Title: Where I was the past few days
Mr Zektoll - May 14, 2007 06:36 AM (GMT)
As some of you may know, Acen (Anime Central) an anime convention in the Chicago area has just finished, and this is where I was the past four days. Anyway like last year, some interesting stuff happened here. Last years acen I consider to be the most memorable acen for me, the best acen was the one where the pillows came and had their concert. This particular acen was also exceptional in some way, I really can’t put my finger on. It’s not the best, and last year was very hard to top in the memorable department given that uhh…certain incidents I’m not supposed to talk about occurred last year.
I think if anything, this was the most disorganized acen, which says a lot since every year my main complaint about staffing is that its disorganized.
Anyway, on Thursday I drove up to acen, things were going smooth at first, I was almost there, but somehow I took a wrong turn and ended up on a highway. I knew I needed to get of so I kept on trying to get off the highway only to end up on other highways, it was a highway nightmare, a labyrinth with no end! But somehow I made it back anyway.
After getting there I went to the staff meet & greet looking foreward to seeing Nabeshin AKA Shnichi Watanabe (the crazy director of puni puni poemi & excel saga) again and getting him to draw something on my paper plate mask.
Yes, every year I bring a fresh paper plate mask to acen, I’ve been trying to get any guests who are involved in things I like to draw something on each one, last year I got Junko Mizuno so I was going for Nabeshin this year but was pretty disappointed to have a no show, however my patience would later be rewarded with some interesting results.
This year I was on customer service, this of course was a mad house because the con was so disorganized this year. New management had taken over, as a result everything was just barely holding together. Among the dumb things the management did was have tickets handed out to people to get into most of the big events in the auditorium, but they grossly miscalculated the number of people the auditorium could hold and as a result many people weren’t let in without them even being filled. Another problem was that the information about when registration closed was wrong, it closed at 6 when they told everyone it was 9. As a result many people who arrived weren’t able to participate in the con until a day after they arrived. Turns out there was a way to get temp badges, but they didn’t tell us until Saturday night. A lot of other information was just plain wrong and it was just awful. I hope that a lot of complaints get sent in and whoever in the management whose responsible for this mess gets whats coming to them (yeah I said it!)
Anyway aside from that mess the con was actually pretty good.
One thing that’s kind of odd is that nearly half the cosplayers there were dudes dressing up as girls. It’s almost like Sailor Bubbah was the popular girl in school and now all the “girls” are imitating him trying to be popular too. I even saw a guy dressed up as Konata from Lucky Star, this was suprising because Lucky Stars barely been out so he wouldn’t have a lot of time to make a costume for it. Most of these guys were either old , fat or a combo of the two, I ended up seeing a lot more of them then I wanted at this con. Some girls crossplayed too, almost all of them were deathnote characters for some reason.
On the other hand, there were some really good cosplayers too
On Friday someone dropped some yellow panties in the hallway. So since I was on staff they had me go to deal with it. I was going to go dispose of it and do it in a comedic way too, I mean how often do you get the opportunity to dispose of panties in a comedic way? But in order to do what I wanted to I needed to find a stick. I didn’t want to touch it, because chances are the panties belonged to one of those crossplayers. The grounds were amazingly clean , it took me half an hour to actually find a stick. By the time I did someone had picked up the panties and run off with them.
[img=http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/733/img0518wt5.th.jpg]
Later on I went to the Gainax panel since I’m a big fan of most of Gainax’s stuff, I missed the eva panel but this was pretty cool too. We talked about Honmease , Nadia and other Gainax anime there. Carl Horn the editor of the eva manga who showed up invited us to a party in his room after it was over. Later I went to Nabeshins Q&A panel where I had a Rumiko Takahashi moment with Nabeshin.
For those of you unfamiliar with what I mean by “Rumiko Takahashi moment” heres what I mean by that. Sometime in the past Takahashi went to some anime con as a guest and was asked by a conger “What would happen if Ranma got pregnant?” her response was “I don’t think about that and neither should you” Anyway if you don’t know why Nabeshin responding to me the same way is a big deal, I suggest you go watch Puni Puni Poemi RIGHT NOW!
Here’s what went down
Me: You know that alien guy in Puni Puni Poemi who has the ball hanging off his crotch? What would happen if he accidently stepped on it? Would it hurt?
Nabeshin got this funny look on his face and this was his response
Nabeshin: If someone stepped on your balls how would you feel? It would hurt! It would be painful! Please don’t think about this!
Yes, that was an awesome moment, time stopped as Nabeshin, the king of anime wrongness said I shouldn’t think about it.
After that was over we went to his signing session where He drew himself on my mask, this is the Nabeshin version of the paper plate mask below where I’m touching his afro for some reason.
[img=http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/3189/petkp9.th.jpg]
After that I saw anime hell (Mostly not anime, just a lot of really weird stuff), there’s always so much cool stuff they show there, my favorite part was a regular guy who got mistaken for a villain by some incompetent power rangers who keep trying to attack him.
Nothing too interesting happened until the next day when I picked up evangelion manga vol 10 in the dealers room. While on shift for staff I was reading it while I wasn’t dealing with the disorganization problem. When I got to the back I read a part where Carl Horn is talking about eva and mentions the eva monkey forums. Specifically he mentions a thread “Gender of non-Lillim persons” a thread started by me got mentioned in the evangelion manga, that’s almost as awsome as Nabeshin getting weirded out by my question. Later when I went up to Carls party I mentioned this to him. He says “I put this in there to show how deranged some evanglion fans can be”
http://www.evamonkey.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=1904
[img=http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/2206/nonlillumpe1.th.jpg]
My response was “Yeah that’s me, I’m totally deranged” after that I got kind of drunk on some kind of drink Carl made with rum and some other stuff while we talked about Gainax, movies, politics, extending human life and the dream where I dreampt I was an alien parasite on my friends neck. His room had a cool setup because it had a projector that showed the wings of Honmease artwork stills on the ceiling.
Hiroyuki Yamaga was the around the same age I am when he made Honmease. Whenever I think about this I get a little depressed, because as of now I haven’t made anything super awesome like that even though I’de like to. I have tons of good ideas but not a lot of resources to carry them out. But I am graduating from school right now so that’ll give me more time to develop my ideas and hopefully make one of them into a comic book I intend to publish, not a movie yet, but it’ll be a step in the right direction anyway.
Not much happened the next day, I watched some anime and went to the Godzilla and Kaiju panel where I finally got to see the Gamera meat song from MST3K. That’s about all, kind of sad to see acen go as usual since I got to go back to the same boring atmosphere back home again. Well at least I won’t need to see any of the ugly crossplayers anymore.
I think if anything, this was the most disorganized acen, which says a lot since every year my main complaint about staffing is that its disorganized.
Anyway, on Thursday I drove up to acen, things were going smooth at first, I was almost there, but somehow I took a wrong turn and ended up on a highway. I knew I needed to get of so I kept on trying to get off the highway only to end up on other highways, it was a highway nightmare, a labyrinth with no end! But somehow I made it back anyway.
After getting there I went to the staff meet & greet looking foreward to seeing Nabeshin AKA Shnichi Watanabe (the crazy director of puni puni poemi & excel saga) again and getting him to draw something on my paper plate mask.
Yes, every year I bring a fresh paper plate mask to acen, I’ve been trying to get any guests who are involved in things I like to draw something on each one, last year I got Junko Mizuno so I was going for Nabeshin this year but was pretty disappointed to have a no show, however my patience would later be rewarded with some interesting results.
This year I was on customer service, this of course was a mad house because the con was so disorganized this year. New management had taken over, as a result everything was just barely holding together. Among the dumb things the management did was have tickets handed out to people to get into most of the big events in the auditorium, but they grossly miscalculated the number of people the auditorium could hold and as a result many people weren’t let in without them even being filled. Another problem was that the information about when registration closed was wrong, it closed at 6 when they told everyone it was 9. As a result many people who arrived weren’t able to participate in the con until a day after they arrived. Turns out there was a way to get temp badges, but they didn’t tell us until Saturday night. A lot of other information was just plain wrong and it was just awful. I hope that a lot of complaints get sent in and whoever in the management whose responsible for this mess gets whats coming to them (yeah I said it!)
Anyway aside from that mess the con was actually pretty good.
One thing that’s kind of odd is that nearly half the cosplayers there were dudes dressing up as girls. It’s almost like Sailor Bubbah was the popular girl in school and now all the “girls” are imitating him trying to be popular too. I even saw a guy dressed up as Konata from Lucky Star, this was suprising because Lucky Stars barely been out so he wouldn’t have a lot of time to make a costume for it. Most of these guys were either old , fat or a combo of the two, I ended up seeing a lot more of them then I wanted at this con. Some girls crossplayed too, almost all of them were deathnote characters for some reason.
On the other hand, there were some really good cosplayers too
On Friday someone dropped some yellow panties in the hallway. So since I was on staff they had me go to deal with it. I was going to go dispose of it and do it in a comedic way too, I mean how often do you get the opportunity to dispose of panties in a comedic way? But in order to do what I wanted to I needed to find a stick. I didn’t want to touch it, because chances are the panties belonged to one of those crossplayers. The grounds were amazingly clean , it took me half an hour to actually find a stick. By the time I did someone had picked up the panties and run off with them.
[img=http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/733/img0518wt5.th.jpg]
Later on I went to the Gainax panel since I’m a big fan of most of Gainax’s stuff, I missed the eva panel but this was pretty cool too. We talked about Honmease , Nadia and other Gainax anime there. Carl Horn the editor of the eva manga who showed up invited us to a party in his room after it was over. Later I went to Nabeshins Q&A panel where I had a Rumiko Takahashi moment with Nabeshin.
For those of you unfamiliar with what I mean by “Rumiko Takahashi moment” heres what I mean by that. Sometime in the past Takahashi went to some anime con as a guest and was asked by a conger “What would happen if Ranma got pregnant?” her response was “I don’t think about that and neither should you” Anyway if you don’t know why Nabeshin responding to me the same way is a big deal, I suggest you go watch Puni Puni Poemi RIGHT NOW!
Here’s what went down
Me: You know that alien guy in Puni Puni Poemi who has the ball hanging off his crotch? What would happen if he accidently stepped on it? Would it hurt?
Nabeshin got this funny look on his face and this was his response
Nabeshin: If someone stepped on your balls how would you feel? It would hurt! It would be painful! Please don’t think about this!
Yes, that was an awesome moment, time stopped as Nabeshin, the king of anime wrongness said I shouldn’t think about it.
After that was over we went to his signing session where He drew himself on my mask, this is the Nabeshin version of the paper plate mask below where I’m touching his afro for some reason.
[img=http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/3189/petkp9.th.jpg]
After that I saw anime hell (Mostly not anime, just a lot of really weird stuff), there’s always so much cool stuff they show there, my favorite part was a regular guy who got mistaken for a villain by some incompetent power rangers who keep trying to attack him.
Nothing too interesting happened until the next day when I picked up evangelion manga vol 10 in the dealers room. While on shift for staff I was reading it while I wasn’t dealing with the disorganization problem. When I got to the back I read a part where Carl Horn is talking about eva and mentions the eva monkey forums. Specifically he mentions a thread “Gender of non-Lillim persons” a thread started by me got mentioned in the evangelion manga, that’s almost as awsome as Nabeshin getting weirded out by my question. Later when I went up to Carls party I mentioned this to him. He says “I put this in there to show how deranged some evanglion fans can be”
http://www.evamonkey.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=1904
[img=http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/2206/nonlillumpe1.th.jpg]
My response was “Yeah that’s me, I’m totally deranged” after that I got kind of drunk on some kind of drink Carl made with rum and some other stuff while we talked about Gainax, movies, politics, extending human life and the dream where I dreampt I was an alien parasite on my friends neck. His room had a cool setup because it had a projector that showed the wings of Honmease artwork stills on the ceiling.
Hiroyuki Yamaga was the around the same age I am when he made Honmease. Whenever I think about this I get a little depressed, because as of now I haven’t made anything super awesome like that even though I’de like to. I have tons of good ideas but not a lot of resources to carry them out. But I am graduating from school right now so that’ll give me more time to develop my ideas and hopefully make one of them into a comic book I intend to publish, not a movie yet, but it’ll be a step in the right direction anyway.
Not much happened the next day, I watched some anime and went to the Godzilla and Kaiju panel where I finally got to see the Gamera meat song from MST3K. That’s about all, kind of sad to see acen go as usual since I got to go back to the same boring atmosphere back home again. Well at least I won’t need to see any of the ugly crossplayers anymore.
Sith Guyver - May 14, 2007 07:43 AM (GMT)
hahahahaha Go z. way to uphold tradition.