Acen 2008 post-report

My first Anime Central has come and gone.  My body is tired, my voice is completely shot, but my mind is still running smoothly, amazingly enough.  Even with only one responsibility I still managed to run myself into the ground.  Apparently 14 hours of sleep over a 96 hour period is just not enough.  Oh well, I guess that’s just what I do.  Please excuse the photo quality, my camera phone isn’t very good, I think I’ll get an actual camera before the next convention.  Continue past the break folks.

We arrived at the convention at a little after 2 PM Friday, and ended up parking in the garage at another hotel 3 blocks away.  Oh well, that’s life I suppose.  After a little confusion over where exactly we needed to go to get our comp badges, our badges were made and signed off by Justin, the panel programming head.  I wish this were the normal outcome for people at Acen; unfortunately, it wasn’t.  Line waits extended from 4 to 8 hours, for several problems that were completely avoidable with just a little planning.  However, this is not the place to go into that.  There might be a rant post later. ^_^

After that we dashed over to the Convention Center to check out our Exhibition Hall and hopefully see Faye sing.  Fortunately, Acen Idol was in our room, so that was not a problem.  We all made it in just in time, Faye included; she had a genetics exam to take before leaving that morning.  We listened to her excellent performance and that of the last few contestants.  I was actually pretty surprised at how well the event ran, and I hope to attend it next year.

We had a few minutes before meeting up with the rest of our group, so we quickly browsed Artist’s Alley.  There I met Michelle, one of my internet friends and on my D-A watchlist.  She’s also an awesome cosplayer and was dressed as Nell Tu, but of course, I lacked the foresight to take a picture.  By the end of the convention I bought this print of Renji from her, now I need to grab a frame. :)

Then we ran to catch the Gurren Lagann photoshoot and hand over badges to our other members.  All the people there were simply amazing.  My camera-phone can’t do it justice, I’ll find photo’s from someone else’s collection later.  One of our Ohio friends had to jump out of the reg line to come to the photoshoot, so we handed him a badge and took him into the Dealer’s Room for a while.  There were a lot of booths there, but not a terribly large amount of variety.  Despite that, I’d end up spending about 5 hours looking around through the entire convention.

Our group ditched their cosplays and we ran to catch Gurren Lagann fanpanel.  *Sigh*  Unfortunately, it was run very shoddily, again, perhaps a rant post later.  Because of that, we actually started another TTGL panel out in the hallway.  Security eventually broke us up, not because we were bothering the other panel, but because we managed to grow so big that we completely blocked the hallway.  We used that time to go grab some food at McDonald’s before the next panel.

Horray for non sequiturs!  Anyway, we skipped the first part of Anime Hell to go see Cosplaying – You’re Doing it Wrong.  It was a pretty entertaining panel and ran very well.  They also opened the floor for debate and handed around the microphone to people to share their opinions on whether certain trends in cosplaying were neccessarily good ideas.  Then it was back to catch the second hour of Anime Hell.  I spent the rest of the night hanging with Celeste, and ended up in bed around 3:30.

The second and last non sequitur.  I forced myself out of bed at 8:30, curse these stupid sinuses!  I kind of hung around the hotel a little, and embarked on a quest to find Celeste a Naruto/Akatsuki coat for her Masquerade skit, and failed miserably at that.  I’ll admit, I lack a bit of confidence in approaching people I completely don’t know and talking to them.  Faye needed some help getting to the Brawl tournament, so I got her over there, watched her play, then went to watch her in the second round of Acen Idol.  Everyone there did a phenomenal job, and I wish that I could have seen the finals during the masquerade.

I met up with my group at the breakdancing battle and we all headed to Your Favorite Anime Sucks.  The show went spectacularly and in the end it broke down to a group singing of Bohemian Rhapsody.  Yes, only in a panel run by Mike Beuerlein can such a thing happen.  After that we had a three hour excursion go Giordano’s for pizza and ran back for our show.  We played to our largest crowd ever of just under 700 people, and had an excellent show.  Hopefully we’ll get a better time slot and a bigger room next year, but we were satisfied.

From here on all of my time was spent hanging out with people, so I’ll stop here.  Acen was a fun convention, but it’s got some glaring issues that need to be straightened out before it collapses upon itself.  Hopefully I’ll see them fixed next year.  The next convention is ColossalCon in Cleveland.  We won’t be running Whose Line but we will be paneling and participating in Kyo’s shows.  I should probably ask him if I can tape it.  Acen videos will be cut and uploaded as soon as I go to Indiana, which should be by the end of the month.