02.25.08
Conventioneering
(Note: Yeah, two ‘new’ Game Clears over the weekend. It does warrant mentioning, but not here– no time right now, and besides, this post is all ready to go and everything, so… yeah, tomorrow on the LJ you should see something on both the Professor and the Valkyrie.)
We’re just shy of seven weeks away from, for me at any rate, the start of anime convention season. Given that I intend to hit more than two, separated by about four to six months, yes, it is a “season”. ahem I’m running into the wonderful scheduling conflicts that pop up now and again, including the fact that one of the more accessible ‘new’ cons is the exact same weekend as Tekkoshocon (UB-Con, which wouldn’t irritate me as much if it wasn’t going to have a ‘playable demo’ of D&D 4th Edition). Still, it’s worth me making yet another resolution to you all: I’m going to do writeups of these conventions. I promise, this time– no excuses this year.
Last year I had notes during Tekkoshocon, and had mentioned that I wanted to expand those into a full report. Then, some Bad Things Happened, and I became depressed, so you got no report. For that, I truly apologize; the convention was very good and a true treat to go to, but there were other circumstances surrounding it (quite literally, actually) that caused me to not want to write it up until long after its events were obliviated from my mind in sufficient detail to do it justice. I did come away from it with a couple of interesting lessons: first, despite my best efforts, I cannot sleep in my car, even if I really, really want to. Second, do not schedule anything important or life-changing within one week on either side of the convention unless you want said things to go horribly, atrociously wrong. And finally, marathonning series is a good idea in theory; in practice, I had better make sure the seats are actually comfortable enough to warrant sitting in them for greater than three hours at a time before committing to it.
In any event, that is the half-assed excuse for not having a Tekko report. There really is no excuse for not having anything up from Otakon ‘07 besides the “Rick Star” video, so I’m not even really going to apologize. About the only thing that I can say in defense of the silence, really, is that for that trip (and given my state of disconnectedness from being an otaku at the time) the focus was not specifically on the convention, but rather on the people with whom I attended the festivities. Therefore, most of the most memorable ‘things’ that happened wound up being kind of personal to be blasting out all over the Interwebs. Now, that said, a few things– such as the remark regarding the “‘Elite Beat’-off”, and being literally three minutes too late for a Pokemon event across town– those are pretty much universally interesting. The rest would probably just be incomprehensible inside jokes, and I think there’s enough cliques out there in the world that the omission of these particular shared memories will go largely unnoticed.
Still, I can’t believe he played through all thirty-five minutes of it. Holy crap. ANYWAY.
Pez actually inspired my drive to commit to full reports from Tekko and Otakon this year; he’d written up a couple of long-winded and very detailed travelogues of trips he’d taken, and they’re powerful stuff. It’s very strong nonfiction, and I think it stands up by itself; sadly, I don’t have a link to anywhere he’s elected to showcase this (hint hint), but if one shows up, I recommend taking a look. Nonfiction has always been a particular weakness of mine, and as a result I think that the Tekko report is going to be my big “writing” project. Of course, this means that I might actually have to, y’know, pay attention, and detail events more than I usually do, but… Hrm. We’ll see. It’ll also probably shoot to hell my plans for finally volunteering, but there’s always next year…. when I can actually remember to sign up on time and participate more.
We’ll see. I’m hoping that I can manage to do this in a way that doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of both cons, but we’ll see… likely, for Tekko, this will mean sitting in my car for half an hour typing up disjointed notes on the Basroil before starting the drive home each night. I somehow don’t think that would be so bad, do you?
Pez said,
02.25.08 at 10:41 am
http://www.greenjournal.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=184
This was in, oh, 2005.
32_footsteps said,
02.25.08 at 11:45 am
I’m slightly concerned that every single story from Otakon ‘07 you allude to here involves me in some fashion.
Sigh… con season starts in four weeks for me, and goes until October. My God, I’m becoming a con geek.
John said,
02.25.08 at 12:17 pm
Those are just the public ones, like I said… not much of what happened with everyone else would make sense to the world at large, which was kind of my point.
Though, I suppose the watching of Danger Mouse might be worth mentioning as well; I figured that would have been somewhat less accessible.
Ismail Saeed said,
02.26.08 at 11:37 am
I missed seeing Danger Mouse?
Bah.
I need con reports from people. I want to relive Otakon 2007 vicariously. Please?
ALSO: There is one other notable thing – the Amazing Violent and then Disappearing Sickness I had. :P But that kinda makes for yucky storytelling. I remember reading Rick’s Netjak column he wrote that night (afterwards) while I was vomiting, and marveling at his focus while he was hearing vomiting mere feet away.
… Yeah, maybe that’s why you don’t tell that story.