage and Gerald brought a choice (but safe for work - barely) Urotsukidoji clip, leaving me to dredge through debatably great moments from the original SPACE CRUISER YAMATO movie, BE FOREVER YAMATO (mainly for the bizarro transition to super-widescreen and the overblown narration about TWIN GALAXIES) and, of course, the alternate ending to FINAL YAMATO, where Kodai and Yuki consummate their relationship - onscreen, while the end credits roll. That was in addition to the Nish's other works, like THUNDERSUB and YAMATO 2520. The panel pulled a modest crowd (looked about 30-40% full, maybe 75 people tops) but was lively and fun. I've been asked to present this at Anime Boston already. I'm down with that, because there will probably be new material by then, considering Nish's new Yamato movie is slated for Decemer release.
Review Anime the Right Way, much to my surprise, almost completely filled Panel 2. I kept it focused, using a series of bizarre, jokey slides and polling each panelist every time we hit a key point. Along for the ride were the seemingly ubiquitous Professor Surat, as well as his fellow Otaku USA contributor and AWO partner Clarissa, and old pal sakechanbd.
After the second panel, I had some time, so I met up with dotiscute. This is me and her. The thing about this woman? Way back in 1998, when I first started Anime Jump, she was one of its first regular readers - she entered all the contests (and won stuff, IIRC), and readily sent in correspondence about what she liked (and disliked) about the site. As the years passed, we bumped into each other in other online venues, like the old TRIGUN email list, and somehow kept in touch. Ten years later, I count her as a very good friend indeed; it's kind of a shame we only hang out at Otakon. How 'bout that? We had a couple of drinks with her pals at a really low-key steakhouse-type place a couple of blocks from the con, which was a nice break from the festivities.
Dubs that Time Forgot, my "big" event, went beautifully. Room was full, great energy, lots of fantastic feedback straight afterwards. People delighted to footage of ridiculous shit like NINJA ROBOTS, the ZORRO anime, and GALACTIC PIRATES, the British dub of THE ENEMY'S THE PIRATES, featuring a jive-talking black cat character. I'm gonna try to get a bigger room for next year, I filled the little panel room ("little" = only about 250 people, as opposed to 600-800) with ease. Like last year's deal, video of the entire panel will be hitting animenewsnetwork.com in a couple of weeks.
Later that night it was time to party. "Party," in a convention guest room context, means "hang around with a bunch of pals in a regular guestroom and try not to spill beer on the carpet." I failed this immediately, mainly because I didn't have a bottle opener and used the edge of the table to open the bottle. Anyway, the shindig was hosted by Dave and Joel of Dave and Joel fame, and it was actually shitloads of fun, despite the fact that it amounted to about 30 nerds wedged into a room with two double beds.
Here's party host Dave. I tried to surprise him with the camera, but he was ready. He's always ready. Waiting.
Erin of ninjaconsultant fame thought it would be a great idea to do a podcast, because that's what we did last year, and that turned out to be a lot of fun, if incoherent. I pointed out that the room was probably too crowded to permit this, and she relented. It's not that I didn't want to do the podcast, it's that I didn't want to kick the 12-15 non-podcast people out of the room to achieve this. Next time for sure!
Here's AWO-ite Gerald Rathkolb holding court.
Here's me, using motorbike's glasses to facilitate my Drew Carey look. Emma is clearly impressed. I was kind of obnoxious, honestly, and I guess people let that slide because everyone was drinking and therefore also kind of obnoxious. Little did they know that I was actually quite sober-- being a big dude (read: FAT), five or six Rolling Rocks are not going to hit me as hard as a lot of folks. So I'd therefore like to apologize for... well... honestly, I'd like to apologize for this:
I really should've known better. (Thanks for the photo, Gerald.) In the meantime, I'll have to put that on my LinkedIn profile so all of my coworkers and colleagues can see it!
Emma's pal spacetart, moi, and new buddy Daniel.
Moi et motorbike. This girl is a fan of FINAL FANTASY TACTICS. And here I'd thought I was the only one!
Me and the hot wimmens. hopefully this will totally make hooverdam jealous. ARE YOU WATCHING WIFE?!
Sunday started slower. I wanted breakfast, but it just didn't happen. I was greeted by this sign, which reads THERE NO DAY ARE ONE PASSES. Cryptic.
It all wound up with brunch at a joint with this sign. The sign is pretty alright; the service is not.
I actually asked Bamboo and Daryl to look disappointed, but that's probably very real disappointment on their faces, because the slow service made us late for panels and stuff.
Fortunately, we did arrive in time to see the remarkable Fred Schodt (who now looks somewhat less like Revolver Ocelot now that he's lost the ponytail) discuss Osamu Tezuka, Astroboy, and how he got to watch the phenomenon firsthand.
Daryl even got the man's autograph. If you have a chance to see Fred speak, do not pass it up!
After that, the con really started to wind down; I tried to attend the Naomi Tamura concert (she did the MAGIC KNIGHT RAYEARTH themes back in the day), but she started late and played a very short set, so I managed to miss the whole thing. I did get to hang out with Emma one last time, so it was worth it. At this point, I figured I'd be left twisting in the breeze for the rest of the day, but I totally got rescued by Bamboo and Jonathan of ANN. They invited me back to their room for the afternoon; I chatted for awhile about the con with them and Mikhail, who was also at the room, and then we went swimming. The swimming was completely unexpected (we all kind of simultaneously remembered we had swimsuits and were kind of sore, so lounging in the pool became a priority) and actually pretty awsome, despite being in a tiny, asymmetrical pool. It kills me that some of my pals pay hundreds of dollars a night for rooms at nice hotels for these stupid cons, but then don't use the pool. I paid good money for my lodgings, goddammit, so I'm going to use the fuckin' pool!
It all ended in a sports bar. Here's me kitted out to see the Revs, with ANN videographer Jonathan. The game was actually on in the background, which pleased me immensely and frightened my tablemates (they weren't ready for the caveman-like roar I let out when the Revs scored the first goal on the way to a 2-0 victory.) I jumped in a cab to BWI, and after a hilarious 25-minute drive which involved a stop for gas and smokes and lots of friendly trash-talk about sports with the driver, was on my way home.
So... that's Otakon. Sorry to be so damn verbose, but some of my pals actually wanted to know what I did there. There you have it. There were pals I somehow missed, like brakusjs-- we kept each other posted on our movements via twitter and txt messages, but managed to not cross paths. Next time, dude, and that also goes for jefurii.
There is an addendum. Prairie and I also got visited by Atlanta pal hipsterdad and his new bride Marie, who are road-tripping up and down the country for their honeymoon. Their visit just happened to coincide with an in-store appearance by Bleu, a local (well, formerly local... he packed up and headed to L.A. a few years back) singer who does neat, sardonic power pop stuff. I saw Bleu open for Puffy Amiyumi in 2002, and circumstances conspired to keep me from seeing him again until this week.
As you can see, we were definitely excellent to each other (don't be alarmed, the guy is simply not capable of making a normal face when he sees a camera). This is why it is so important to find local musicians that you love and support them. I like to listen to the Killers, but I am never going to get to shoot the shit with Brandon Flowers. I did get to do this with Bleu (we talked about the 2002 tour, and how Ami and Yumi probably should've stuck with Andy Sturmer as their producer-- their Butch Walker stuff is really inconsistent), and saw him again on Friday evening. I miss going to shows; I'm going to have to see a few more this summer.
As for Bleu's music, you can score some free songs here. (You don't have to do the viral tell-people thing; just select "PAY WHAT YOU WANT" and pay nothing.) They're all B-sides, but the lead track is good stuff and representative of his sound.
The week wrapped up with USA vs. Mexico in the Gold Cup final, and... the less said about that, the better. Ugh. Sports fandom really sucks sometimes.
It started with a business trip to St. Louis. Not too much to say about that-- corporate training, it all went fine. I rode in a stretch Hummer (awful, but kind of hilarious), saw the arches, and my co-workers took to calling me "Puddy." I can't imagine why.
That wrapped on Friday, which meant the first day of Otakon was off the table. I was OK with that, as my stuff wasn't going on until Saturday anyway.
I can't quite explain why I'm so fond of Otakon. I've actually only been four times. I went in 1998, and actually road-tripped down with translator extraordinaire Neil Nadelman. I was new to attending the things as a journalist, and still fairly new to conventions. It was a memorable affair; everyone seemed remarkably approachable, whether it was the dudes who dubbed Evangelion or Macross director Shoji Kawamori. My goofy, only mildly embarrassing thoughts written in the wake of the con are here.
2000 was when I went back, and it was even better-- I scored a really good interview with the guys behind SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN that drove a ton of traffic to Anime Jump, and forged friendships that lasted remarkably long, with the likes of Chad Kime of Pioneer (Chad would later tap me to work for Pioneer). I spent Saturday evening at a Korean-run Japanese restaurant, swapping stories with then-Bandai producer Nobu Yamamoto about the antics of Berklee students, since I lived nearby and he attended the place. He'd gotten a degree in music production. "It is bullshit degree," remarked Nobu proudly. A couple of years down the road, he'd head up Geneon's valiant but too-late soundtracks division, so maybe it wasn't a bullshit degree!
I didn't go back to Otakon until last year. I ran a couple of panels, but registered as an attendee, intent on not worrying about interviewing guests or anything like that. I had a great time, so naturally I went back. And so it was that I found myself sitting at the airport in St. Louis, fretting and waiting for my connector flight to Milwaukee to show up.
Somehow the flights magically connected despite a 45-minute delay on a very tight connection in Milwaukee; after watching Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE on my phone during the flight (fucking awesome, I'm getting the blu-ray) I rolled into town on Friday evening. It was stupid o'clock; people everywhere, in all kinds of ridiculous clothes, doing all sorts of ridiculous shit. Everyone I gabbed at on the phone was either eating or enjoying late-night festivities, so still badgeless and therefore unable to partake, I retired to the room to finish up on organizing panel stuff. I was soon joined by my roomates, Professor Daryl Surat, Gerald, Clarissa, and Tyler. Rooming with four people in a double room was a nostalgic experience. That's kind of the thing to do if you're a poor college student (actually, let's be honest: if you're a poor college student, you've got two people on each bed, a guy on the easy chair, three people on the floor, someone in the closet, and one more person in the bathtub, using the towels as bed linens) but I hadn't done it in something like ten years. Somehow, my back didn't mind using the easy chair, ottoman, and office chair as a makeshift bed. One happy accident: turns out my sweet Sony noise-canceling earbuds do a fine job blocking out snoring, and snoring is inevitable in a room with 5 people sleeping at the same time.
Anyway: Saturday. Saturday was all about my favorite bit about conventions, and that's the fan panels. Otakon has plenty of them, and plenty of attendees, which means a chance to learn all about the stuff with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of other enthusiastic folks. Daryl had previously pulled an even larger crowd for his "Anime's Craziest Deaths" panel, but a spot of controversy led to the event getting shut down after just 15 minutes. The full explanation is here. Needless to say, this has only resulted in an already entertaining panel gaining a big spot of notoriety; and despite the shutdown, Otakon's panel staff reacted positively to the idea of making the show an 18+ event next year. In the meantime, we hustled over to panel operations to go about censoring the decidedly NSFW images of 70s shonen comics for his next panel: The Neo-Shonen Revolution, all about how very crude, gnarly boys' comics (tits! explosions! macho-ness! more tits!) have evolved into exciting but benign hits of today like One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach.
It's kind of neat that you can pull a crowd like this, even if you're lecturing about the relatively dry topic of the evolution of boys' manga.
I had panels, too. My first? The Melancholy of Yoshinobu Nishizaki - an examination of the storied SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO producer that I came up with after hearing the title used as a joke on an Anime World Order episode. Daryl took care of ODIN footage and Gerald brought a choice (but safe for work - barely) Urotsukidoji clip, leaving me to dredge through debatably great moments from the original SPACE CRUISER YAMATO movie, BE FOREVER YAMATO (mainly for the bizarro transition to super-widescreen and the overblown narration about TWIN GALAXIES) and, of course, the alternate ending to FINAL YAMATO, where Kodai and Yuki consummate their relationship - onscreen, while the end credits roll. That was in addition to the Nish's other works, like THUNDERSUB and YAMATO 2520. The panel pulled a modest crowd (looked about 30-40% full, maybe 75 people tops) but was lively and fun. I've been asked to present this at Anime Boston already. I'm down with that, because there will probably be new material by then, considering Nish's new Yamato movie is slated for Decemer release.
Review Anime the Right Way, much to my surprise, almost completely filled Panel 2. I kept it focused, using a series of bizarre, jokey slides and polling each panelist every time we hit a key point. Along for the ride were the seemingly ubiquitous Professor Surat, as well as his fellow Otaku USA contributor and AWO partner Clarissa, and old pal sakechanbd.
After the second panel, I had some time, so I met up with dotiscute. This is me and her. The thing about this woman? Way back in 1998, when I first started Anime Jump, she was one of its first regular readers - she entered all the contests (and won stuff, IIRC), and readily sent in correspondence about what she liked (and disliked) about the site. As the years passed, we bumped into each other in other online venues, like the old TRIGUN email list, and somehow kept in touch. Ten years later, I count her as a very good friend indeed; it's kind of a shame we only hang out at Otakon. How 'bout that? We had a couple of drinks with her pals at a really low-key steakhouse-type place a couple of blocks from the con, which was a nice break from the festivities.
Dubs that Time Forgot, my "big" event, went beautifully. Room was full, great energy, lots of fantastic feedback straight afterwards. People delighted to footage of ridiculous shit like NINJA ROBOTS, the ZORRO anime, and GALACTIC PIRATES, the British dub of THE ENEMY'S THE PIRATES, featuring a jive-talking black cat character. I'm gonna try to get a bigger room for next year, I filled the little panel room ("little" = only about 250 people, as opposed to 600-800) with ease. Like last year's deal, video of the entire panel will be hitting animenewsnetwork.com in a couple of weeks.
Later that night it was time to party. "Party," in a convention guest room context, means "hang around with a bunch of pals in a regular guestroom and try not to spill beer on the carpet." I failed this immediately, mainly because I didn't have a bottle opener and used the edge of the table to open the bottle. Anyway, the shindig was hosted by Dave and Joel of Dave and Joel fame, and it was actually shitloads of fun, despite the fact that it amounted to about 30 nerds wedged into a room with two double beds.
Here's party host Dave. I tried to surprise him with the camera, but he was ready. He's always ready. Waiting.
Erin of ninjaconsultant fame thought it would be a great idea to do a podcast, because that's what we did last year, and that turned out to be a lot of fun, if incoherent. I pointed out that the room was probably too crowded to permit this, and she relented. It's not that I didn't want to do the podcast, it's that I didn't want to kick the 12-15 non-podcast people out of the room to achieve this. Next time for sure!
Here's AWO-ite Gerald Rathkolb holding court.
Here's me, using motorbike's glasses to facilitate my Drew Carey look. Emma is clearly impressed. I was kind of obnoxious, honestly, and I guess people let that slide because everyone was drinking and therefore also kind of obnoxious. Little did they know that I was actually quite sober-- being a big dude (read: FAT), five or six Rolling Rocks are not going to hit me as hard as a lot of folks. So I'd therefore like to apologize for... well... honestly, I'd like to apologize for this:
I really should've known better. (Thanks for the photo, Gerald.) In the meantime, I'll have to put that on my LinkedIn profile so all of my coworkers and colleagues can see it!
Emma's pal spacetart, moi, and new buddy Daniel.
Moi et motorbike. This girl is a fan of FINAL FANTASY TACTICS. And here I'd thought I was the only one!
Me and the hot wimmens. hopefully this will totally make hooverdam jealous. ARE YOU WATCHING WIFE?!
Sunday started slower. I wanted breakfast, but it just didn't happen. I was greeted by this sign, which reads THERE NO DAY ARE ONE PASSES. Cryptic.
It all wound up with brunch at a joint with this sign. The sign is pretty alright; the service is not.
I actually asked Bamboo and Daryl to look disappointed, but that's probably very real disappointment on their faces, because the slow service made us late for panels and stuff.
Fortunately, we did arrive in time to see the remarkable Fred Schodt (who now looks somewhat less like Revolver Ocelot now that he's lost the ponytail) discuss Osamu Tezuka, Astroboy, and how he got to watch the phenomenon firsthand.
Daryl even got the man's autograph. If you have a chance to see Fred speak, do not pass it up!
After that, the con really started to wind down; I tried to attend the Naomi Tamura concert (she did the MAGIC KNIGHT RAYEARTH themes back in the day), but she started late and played a very short set, so I managed to miss the whole thing. I did get to hang out with Emma one last time, so it was worth it. At this point, I figured I'd be left twisting in the breeze for the rest of the day, but I totally got rescued by Bamboo and Jonathan of ANN. They invited me back to their room for the afternoon; I chatted for awhile about the con with them and Mikhail, who was also at the room, and then we went swimming. The swimming was completely unexpected (we all kind of simultaneously remembered we had swimsuits and were kind of sore, so lounging in the pool became a priority) and actually pretty awsome, despite being in a tiny, asymmetrical pool. It kills me that some of my pals pay hundreds of dollars a night for rooms at nice hotels for these stupid cons, but then don't use the pool. I paid good money for my lodgings, goddammit, so I'm going to use the fuckin' pool!
It all ended in a sports bar. Here's me kitted out to see the Revs, with ANN videographer Jonathan. The game was actually on in the background, which pleased me immensely and frightened my tablemates (they weren't ready for the caveman-like roar I let out when the Revs scored the first goal on the way to a 2-0 victory.) I jumped in a cab to BWI, and after a hilarious 25-minute drive which involved a stop for gas and smokes and lots of friendly trash-talk about sports with the driver, was on my way home.
So... that's Otakon. Sorry to be so damn verbose, but some of my pals actually wanted to know what I did there. There you have it. There were pals I somehow missed, like brakusjs-- we kept each other posted on our movements via twitter and txt messages, but managed to not cross paths. Next time, dude, and that also goes for jefurii.
There is an addendum. Prairie and I also got visited by Atlanta pal hipsterdad and his new bride Marie, who are road-tripping up and down the country for their honeymoon. Their visit just happened to coincide with an in-store appearance by Bleu, a local (well, formerly local... he packed up and headed to L.A. a few years back) singer who does neat, sardonic power pop stuff. I saw Bleu open for Puffy Amiyumi in 2002, and circumstances conspired to keep me from seeing him again until this week.
As you can see, we were definitely excellent to each other (don't be alarmed, the guy is simply not capable of making a normal face when he sees a camera). This is why it is so important to find local musicians that you love and support them. I like to listen to the Killers, but I am never going to get to shoot the shit with Brandon Flowers. I did get to do this with Bleu (we talked about the 2002 tour, and how Ami and Yumi probably should've stuck with Andy Sturmer as their producer-- their Butch Walker stuff is really inconsistent), and saw him again on Friday evening. I miss going to shows; I'm going to have to see a few more this summer.
As for Bleu's music, you can score some free songs here. (You don't have to do the viral tell-people thing; just select "PAY WHAT YOU WANT" and pay nothing.) They're all B-sides, but the lead track is good stuff and representative of his sound.
The week wrapped up with USA vs. Mexico in the Gold Cup final, and... the less said about that, the better. Ugh. Sports fandom really sucks sometimes.