AOD 2008 Sucked By Myself But I Got to Interview Someone

Last night, I drove home from San Francisco tired from AOD 2008. I seemed to do more stuff outside the convention than inside, such as walking 10 minutes to Japantown or getting lost on the other side of town, taking Muni halfway back before jumping off at Chinatown and eventually making my way back to the Cathedral Hall Hotel. The latter is part of a long story that I could tell on the up-and-down draining experience of the convention (something I might flesh out tomorrow on AOR) but for now, I’ll hit the important stuff and punctuate those with pictures after the jump.

I DID learn two easy lessons that I try to abide by the next time I plan to attend a convention: don’t attend a convention alone because you’ll get bored sooner and, more importantly, figure out where you’ll stay overnight well before the event. Otherwise, you’ll end up in a Redwood City inn near the railroad tracks.

Saturday:
The first thing I did after getting my reg badge and my parking validated ($8 all day with no in-out privileges) was go down the artists line. I was a bit surprised to see Tim Ferreira again at the BAAU table and bought his now-printed Techgal comic. I also picked up a couple buttons from the collective along with two comics from another artist. Nothing struck my eye in the dealers’ hall after a quick walkaround and I didn’t visit it again the remainder of the weekend.

I then decided to walk down to J-Town since it was close and I needed to kill some time until the Writing Animation panel at 1. I hit Kinokuniya but was surprised by the redesigned, more spacious interior. The manga section had been moved downstairs into the former Kinokuniya office space around November and was arranged similar to how it was in the past except that now Japanese language stuff is now a couple feet away from instead of on the other side of the store. I bought three first volumes of manga I’d never heard before – Megalomania, Five, and Kizuna – along with a Lovely Complex color illustration manga-sized book. For a quick lunch, I had chicken curry at May’s Cafe and then began to walk up the hilly Post Street back to CHH.

The Writing Animation panel had Ken Pontac (Happy Tree Friends story editor) and Marv Wolfman (New Teen Titans writer-creator) giving tips about getting your stuff noticed as well as stories about annoying network notes involving ReBoot and other shows. Following the conclusion of their session I stopped by the video game room and played some MLB Power Pros for the Wii, which was a good challenge on Normal level. There were no special Wii controls but I had been eyeing this game for the past couple months and might eventually get for the PS2 when the price falls to below 20 bucks. I visited the gaming room twice more over the course of the con and played Super Swing Golf and Metal Slug Anthology.

The next significant thing I attended was Anime Bingo [in-line text ad] – the cards cost 50 cents each or 5 for $2. I ended up not getting a bingo, despite coming close five times, and didn’t win the raffle for the remaining prizes. Then I began trying to call various hotels/motels/inns to see if they had vacancies and, based on a tip from a friend, found a room in Redwood City for $77. I checked in a little after 10, failed logging onto a weak wifi signal, watched the local news, and fell asleep listening to remixes on Movin’ 99.7 FM.

Sunday:
After being woken up by a knock on the door I looked my watch and saw it was 10:40, meaning I had 20 minutes to check out of my room to avoid being charged for another day. I quickly got dressed, packed up, and returned my room key and non-functional remote to the office. I was hungry so I picked up some bakery stuff at the 7-Eleven across the tracks and got on the highway to San Francisco.

I got to CHH around a quarter to noon and caught the end of Sean McCoy’s Animation Industry Insight panel. He, I, and an amateur photographer talked for about ten minutes about current issues and then he agreed to let me conduct a video interview since he had over two hours before his How To Talk To Girls panel and the girl wasn’t there yet. I ended up getting around 45 minutes of footage – I’ll try to get it digitized and posted by this Friday – and had a good time talking with him. (He has a side business of selling women’s underwear called Pink Propaganda that will sold through his website when it gets updated.)

Does anyone know what game this is called? issa-sa says it’s Xiangqi.

That afternoon, I started wandering north in search of a wireless hotspot then ended up lost somewhere near Fisherman’s Wharf so I jumped onto a Muni train and rode it until I got off to Chinatown and walked into a video store called Eastwind. There I bought a DVD set of 28 Detective Conan episodes on seven DVD-5 PAL discs that have Chinese hard subs and Japanese/Chinese audio (expect an entry on the voicing sometime soon). It took about an hour for me to walk back to the CHH after going in the wrong direction toward Pier 5.

I got back in time for the end of the Vic Mignogna Live and I sat in to wait for the Game Show to begin. Vic answered a question about Japanese collective dubbing sessions vs. American dubbing and recounted a session he sat in on where he saw the seiyuu walk up to a line of microphones and look at storyboards while speaking – basically what I found out from watching the “Making Of” extra for the FMA movie.

After his thing was over, I was one of the three contestants to take part in the first game show round and won a Bleach pin shaped thing, avoiding getting State of Emergency or a bad Xbox Batman game. I was also being able to promote this blog in front of thirty people and was given the name Napkin by the audience as my in-game moniker. The first two rounds were multiple-choice video game questions with three competors in each while the later matches had four players connecting the dots to slowly reveal a picture where they had to name the series and sometimes the characters. (Anyone remember Get the Picture with Mike O’Malley?) It was fun to watch and an okay ending to the con for me, considering the swap meet was a bit underwhelming like much of AOD.

The events of the past weekend have made me very reluctant to attend another convention in the near future if I am not going to know other people who are attending (and could possibly provide me lodging). The size of AOD seemed to be on par with Sac-Anime although there were fewer dealers and more panels at AOD. The next con I might attend could be Sac-Anime next January and that will still depend on what kind of guests and programming are scheduled. The enjoyment of going to those kind of events is definitely enhanced when you have friends with whom you can eat and hang out, elements that are making me look forward to the club’s Japantown trip two weeks from now.

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