For once, I was able to wonder at acen. Wonder, specifically, if any of the strangest strangers I won't find anywhere else might include one or two people bound to propel me towards my destined throne.
Especially one girl on an elevator. It's a shame that we were going up, or I might have tried making a new friend, instead of just testing my violent-mindedness against her--and she even passed at that last second. I forgot the fragment of name I tried comitting to memory from her con badge, but this is one I'll drop everything to say hello to if I see her in the real world.
Anime Central isn't the real world, not by a long shot. There are tangents that drive small groups, sections here and there, that serve as consistent passageways back to reality, but if you stay focused then it is impossibly positive. Even with the average magnitude of person, the superficial railings fail to disgust me beyond any value of significance. ACen is Heaven on Earth for my kind, even when one comes face to face with old demons.
Phobia Press, (full) website pending, sold its first copies of anything ever. In total, we sold nearly twenty items, covering printing costs and generally allowing us to have broken even with badge/table prices. Many costumers were memerable--some women who denied their own laughter, prompting "Sign #2," "We make people laugh and whores smile." Apparently we also depressed one fellow... he walked away from our table looking ready to cry. Perhaps we reminded him of a lost childhood, playing with every tool at our disposal to increase sales and generally steal peoples' attention.
I arrived at the convention this year with only one hour of sleep because of Phobia Press. The friend who promised to finish digital design aspects dropped the ball thirteen times since he took his job back in January, and I had to do last minute editing myself--we finished around 6am, and we left at 8:30am. This meant I took position on a hard hotel-room floor to sleep a little earlier than usual; probably 2am.
But it is questionable whether I would have lasted longer even with a decent night's sleep beforehand. the pillows are known in many circles as one of the best live rock acts in Japan for good reason--they know, for sure, how to rock. We showed them that American audiences know how to rock back, keeping a medium mosh pit going in the center of the crowd for more than half their set (having been deliberately instructed that all such antisocial circles would be broken up immediately by security). Elon, the boy who dropped the ball whatwith our comic, crowd-surfed for well over a minute. Me, I moved to the rhythm and danced to the beat harder than I ever have before--I left the room, ears ringing and body drenched in sweat, with a peaceful smile I likely haven't shown in almost a year. Or, to be fair, since Tantalus Theatre's Ragnarok.
Highlights of their set include Crazy Sunshine, Blues Drive Monster, Instant Music, Terminal Heaven's Rock, Ride on Shooting Star, Hybrid Rainbow, Last Dinosaur, and the very best possible choice for an encore--Advice. I would have enjoyed hearing Good Dreams, Biscuit Hammer, Killing Field, or Runners High, but I don't think the show could have been any bit much better than it was, because it /was/ perfect, even with some favorites left out.
I took a quick shower and spent $85 on pillows merchandise, having the band sign a copy of their first American-released album, Penalty Life. Iron Guest, which ran at 2pm on Friday, was about the only other thing I saw that day, and it was, as always, an exciting staple of the convention. The picture of the bar-maid won.
Saturday felt a little different than usual. I think it was the absense of a second Iron Guest show, as well as spending a little more than two hours behind an Artist Alley table, that accounts for the change. I decided to join my friend Jordan for the end of Anime Price is Right, and then caught an hour of retro-game AMVs before finding myself at the back of a filled-beyond-capacity panel called, "RPGs beyond Final Fantasy."
This was a standing-room-only panel if you happened to get in the door within 3 minutes of its posted starting time--luckily, I snagged one of the last spots in the back corner. The room packed as it was, there were likely 65 people--and the panel focused (and it was more exciting than it will probably come off as in writing) on everyone in the room trying to stump everyone else with their digital-RPG knowledge. The paradoxical outcome was that very few of us left with more knowledge than we came in with, aside from knowing that our kind does exist among the masses outside ourselves.
Because it is still difficult to find a person that can be defined as more than a "casual gamer." Among the upper-echelons of gaming, Adventure and RPGamers seem to be even more rare, especially when travelling beyond the top-sellers like Square's Final Fantasy series. We occasionally find each other online, especially through sites like www.rpgamer.com and www.rpgamers.net, but almost never do we pass people with similar gaming experience in the real world. Thus, in short, the panel was a success.
Most of the rest of Saturday was spent in the Convention Hall, mostly having fun with potential customers behind our table.
Mr. Christian, a gracious member of my former-highschool's faculty who served as our anime club sponsor, treated our group of 14 to pizza while the Masquerade began. There has been rumor that this year's Masquerade was exceptional, but I haven't been back since my second year--that was a disappointing show, and we missed a lot elsewise. This year half my group entered the Smash Brothers Melee tournament in the gaming room, and the rest of us cheered them through most of it. I practiced some Puzzle Fighter.
And then I wandered off to try and see Vic Mignolia's "Fullmetal Fantasy" film. It was a live-action take on what might happen if a real-world voice actor became the character he portrays. It was fun.
A staff member handed me a raffle ticket, so I stayed in the room and watched two episodes of Burst Angel and one innuendo-filled episode of Gunslinger Girls. My raffle ticket failed me.
Tired, I proceeded back to the hotel room where I yelled at members from a different ACen group from the area getting drunk. We watched Six-string Samurai and Hakaider before turning in, and Sunday...
well, I lost the Puzzle Fighter tournament. If I had chose a better character and been a little less cocky, I would have easily won, but I suppose there was a lesson to be learned, and learn it I did.
If it isn't readily apparent, I am tiring of adding to this post... now a number of weeks after the event. It was a good year. The pillows concert was by far the best single ACen event I have attended, but some other parts were lacking, and it was irritating to lose the Puzzle Fighter trophy.
This goes up June 2nd at 7pm.
