FanimeCon Day 4 & Wrap-up

This is actually going to be a pretty long post, so I’m going to use a ‘read more’ tag for this one. But first, I should explain how this is going to work.

So at first I thought of just throwing up a slideshow for everyone to scroll through stuff as I talked about each one (which I did last year), but since that doesn’t allow you to pull up the picture and enlarge it or whatever if you want to, I didn’t want to do it that way again. The other option would have been to just throw up each picture as I talk about, but that’s just going to be a clustered mess.

Instead of those, the solution came to me as I plugged in my camera: Dropbox.

They added a new, dandy feature that basically works like a slideshow, but they’re at normal size and you can enlarge each one if you want or download them and various other cool things. So for that, you need a link, which would be this one.

Just ignore the first three since I’ve already shown those, and click on the fourth. Then come back here as I talk about each one or a group of them, then you can go back to the other tab and move to the next picture as I go through each one. They’re even numbered at the bottom so you’ll know which one you’re on! Cool? Cool.

Also, if you don’t have Dropbox yet, you should get it. It’s a nice and dandy tool to have.

Read the rest of this entry »

FanimeCon 2012 Day 3

HOLY SHIT GUYS. I FOUND A DAWN POSTER. AND IT’S KAWAII AS FUCK.

I’m so happy you guys. Though I also got another two posters with Dawn in them, this was the only one that focused on her and only her. I feel like I’ve reached a life goal or something.

Oh, the story behind getting it is that I slept through my alarm this morning and missed Koyama’s second/last autograph session, so I coped by going to the Artist Alley and buying every Pokemon poster in sight. I’m not kidding, I bought like six or eight of them within about five minutes.

Though honestly it isn’t that big of a deal that I missed the session, since I realized my so-claimed “greatest photo idea ever” wasn’t all that great after getting some sleep. Sure, it would have been amusing at the time of taking it, but that would have been it.

But that’s just random banter, I should say what I did for the day.

I went through Artist’s Alley and Dealer’s Hall one more time to see if there was anything that I wanted but had missed on previous explorations. There are actually a few things, but most of those were sold out, so I’m hoping they’ll be restocked for the short time stuff is open tomorrow.

The first panel I went to was Shigeto Koyama’s panel: Character Design 101. He mainly covered characters, but he also briefly went over mecha design. It was actually an extremely informative panel, and I mean that in more ways than just learning that his laptop background was a repeating picture of an anime-esque drawing of a cut of beef.

Now, he mentioned not all character designers do what he talked about (so mainly ones drawing for ecchi shows and possibly shounen and such), but what he said reminded me a lot of TRazor’s post on anime character’s hair.

Basically, since anime is a medium that has a lot more close-ups than others, designers don’t really bother to do much with character’s pants or shoes or whatever because you’re basically never going to see them. Instead, they bring out the personality of the characters through facial expressions and… their hair.

His first example was Joey from Heroman (because he did the character designs for it), and he pointed out how characters that have the hair in the area between their eyes and ears curving inwards is a way of showing that they’re introverted. His biggest example was Rei from Evangelion.
Also, on the opposite end, characters with hair that sticks out tend to be extroverted.

He mentioned that hair accessories can also symbolise something, and for this he mentioned Eureka from Eureka Seven. Her accessories bind and hold down her hair, but also show how she herself is restrained our bound in some way. Trapped, if you may. When she takes them off halfway through the series, it’s to show she’s breaking free from her cage and the things holding her down.
He also pointed out how, in comparison, Anemone had an accessory that went completely around her head, showing that she had a larger restraint holding her down.

There were a few other details he mentioned, and he talked about the process he went through in creating the design for Samekh for Star Driver, but it’s too much to type up. It was an extremely interesting discussion, and if anyone else gets the chance to see Shigeto Koyama at any point, fucking do it. You will not regret it.

Oh, and it was also a funny discussion, because when he googled up one picture to show as his example (I believe it was Rei), one of the ads in the background on the site was a hentai ad, and refreshing the page didn’t help. We all just kind of laughed it off and used a different picture.

Afterwards, I went to the Cthulhu for President panel, which is run by the same guy that runs the Hentai Music Videos. I swear if the guy pursued comedy, he’d easily make it as an insult comic. The panel was hilarious and full of swearing, talk of baby-eating, destroying Japan for making tentacle porn, and “your mom” jokes (not to be confused with “yo momma” jokes).

I then had a break and decided to buy some food from the Dealer’s Hall to try out. Specifically, this stuff:

The top three are different flavors of some kind of “Swiss Roll”, the bottom left is dango, and the bottom right is obviously mochi.

First things first, I’m pretty sure that mochi isn’t supposed to taste the way this one did. It was really hard and tasted like ricey cardboard. So basically, it was really bad. The dango wasn’t much of an improvement, but at least I didn’t spit it out in disgust. I could tell it just wasn’t something my tastes agreed with. The Swiss Rolls were pretty good though.

For now I’m just chalking it up to being a bad batch or something, because my friend has had both before and he agreed the mochi and dango I got tasted pretty terrible. Oh well.

As for the final attraction of the day, if you remember my posts for FanimeCon last year, it was yet again Banzai Arcade. I swear, this almost feels like the true finale of the convention. It’s always just full of such excitement and laughter that you’re pretty much completely drained after the three hours are over.

Getting to details on Banzai Arcade, it’s run by Kajetokun from Youtube, also known as the guy that made/popularized the “OVER 9000!!!!” meme. He’s pretty much the grandfather of memes. The game itself this year was 12 different route choices, each one having an easy fight, a medium fight, and a boss fight. The fights have teams answering anime or video game questions, and if they get it right, they roll the dice to do damage, which can be anything from one to ten. If they get the question wrong, the enemy attacks. After each fight, a new team was brought up.

While all the fights are fun, the boss fights are the most tense and hilarious parts of the game. You get to fight the likes of Articunosaurus Rex, Navi injected with the T-Virus, the car from Street Fighter, and Red Eyes Dracula (Dragon) complete with audio tracks from Castlevania.

Actually, one exception was the fight where you fight “an adorable dog”, which was just a randomly googled Labrador Retriever. People were actually booing when the team got questions right, and the fight ended with the dog exploding, Star Fox 64-style, for extra dramatic impact.

It was really fun, but now I’ve returned back to the room and am now writing this post. I’m gonna end it here and head to bed since I want to get a decent amount of sleep tonight. I think we need to be out of the room by 12:00 or so, and I’m not looking forward to that.

Oh, and I’m aware at the lack of pictures. I apologize for that, but I didn’t really take any due to a combination of going to panels and just straight-up being used to this stuff. I guess when you get used to conventions, you just take less pictures. It doesn’t seem as grand a thing. It’s still fun and people usually look awesome, but it’s just not something you feel the need to immortalize digitally.

I’m going to make it up to you guys by taking pictures of the convention areas tomorrow, such as the Dealer’s Hall and Artist’s Alley and such. That way you can see what I’ve been wading through the last three days.

FanimeCon 2012 Day 2

I finally have a working camera! But I didn’t get it charged until later into the day, so there wasn’t much to take pictures of. I’ll probably use it much more liberally tomorrow.

Today was a bit more hectic for me because I had to run from my hotel room to somewhere else and then back repeatedly for various reasons. I think within two or three hours, I had returned to the room four or five times. Yikes.

That didn’t stop me from buying some more stuff, though! The Artist Alley was the lucky winner today, as I bought a Rachel (from BlazBlue) poster, an Alice (from Pandora Heart) bookmark for a friend, a Squirtle cell phone strap-thing for a friend, and a Hawkeye pin for yet another friend.

I also got a Dawn bookmark from the same girl that was selling the Alice one, and I was so happy when I saw it. At first I only saw ones for like Ash and May and such, but then hiding in the corner of the display on the other side of the booth was the Dawn one. My only regret is that this was the best Dawn-related item I could find.

Seriously, you guys have no idea the things I’d do for an awesome drawing of Dawn that’s poster-sized. But I guess I’m a few years too late for that.

I also bought a very large Madoka Magica wallscroll from the Dealer’s Hall. Seriously, it’s really cool (it was also retardedly expensive), but you guys will see it in my wrap-up post when I post pictures of all the loot I got.

I went to Shigeto Koyama’s panel, which was pretty short, but it was fun since he’s a funny guy. He joked about how the Eureka Seven AO staff is working really hard and 24/7 on the show, but he snuck out so he could go to America. The panel was mainly questions for him, so we learned stuff such as how Samekh his his favourite Cybody, and what Western cartoons the PSG staff watched to help with making the show. Also, apparently his favourite colour is pink. I’m actually not sure if that one was a joke or not.

And yes, I went to the autograph session just like I planned. When I got up and it was almost my turn, I realized that he’d only have time to sign one of my BDs, not both. So when it was my turn, I just kind of put both of them down, and resignedly said he could sign either one on either side. Before the translator could even begin to relay what I said, he had grabbed them both and started doing this:

This guy is a genius. I never would have thought of something like this. Now my volumes are inseparable. Two halves of a whole, and not just because you need both to finish watching the show.

Even better, after he had given them back to me, I thanked him, and then kiraboshi’d him. And he did it back! He thought it was funny and laughed, but he still did it! God that was awesome. And if you don’t know what a kiraboshi is, then stop reading this and go watch Star Driver right now. Seriously. This post isn’t going anywhere.

Anyways, there was a decently-sized line waiting for their turn, so I left without asking for a picture. However, I’m going to his second signing and will ask for one.

Other than that, I went to the Nerd Courting panel, which was really funny. I mean, it was legitimate analysis and comments about how nerds date and what they should do, but the speaker did it in such a hilarious way that it was immensely entertaining.

After that was the Hentai Music Video Contest, and more people sent in submissions this year! We got five! Hey, it’s better than last year which only had three, or the year before which only got one. Anyways, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from that event, it’s that you should always aim for comedy with HMVs. When they’re serious like most AMVs, it’s extremely awkward to watch, especially with a large crowd. But it was still entertaining, regardless, since three of the submissions were really funny.

Before heading back to the hotel room to write this post, my last stop was the Nostalgia Room since they were showing Video Girl Ai. Partially because I figured it was my last good chance of catching sight of 2DT to say hello, but mainly because I actually was interested in watching the show. I caught the fourth and fifth episodes, but they didn’t have time for the last one and showed other random stuff until time was up.

So now I have to delve into the depths of the Internet to try and find a torrent for the show, and most likely have to wait around a month for said torrent to finish. Oh well, at least I’ll be able to watch it in full.

That’s it for today’s post, though. I wrote more than expected because I found a power outlet like a badass. But yeah, I’m off to bed since Koyama’s next/last autograph session is pretty early tomorrow, and I have the best photo idea to ever be conceived.

FanimeCon 2012 Day 1

So upon seeing this post, the first thing you’ll probably think is, “What the hell, Riyoga? I thought you were on hiatus!” Indeed, I was on hiatus. It actually ended on Thursday, but I didn’t have time to write a return post due to a string of unfortunate incidents. I’m still going to write a post, because I have more to say than just “hay guiz im back lol”, but it’ll have to wait until FanimeCon is over.

Now, in more important affairs, the first day of FanimeCon has ended. Well, technically it’s a 24-hour convention, but everyone sleeps at night anyways since no panels run at this time.

First things first, I don’t have pictures. I actually have a working camera this time, but I forgot the battery charger. However, I am receiving said charger tomorrow, so hopefully I can start taking pictures then. We’ll see. But yeah, I seriously need to start keeping all of this stuff in a large bag so I don’t forget any of it.

As for what I did, I spent nearly all of it in the Dealer’s Hall. I was mainly looking for Shana stuff since the final season ended not long ago, but lo and behold, still practically nothing. Why must I be tormented so?

What I did buy were some keychain/pin things. One booth had those larger, fridge-magnet looking ones for a bunch of Umineko characters. I bought like seven of them, along with a normal keychain thing of Keima Katsuragi.

I also found some other cool shit, like an artbook by the mangaka of Pandora Hearts and some Devil May Cry art from an insanely good artist (hence why they were in the Dealer’s Hall instead of the Artist Alley; they had like an actual business and such with a manager).

I only went to one panel today, which was called the Horrible Nerd Comedy Workshop. I thought it was going to be people doing stand-up comedy and then the panel were going to make fun of them as they gave them critiques, but… well, it actually was pretty much that, just that the critique portion was done seriously rather than mockingly. It was pretty funny, some people had some good stuff, others didn’t. When the actual panelists did their acts, I was dying. They were some seriously hilarious dudes.

But the most important news of the day is that I found and bought melon-pan. I expected to hate it since I normally don’t like melon-flavoured stuff, but it was surprisingly good. Badass.

Alright, I need to go to bed so I can wake up early and go to the Pokemon gathering so I can get my friend to take pictures. I’m also hoping to get my Star Driver BDs signed by the guy who did the mecha designs for it, Shigeto Koyama. Wish me luck!