Chapters 4 and 5
Cut because people will bitch otherwise
Chapter 4: In Line with the Online
The hotel was nice. It was the Waverly, a ritzy four-star establishment. According to Miko, the con's had a rather bad history with hotels. Anime people smell bad and tend to get drunk and pass out all over the damn place, messing with regular customers. It turns out that old business dude types aren't expecting to see ninjas and schoolgirls walking around the buffet while they drink their morning tea. Most hotels agree to the task under the "How bad can it be?" principle and later vow to never do so again. The Waverly, on the other hand, decided to go for a round two. Silly them.
It's laid out like the stacks level in Goldeneye: an open center with platforms along the edges, housing the rooms. The bottom floor has a general lobby area with a buffet too expensive for our budgets. Looking up finds windows at the top, letting in sunlight to rain down upon folks who otherwise hadn't seen natural illumination in years. It also managed to materialize the previously mentioned yellow Atlanta smog-haze. Even the insides of large buildings are not immune. Pollution rocks.
The Waverly
Transportation would be some short escalators and four glass elevators on one side. There was always a line for the lifts, especially on the first and last days as everyone had to move all their gear up and down. Stairs weren't lacking, but security guards for some reason decided that they ought to be emergency only and yelled at people for using them. Of course, the stairs were only marked "emergency use only" on the bottom floors. The top ones simply said "Stair B" or whatever. You could always go down and plead ignorance, but up would be tough. Luckily, they gave up this tomfoolery after day one and the lines weren't quite so terrible afterward.
Do you have stairs in your hotel?
So, where were we? Oh yeah…getting out of the car. Grabbing as much as we could carry, we walked into the entrance in the adjoining shopping mall. Oddly, it was a "specialty mall," which meant that all the shops would only carry specialty items. There was a wedding store, a glass china store, a painting store, and all sorts of upper-class establishments that had to know they wouldn't be selling anything to the clientele this weekend. You could see it in their eyes. Some of the clerks sat looking forlornly at the parade of fantasy characters. Maybe a white mage would come in to look for a costume prop, but it'd probably be too expensive anyway. Some just closed their doors and didn't even bother trying.
Walking through the hall of lonely shopkeepers, we found the hotel, checked in, and went upstairs to find Ben already furiously typing at his laptop. We still hadn't gotten our convention badges and I wasn't even sure if the plan to be boyfriend Wade for the weekend would go through and save me $20. But this would not be the most important order of business. Ben and I were quickly shuffled out of the room. It was time for the girls to change into their first costumes. We would wait down by registration for their arrival.
Allison stars in: Good Afternoon, Atlanta!
The registration line was in a somewhat central lobby area made into the Artists' room. This has rows of tables where anyone can set up to try their hand at selling drawings and other homemade anime-related items for money. My first glance found a pencil drawing of furry wolf Sephiroth, so I stopped glancing for a while. The sights walking around were often far better.
Artists' Room
Let's talk about the atmosphere at an anime convention. It's a scary thing if you've never been. My first few hours' entertainment was pretty much walking around with wide eyes, saying nothing and taking it all in. About two thirds of the people were in costume. I barely recognized any of them, not knowing anime, but people from video games I'd played made me warm and fuzzy inside, especially when they were hot girls. With the right girl under the tunic, even Link can look kind of hot. I'd show her my hookshot any day.
The way it works is that everyone has a camera and must take a picture of every person who is dressed up. Every cosplayer wants people to stop them and ask for a picture. For the photographers, it's like a game of Pokemon Snap: Gotta Catch 'em All. For the photographees, it's attention whoring taken offline. Everyone gets to be a celebrity for a day. This being my second con, I should theoretically be used to it.
Halloween, one month too early
There's no point in loading this thing up with pictures of random cosplayers. For more, try
RisingSun
AnimeBelle
FansView
Dave Nelson Photography (Includes official judging photos)
The girls actually didn't take long at all to get costumed and come downstairs. They're girls. They're also wearing insanely intricate costumes and need to look good for judges, photographers, and fanboys. All these considered, I'd expected to see them in about an hour and a half. Turns out, they were down in around 30 but had spent another 30 just in walking from one side of the hotel to the other. Everyone asking them to stop and pose constantly had made traveling quite laborious. One person'd ask them and they'd end up staying in pose for a few minutes while everyone in the area would swarm to get their shots. When the feeding frenzy dispersed, they could grab the purses and progress another few feet before repeating the process. Of course, putting down and picking up the purses required bending over, which meant everyone could check out their asses, attracting more crowds. In normal circumstances, this would all be rather odd, vile, and shunned, but at a con, it's the bar of normality.
Day one's costumes: Miko, Amanda (courtesy animebelle.com)
Day one's costumes: Allison, Amanda
I have no idea what they are dressed as
When they arrived, we got our admission badges and proceeded. I got my Wade badge and didn't even have to defeat a gym master to do it. Badges are another funny thing about cons. For most parts, you really don't even need one. All forms of entertainment, excepting those reserved for the 18+ crowd, don't have anyone checking to see if you paid. Shoot, it seems like you could have won a contest and not even paid to get in. The only point where it really matters is if you want to go spend money in what's called the "Dealer Room." With how the anime, posters, plushes, and tee shirts within attract the hordes willing to spend exorbitant fees on it, the name seems suitable. But the odd thing is: how much business sense does it make to have free entertainment but require admission to get into the shops? We'll talk more about my shopping experiences later. Regardless, I had my damn badge. We could do stuff now, assuming we could ever get the hell away from the paparazzi.
Got my Wade badge!
We decided to finish up the night by attending its main events: Anime Hell and Midnight Madness. Anime Hell surprisingly doesn't have much to do with anime. It's more along the lines of "everyone sits in the ballroom while the host shows all the weird movies he's downloaded from the internet." Being an active goon, I was banking on knowing almost everything shown, but turned out pleasantly surprised. Most clips were in one of two categories: A) Japan is weird or B) Drugs are cool and anti-drug ads are funny. In an hour and a half, I only saw two things that I'd seen before. My pride was slightly injured, but at least I had a good time. Still, having eaten only had one triple cheeseburger in the past 24 hours was starting to make me weak and everyone else seemed hungry too, so we went back to the room for a dinner of burgers and hot dogs, courtesy of Amanda and her lovely George Forman grill. It was a slice of college life right in the room.
Before heading back down, we switched to pajamas so we'd actually be able to move without the photography feeding frenzy and get downstairs in time for Midnight Madness. M.M. is the comedic redubbing showcase, featuring extended skits of anime being manipulated to fit various bits of audio. Inuyasha got remixed to Lord of the Rings, finding way the hell more parallels between the two than I was aware of, though I'm not particularly a fan of either. Another called Fisting the North Star used, of course, Fist of the North Star. I'd never seen that one before, but apparently it's full of burly dudes, almost no girls, and lots of macho manly fighting. Our entertainers here turned it all into one massive orgy of gay sex and penis jokes. In fact, it was 30 straight minutes of penis jokes. The main character was named Biggus Dickus. His sensei was Master Bater. It was a little sophomoric, but when every sentence takes a shot, some of them are bound to hit. My lesson for Friday night was that you can say whatever you want about anime people, but at least they know how to make fun of themselves and have a sense of humor about the flaws in what they love. I went to bed feeling slightly more respect for the fandom. Tomorrow would be a long day of the main events: costume competition.
Chapter 5: Saturday is Silly Costume Day
Saturday morning began bright and early with an ear splitting rousing courtesy of Allison's Power-Puff Girl alarm clock. The women had to hurriedly get into their main costumes and dash downstairs to get in line for prejudging. Only the first 150 people would get to be in the contest, and the line would work on a first in, first out system. If you haven't gotten the idea by now, the costume contest is essentially the biggest event of the con. For our party's feminine side, it would be the climax of about eight months of work. For me, it'd be weirdos on parade.
That alarm clock is loud enough to wake the dead. Bubbles screams like a banshee before offering a pitiful "good morning" to maintain cuteness-sadistic bitch. Even though we had no particular reason to wake up early, the other guys and I found ourselves pretty roused. After talking about the impending hurricane and booking a room in South Georgia for Sunday night to appease our spazzing parental units, we went downstairs. Andy agreed that he'd spend the day as "cosplay support technician," holding the purses and handing out the girls' cards to whoever took their photo. The cards had the name of their cosplaying "group" and their web address. He would also be in charge of bodyguard duty to ensure none of the fanboys got too rabid.
Rikku, Payne, and Yuna
Unfortunately, waiting in line is about as interesting as… waiting in line. Thus, we did the gentlemanly thing and ditched the girls to go walk around and generally enjoy ourselves. Stop one would be the dealer room.
What can I say about the dealer room? It's the size of a warehouse, lined with rows and rows of tables. The aisles are abysmally full, making passage rather difficult. It doesn't help the situation when people pause and swarm to take photos within the lanes. And for a room that cost everyone between twenty and forty dollars to enter, the prices are astounding. Action figures an inch and a half tall are $5. Normal sized ones are about $20 unless they're from FF7, for which you'd spend about $50 each. Small plushes run about $15, with large ones starting at $30. I have no firsthand knowledge of normal prices for anime itself, but I'm told it wasn't too terrible.
The dealer room
Some random stuff on sale
I listed some base prices but, if someone looked desperate, the dealers would quote something twice as high and often get it. Perverts could get their fill too: drawings of Squall bumraping Siefer were far less rare than I'd have wished, but at least it was all properly labeled under the appropriate categories of "hentai," "yaoi," or "yuri." Anyone reading this should know that hentai is pretty much the general term for all sexually explicit forms of anime, mostly unofficial when using unoriginal characters. Yaoi is the gay stuff. Yuri is the lesbian stuff. I bought none of these. I had to hunt very hard to find anything Nintendo related, but eventually walked out with a Super Mario Bros. clock, a Kirby keychain, and Mario Bros. playset type thing for a total of $50. It's more than I wanted to spend, but judging by other peoples' loads, I was fine. Andy bought a cheesecake poster of some anime chick losing her top at the beach and looking embarrassed. It's still in my trunk, being held ransom for a box of ice cream sandwiches he owes me. I have a hunch that my constant mockery and reference to it as "Andy's anime porn" is making him sorry he bought it.
Some of the Mario playset I bought, now pinned to my wall
Mario Clock
The Kirby keychain I bought, posing in front of some of my other stuff (not loser)
Japanophilia runs rampant here. Nobody's surprised to find anime and anime collectables at an anime convention, but there's also Japanese food, Jpop CDs, and assorted other barely-related oddities. The crowd flips for a food called "Pocky," which seem to be exactly the same as these little pastries in the shape of a stick that my grandparents buy from Pepperidge Farm. I think it's supposed go to in coffee or something. It's alright, but being Japanese seems to instantly make it better; people go nuts for the stuff. There are tee shirts that say "Pocky fanatic" like it's some great thing. One dude even dressed as a giant Pocky box. Anime people are weird.
One could also buy shirts that said, "Glomp me!" What is glomping? It's the practice of a hug combined with a running tackle. Originating from a written sound effect in some manga (Japanese comic) series, it's been popularized as lonely men ask hot girls to "glomp" them, eliciting varying levels of compliance. Many stand around with the request written on a sign. Speaking of signs, holding them is another typical practice. According to Miko, it's gotten so bad that some cons ban this entirely, but AWA was not one of them. Again, anime people are weird.
Pocky!
Glomp me!
By now, I'd lost the other guys into the sea of oddballs, finding myself alone. On top of that, the line outside the prejudging room had moved, rendering the girls "missing in action." I do have a cell phone, but it has roaming out of state, so who wants to mess with that? Thus, I sought out the last person I could meet: an IRC friend named Gene.
Despite being from the internet, Gene fit in fine at the con. Perhaps this is because everyone there was from the internet. It came up that I hadn't tried Pocky yet, so he asked the nearest person walking out of the dealer room if he could borrow a stick. Of course, she had some and obliged. The penetration rate for that stuff is crazy. He was also wearing pants large enough to fit a two-liter of mountain dew in each pocket, carrying around both regular and code red for consumption by surrounding friends and acquaintances. Soon, I was joining him on a new quest.
ATMs at cons are notorious for being emptied within a few hours. Everyone has to get money to blow on massive amounts of obsessive crap in the dealer room, yet somehow never brings enough. Gene needed to find an ATM, so we set off in search of nearby hotels. Nearing the closest one, we ran into another dude doing the same thing. He told us it was already empty there too; we were wasting our time. On the way to the next, a car pulled up containing some friends of his. I'd probably have joined the journey to wherever they were going, but the car was so full of stuff that there was only room for one more. Feeling pretty ambivalent about where I went, I said it didn't matter and bid Gene adieu before returning to the con.
Again feeling alone, I sent a text message Andy's way that led me to finding Ben and him back in the main Ballroom watching the winners of the Anime Music Video competition. Like the costumes, AMVs are a surprisingly big deal in these circles. The idea is to pick a song and sequence bits of anime that go along with it, creating a music video. Categories ranged from the actually entertaining "most upbeat," "best parody," and "best comedy" to things like "best character study" and "most sentimental." The highlight to me was a clip called "Danger! Lowbrow Humor!" It sequenced some Dragon Ball Z over Electric Six's "Danger! High Voltage!" for homoerotic fun. As a bonus, they accidentally listed it as winning "most sentimental" and had to take that back. I had no idea when I sat down that the event would last over two hours. By the time it ended, all the "sentimental" stuff had about put me to sleep and we left before whatever came next. A text message from my parents came through in the interim informing us that the hurricane had canceled classes Monday. K-Rad!
By another stroke of luck, we ran into the girls again. Apparently, waiting in line for prejudging had been a big waste of time. When the doors opened, they'd been ordered to sit throughout a room and were taken in arbitrary order. Bummer. Once they got out of there, it was the usual "walk around and get assaulted for pictures from all sides" routine for a few hours.
Chapter 4: In Line with the Online
The hotel was nice. It was the Waverly, a ritzy four-star establishment. According to Miko, the con's had a rather bad history with hotels. Anime people smell bad and tend to get drunk and pass out all over the damn place, messing with regular customers. It turns out that old business dude types aren't expecting to see ninjas and schoolgirls walking around the buffet while they drink their morning tea. Most hotels agree to the task under the "How bad can it be?" principle and later vow to never do so again. The Waverly, on the other hand, decided to go for a round two. Silly them.
It's laid out like the stacks level in Goldeneye: an open center with platforms along the edges, housing the rooms. The bottom floor has a general lobby area with a buffet too expensive for our budgets. Looking up finds windows at the top, letting in sunlight to rain down upon folks who otherwise hadn't seen natural illumination in years. It also managed to materialize the previously mentioned yellow Atlanta smog-haze. Even the insides of large buildings are not immune. Pollution rocks.
The Waverly
Transportation would be some short escalators and four glass elevators on one side. There was always a line for the lifts, especially on the first and last days as everyone had to move all their gear up and down. Stairs weren't lacking, but security guards for some reason decided that they ought to be emergency only and yelled at people for using them. Of course, the stairs were only marked "emergency use only" on the bottom floors. The top ones simply said "Stair B" or whatever. You could always go down and plead ignorance, but up would be tough. Luckily, they gave up this tomfoolery after day one and the lines weren't quite so terrible afterward.
Do you have stairs in your hotel?
So, where were we? Oh yeah…getting out of the car. Grabbing as much as we could carry, we walked into the entrance in the adjoining shopping mall. Oddly, it was a "specialty mall," which meant that all the shops would only carry specialty items. There was a wedding store, a glass china store, a painting store, and all sorts of upper-class establishments that had to know they wouldn't be selling anything to the clientele this weekend. You could see it in their eyes. Some of the clerks sat looking forlornly at the parade of fantasy characters. Maybe a white mage would come in to look for a costume prop, but it'd probably be too expensive anyway. Some just closed their doors and didn't even bother trying.
Walking through the hall of lonely shopkeepers, we found the hotel, checked in, and went upstairs to find Ben already furiously typing at his laptop. We still hadn't gotten our convention badges and I wasn't even sure if the plan to be boyfriend Wade for the weekend would go through and save me $20. But this would not be the most important order of business. Ben and I were quickly shuffled out of the room. It was time for the girls to change into their first costumes. We would wait down by registration for their arrival.
Allison stars in: Good Afternoon, Atlanta!
The registration line was in a somewhat central lobby area made into the Artists' room. This has rows of tables where anyone can set up to try their hand at selling drawings and other homemade anime-related items for money. My first glance found a pencil drawing of furry wolf Sephiroth, so I stopped glancing for a while. The sights walking around were often far better.
Artists' Room
Let's talk about the atmosphere at an anime convention. It's a scary thing if you've never been. My first few hours' entertainment was pretty much walking around with wide eyes, saying nothing and taking it all in. About two thirds of the people were in costume. I barely recognized any of them, not knowing anime, but people from video games I'd played made me warm and fuzzy inside, especially when they were hot girls. With the right girl under the tunic, even Link can look kind of hot. I'd show her my hookshot any day.
The way it works is that everyone has a camera and must take a picture of every person who is dressed up. Every cosplayer wants people to stop them and ask for a picture. For the photographers, it's like a game of Pokemon Snap: Gotta Catch 'em All. For the photographees, it's attention whoring taken offline. Everyone gets to be a celebrity for a day. This being my second con, I should theoretically be used to it.
Halloween, one month too early
There's no point in loading this thing up with pictures of random cosplayers. For more, try
RisingSun
AnimeBelle
FansView
Dave Nelson Photography (Includes official judging photos)
The girls actually didn't take long at all to get costumed and come downstairs. They're girls. They're also wearing insanely intricate costumes and need to look good for judges, photographers, and fanboys. All these considered, I'd expected to see them in about an hour and a half. Turns out, they were down in around 30 but had spent another 30 just in walking from one side of the hotel to the other. Everyone asking them to stop and pose constantly had made traveling quite laborious. One person'd ask them and they'd end up staying in pose for a few minutes while everyone in the area would swarm to get their shots. When the feeding frenzy dispersed, they could grab the purses and progress another few feet before repeating the process. Of course, putting down and picking up the purses required bending over, which meant everyone could check out their asses, attracting more crowds. In normal circumstances, this would all be rather odd, vile, and shunned, but at a con, it's the bar of normality.
Day one's costumes: Miko, Amanda (courtesy animebelle.com)
Day one's costumes: Allison, Amanda
I have no idea what they are dressed as
When they arrived, we got our admission badges and proceeded. I got my Wade badge and didn't even have to defeat a gym master to do it. Badges are another funny thing about cons. For most parts, you really don't even need one. All forms of entertainment, excepting those reserved for the 18+ crowd, don't have anyone checking to see if you paid. Shoot, it seems like you could have won a contest and not even paid to get in. The only point where it really matters is if you want to go spend money in what's called the "Dealer Room." With how the anime, posters, plushes, and tee shirts within attract the hordes willing to spend exorbitant fees on it, the name seems suitable. But the odd thing is: how much business sense does it make to have free entertainment but require admission to get into the shops? We'll talk more about my shopping experiences later. Regardless, I had my damn badge. We could do stuff now, assuming we could ever get the hell away from the paparazzi.
Got my Wade badge!
We decided to finish up the night by attending its main events: Anime Hell and Midnight Madness. Anime Hell surprisingly doesn't have much to do with anime. It's more along the lines of "everyone sits in the ballroom while the host shows all the weird movies he's downloaded from the internet." Being an active goon, I was banking on knowing almost everything shown, but turned out pleasantly surprised. Most clips were in one of two categories: A) Japan is weird or B) Drugs are cool and anti-drug ads are funny. In an hour and a half, I only saw two things that I'd seen before. My pride was slightly injured, but at least I had a good time. Still, having eaten only had one triple cheeseburger in the past 24 hours was starting to make me weak and everyone else seemed hungry too, so we went back to the room for a dinner of burgers and hot dogs, courtesy of Amanda and her lovely George Forman grill. It was a slice of college life right in the room.
Before heading back down, we switched to pajamas so we'd actually be able to move without the photography feeding frenzy and get downstairs in time for Midnight Madness. M.M. is the comedic redubbing showcase, featuring extended skits of anime being manipulated to fit various bits of audio. Inuyasha got remixed to Lord of the Rings, finding way the hell more parallels between the two than I was aware of, though I'm not particularly a fan of either. Another called Fisting the North Star used, of course, Fist of the North Star. I'd never seen that one before, but apparently it's full of burly dudes, almost no girls, and lots of macho manly fighting. Our entertainers here turned it all into one massive orgy of gay sex and penis jokes. In fact, it was 30 straight minutes of penis jokes. The main character was named Biggus Dickus. His sensei was Master Bater. It was a little sophomoric, but when every sentence takes a shot, some of them are bound to hit. My lesson for Friday night was that you can say whatever you want about anime people, but at least they know how to make fun of themselves and have a sense of humor about the flaws in what they love. I went to bed feeling slightly more respect for the fandom. Tomorrow would be a long day of the main events: costume competition.
Chapter 5: Saturday is Silly Costume Day
Saturday morning began bright and early with an ear splitting rousing courtesy of Allison's Power-Puff Girl alarm clock. The women had to hurriedly get into their main costumes and dash downstairs to get in line for prejudging. Only the first 150 people would get to be in the contest, and the line would work on a first in, first out system. If you haven't gotten the idea by now, the costume contest is essentially the biggest event of the con. For our party's feminine side, it would be the climax of about eight months of work. For me, it'd be weirdos on parade.
That alarm clock is loud enough to wake the dead. Bubbles screams like a banshee before offering a pitiful "good morning" to maintain cuteness-sadistic bitch. Even though we had no particular reason to wake up early, the other guys and I found ourselves pretty roused. After talking about the impending hurricane and booking a room in South Georgia for Sunday night to appease our spazzing parental units, we went downstairs. Andy agreed that he'd spend the day as "cosplay support technician," holding the purses and handing out the girls' cards to whoever took their photo. The cards had the name of their cosplaying "group" and their web address. He would also be in charge of bodyguard duty to ensure none of the fanboys got too rabid.
Rikku, Payne, and Yuna
Unfortunately, waiting in line is about as interesting as… waiting in line. Thus, we did the gentlemanly thing and ditched the girls to go walk around and generally enjoy ourselves. Stop one would be the dealer room.
What can I say about the dealer room? It's the size of a warehouse, lined with rows and rows of tables. The aisles are abysmally full, making passage rather difficult. It doesn't help the situation when people pause and swarm to take photos within the lanes. And for a room that cost everyone between twenty and forty dollars to enter, the prices are astounding. Action figures an inch and a half tall are $5. Normal sized ones are about $20 unless they're from FF7, for which you'd spend about $50 each. Small plushes run about $15, with large ones starting at $30. I have no firsthand knowledge of normal prices for anime itself, but I'm told it wasn't too terrible.
The dealer room
Some random stuff on sale
I listed some base prices but, if someone looked desperate, the dealers would quote something twice as high and often get it. Perverts could get their fill too: drawings of Squall bumraping Siefer were far less rare than I'd have wished, but at least it was all properly labeled under the appropriate categories of "hentai," "yaoi," or "yuri." Anyone reading this should know that hentai is pretty much the general term for all sexually explicit forms of anime, mostly unofficial when using unoriginal characters. Yaoi is the gay stuff. Yuri is the lesbian stuff. I bought none of these. I had to hunt very hard to find anything Nintendo related, but eventually walked out with a Super Mario Bros. clock, a Kirby keychain, and Mario Bros. playset type thing for a total of $50. It's more than I wanted to spend, but judging by other peoples' loads, I was fine. Andy bought a cheesecake poster of some anime chick losing her top at the beach and looking embarrassed. It's still in my trunk, being held ransom for a box of ice cream sandwiches he owes me. I have a hunch that my constant mockery and reference to it as "Andy's anime porn" is making him sorry he bought it.
Some of the Mario playset I bought, now pinned to my wall
Mario Clock
The Kirby keychain I bought, posing in front of some of my other stuff (not loser)
Japanophilia runs rampant here. Nobody's surprised to find anime and anime collectables at an anime convention, but there's also Japanese food, Jpop CDs, and assorted other barely-related oddities. The crowd flips for a food called "Pocky," which seem to be exactly the same as these little pastries in the shape of a stick that my grandparents buy from Pepperidge Farm. I think it's supposed go to in coffee or something. It's alright, but being Japanese seems to instantly make it better; people go nuts for the stuff. There are tee shirts that say "Pocky fanatic" like it's some great thing. One dude even dressed as a giant Pocky box. Anime people are weird.
One could also buy shirts that said, "Glomp me!" What is glomping? It's the practice of a hug combined with a running tackle. Originating from a written sound effect in some manga (Japanese comic) series, it's been popularized as lonely men ask hot girls to "glomp" them, eliciting varying levels of compliance. Many stand around with the request written on a sign. Speaking of signs, holding them is another typical practice. According to Miko, it's gotten so bad that some cons ban this entirely, but AWA was not one of them. Again, anime people are weird.
Pocky!
Glomp me!
By now, I'd lost the other guys into the sea of oddballs, finding myself alone. On top of that, the line outside the prejudging room had moved, rendering the girls "missing in action." I do have a cell phone, but it has roaming out of state, so who wants to mess with that? Thus, I sought out the last person I could meet: an IRC friend named Gene.
Despite being from the internet, Gene fit in fine at the con. Perhaps this is because everyone there was from the internet. It came up that I hadn't tried Pocky yet, so he asked the nearest person walking out of the dealer room if he could borrow a stick. Of course, she had some and obliged. The penetration rate for that stuff is crazy. He was also wearing pants large enough to fit a two-liter of mountain dew in each pocket, carrying around both regular and code red for consumption by surrounding friends and acquaintances. Soon, I was joining him on a new quest.
ATMs at cons are notorious for being emptied within a few hours. Everyone has to get money to blow on massive amounts of obsessive crap in the dealer room, yet somehow never brings enough. Gene needed to find an ATM, so we set off in search of nearby hotels. Nearing the closest one, we ran into another dude doing the same thing. He told us it was already empty there too; we were wasting our time. On the way to the next, a car pulled up containing some friends of his. I'd probably have joined the journey to wherever they were going, but the car was so full of stuff that there was only room for one more. Feeling pretty ambivalent about where I went, I said it didn't matter and bid Gene adieu before returning to the con.
Again feeling alone, I sent a text message Andy's way that led me to finding Ben and him back in the main Ballroom watching the winners of the Anime Music Video competition. Like the costumes, AMVs are a surprisingly big deal in these circles. The idea is to pick a song and sequence bits of anime that go along with it, creating a music video. Categories ranged from the actually entertaining "most upbeat," "best parody," and "best comedy" to things like "best character study" and "most sentimental." The highlight to me was a clip called "Danger! Lowbrow Humor!" It sequenced some Dragon Ball Z over Electric Six's "Danger! High Voltage!" for homoerotic fun. As a bonus, they accidentally listed it as winning "most sentimental" and had to take that back. I had no idea when I sat down that the event would last over two hours. By the time it ended, all the "sentimental" stuff had about put me to sleep and we left before whatever came next. A text message from my parents came through in the interim informing us that the hurricane had canceled classes Monday. K-Rad!
By another stroke of luck, we ran into the girls again. Apparently, waiting in line for prejudging had been a big waste of time. When the doors opened, they'd been ordered to sit throughout a room and were taken in arbitrary order. Bummer. Once they got out of there, it was the usual "walk around and get assaulted for pictures from all sides" routine for a few hours.