Kawaii 5-0 aka Busters and Haters
So there's been a lot of nerd conventions in my life recently. My old rule was only go for free. If I payed to attend like a chump then I'll be one of those weird con people. I was safe as long as I only loitered on the convention grounds or got free tickets somehow. But last year I paid money to a con, albeit at a discount rate, and broke my vow (however I have no vows about breaking vows). I had such a good time that I started to pay to go to more of them. Since then I've done some time on the nerd con circuit, mostly doing interviews for online video channels. Our team has traveled down to the states in pursuit of anime, gaming and cosplay people, their stories, and their personality. Memories of sakura con, fan expo west, anime evolution all kind of blended together, largely because a lot of the same people would be on the same circuit and attending all of the cons. It seems almost like the whole west coast anime and cosplay scene is a single living entity like a colony of chlamydomonas or a cellular slime mold. But each of them had unique stories for me.
At sakura con our team was busted by undercover con cops when we mentioned the word "penis" during an interview. They took pictures of us and threatened to kick us out if it happened again. We said worse stuff in other interviews, but I feel there was two factors that put us in especially hot water. 1) We said it in the vendor room instead of outside the building where most of the cosplayers were hanging out as a sort of ad hoc communal space. Outside of the venue's property we can do whatever we want. But if we fuck around inside the building our ass is grass and anal retentive con staff is going to smoke it. Inside the building they had full time staff dedicated to stopping any skipping, piggyback rides, vigorous hugs, or anything remotely possibly dangerous. These guys were posted at all hours (2 in the morning) and stopped us from standing and talking in a stairway ... in a building totally empty save for ourselves and the full time con gestapo. 2) The other factor is that we said it to not just any female attendee, but to a "hot" cosplay girl. Just prior to this con at pax east there was a huge meltdown when a scantily clad cosplay lady was harassed by a video comedy interviewer. It caused a huge shitstorm and sakura con, still reeling from sexual harassment cases stemming back to the 2009-ish 4chan /b/ panel (which was forever banned from the con henceforth for obvious reasons), had disguised informants among the cosplayers that were stationed near hot chicks to catch any PG rated youtube comedians trying to interview them. Following the bust, they told us to keep our interviews disney-level, but even disney has implied sex scenes and off-screen death. I think they wanted mister rogers or bob ross, which is surprisingly hard to deliver. Those guys are fucking beasts when it comes to parent-friendly entertainment.
Fan expo vancouver happened to be on 420 day, and the convention center was a few-minute a walk away from the vancouver art gallery (VAG) lawn which functioned at the meeting place for the 420 festival. I took a break from the con to go watch the giant puff of smoke rise out of the VAG lawn when the clock hit 4:20 pm. While there I picked up some cookies, mostly because I was hungry. They were really cheap because by the time we arrived everyone was already pretty loaded up on THC. The dealers were trying to dump off the rest of their product asap. The THC cookies were actually about the same price of normal cookies lacking medicinal ingredients. So I ate a lot of them. When I got back to the con, I was tripping out. I still had to interview people, so I had my team lead me around while I interviewed people hiiiigh. I concluded that cons are a great place to get stoned. It's a safe place - you probably won't get beat up or anything. Also, no matter how fucked up you get, you're still never the weirdest person there. Furrys occupy a space at cons shared by bronies and homestuck people: they just kind of show up everywhere at every con regardless of the theme. In this case their big, bobbing cartoon heads scared the crap out of me when I saw them towering over the crowd. "Not while I'm high. Not while I'm high..." I repeated when I saw their creepy, vacant eyes and neon heads wobbling around and heading toward me. My memory faded in and out, but one thing I remember was bumping into a hunter s thompson cosplayer. We proceeded to freak each other out for 2 minutes straight. Sadly the camera wasn't rolling as we faced off and shouted "woah" at each other in spastic, confused postures, but we got a good interview afterwards.
I just recently came off the 3-day event signifying the full return of anime evolution. AE is one of the oldest anime cons in vancouver. It used to be the only con of its type, but has since been faced with new challengers to its place in the nerd con scene. I competed in the walk off event, a zoolander-ish male model walk off where male competitors go up on stage and do skits to win the favor of a female panel of judges. For a number of reasons I'm pretty confident that I would never win such an event, but I realized that I have a place there. I postulated that it's my job to eliminate the competitors that the judges really don't like. Like the weird guys who just wandered in. Rather than sully the good competitors and waste their talent on huge mismatches, I'm used as a sort of cockblock to knock out the creepy and obscene participants while the real contenders feel each other out. There are a lot of factors going into a winning contestant, including body type, physicality, cosplay quality, preparation, and general connections to other con goers. I may not have had all those things, but I had a luchadore mask and a bottle of aloe lotion. I made it into the second round, but realized I was going to get steam rolled eventually. So I did the sensible thing to do in front of a panel of judges with tender feminine sensibilities and conventional values: I ripped off my shirt and started smearing aloe lotion over myself in a horrifying display of halfbreed colored bear-like body mass. My score for that round dropped immediately by 50%. And the shirt was destroyed. As was my dignity. But it was worth it. Even in an ailing economy.
The real fun was behind the curtains. I got to see the panic and quick thinking that goes into the walk off. It was as intense as any sport and as creative as any improv battle. The people who made it to finals were masters of dance, costuming, pantomime, improv, singing, and comedy. It was by far one of the most impressive live shows that I've ever gotten to see and be a part of.
But I got some interesting vibes. It was as if I were being led through a story like I was a The Dude being bounced between a network of lebowskis dressed in craft foam stitch patterns. I got the impression that there was some kind of behind-the-scenes nerd drama in play and it involved not only the contestants and judges, but people from all reaches of the vancouver geek empire and perhaps even the whole west coast. The "geek" scene is fairly small and incestuous. Everyone seems to know each other, but it's hard to really go over all of the connections. But those connections seem to shape what went on at that con. By "geek" I'm not really referring to academics, such as the people I work with, or hobbyists in most areas that aren't cosplay or related to sci-fi, anime, or other areas of pop-culture. The whole local "geek" movement really doesn't have much to do with people I see day and night in the physics common room, or the bug enthusiasts who go on walks to photograph insects or fungus they find, or the people who build their own electronics from stuff they salvage. When I see a facebook event advertising something with the word "geek" in it, I realize that I'm looking at an event for people who are trying to make up for past social failures. These are people who, in high school, may have been geeks and who also may have been excluded from the drama and politics of having a dynamic and socially competitive peer group. They were outsiders looking in and always the victims of politics, but never the agents. But now it's their chance to build their own rickety ramshackle version of the hierarchies that stunted their social growth. It's like a second high school, but this time anime and gaming is cool. It's a second chance to be an in group, to arbitrarily make enemies and allies. To draw imaginary lines in the sand to separate the cool and uncool like dung beetles fighting over a ball of poop. But the stakes are there. I've seen geek royalty descend and scoop up lines of willing fangirls. I've seen haters and pariahs that wander the dance floor lost, bored, but wanting more like banished ghosts hungry for souls. I've seen love and hate and games. Social games like the app kind, but also social games like people making other people hate each other. It's precisely the stuff I never had time for. I figure every human has a set drama level that they're comfortable with. If they're not getting their drama dose from life being a bitch, then they fill the void themselves. So there I am, a pawn in someone's game, commands going over my head as someone builds an empire out of the shattered egos of those who didn't quite make it through their development properly. Maybe their flawed teen years left them incurably shy, or sexually damaged, or sexually twisted, or obsessed, or depressed. But now they can try to salvage the remains of their psyche and build a new pyramid on the charred and salted earth. And I'll be there at the gates, with my aloe lotion, to deny them entry to the golden chamber within.
At sakura con our team was busted by undercover con cops when we mentioned the word "penis" during an interview. They took pictures of us and threatened to kick us out if it happened again. We said worse stuff in other interviews, but I feel there was two factors that put us in especially hot water. 1) We said it in the vendor room instead of outside the building where most of the cosplayers were hanging out as a sort of ad hoc communal space. Outside of the venue's property we can do whatever we want. But if we fuck around inside the building our ass is grass and anal retentive con staff is going to smoke it. Inside the building they had full time staff dedicated to stopping any skipping, piggyback rides, vigorous hugs, or anything remotely possibly dangerous. These guys were posted at all hours (2 in the morning) and stopped us from standing and talking in a stairway ... in a building totally empty save for ourselves and the full time con gestapo. 2) The other factor is that we said it to not just any female attendee, but to a "hot" cosplay girl. Just prior to this con at pax east there was a huge meltdown when a scantily clad cosplay lady was harassed by a video comedy interviewer. It caused a huge shitstorm and sakura con, still reeling from sexual harassment cases stemming back to the 2009-ish 4chan /b/ panel (which was forever banned from the con henceforth for obvious reasons), had disguised informants among the cosplayers that were stationed near hot chicks to catch any PG rated youtube comedians trying to interview them. Following the bust, they told us to keep our interviews disney-level, but even disney has implied sex scenes and off-screen death. I think they wanted mister rogers or bob ross, which is surprisingly hard to deliver. Those guys are fucking beasts when it comes to parent-friendly entertainment.
Fan expo vancouver happened to be on 420 day, and the convention center was a few-minute a walk away from the vancouver art gallery (VAG) lawn which functioned at the meeting place for the 420 festival. I took a break from the con to go watch the giant puff of smoke rise out of the VAG lawn when the clock hit 4:20 pm. While there I picked up some cookies, mostly because I was hungry. They were really cheap because by the time we arrived everyone was already pretty loaded up on THC. The dealers were trying to dump off the rest of their product asap. The THC cookies were actually about the same price of normal cookies lacking medicinal ingredients. So I ate a lot of them. When I got back to the con, I was tripping out. I still had to interview people, so I had my team lead me around while I interviewed people hiiiigh. I concluded that cons are a great place to get stoned. It's a safe place - you probably won't get beat up or anything. Also, no matter how fucked up you get, you're still never the weirdest person there. Furrys occupy a space at cons shared by bronies and homestuck people: they just kind of show up everywhere at every con regardless of the theme. In this case their big, bobbing cartoon heads scared the crap out of me when I saw them towering over the crowd. "Not while I'm high. Not while I'm high..." I repeated when I saw their creepy, vacant eyes and neon heads wobbling around and heading toward me. My memory faded in and out, but one thing I remember was bumping into a hunter s thompson cosplayer. We proceeded to freak each other out for 2 minutes straight. Sadly the camera wasn't rolling as we faced off and shouted "woah" at each other in spastic, confused postures, but we got a good interview afterwards.
I just recently came off the 3-day event signifying the full return of anime evolution. AE is one of the oldest anime cons in vancouver. It used to be the only con of its type, but has since been faced with new challengers to its place in the nerd con scene. I competed in the walk off event, a zoolander-ish male model walk off where male competitors go up on stage and do skits to win the favor of a female panel of judges. For a number of reasons I'm pretty confident that I would never win such an event, but I realized that I have a place there. I postulated that it's my job to eliminate the competitors that the judges really don't like. Like the weird guys who just wandered in. Rather than sully the good competitors and waste their talent on huge mismatches, I'm used as a sort of cockblock to knock out the creepy and obscene participants while the real contenders feel each other out. There are a lot of factors going into a winning contestant, including body type, physicality, cosplay quality, preparation, and general connections to other con goers. I may not have had all those things, but I had a luchadore mask and a bottle of aloe lotion. I made it into the second round, but realized I was going to get steam rolled eventually. So I did the sensible thing to do in front of a panel of judges with tender feminine sensibilities and conventional values: I ripped off my shirt and started smearing aloe lotion over myself in a horrifying display of halfbreed colored bear-like body mass. My score for that round dropped immediately by 50%. And the shirt was destroyed. As was my dignity. But it was worth it. Even in an ailing economy.
The real fun was behind the curtains. I got to see the panic and quick thinking that goes into the walk off. It was as intense as any sport and as creative as any improv battle. The people who made it to finals were masters of dance, costuming, pantomime, improv, singing, and comedy. It was by far one of the most impressive live shows that I've ever gotten to see and be a part of.
But I got some interesting vibes. It was as if I were being led through a story like I was a The Dude being bounced between a network of lebowskis dressed in craft foam stitch patterns. I got the impression that there was some kind of behind-the-scenes nerd drama in play and it involved not only the contestants and judges, but people from all reaches of the vancouver geek empire and perhaps even the whole west coast. The "geek" scene is fairly small and incestuous. Everyone seems to know each other, but it's hard to really go over all of the connections. But those connections seem to shape what went on at that con. By "geek" I'm not really referring to academics, such as the people I work with, or hobbyists in most areas that aren't cosplay or related to sci-fi, anime, or other areas of pop-culture. The whole local "geek" movement really doesn't have much to do with people I see day and night in the physics common room, or the bug enthusiasts who go on walks to photograph insects or fungus they find, or the people who build their own electronics from stuff they salvage. When I see a facebook event advertising something with the word "geek" in it, I realize that I'm looking at an event for people who are trying to make up for past social failures. These are people who, in high school, may have been geeks and who also may have been excluded from the drama and politics of having a dynamic and socially competitive peer group. They were outsiders looking in and always the victims of politics, but never the agents. But now it's their chance to build their own rickety ramshackle version of the hierarchies that stunted their social growth. It's like a second high school, but this time anime and gaming is cool. It's a second chance to be an in group, to arbitrarily make enemies and allies. To draw imaginary lines in the sand to separate the cool and uncool like dung beetles fighting over a ball of poop. But the stakes are there. I've seen geek royalty descend and scoop up lines of willing fangirls. I've seen haters and pariahs that wander the dance floor lost, bored, but wanting more like banished ghosts hungry for souls. I've seen love and hate and games. Social games like the app kind, but also social games like people making other people hate each other. It's precisely the stuff I never had time for. I figure every human has a set drama level that they're comfortable with. If they're not getting their drama dose from life being a bitch, then they fill the void themselves. So there I am, a pawn in someone's game, commands going over my head as someone builds an empire out of the shattered egos of those who didn't quite make it through their development properly. Maybe their flawed teen years left them incurably shy, or sexually damaged, or sexually twisted, or obsessed, or depressed. But now they can try to salvage the remains of their psyche and build a new pyramid on the charred and salted earth. And I'll be there at the gates, with my aloe lotion, to deny them entry to the golden chamber within.