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Anime Detour Con Report - Friday

Today I learned that small cons ROCK.

There were some hangups today because my mom's plans fell through and so she was stuck here with nothing to do. I dropped her off at the Mall of America before going to the con, but we got going late, so I missed the first hour, but there wasn't anything super important I wanted to see at that time, so that was okay.

There was a bit of a wait for registration pickup but all things considered it was pretty fast. They gave out numbers and then put you in a waiting room, and then they called your numbers to get in line. I didn't have to wait too long. They put my online name on my badge, whee! ^^ *basks in anonymity* Hee.

My first thoughts: "This is SO COOL." I seriously thought nothing but that for about ten minutes. It was just so awesome to be wandering around a packed anime con right here in my own state. The coolness of that was totally overwhelming for a while. After that, it was "I love anime fans!" and general glee at being there until I got my brain together and headed for some events.

The first programming thing I went to was Japanese Basics. It sounded good, but... well... it wasn't executed well at all, in my opinion. It was way too technical at the beginning. They showed all these charts of English vocal sounds first, and then the Japanese ones, which makes sense for in-depth classroom learning, but for a crash course like this...it was too much. It went on too long and there was no way anyone was going to remember that stuff. After that it was a lot of pronouncing English words using the Japanese sounds. Again, makes sense for class, but for this? Bad idea. It got better after that point, when we got into the alphabets and sentence structure and gestures, but unfortunately, they didn't have any handouts for us with the alphabets or whatever. The second half was interesting but I don't remember hardly anything from the whole panel. Kind of a wash.

After that, I stayed for "Buried Treasures," which was a bunch of unusual old anime the guy found at the bottom of his collection. The idea was, good stuff that you've probably never heard of. There were a couple of titles that caught my interest - "Cromartie High School," for humor, "Golgo 13," for action, and "Wings of Honneamise," for unusualness. The guy also brought up a couple of collections my dad happened to pick up recently, which was amusing. Oh. Never, ever, EVER watch "Apocalypse Zero." I'm not kidding. You will regret it. Seriously. The guy brought THAT one up for shock/horror/WTF value.

I changed my mind about going to the next event I had marked down and went to the dealer's room instead at that point. Oh. My. GOD. The dealer's room here totally kicks Otakon's ASS! It is AWESOME! At Otakon, everyone seemed to have the same stuff, and it was all from the new popular anime. Here, there's new stuff, old stuff, unusual stuff, you name it it's probably there. I even saw a set of those little Evangelion figures I always thought were cute, with Asuka in the fat insulated suit and Rei with a bow and arrow, but those were pretty expensive. I forgot how expensive dealer's room stuff gets. The prices are still insane. There are some good deals there, though. I got a little Alphonse Elric plushie (pity him, he'll probably be up against

thechibisenshi eventually :3) and a FMA keychain and the next volume of Trigun I needed. Tomorrow I'm hopefully going to pick up a set of Totoro magnets I had my eye on, I ran out of cash today.

Know what? Hotel cons > Non-hotel cons. Really. Trust me on this. Small cons > Big cons too. If you have a local con in your area, GO TO IT. Do it. I really wish I had gone to this the last couple of years. Obviously, big cons just can't be hotel cons anymore, but a lot is sacrificed by making that move to a convention center. Small hotel cons contain the beauty that is the consuite. Free snacks, woohoo! They plastic-wrapped the floor in there. I'm amused. xD

Another plus of a hotel con - NO FOOD RESTRICTIONS. At Otakon they have no choice but to use Aramark, which charges an arm and a leg for pretty crappy food. Here, the dealer's room is STUFFED with Japanese snacks. Gummis and pocky of all kinds and all sorts of fun stuff. Plus, the hotel provided hot dogs and burgers and stuff for sale at less than half the prices at Otakon and it was all twice as good. Very awesome.

Even though I'm local I think I might stay in the hotel next year anyway, for convenience's sake and the fact that they are showing anime ALL NIGHT LONG. I had to throw in the towel and come home to sleep because I'm tired, but if I were staying there, I'm sure I could squeeze in a couple more hours of anime-watching before passing out. Plus, I could've volunteered to help out more easily, they were still looking for people.

So. Small hotel cons are love.

Anyway, moving on. Oh yeah, I also didn't go to another panel because my mom was supposed to be calling me and I didn't want my phone ringing in the middle of a panel. She still hadn't called, so I went and watched some random bits of "Chrono Crusade." It was actually pretty good, I was impressed. If anyone happens to know the title of the ending theme, let me know, I meant to catch it in the credits but my mom finally called and I missed it.

I left the con for a while to drive my mom back to my apartment, and then got back in time for the opening ceremonies. I skipped them at Otakon, so this was a first. The head guy's pretty funny, so he made what could have been a boring deluge of information rather entertaining. There was some funky light-show stuff involved too, which made it worth the time, and the essential emphasis on the need for everyone to make use of the shower. xD

After that there was some downtime, so I got a chance to watch the first couple episodes of "I My Me! Strawberry Eggs," which I knew absolutely nothing about but had always wanted to see for some reason. It was hilarious. I think I need to get myself some of that. I had to sneak out early, though, because there was a big event I wanted to be sure to squeeze into so I went to the second half of the previous event in that room - "Cafe Risque." It was a collection of AMVs too R-rated to be in the previous contest. Some of them were pretty funny, but unfortunately I can't remember any of them at the moment, they were all flooded out of my brain by the following event. ^^;; I got my first look at Phade, though, the founder of AMV.org. Until Anime Detour came along I never knew he lived in my area.

The last event of the evening was the WTF Contest...which was a bit of a disappointment in some ways but awesome in others. To start off with, someone on staff tripped over some cords and broke the sound cables, so that took a while to sort out. -_-;; Then, people had been allowed to submit stuff until the moment the contest began, so the person running it wasn't nearly prepared to play them and some of them didn't work. -_-;;; After that, it was half great and half a letdown. The idea of the event itself was pretty sound; it's a contest to make the worst AMV possible...but I'm sure you can see the problem. There's bad bad, and then there's amusing bad. By having a competition for the worst AMV you end up with stuff like SD Naruto characters walking across the screen in a repeated pattern for the entirety of "Circles," and "Julia Dies," which was nothing but Cowboy Bebop Julia's last scene drawn out super slow to fit some opera aria. Extremely bad, yes, but not in the sense that made them anything worth watching for a room packed with people. Although, it was pretty funny how people were shouting out "Just shoot her!" by the end of "Julia Dies" from the agony. xD

The winner really should've been a DBZ video to Linkin Park's "In The End." That was the absolute model of everything that makes a bad AMV, and it was amusing to boot. I think it was called "AMV Torture," it may show up on AMV.org eventually. It was all Cartoon Network footage, low-quality, and it used absolutely every scene transition in the toolbox. Every single one. There was repeated footage, and random subtitles, and every crazy transition you can imagine. At the end, there was the same scene over and over and over with a subtitle-footnote basically saying "Now I'm being lazy and there's still a minute left in the song!" THAT was awesomely bad. It was great.

It lost, however, by a narrow margin to a video set to "Enormous Penis." That video was hilarious, but it wasn't BAD. That's what makes it kind of unfair. That video wasn't even half bad. It was very funny. Thanks to the amusement factor and the song, it got a bit of an unfair edge. I did, however, get the rare experience of being in a room filled with people chanting "PENIS!" for the first time since high school.

Did I mention I love anime fans? I love how random they are, and how outspoken they can be, and how they seem to have fun even when nothing fun is going on.

Not, however, at the dance, apparently. They seemed to have a sound problem when I peeked in, and there was only reeeeally quiet music and a bunch of people milling about not sure what to do with their glowsticks. No biggie, though, I've never liked dances much anyway.

Now it's off to bed to sleep up for tomorrow's adventure.

But first, let's play Name That Character!

This guy's afro looks really tacky, but that's because it contains compartments in which to store his gun and con booklet, among other things. The coolness of being able to pull random things out of the hair outweighs the tackiness in my opinion.