Summer Travels: Anime Expo 2012 – Part 3

Day 2: Hit and Miss.
ALREADY SO TIRED.
I woke up and left first to make it to the Aniplex AoEx photoshoot and Okamoto Nobuhiko autograph session at 10, and boy did I choose the wrong path that morning. I decided to take my chances by taking the other coarse in front of the convention center (rather than behind, through parking lots) and discovered we get rerouted around two to three street blocks before getting to an entrance of the LACC. While weaving around slow trekkers, I gracefully PK'd, and ended up with some minor hand scrapes. I picked up a free energy drink on the way, which ended up being both a nice pain reliever for my scraped hands and a much needed energy boost. I arrived to find that the autograph lineup was already well packed and the cut-off was already determined. Regardless, I joined the line to take my chances and, fortunately, Okamoto was a FAST autographer and breezed through the line. With one success, Sty finally joined me and brought breakfast (mocha cookie crumble frappucino mmmm...).

[some asian blogging flare]

After Okamoto's autographin' he panel'd next and that's where we headed. The panel itself mostly consisted of girls asking for character quote requests, which was nothing new, but super disappointing. When that disappointment ended, we continued our exhibition hall rounds before I made my way to the fan AoEx photoshoot later that afternoon.

So the photoshoot was quite the mess. Somehow some girl with no knowledge of the series was appointed to be the screamer (aka. the person who tells which characters go up and pose). After wasting some-odd precious minutes listening to the screamer scream all while staring back at random X-Gamers peering over the fence (probably wondering why this girl was screaming at blankly staring cosplayers), I headed back to the exhibition hall in attempts to finish walking it.

Without much success, me and Sty stripped down at the hotel (drop everything unnecessary) before making our way to the Kajiura/FJ concert. Seating was behind schedule and as it was assigned seating, we chilled outside in the shade while watching the lineuppers make their way in the hall under the blazing sun.

The concert itself was amazing. Despite it being in a hall rather than an actual concert-appropriate venue like the Staples Center or even the Nokia Club, the hall was decent for what it was. Kajiura kicked it off with bgms from Fate/Zero, then touched on Xenosaga II, .hack, vocal themes from Hokuto no Ken and Pandora Hearts, the extraordinary "salva nos" from Noir, the epic bgms from Madoka, Mai-HiME, Aquarian Age (never knew; I guess it was a less memorable ost), and to top it off, they encored with "The World." Unfortunately there was no tribute to any Gundams, seeing they were all YUUKA's tracks who was not present.

The concert ended around 9pm and we were well ready to have our first real meal of the day. Sty, Kozu, and I hung out in the empty convention halls while Kozu gathered more men for the trip to the Original Pantry Cafe for breakfast food. We got the usual big plates of breakfast goodies and then figured headed back for much needed sleep.

Summer Travels: Anime Expo 2012 – Part 2

Taken over Staples Center

Day 1: A Slow Start
It was difficult waking up that morning but we managed to leave Ken's place, charge through the bad LA traffic, and arrive about half way through the Total Eclipse panel. Speaking at the panel was Yoshimune Kouki (producer/creator), ayami, and, returning pop star, Kuribayashi Minami. Sadly Kuribayashi did not get the big name treatment again this time, and silently came with the "Total Eclipse" package. We found Kozu doing his press work in the room before heading to the exhibitor's hall for our first round of shopping. We followed the line going into the hall and caught some unwanted sunshine while we snaked around. We managed to walk a few rows in the hall before heading to the "secret" Kajiura/FictionJunction autograph session. So, for some reason I discovered a text file in the mirrored AX schedule folder the night before, which had a list of all, if not most, of the autograph sessions happening at the con. I decided to take the chance and get in on the line and, what did you know, it really was happening!

After snagging autos, we headed to their panel. Although the translator was kinda awful at her job and the few "OMG you are the prettiest females in the world!" Q&A comments aside, we still got a few good discussions going such as finding out Kajiura's what-could-have-been job, if she didn't get involved in music (spoiler: she would've been a software engineer – say what!?).

Post panel we returned to the exhibitor's hall for some last minute strolling before deciding to finally check-in to our hotel at the JW Marriott. We picked up our stuff from Ken's car and wheeled our way to the hotel. It was then we discovered that the hotel was not as convenient this year as we hoped, all wonderfully thanks to the X-Games. Paths were blocked and the through passageway required us to go through multiple parking lots, backstreets, and walking around road intersections. When we managed to get to our hotel, we chilled in for quite sometime before meeting up with HB, Kozu, and the Touhou group (from the previous year) to plan dinner.

First meal of the day.

Since we wanted to check out the JAST panel later that night, we opted to eat at a curry house in Little Tokyo, which was our closest and opened late option, even though I recalled the food being not so great. The restaurant stayed open way later their scheduled closing time (which was nice) and managed to seat our kinda big table of ten after a whiles wait (which was not nice). With less than an hour left for us to eat and fly back, we scarfed down our food, dropped our monies, and headed back before the TH group.

The JAST panel had a pretty amusing simulated gameplay of a scenario from School Days HQ, but the giveaway that followed was horribly organized. Regardless, we called it a night and headed back to our room to chat and chill.

Summer Travels: Anime Expo 2012 – Part 1

The AX building looking the same.

It's hard to believe that my biggest trip of the year has already come and gone. The planning leading up to the  trip was less than smooth, but things managed to come together in the nick of time, both work and itinerary. Now that it's over though, that just means that more than half the year has gone by. Sigh.

Day 0 – Hello, Heat!
I made my way to the airport three hours in advance, as the obedient international flyer that I am, and strangely enough bumped into my travel companion, Sty, who was scheduled to leave 3 hours before me. It wasn't until I kicked her in the butt hard enough (figuratively) to urge her to gtfo, did she hurry it up and get to her plane on time.

Since I spent the night before staying up and paranoiding as to what I might have forgotten to pack, I had hoped to catch some shut eye while waiting for my flight but it seemed like somebody forgot to turn on the heat in the building. :| To add to that, the plane ride was also kinda chilly, and uncomfortably cramped as I sat beside a huge dude.

Upon my arrival, I was greeted by Sty and Ken, and the familiar smell of smoggy L.A. We grabbed some tasty hot dogs from Pink's and did some air-conditioned mall loitering in Beverly Hills. Ken wanted to pick up something from Fry's so, for convenience sake, we chose the nearest location which turned out to be the worst location. The hour-long traffic combined with the smallest product selection, almost made our trip there almost meaningless. He still did manage to get what he wanted, but even with my want-to-spend-money mode on, I personally wasn't able to get anything.

The sun was starting to set when we finally made our way to the convention centre for pre-reg badge pickup. We dodged random high fives and went in and out in 45mins, which was delicious record time in comparison to another friend who lined up for many hours under the dreadful high noon sun.

However things looked a bit different than usual this year. Right next door we had:

Herrooo, AX-Games!

Thanks to the X-Games this year, AX lost a good chunk of the usual amazing venue (Staples Center and Nokia Theatre) and most of the general convention area which was blocked off from entry. Little did I know then that it was going to be more troublesome that I originally anticipated. It looked interesting from afar and that's all there was to it at the time.

With our most important task of the day completed, we made our way to Ken's place, hunted down his local favourite Mexican food truck for some delicious cheap eats, and eventually fell asleep to 21 Jump Street playing in the background that night.

To be continued in Part 2, when the real party begins...!

Fan Expo Vancouver 2012

Fan Expo has finally taken over the west side of Canada and as a big name convention in Canada, it had to be checked out.

The pre-registration pick-up line was long but moved quickly, although it was ridiculous to see how there was absolutely no line for the on-site registrants. The convention pass was a mere glittery wrist band, or a stamp on the hand for single day passes. The simple wrist band made it transferable, which was nice (whether transferring was even allowed or not is another story). The convention *was* the exhibition hall where practically everything was held: autographs, photographs, dealers, and artist alley. They had one relatively giant area broken off from the hall and one extra, smaller conference room upstairs that were used for panels. The smaller room was way too small for the people they should've expected to show up so if you weren't lining up early, you have basically missed your chance. And if you missed your chance and had already strolled around the exhibition hall enough times, you've just set yourself up to be bored for the rest of the event. The dealers present were of a nice variety, mostly focusing on comics, and then there were the other geeky cultures covered. Speaking of other geeky cultures, the anime cosplaying crowd were the most prominent (an excuse for them to dress up?), but there definitely were a number of awesome old school appearances from childhood cartoons as well.

The sketching panels, which featured a few named comic book artists per panel, were the most interesting at the event. While questions were asked, they sketched and by the end of it, they had an amazing piece of art which they gave away to the audience. Other than that, we chilled out at the Bongo Comics panel to cheer on Space and rolled our eyes at the Anime Revolution panels.

I think it's pretty safe to say that the event was successful so I imagine we'll be seeing them again next year.

Sakuracon Repo 2012

Come Easter weekend, come Sakuracon.

This year's convention landed early in the month, mauling my birthday weekend but, hey, the regular dose of geekery was needed. The weekend started slightly earlier for me as I took the Thursday off to give myself some time to get some last minute things done. I ended up spending the Wednesday night finishing up small costume tweaks and my absolutely divine durian-filled cake. Caught a bit of shut-eye before waking up early to pick up Xenoblade Chronicles, a bday package (from my smexy mango sister) at the post office, and some delicious Chinatown nam sammiches with my brother. Mid-afternoon ToFu, Sty, and I made our way down to Seattle to arrive sometime in the evening and followed to unload our stuff at Garret's. Unfortunately the gang wasn't very pro-karaoke and were feeling very pro-pizza, so pizza happened. Ion joined us for food and brought over a Pokemon board game which we tackled for the rest of the night. Also, discovered that beer floats are generally pretty gross (at least the dark beer and vanilla ice cream combination).

Day 1: LineCon.

The convention decided to scrap the Will Call idea without notice this year so me and Sty ended up having to line up to register. Sadly their registration did not improve since I last experienced it a previous year where the wait time was a solid 3 hours. Regrettably, this year was no exception, as we ended up waiting about the same long 3-4 hours (I completely lost track).

With the registration horror finally behind us, we moved to our first panel of the day to a manga work-related talk panel with Zekkyo and Retsu Tateo. Some pretty interesting fetishes were revealed thanks to some smart questioning. We waltzed into the room next door after for the Gen Urobuchi, Atsuhiro Iwakami, and Katsushi Ota Q&A panel. There was a bit of an intro vid for some of their recent works (interestingly enough, all shown were scored by Kajiura Yuki). While barely paying attention to the less then stellar questions, I spotted LightningSabre a few rows in front of me (actually more like I saw his signature Shana jacket.) and flagged him down afterwards. His fancy press badge got me thinking about BLOGGING (= Press = Free). Something to consider! We stayed for the following panel for Wakeshima Kanon and she came out looking a bit rundown with the wig? bleached-dyed hair? that didn't seem to quite suit her. After the Q&A, we headed to the exhibitor hall's final hour to do some quick browsing. Fortunately nothing really caught my eye this time around, except for an artbook or two.

We reassembled our group, met up with ToFu's friend, Magister, and then headed out to finally get our first meal of the day at the Taphouse. I ate his caesar salad. Sorry, dude. :|

The Stereopony concert was already well on its way when we got back to the convention. None of us were huge fans and I wasn't particularly a fan of their music either so it wasn't a loss for any of us. We then spent the next while in the boardgaming room before the Iron Artist panel at 11. The panel turnout seemed bigger than the years past, but it might've been because of the the room size and layout. Unfortunately there wasn't an 18+ version of the panel this year either, but it was still pretty entertaining.

Day 2: Omiyage.
We allowed ourselves to sleep in a bit before making our way to the convention for some artist Q&As. Both panels featured a slideshow of some of the artists' work, projected on a wall that wasn't completely flat. Nothing out of the norm for questions but we did try and prod Zekkyo on her BLing and Retsu on her hot, bald men fetish.

After panels, I headed to check out the AoEx photoshoot which wasn't situated in the best location imho and then visited the ending of the PanSto photoshoot where Lester was at. Made our way to the autograph lines and started with the Aniplex trio, Urobuchi/Ota/Iwakami. Bumped into LS again before the lines started forming were allowed to be formed.

When it got to my turn as I handed my to-sign piece around the table, Ota reached under the table, handed me a Fate/Zero desk mat featuring suit!Sabre, and said "omiyage" (souvenir). So, the surprised me looking like @__@ thanked him, got my autographs, and moved along, still dazed. With a new desk mat in my hand, we wobbled to Steve Blum's extended Q&A panel and caught the last bit of it before returning to the autograph room for HIS autograph.

Fortunately he had some neato postcards featuring some of his work so me and Sty both picked ourselves one each for him to sign. It was a real shame we weren't able to sit in on his panel though. With the remaining time, we took a last visit to the exhibitor's hall before meeting up with the people for that day's round of food at, yet again, the Taphouse. Although this time around, we had a table of at least ten of us but food and drinks came quickly.

With filled bellehs, Sty, Lester, Ion and I returned to the convention to check out Wakeshima Kanon's concert (or at least the latter half). I felt the concert was a bit underwhelming, although it may have been because of the lack of songs I personally enjoyed of hers, so I'm probably just being bias. We trekked along to the autographs line afterwards and nabbed myself an autograph. We spend the next bit in the boardgaming room (a fancy anniversary version of Settlers of Catan which was defective!) before the swimsuit contest. I regret not snapping a photo of team Seigaku playing DDR outside the panel room. SO REGRET ...because the swimsuit contest was a huge disappointment. Not even worth mentioning the details.

Day 3: Finishing Up.
Autographs were held for both the Japanese artists in the morning. Sadly they only gave sketches for ticket lotto winners (none of us were lucky enough) so we still got ourselves autographs. Bumped into LS again somewhere here. :D

The rest of the afternoon was a blur, but I do recall checking out the Charity Auction and seeing people bid ridiculous prices on stuff. I do regret letting someone get away with a signed and framed Capcom poster at a mere $120. Oh and watched some of the Gundam EXVS tournament. Aside from that, we bummed around a bit before deciding on dinner and packing up our things for the drive back.

We finalized on Crab Pot again this time around, got our hands and faces dirty, and had a good seafoody feast.

No real loot this year... but I did come back with stuff: