Okay, well it has indeed been a while. My last entry referred to Disneyland, and since then, a week has gone by, and I have gone to something known as Fanime. For those that are not into Japanese Animation (Anime), Fanime is the second largest Anime confrence in the 9 western United States. The largest is Anime Expo. During the week, nothing super exciting happened, so instead I am going to focus on Fanime itself. Just as a fair warning, I do have a large bias that clouds these entries and skews them towards a less pleasant side. To clear things up, all my good times seemed to happen when I was NOT with the Anime Club. Now, onto the story.
The time is 9am on Friday morning, and everybody is arriving in front of the 206 common room with their gear. It is hectic, mostly because it is 16 people and our club (or mroe specifically the Fanime coordinator) was very unorganized. The result was us not leaving until ... oh about 10am, almost an hour past when we wanted to leave. Not only did we miss the Tea Ceremony, but it was too late to huddle up wor being a volunteer. And volunteering, from what I had heard, was fun. You got free food, a place to sleep, a hang out rooom, and all you had to do was contribute 14 hours of time to the convention. What a sweet deal. And since it is a three day convention and sleeping is unheard of it is not difficult to get 14 hours in a 72 hour period. My 72 hours was cut to 48 because we got there so late. Okay, not tht big of a deal. Now, onto the events after getting my badge. Just on that note, I had a picture of Epyon on my badge.
After registration, we went to the rooms to chill. Out of a 14 story building, we were on the 5th floor. The nice thing was, we could walk down to ground level when the elevators got too busy. (Oh, and they tend to do that at conventions.) So up at the room, we planned our days, what we wanted to do, what we wanted to see, etc. In all honesty, by this time, I was getting very tired of Dave, our 'great', 'wonderful', 'knowledgable' cough leader at the convention. I immediately tried to schedule myself with any and all different shifts. I never have been able to work with Dave, mostly because he orders people around and seems to demand that everyone listen to him. So, I made sure I went to see stuff he wasn't at. But he wanted the whole club to do things ... excuse time! I immediatly went to the Volunteer Room (The Vole Hole) and signed up to work. I knew I couldn't get any hours that Friday, but I needed excuses, and there they were, in the form of 1 and 2 hour blocks. Since this was my first convention I ever actually volunteered at, I didn't really do much in the way of meeting people. That changed later in the night.
Cue the evening huddle, after a day of fun. What fun? It's called the dealer room. What is there? Um duh, every anime dealer in the nearest 1,000 mile radius. There was over 200 dealers there, selling everything having to do with Anime you could imagine. I escaped with only spending $100. Other people were WAY less fortunate. Dave cleared $300 to my info, Jake Semm $120 or something like that. And that was the high point of the day. Now, back to the NIGHT, the other part that was cool. What specifically? Her name was Auora. She and I sat next to each other at the evening huddle, and I talked to her and we got to know each other. They were talking about crash space, and although I had a room with my Anime club, there were already about 12 to a room, so I chose the Crash Space. Best choice I ever made, I swear. Why? Well, Auora and I really got to know each other, and took one look at the people that were staying in the Crash Space and decided it would be for the best if we shared a bed. Bear in mind, that by default this is VERY much so against regulation. It is supposed to be guys in one room, girls in the other. So how did we pull it off? She was my long time girlfriend, and we both promised we wouldn't "do anything". It was cool because we got to share a Queen bed instead of sleeping on the floor. Friday night, we just talked until about 4am and then we fell asleep. She rolls in her sleep, and we woke up next to each other, which was kinda funny because we started at opposite sides of the bed.
So we were asleep by 4am, at huddle by 8am. 3 hours of sleep is plenty! Well, unless that is the only sleep you get. We were done with the huddle by 8:30, which left a half hour remaining for our on-call shift. After that we broke off into seperate groups for an hour break. Auora went with Molly and Jason to check out the video rooms and I went to the panels. I specifically went to see the 5XL panel, which I must say, was very cool. There was a lot of talk about their upcoming releases and how they got started in the industry. I had to leave partway through to report to registration at 10am. It was the only shift I had where I had to work with Dave and Andrea. That was the only time I ever got a slot the same time as them. Dave seems to have an odd charisma about him, everyone in high power lets him do whatever he wants. Thus the staff members left and put Dave in charge. As if I didn't have to "obey" him enough? The tasks we had to do included line control and registration forms. IT was pretty tedious, especially since the lines seemed to keep growing by the hour. Skeve wasn't kidding when he said Saturday was the day we would get our asses kicked. And so ass kicked we were. By 6pm, we were all beat. I had done back to back to back shifts, as had Molly, Auora, Mike, and Jinte. We all got pizza from the staff room and chilled. Well, for about an hour or so. Then we did an all night Anime binge... well, until we heard about the Der Cosplay, which made us all rush to the theater.
Der Cosplay is an interesting event. Basically it is a costume contest, and groups of cast characters put on skits for the audience's enjoyment. "Chair, Chair, Chair," were the chants that echoed in the concert hall, a golden lawn chair appearing from behind the curtain, only to disappear once more. Chants of "box box box" were greated by the huge towers of Evangelion doing...you guessed it, Dance Dance Revolution. That game ius seriously the shit. It has swept over arcades everywhere, and it attacked Fanime too. More on that in a bit. So anyway, the awards were handed out, but I didn't get to see that. Why? 10pm volunteer huddle. So there we were, about 5 of us, at 10pm sharp. There was no Skeve. See, he was in the last play of the night, and didn't tell us. So Auora, myself, and 3 other guys were sitting in the Napa 3 meeting room for a little more than an hour with nothing else to do. Auora and I went back to what we usually did, which was talking. I didn't even realize an hour had passed, go figure. So Skeve and the other coaches finally showed up, we had a quick huddle, then we went to Viewing Room One to watch Der Cosplay to see what we missed. That lasted until about 3:00am because they started it so late. And after that, it was time to go sleep.
Okay, maybe not. Actually, Auora, Nikki, and I raced back to the Vole Hole. 2 buildings, 3 hotel security personel, 1 flight of stairs, and one mad dash down a deserted hallway later we were at the door, panting and laughing so hard we couldn't stand. The laughing was because we were running and about 30 people were following us! They thought we were running to the Love Hina marathon on the same floor, so they took off running too! It was awesome to sit there and watch them all dashing into the viewing room. Finally Skeve showed up and let us all into the hole. By now it was 3:30am and we were feeling pretty wasted. The run didn't help much. So what did we go and do? Well, it was 3:30, nobody was around, and Auora and I wanted to learn how to play Dance Dance Revolution... 4 hours later of straight practice, we declared our sweaty and exausted selves pretty good. There was nobody to celebrate with, so we went back to the crash space silently. Molly and Skeve were asleep sharing the couch and Nikki was crashed out in the corner. To make things worse, when we got up to the Female Crash Space, the door was locked! Bear in mind this is 7am on Sunday now, and everyone is recovering from the biggest day of the convention. Since we didn't want to wake anyone, we went back to the guy's room. And nobody was there. They all went to see the end of the Love Hina Marathon! So we had the room to ourselves. Skeve pushed the huddle back a bit, so we had some time to shower. Well, kinda. We had about 15 minutes and we could both barely stand. But we survived, and the 6 minute showers helped. Until we saw we were almost late and ran for the huddle. We barely made it and Skeve looked as us really funny. After the huddle he fired off about a half dozen questions. "I swear, we just went and showered!" / "Uh-huh," he said with a smirk. "No, not together ya dork!" / "Uh-huh..." It was crazy. Skeve started telling people that Auora and I were the "Fanime couple of the year" to which, of course, we both turned bright red because WE knew it wasn't true. Didn't stop the ridicule though. Skeve did finally appologise, but not until it was like 11 in the morning or so. I finished out my hours, and reported to the club room for our one and only meeting. It was at this meeting where I was reminded why I didn't want to do anything with the club. Dave decreed we were leaving, skipping closing ceremonies. We were going, checking out, and gone.
I was crushed! I didn't get to finish Fanime out like I wanted, sitting in closing ceremonies, up front with all the Vols, participating in the gripe session, all the stuff that would have been a lot of fun. But no, we left. And on the way out, Nicci and Auora and Mike were at the corner waving. I fought so hard not to cry in the car with others around. I felt so defeated. I told Skeve and Auora when I got my $35 back that I couldn't stay. Auora told me to call her, so I will when I get the chance. Most liekly will be Monday night at some point. Will anything acually happen between us? Not likely, we are of two differnet worlds really. She couldn't sit in front of a computer just like I could never manage to meditate. It's just that way. Doesn't mean we won't email each other or anything. When Jess, Jesse, Sheyne, and I got back, we wondered where Dave and the others were. I called Dave. HE was still at Fanime! He wanted to get something from an auction in the Dealer's room. I could have gone to closing ceremonies! I just about cried there on the spot, for the second time in less than 2 hours. I mean, how seriously fucking lame that he makes everyone leave, but then has his car stay so he can get something from the Dealer's room. I will be perfectly civil around him though, may as well. Being pissed won't get anything done anywho. The remainder of my Sunday was basically just chilling and recovering. And boy did I recover.
I slept from 10:00 pm that night to 3pm on Monday, making me miss all my morning classes. The convention soundly kicked my ass. :)
Now, I got this crush thing in the mail, and I am working to solve it. Below is the info I obtained: number of letters in first name, number of letters in last name, and my guesses. 5 8+ A. Galbraith, A. Wycliffe 6 6 C. Santos, A. Mugley 8+ 5 K. Jones
Um, I need sleep... 2 am on Monday morning and I really do need to wake up tomorrow for class. :)
In response to "Fanime!":