Otakon 2003 con report

[giza]

Saturday

I arrived at the convention center early in the morning, and I managed to get a good parking space. I remember the first thing I saw was LOTS of folks running around with costumes on. Except for the lack of animal themes, it was just like a furry con! I found the pre-registration line, and after waiting for registartion to open, got my conbadge, which was surprisingly painless.

After spending a bit of time to look through the conbook and program schedule, the first place I went to was the Anime Music Video (AMV) room, where I watched a several videos and enjoyed them. After I got ot of there, I wandered downstairs to the hall that was showing 35mm movies, and caught the second half of Catnapped. I need to find that movie on DVD sometime...

In the afternoon, I went to the workshop on how to play "Go". There was a large turnout, so I only hung around for the beginning while the person leading the workshop explained how the game is played. Then I took a pamphlet and headed out to explore some more.

During the rest of the afternoon, I bumped into to stahi, film2edit, jbadger, and I also met a couple of other furs. The only one of the bunch that I emember was a fellow named "Sirfox". Ah well. I remember then checking out Artists' Alley, and later hanging out with Jbadger for a bit, where we chatted about furry for awhile. Somewhere in there I visited Loki's (joshvon) booth, and picked up a Ninjaburger t-shirt. A gentleman from nogagreflex.com also flagged me down in the Dealers' Room, and gave me an invitation to a room party later in the evening that Ninja Burger was sponsoring. He was giving them to all guys with shaved heads. SCORE!

I remember watching some more videos in the afternoon, then hooking up with Loki after the dealers' room closed at 6 PM. We went out and got some dinner, then came back to the convention center around 9:30 or so. The Ninja Burger party didn't start until 11, so we went into one of the video rooms and watched a live MST3King of an Anime being done by some fans with microphones. Some of the comments that these people were outright hilarious. However, exhaustion took its toll, and both Loki and myself fell asleep for brief periods during the movie. After the movie, we hung around for some more AMVs, then we proceeded to the room party in the nearby Hyatt.

The party was a rather quiet affair, about 10-15 of us sitting around, having a few drinks, and talking. As the party wound down, they did a little raffle, and I ended up winning a Headblade and some HeadSlick shaving cream to go with it. I'm still getting used to the blade, but the shave cream is pretty cool stuff.

After that, it was off to bed!

Sunday

After getting back to the convention center, the first thing I did was to attend a 10:30 AM panel caled "The Fandom Viewed By The Outside", or similar. It was led by a lady from The University of Texas (I think) who was studying the Anime fandom. She started off with a Powerpoint Presentation, and told us about the history of people who were interested in Japanese culture (goes back to the 1800's!) and how the Anime fandom sprung from it. It was educational and interesting. There was also talk about some politics and backlash that existed in the fandom. What a surprise! The furry fandom isn't the only fandom with issues!

Around lunchtime, I bumped into Jbadger again, and we chatted for awhile. Mostly about science fiction conventions and the like, I think. At some point, I wandered around and found the videogame room. I saw all manner of games being played, and I ended up playing some Metal Slug 3. It continued the tradition of the previous Metal Slug games with cool gameplay, and some really funny visual gags.

In the afternoon, I went to a panel called "Intro to Cosplay". Cosplay is short for "Costume Play", and it is to the Anime fandom what fursuiting is to furry. Lots of folks make costumes of an anime character, and run around the con dressed up as them. There is a little more variety in furry, and lots of the characters have (fake) weapons, too. :-) The panel ended up being not too far off from a furry costuming panel, actually. There was discussing on how to sew your own clothes and how to procure and improvise for really odd pieces of a costume. There were 4 panelists, and they were all pretty knowledge on their stuff. That panel was definitely worth going to.

After that, it was approaching 3 PM, so I headed down to the Dealers' Room to help Loki get his stuff together so we could make a quick exit after closing. After closing, we loaded up his truck, took the stuff off to my place, and that was the end of Otakon for me.

Cool stuff:

• A couple of girls I saw in registration, who were dressed up like the dinosaurs in Bubble Bobble. Too cute!
• All the costumes that I saw there. Lots and lots of creativity. These people could easily give the furry fandom a run for their money.
• Random people who were standing in public areas holding signs that said, "Free Hugs". I'm not quite sure what was up with that, and I didn't have the courage to stop and inquire.
• The radio station near pre-reg that was playing tunes the whole weekend long.
• The Anime Music Videos. There was some funny funny stuff!
• Wearing my ears and tail, and fitting right in!
• Some of the DVDs I picked up: Reboot Season 3, KO Beast Volume 1, and Riding Bean (which I had been wanting to get for YEARS).

Not so cool stuff:

• I wish I could have met more people there, and maybe gone to a few more room parties. At the "Fandom Viewed By The Outside" panel, the person leading the discussion said that she had interviewed anime fans before, and they had talked about how people in the fandom were so friendly and nice. (Gee, sounds like the furry fandom!)
• I wish I could have made it there on Friday, so I could have gotten to the panel that explained the difference between Robotech, Macross, and some of the other Anime series that are involved.

So, am I going to be back next year? I think so. And I might even bring a surprise or two with me. *grin!*

Comments

[malamute.livejournal.com]

So aside from having a good time, what did you learn or observe at the convention that could be applied to improve Anthrocon?

[giza.livejournal.com]

Not a whole lot, actually, as the membership of Otakon is different in other ways. For example, they had 8x (16,000 people) the membership of Anthrocon, yet only 1.5-2x the amount of programming, which tells me that programming isn't as important to their membership. They did, however, have something like 7 video rooms there.

I didn't get to see opening/closing ceremonies, the masquerade, or any of the dances, so I don't know how those differ.

Other than being about 3x bigger, the dealers' room wasn't much different from Anthrocon's.

The conbook was a whole lot smaller than Anthrocon's. Not much fiction in it or artwork in it. :-( It did have professional quality pictures of the previous year's cosplayers in it, which seemed like an interesting idea. I don't know how that would work for Anthrocon, however.

I wasn't able to get into the Ops Office, because that was in a room that had an information table out in front of it. I assume that their Operations department was big enough that they could have people on duty at the table answering general inquiries, and the people in the office in back exclusively handed internal con things like staff checkin, radios, etc.

One thing I noticed about the convention center is that there were no hotels directly attached to it. The closest hotel was the hyatt, and that was a short walk away. I'm not sure how that would go over with OUR membership. (Thinking back to CF 8, or was it CF 9, with the seperate hotels)

I wish I could have had the chance to meet some of the senior staff from Otakon and chat with them about running cons, I'm sure we could learn from each others' experiences. Ah well.

Bubble Bobble.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

I want to see pictures of the bubble bobble cosplayers };>.

-Deuce

(Must convince Trent et. al. to dust off the game at some point.)

[entropicana.livejournal.com]

Dust off? Dude, that game gets played more than anything else I own! People come over, they see the NES, they get their Bub on.

[entropicana.livejournal.com]

If you desperately need to know the difference, all three of the unrelated series that were edited together to become 'Robotech' - Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, Cavalry of the Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospedea- are all being released by ADV in their original Japanese forms.

I especially want to get my hands on Mospedea, since the english version screwed up the episode order. And I like post-apocalyptic stories.

[atpaw.livejournal.com]

Regarding Robotech..

This might help in the meantime:
http://protoculture.lebhead.com/index.html (http://protoculture.lebhead.com/index.html) :)

[elfasi.livejournal.com]

KO Century Beast Warriors is out on DVD?! Where?! I can't find it on Amazon! I've been after this for so many years!

[giza.livejournal.com]

I'll check my receipts and see if I can find what place I got it from. If you can handle Region 1 DVDs, drop my a line via e-mail and maybe we can work something out. :-)

[elfasi.livejournal.com]

All of my anime DVDs are region 1, it's the only decent way to get hold of them :). The one region 2 anime DVD I ever bought (Macross Plus the movie) was such an apallingly bad transfer, I took it back and got a refund, I will buy the R1 version some day. I shall email you :)

[perm-den.livejournal.com]

:-]