Anime Punch III: After Action Report
I didn't manage to get to the Columbus Airport Marriott until about 9:30 in the evening due to classes, communication foul ups, and working on stuff for "Clips!" (an anime hell-like event of just random crap that I've accumulated over the years). After I got over to the con I set up shop in Video Room One and started Clips! around 10:30.
Clips! ended up running from 10:30pm Friday until 8:30 Am Monday (due to foul ups in Video the Parodies, Nana, and Loveless never made it to the room and could not be found). It had a decent cycling audience and I'm really glad that I copied my entire library of decent stuff to my Laptop but still ended up cycling everything about three times through out the evening I did my best to keep things going, and for a period it became the Hard Gay room as I showed a bunch of Hard Gay stuff and then a DVD of Dr. Tran stuff from Beyond Grandpa...
Space Adventure Cobra actually was at the con and made it to the room and two episodes were shown however the Saturday Morning (Japanese) Cartoons stuff was missing (turned out that the person who was to grab the videos forgot to bring them)... So then two more episodes of Space Adventure Cobra were shown and I was sent Princess Arete and that was shown...
Then it was around Noonish and I actually got Legend of the Galactic Heroes so that was started... and twelve episodes were shown because video did not actually have The Place Promised in our Early Days at the con and the Disk of Shorts by Shinkai Makoto was somewhere else... Several people told me they thought it was in another video room... I sent two different gophers after it, neither managed to return.
After all this it got to be around four and the room filled up with people as the next two things, Dancouga Nova and Studio 4°C's Mindgame, were heavily promoted by several members of staff. This time we had the disks and Dancouga went off without a hitch... for about twenty minutes. Then came word via a gopher that all the video rooms were being closed because there was not enough chairs for the Cosplay audience, I protested for a few moments until I got confirmation that S had ordered it. So then I helped move chairs, and it turned out that closing all the video rooms wasn't needed as they only needed chairs from some of them. Video One had been effectively raided of half it's chairs so Video 2 was reopened to show Dancouga & Mindgame later on in a new combined schedule.
Incidentally, most of the Cosplay stuff is on YouTube, the best ones in my opinion: One Piece: YOU ARE A PIRATE!, Dark Stalkers Make Over, Full Metal Pokemon Master-Holder of the Shikon Jewel-Ninja-Gear-Alchemist, and of course the Pre-show beatbox.
Anyways, with Video One needing to be locked up (as it had our equipment in it) I contacted hotel staff to get someone to lock the room and went to the room and guarded the entrance... About thirty minutes later after contacting hotel security again someone finally came to lock the room... After that I went to the con suite and ate a mustard & cheese sandwich with some very stale chips and a pop... Then I thought I should get some real rest so I got into a staff room to rest, unfortunately it was the one next to the con suite.
It was sometime after 7:30 PM and I listened to some music and used I-Doser. I didn't actually get any sleep, whenever I tried to sleep, I was awaken by someone knocking on the door to get to the Stash of Alcohol in the room, sitting on me as they didn't notice me on the bed (trying the floor was worse in this regard)...
A little after 11:00 The Protomen came in with a bunch of other staffers and I gave up on the sleep idea and went off to do some more work...
I ended up running the Classic Video Games room from almost midnight until sometime after 9am... While I was running this fairly quiet room all shit broke loose all over the con: A staffer got drunk and ended up in the hotel mail room, a guest (Harlan Watkins, the Executive Chairman of Archaic Jump Productions) dislocated his knee and was hospitalized, several fights broke out, sex in one of the video rooms, chaos, and a Canoe group from the University of Kentucky causing havoc.
I found out about the Kentucky folks from S a little into my shift (they weren't con attendees and were drunk, invading rooms, and causing trouble as I understood it), which explained why there was a large number of Columbus Police Officers and Security Guards walking around. Their room was apparently raided and they were busted by the police as I later heard it.
The Classic Video Games room ended up being nearly empty from about 3 until 8 so I ended up being bored... E came in for a while and we talked about Birth Rates and Gender Roles in Japan and after he left I tried to read some of Gananath Obeyesekere's Imagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (I bought a copy and at some point I plan to actually finish reading the thing but it's back to the back burner for it right now) but it really isn't a book one reads when one was as tired as I was... So I ended up cleaning the room and then even picking up specks from the floor every now and then and keeping myself awake with a toy ball.
Next morning, after I was relieved I went to the Con Suite and grabbed some soda... Then I helped break down the con suite and some staff rooms that needed to be closed... Then I staffed Video Rooms 2 & 3... during a quick break from someone I ran into the dealers' room and bought Kamichu! (an awesome Ghibli-esque comedy about a Shinto Shrine and a Girl who becomes an Arahitogami, a living god.)
I ended up actually running some of Kamichu! after 1 PM when there was nothing else (Paradise Kiss was suppose to be presented by Harlan Watkins but that was not going to happen after the previous evening). Most interesting thing that happened was a fan girl going ga ga over Crispin Freeman.
A while later I helped break down the video rooms and walked into closing ceremonies during a part where some of the staff was tossing candy into the audience. I had gotten a bunch of Mardi Gras beads with Kamichu! from the dealer so I tossed those out in to the crowd. I then asked where rpb3000 was and found out he was still breaking down Classic Video Games so I left closing and headed over to help.
A little later all hell apparently broke loose in closing ceremonies and from all the conflicting accounts I'm not sure what really happened. It seemed to start after a group of fur-suiters charged the stage with many thinking that it was one of our staged jokes. For the record I didn't see any massive organised campaign against furries by staffers as alleged (there was at least one furry on staff) but I cannot really answer for individual staffers. From all I've heard there is a whole lot of BS, double-talk, and exaggerations coming from both sides here. I'm kind of the mind that there are multiple people at fault here with no 'victims'. First question I'd like to ask is what the group of fur-suiters were trying to accomplish by invading closing ceremonies and rushing the stage (as a lot of the accounts have said)? This doesn't sound like a very sound way to resolve issues...
Anyways after the Video Game Rooms were done and TVs taken out I went to help with the clean up of various rooms and especially the dealers' room. Dealers are worse slobs than con attendees, they mostly just tossed trash on the ground... Where one unnamed dealer was we found a large number of used Kleenexes all over the floor, and there were wet towels, half eaten food, and all kinds of other crap everywhere. Some people found bits of merchandise ranging from posters, to charms, to necklaces, to a small basketball hoop and ball. Anyways after a massive clean up effort which overflowed the dumpster things were finally done. I sat around and talked for a while and someone mentioned something about furries crashing closing but I didn't really find out much about it at the time. I started watching Kamichu! with a couple other people as others went to waffle house and then nearly everyone else went to the hotel bar to load up on drinks... Ended up watching through episode 12, then went over for the last few rounds... Got a Chaos Emerald (the hotel bar had come up with a number of theme mixed drinks) which was some very green and weird tasting concoction involving vodka.
By now it was after 1am... I got a ride to campus and got back around 2 am... As I had some stuff to do I didn't actually get into bed until about 5 am... though I was strongly considering not sleeping and going to my early classes... but since I also had an important evening class and hadn't slept since Thursday afternoon, sleep won out.
So that was my experience of AP III...