Otakon 2009 Day 1: (Ful)Filling

I find that it’s been hard for me to write up my thoughts on things like going to conventions (or just writing in general recently). Part of it is me worrying if I got everything down that I remembered or wanted to remember (but that’s what other people fact checking are for! \o). Part of it is that I feel like there’s a lot that I want to say, but it’s going to be tedious as it’s long as the pre-reg line was on Friday (took about an hour 45 minutes to get in); i.e., me being a lazy bum. And part of it is that other people have done it beforehand. But I did achieve a lot more in this con than I was expecting to; getting autographs and pictures with some guests (more like one guest :3), meeting up with Internet friends I’ve met with before and meeting plenty of new ones in the process (so many that I’m not sure if I can name them all), spending all of my spending money in one hour on the first day at the dealer’s room (still not sure how I did that), taking pictures of cosplay with my recently acquired camera (pics up soon I thinks), doing more karaoke than last year (and how) and so on. For not really having a definite plan for this year’s Otakon, I still had a blast.

First Alice I saw at the con the pre-reg line. The best one out of all I saw too.

Otakon Ho! Part 2!

By TheBigN

So yeah, I’m heading to Otakon on Friday barring any unforseen holdups, hangups, and inconviniences to that end. Looking at the schedule, I have an idea of what I want to do for each day, but nothing too certain yet. I hope to meet up with a lot of people that I met last year, and hope to make some new acquaintances/friends/people I know as well during thesse three days. Maybe do some more karaoke (not as epic as last year’s though. Probably.) every once in a while. Winging things might not be the best way to enjoy the con, but it’s worked before, and I think it can work out again. We’ll see what happens.

Taking a well-needed break.

Nomad’s Super Awesome Manga Review Part The Nth: Buckaroo Banzai

By Nomad(There! Evil PURE AND SIMPLE by way of the Eighth Dimension!)Otto

I have a series of papers to write to justify my continued suckling of the public teat. They are due very soon. They require data which I have not yet fully collected/analyzed. They are very important and need to be super awesome in order that I might avoid teaching in the future. This means that my room and desk at the office have been made very clean, a great deal of boozahol has been consumed, many sci-fi/gangster  movies have been watched and a great many used book and record stores have been visited. Moreover, it means that some of the manga that’s been sitting around unread is being/has been read.  This is a review, or, rather a series of reviews. I would have more words, but they are currently being pressed into the service of SCIENCE! and my future conquest of both my own sanity and the pitiful nations of man. The pictures have been stolen by pixel elves, and I have no time or desire to travel to their kingdom to get them back. Now, Son of Jor-El: KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!

I may have seen this movie a couple of times, yes.

My Delusions As A Fanboy: If Moe Is A Cancer…

By TheBigN

What type of cancer would it be? Something slow-growing, yet considered incurable like a chronic lymphocytic leukemia? Something that could have been avoided if people didn’t use certain things too much, like smoking with lung cancers? Something that’s silent until it’s too late, like some forms of pancreatic cancer? Course, I have problems with hearing this metaphor in the first place, as it paints moe as something that’s negative, bothersome, and ultimately ruinous for anime, and I wonder why? Whether you agree with that or not (and I feel like I’m simplifying things too much here, in my opinion), I feel like moe is used as a scapegoat too much, where people use it as the answer du jour for whatever ails anime, and I never feel comfortable about that.

Is the answer really cancer?