Kumori Con 2010 Report
Let's see if LJ accepts this post, the whorebags.
Thursday morning I went to work to herd two of the dudes to various appointments. Everybody kept staring at me because I was like, I am on vacation I am not wearing khakis, but the first appointment went well and even the second went well although it ran very, very long. Got out about twelve and went to Dawn's to pack up Relations shiz; around four thirty we headed out toward the Hilton, dumped all the stuff onto the sidewalk and waited for Dawn to get the car valet-parked. As we were standing there a dude in a taxi pulled up and tried to get us to use his services. He only gave up when I said "Dude, we are at our destination". Which, you know, inarguable. The rest of the night was spent unloading shit from the Truck into Ballroom and then going home and falling over dead. Around six pm I had one of those hilarious realizations involving 'shit! Did I eat anything since I had breakfast at work? --- shit!' and ran to McDonalds - and then of course we all oozed over to Koji's and had delicious, delicious Japanese food. Originally we were going to go to the one on Broadway and Alder, but it's really small and the dude got all huge eyed and terrified at the sight of the ten of us. So he called the bigger one on Broadway and Evergreen (it's kind of by the Schintz?) and we trekked four blocks up there instead.
The manager was very gracious and friendly and we ended up being seated in the tatami-style area (no actual tatami mats tho) and being waited on this girl who was like, absurdly graceful at getting up and down from a kneel. Dawn ended up having a conversation with the manager in Japanese, which was apparently unexpected, but she acquitted herself pretty well.
Friday I got to the Hilton around nine am, hauled shit around for Prog and Ops, and then saw Ellen and Fox from last year at Artist Alley. Fox is also a caregiver type person (she's a medaide at Gateway Gardens, I think) and Ellen works for Home Instead, so Fox and I had sort of clutched at each other gratefully at the prospect of an entire week with no old people around the night before. Well, she's running Chibi Room (craft room for the short fans), but as she pointed out, at least it's different. Ended up helping her set up Chibi Room and cutting out about a million scales for fish kites. (note from Sunday: apparently we didn't make enough. No, seriously, I cut up like, forty sheets worth of construction paper and there wasn't enough. What. The. Hell.) Then I realized that if I had to make one more fucking stitch out of the Knit Picks Essential yarn I'd packed I would actually end up killing someone, so I went to Knit-Purl to ask piteously if they'd credited me for the [REDACTED] I'd knit for them. They ended up paying me $25 in store credit so I got some Rowan Felted Tweed in Bilberry instead and thankfully chucked the damn other stuff in the trash. It was Meadow Multi (the Essential, I mean) and while I like brown, and purple, and green, and it doesn't look too terrible in the skein, the actual effect knit up is something like an early 1990s zebra print.
The Felted Tweed is a nice deep purple. Am making plain mitts on the grounds that I need something to knit while I'm waiting for the god damn elevators and also by Tuesday even plain work might be a little much for me.levators are as terrible as usual, although they set them so that some of them only go to the event spaces and some of them only go to hotel rooms, which seems to be working out better than last year, and reminding people that it's only four floors, for Christ's sake, use the god damn stairs. Well, not for tabletop gaming, which is up on 23. Anyway I have an service elevator button so in theory I can use the service elevators instead, but in actual practice we're not supposed to be whorebags about the privilege, so I actually do go on the regular elevators a lot.
(People have been complaining about the lines in general a lot this year, although it doesn't seem any worse than last year and well, we do have 4000 people at this event, dudes.)
Friday night we had the Industry dinner at Bush Gardens (yes, they reopened) in the tatami room. I ended up sitting with Jo and Tabby and Jay-the-con-lawyer (I would totally tap that if his name wasn't Jay - he is adorable, fannish, and did I mention adorable and fannish? But the thought of even theoretically dating a Jay when Amy's Dude is also a Jay is like, a barrelful of Oh Hell No) and two of the Anime Hunter dudes. I pretty much rolllllled out of that room afterward; they started us with sashimi and tempura and edamane, then they brought out miso soup with clams in shell, THEN they brought out box-plates with yet more tempura shrimp and I think tuna, steak and some sort of tofu thing with soy beans and butter beans plus salad, and then when we were all completely comatose they brought out fruit artfully arranged on platters for dessert.
It was totally fucking amaze. Some of the other tables were boozing it up with the sake but for some reason our table was the dry one that evening. Anyway. The tempura was so freaking awesome; it had this beautiful light batter over it and you know, I'd never thought of putting asparagus in a deep fryer but that shit was for the gods.
Somewhere in there I met My Guest, Sonny Strait - he played Krellian (?) in the Dragonball Z dub, Toonami Tom and Hughes in FMA. I'm sure he did other stuff too but I'm pretty terrible with dub VA names. He also did a comic for ElfQuest and is currently doing an OEL manga for Tokyo Pop called We Shadows. He is a super sweetheart. He actually ditched the dinner early because they gave the guests a Powell's card in their gift bags and he was so eager to get over there, and apparently he found his book there and took pictures of it on his cell phone because he was so excited.
Saturday was spent mostly running errands for Dawn and Sonny - I hung out at his booth for a couple of hours while he went to Art Media and shiz, ran and got him some water from Made in Oregon, got supplies for [REDACTED] and then at five thirty we had the VIP / Guest dinner here at the hotel. It was also very good but pretty standard hotel banquet food (prime rib, salads, risotto, chocolatey dessert shiz). We shared the table with two shameless, shameless fangirls, one of whom was in a mini skirt uniform from FMA, lol. There was also a quiet dude and then Sarah and Koop from Prog / Tabletop Gaming showed up, which was nice. Most of the fans were very nice and polite although there was a couple of them who were … possibly not used to dealing with actual people, bless their hearts. Ended up giving Sonny one of my nice felt pens for signatures, but he drew a picture of Hughes in my notebook for me.
Amy found me a Kirk and Starfleet logo pin from Robin of The Gorgonist - it's from the picture of Kirk and Spock brofisting I bought last year. I ran down Sunday and clutched at Robin until I found a Spock pin too. Also got a Kumori messenger bag.
After dinner I went to check email and watched a group of attendees play spin the bottle with … hugs? They were at Pioneer Square and there was dramatic flingings. Gloated at people online over my Hughes sketch, then hung out doing more stuff until it was time to get Sonny to his panel. I don't know if he was expecting as many people to be there as showed up, lol. I got back there at nine thirty to make sure he was doing okay, and he was still answering questions. He ended up doing autographs until his nominal second panel about webcomics started up, and when I came to collect him at eleven thirty he STILL had people talking to him. Debra and I escorted him to his room, I came back to [REDACTED] and crashed on Dawn's couch. We had most of the guests except Sonny here last night - Tiffany Grant, Josh Morris from Funimation, Kevin Kreever - Robotech marketing dude, Todd Haberkorn - Italy from Hetalia and Watanuki from Holic (!) and most of Anime Hunters, who are a professional cosplay group. As soon as Lorien gets in here I'm going to go to Starbucks, get recaffeinated and then go make myself generally Useful. Might end up going to Portland Art Museum with Sonny, there's an exhibit he's interested in.
(later Sunday)
did end up going to the museum with Sonny - apparently they got ALL the orginal drawings for the comic version of the Book of Genesis as drawn by R Crumb. You could like, see the freaking white out. We only managed to see about half of the exhibit before an hour and a half had passed by, but it was pretty amaze nonetheless.
Then I went and bought a boken. It is named Stupidkiller. Nobody is allowing me to kill stupid with it. :( The Aki-con people were randomly giving away their bags from last year, which are really, really nice - vinyl instead of the parachute-style canvas the Kumori bags are in. I'm kind of planning to figure out how to get the print off the front since I've never actually been to Aki-con, let alone Aki-con 2009. Maybe duct tape. (nb - the merch people from us and Sakura were like, WHY DID THEY PUT THE YEAR ON THEIR MERCH LIKE THAAAAT. Always hang out with the people who run the cons, dude, so much hilarifying gossip everywhere.)
Right now there's just a bunch of staff in [REDACTED] hanging out until Sonny gets here so I can throw him to the wolves, I mean, FMA fangirls, and leave for home. I seriously doubt we're going to get home before 1am tomorrow … and it's apparently degrading into a discussion that I'm not going to describe.
----
AND NOW IT IS WEDNESDAY. And I cannot move very well. There is ominous signs of joint stiffness, like, everywhere. Body you can kiss my butt. Anyway, Sunday night I went home to sleep, woke up at six thirty Monday because Amy failed to put her phone with her damn alarm on it in her room, and I cannot sleep through her alarm clock. It sounds like one we had growing up and I claw my way out of sleep like a zombie when I hear it. So I called her many, many loving things and tried to go back to sleep, but failed.
So I sat around the house until noon because I was like, shit, I will be up til 1am lifting boxes, I Must Rest!! - and then it turned out I was in [REDACTED] all through tear down babysitting the ahem guest supplies ahem so they didn't have to lock up after Lorien left. I walked Kevin to the MAX station at Pioneer Square (gave him a ticket I had kicking around, too) and went to Knit-Purl for some scrap yarn and more Felted Tweed to do a hat to match the gloves. (I like Felted Tweed okay as a finished product but I dunno, it's kind of like really high class shoddy?)
Spent pretty much the rest of the day in [REDACTED]. Tear down apparently went pretty well; at about eight or so we were at the point where Jo was passing out tickets for the food. (Tacos.) We sat around with some of the Sakura Con people and Josh and they traded con gossip. At around nine or ten Debra and a bunch of people invaded [REDACTED] and we ended up watching Hetalia until someone said that Dawn needed to go to bed. Apparently the people out in the living area of the suite made a significant dent on the open bottles, but the eight of us huddled in the bedroom area didn't drink at all. I tell a lie, I had some earlier but I am a hard person to make visibly drunken. Everybody pretty much cleared out by eleven or midnight and I crashed on the couch. Dawn had to get up at six to take Tiffany to the airport, but I slept until eight am.
Then we cleared out [REDACTED], packed her car, drove over to her house to be greeted hysterically by her cat, unloaded and sat for about half an hour while Julie and a dude carried in the manga library. Then we went back to the hotel, helped with loading the truck, and drove to the Locker with Kopp and Sarah, both of whom have varying levels of food needs, like Dawn (although Dawn is champion for all eternity when it comes to allergy and food needs) so we stopped by New Seasons to get Things they could Eat first.
Apparently the Locker is out Westside and Far Away - since there were multiple references to it being on the Max line I'd assumed it was closer in, but nooo had it been any further out we would have crossed a county line. Thanks to everybody who was there's complete awesome we got everything unloaded and into the lockers by four pm, just in time for the skies to open up and drench us. I was soaked to the skin and deeply grateful I wore a black shirt on Monday.
Everybody else went to Pizza Hut, but Dawn, Kopp, Sarah and I went back to her house, which took forever because of traffic, had our food, and kind of debriefed about our areas of the con for a while. I finally decided I needed to get home around six. Made all my connections in record time but still didn't get home til like, seven fifteen, because the traffic was so bad.
And now I am very sore.
Thursday morning I went to work to herd two of the dudes to various appointments. Everybody kept staring at me because I was like, I am on vacation I am not wearing khakis, but the first appointment went well and even the second went well although it ran very, very long. Got out about twelve and went to Dawn's to pack up Relations shiz; around four thirty we headed out toward the Hilton, dumped all the stuff onto the sidewalk and waited for Dawn to get the car valet-parked. As we were standing there a dude in a taxi pulled up and tried to get us to use his services. He only gave up when I said "Dude, we are at our destination". Which, you know, inarguable. The rest of the night was spent unloading shit from the Truck into Ballroom and then going home and falling over dead. Around six pm I had one of those hilarious realizations involving 'shit! Did I eat anything since I had breakfast at work? --- shit!' and ran to McDonalds - and then of course we all oozed over to Koji's and had delicious, delicious Japanese food. Originally we were going to go to the one on Broadway and Alder, but it's really small and the dude got all huge eyed and terrified at the sight of the ten of us. So he called the bigger one on Broadway and Evergreen (it's kind of by the Schintz?) and we trekked four blocks up there instead.
The manager was very gracious and friendly and we ended up being seated in the tatami-style area (no actual tatami mats tho) and being waited on this girl who was like, absurdly graceful at getting up and down from a kneel. Dawn ended up having a conversation with the manager in Japanese, which was apparently unexpected, but she acquitted herself pretty well.
Friday I got to the Hilton around nine am, hauled shit around for Prog and Ops, and then saw Ellen and Fox from last year at Artist Alley. Fox is also a caregiver type person (she's a medaide at Gateway Gardens, I think) and Ellen works for Home Instead, so Fox and I had sort of clutched at each other gratefully at the prospect of an entire week with no old people around the night before. Well, she's running Chibi Room (craft room for the short fans), but as she pointed out, at least it's different. Ended up helping her set up Chibi Room and cutting out about a million scales for fish kites. (note from Sunday: apparently we didn't make enough. No, seriously, I cut up like, forty sheets worth of construction paper and there wasn't enough. What. The. Hell.) Then I realized that if I had to make one more fucking stitch out of the Knit Picks Essential yarn I'd packed I would actually end up killing someone, so I went to Knit-Purl to ask piteously if they'd credited me for the [REDACTED] I'd knit for them. They ended up paying me $25 in store credit so I got some Rowan Felted Tweed in Bilberry instead and thankfully chucked the damn other stuff in the trash. It was Meadow Multi (the Essential, I mean) and while I like brown, and purple, and green, and it doesn't look too terrible in the skein, the actual effect knit up is something like an early 1990s zebra print.
The Felted Tweed is a nice deep purple. Am making plain mitts on the grounds that I need something to knit while I'm waiting for the god damn elevators and also by Tuesday even plain work might be a little much for me.levators are as terrible as usual, although they set them so that some of them only go to the event spaces and some of them only go to hotel rooms, which seems to be working out better than last year, and reminding people that it's only four floors, for Christ's sake, use the god damn stairs. Well, not for tabletop gaming, which is up on 23. Anyway I have an service elevator button so in theory I can use the service elevators instead, but in actual practice we're not supposed to be whorebags about the privilege, so I actually do go on the regular elevators a lot.
(People have been complaining about the lines in general a lot this year, although it doesn't seem any worse than last year and well, we do have 4000 people at this event, dudes.)
Friday night we had the Industry dinner at Bush Gardens (yes, they reopened) in the tatami room. I ended up sitting with Jo and Tabby and Jay-the-con-lawyer (I would totally tap that if his name wasn't Jay - he is adorable, fannish, and did I mention adorable and fannish? But the thought of even theoretically dating a Jay when Amy's Dude is also a Jay is like, a barrelful of Oh Hell No) and two of the Anime Hunter dudes. I pretty much rolllllled out of that room afterward; they started us with sashimi and tempura and edamane, then they brought out miso soup with clams in shell, THEN they brought out box-plates with yet more tempura shrimp and I think tuna, steak and some sort of tofu thing with soy beans and butter beans plus salad, and then when we were all completely comatose they brought out fruit artfully arranged on platters for dessert.
It was totally fucking amaze. Some of the other tables were boozing it up with the sake but for some reason our table was the dry one that evening. Anyway. The tempura was so freaking awesome; it had this beautiful light batter over it and you know, I'd never thought of putting asparagus in a deep fryer but that shit was for the gods.
Somewhere in there I met My Guest, Sonny Strait - he played Krellian (?) in the Dragonball Z dub, Toonami Tom and Hughes in FMA. I'm sure he did other stuff too but I'm pretty terrible with dub VA names. He also did a comic for ElfQuest and is currently doing an OEL manga for Tokyo Pop called We Shadows. He is a super sweetheart. He actually ditched the dinner early because they gave the guests a Powell's card in their gift bags and he was so eager to get over there, and apparently he found his book there and took pictures of it on his cell phone because he was so excited.
Saturday was spent mostly running errands for Dawn and Sonny - I hung out at his booth for a couple of hours while he went to Art Media and shiz, ran and got him some water from Made in Oregon, got supplies for [REDACTED] and then at five thirty we had the VIP / Guest dinner here at the hotel. It was also very good but pretty standard hotel banquet food (prime rib, salads, risotto, chocolatey dessert shiz). We shared the table with two shameless, shameless fangirls, one of whom was in a mini skirt uniform from FMA, lol. There was also a quiet dude and then Sarah and Koop from Prog / Tabletop Gaming showed up, which was nice. Most of the fans were very nice and polite although there was a couple of them who were … possibly not used to dealing with actual people, bless their hearts. Ended up giving Sonny one of my nice felt pens for signatures, but he drew a picture of Hughes in my notebook for me.
Amy found me a Kirk and Starfleet logo pin from Robin of The Gorgonist - it's from the picture of Kirk and Spock brofisting I bought last year. I ran down Sunday and clutched at Robin until I found a Spock pin too. Also got a Kumori messenger bag.
After dinner I went to check email and watched a group of attendees play spin the bottle with … hugs? They were at Pioneer Square and there was dramatic flingings. Gloated at people online over my Hughes sketch, then hung out doing more stuff until it was time to get Sonny to his panel. I don't know if he was expecting as many people to be there as showed up, lol. I got back there at nine thirty to make sure he was doing okay, and he was still answering questions. He ended up doing autographs until his nominal second panel about webcomics started up, and when I came to collect him at eleven thirty he STILL had people talking to him. Debra and I escorted him to his room, I came back to [REDACTED] and crashed on Dawn's couch. We had most of the guests except Sonny here last night - Tiffany Grant, Josh Morris from Funimation, Kevin Kreever - Robotech marketing dude, Todd Haberkorn - Italy from Hetalia and Watanuki from Holic (!) and most of Anime Hunters, who are a professional cosplay group. As soon as Lorien gets in here I'm going to go to Starbucks, get recaffeinated and then go make myself generally Useful. Might end up going to Portland Art Museum with Sonny, there's an exhibit he's interested in.
(later Sunday)
did end up going to the museum with Sonny - apparently they got ALL the orginal drawings for the comic version of the Book of Genesis as drawn by R Crumb. You could like, see the freaking white out. We only managed to see about half of the exhibit before an hour and a half had passed by, but it was pretty amaze nonetheless.
Then I went and bought a boken. It is named Stupidkiller. Nobody is allowing me to kill stupid with it. :( The Aki-con people were randomly giving away their bags from last year, which are really, really nice - vinyl instead of the parachute-style canvas the Kumori bags are in. I'm kind of planning to figure out how to get the print off the front since I've never actually been to Aki-con, let alone Aki-con 2009. Maybe duct tape. (nb - the merch people from us and Sakura were like, WHY DID THEY PUT THE YEAR ON THEIR MERCH LIKE THAAAAT. Always hang out with the people who run the cons, dude, so much hilarifying gossip everywhere.)
Right now there's just a bunch of staff in [REDACTED] hanging out until Sonny gets here so I can throw him to the wolves, I mean, FMA fangirls, and leave for home. I seriously doubt we're going to get home before 1am tomorrow … and it's apparently degrading into a discussion that I'm not going to describe.
----
AND NOW IT IS WEDNESDAY. And I cannot move very well. There is ominous signs of joint stiffness, like, everywhere. Body you can kiss my butt. Anyway, Sunday night I went home to sleep, woke up at six thirty Monday because Amy failed to put her phone with her damn alarm on it in her room, and I cannot sleep through her alarm clock. It sounds like one we had growing up and I claw my way out of sleep like a zombie when I hear it. So I called her many, many loving things and tried to go back to sleep, but failed.
So I sat around the house until noon because I was like, shit, I will be up til 1am lifting boxes, I Must Rest!! - and then it turned out I was in [REDACTED] all through tear down babysitting the ahem guest supplies ahem so they didn't have to lock up after Lorien left. I walked Kevin to the MAX station at Pioneer Square (gave him a ticket I had kicking around, too) and went to Knit-Purl for some scrap yarn and more Felted Tweed to do a hat to match the gloves. (I like Felted Tweed okay as a finished product but I dunno, it's kind of like really high class shoddy?)
Spent pretty much the rest of the day in [REDACTED]. Tear down apparently went pretty well; at about eight or so we were at the point where Jo was passing out tickets for the food. (Tacos.) We sat around with some of the Sakura Con people and Josh and they traded con gossip. At around nine or ten Debra and a bunch of people invaded [REDACTED] and we ended up watching Hetalia until someone said that Dawn needed to go to bed. Apparently the people out in the living area of the suite made a significant dent on the open bottles, but the eight of us huddled in the bedroom area didn't drink at all. I tell a lie, I had some earlier but I am a hard person to make visibly drunken. Everybody pretty much cleared out by eleven or midnight and I crashed on the couch. Dawn had to get up at six to take Tiffany to the airport, but I slept until eight am.
Then we cleared out [REDACTED], packed her car, drove over to her house to be greeted hysterically by her cat, unloaded and sat for about half an hour while Julie and a dude carried in the manga library. Then we went back to the hotel, helped with loading the truck, and drove to the Locker with Kopp and Sarah, both of whom have varying levels of food needs, like Dawn (although Dawn is champion for all eternity when it comes to allergy and food needs) so we stopped by New Seasons to get Things they could Eat first.
Apparently the Locker is out Westside and Far Away - since there were multiple references to it being on the Max line I'd assumed it was closer in, but nooo had it been any further out we would have crossed a county line. Thanks to everybody who was there's complete awesome we got everything unloaded and into the lockers by four pm, just in time for the skies to open up and drench us. I was soaked to the skin and deeply grateful I wore a black shirt on Monday.
Everybody else went to Pizza Hut, but Dawn, Kopp, Sarah and I went back to her house, which took forever because of traffic, had our food, and kind of debriefed about our areas of the con for a while. I finally decided I needed to get home around six. Made all my connections in record time but still didn't get home til like, seven fifteen, because the traffic was so bad.
And now I am very sore.