Anime St. Louis is really the impulse convention of the year for me.  I always decide to go at the absolute last-minute, and then somehow the arrangement just works.  This year, I have Heidi to thank for providing the little convincing needed to go.  Seriously, those puppy dog eyes are powerful stuff.  I also need to thank Alisa for providing lodging during the convention so I could attend all three days instead of just one.  Now, without further ado, the convention coverage!

First, the attendees and staff really had it together this year.  Gone were the crazy registration lines from last year.  The setup for this year avoided clogging an entire area of the convention.  When I got there, they opened a third line when only five people were waiting to get people through faster.  I still think the form asks for too much information, but I complain about that for every reg form.  Then with the lost and found this year, one of my friends lost her badge.  In the 10 minutes it took for us to realize it was missing, it was already turned in by someone and waiting for us.  I heard similar stories from others in passing.  We had a tornado warning during the convention as well, and everyone handled themselves very well despite the scare.  So, props to everyone who attended this year.

Now, I am not the panel attendee by any means.  I normally go to conventions to socialize and shoot group photoshoots.  I run panels because I enjoy doing it, and because it has some perks.  However, I don’t know nearly as many people in the central Midwest circuit as the eastern circuit, so I looked into it for this convention.  ASTL suffers from the same programming headaches as everyone else.  There were scheduling conflicts, a few blank spots on the list, and I felt the schedule overall was a little underwhelming.  Despite this, I feel the situation has still improved over last year.  I think I’ll try to get into the mix a bit next year.

The first panel on the talking block is Soul Eater, one of my favorite series.  I want to say this was the first time these girls ran the panel.  It was a little bare bones for my liking, but they were certainly enthusiastic about the subject material.  They also didn’t fall into the “tech trap” that occurs when you suddenly realize the projector will not work for you.  I’ve seen several panels in the past get totally derailed by tech failures, so my hat’s off to them for continuing with what they had available.  They have a lot of room for improvement, so if they get the slot next year, I expect some growth.

The only industry panel I went to this year was the “free-for-all” on Sunday.  Unfortunately, only three guests were still at the convention and available.  Voice actor Troy Baker, Internet personality Doug Walker, and musician Tadahisa Yoshida talked with us for about an hour.  I loved the former two and I regret missing their panels at the convention.  Fortunately, I have another opportunity to see Doug at Matsuricon this year.  Tada was a bit of a fish out of water at the panel, but I have to give him credit for showing up at a Sunday afternoon event.

Then I have the duo of Brad and Derek.  They ran the Code Geass panel with Kira on Friday, and the Naruto panel with Wyatt on Saturday.  These are truly fantastic panelists.  They know their material thoroughly, injecting both insight and humor.  They can also manage the freeform panel setup I enjoy so much more than dissertation style.  If you’re in this region and they have a panel on a series you’re interested in, go to it.  Seriously, if I ran programming at a convention, I’d offer them slots immediately.  I’ve run out of ways to suck up to them for now, but rest assured I have an R&D division working around the clock to develop new methods.

This year ASTL split up the Masquerade into two portions.  The first covered the walkons, and the second had all the skits.  It’s kind of odd when most conventions do both segments together, but I think it works out better.  You only have to attend the Masquerade for the aspects your interested in, which prevents people who just want to see walkons from blocking those who just want to see skits from having a seat.  From the attendance, many people just wanted to see the walkons.  A show of hands at the skits showed only a small portion of those people in attendance.  That’s a good thing because the skits pretty well filled the room.

The staff hosted two dances this year, and I went to both of them.  Friday was the 80s dance, which I liked simply because it was different.  I think song choice needs to improve for next year, but I still had fun in a setting different from the normal fare.  The rave techno dance was also a lot of fun.  The music had some nice variety and a good flow.  Nothing irks me more than a DJ who sticks to the same basic beat, or “safety zone”, for 15 minutes at a time.  I didn’t have that problem here.  I do have to say calling the rave a techno dance is about as effective a euphemism as calling H1N1 the flu, but whatever works for them is fine with me.

Finally, we have the Dealer’s Room, Artist’s Alley, and Game Room.  I’m not much of a shopper myself, and because I went to this convention on impulse I also had no money set aside for buying anything.  The Alley was somewhat small, and the Dealer’s was somewhat big.  The Dealer’s Room also felt like Colossalcon where they had a lot of stuff but it still felt underwhelming.  Maybe the likes of Acen and Otakon have spoiled me.  The Game Room, however, was more than satisfactory for a convention this size.  They had plenty of TVs and consoles setup, including a full Xbox 360 LAN.  They provided a DDR Extreme machine as well, but it fizzled out at some point on Friday.  I suppose you just can’t have everything.

TLDR: I thoroughly enjoyed Anime St. Louis.  In just two years, it has come from being a clustersuck to a solid performer in the region.  There are still faults but the staff has still improved year over year.  In 2011, I intend to plan my attendance instead of just showing up.

Well, Penny Arcade kicked off their first PAX East here in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, so I had to attend. I didn’t make it in time on Friday because I had to stay late for work, but today, Saturday, I spent the whole day there, from 10am to 10:30pm.

Went to a few panels, missed a few due to overly long lines. My favorite panel by far was Memes, Microcultures, and 2D Chicks: Our Future in the Otaku Gamer by Alex Leavitt, a researcher from the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. He broke down how memes start and propagate, what kind of “grammar” is within them. He showed and explained the Hitler meme.

He went in length about the different way niche cultures develop in Japan (he called it microculture). Touhou was a main example, where the gameplay doesn’t matter, but rather the characters, about whom very little is revealed within the original games. But fans took that and built a world of their own, using Nico Nico Douga, doujin comics, animations. He showed some of Bad Apple as a very high production example, but not the insane stop-motion one, which itself is a great example of the meme propagating.

They refused to be photographed apart.

He also compared it to the Vocaloid phenomenon, which really interested me, because I’m a huge fan of Supercell, which got its start uploading Vocaloid vids on Nico Nico Douga. The use of Vocaloid really blew up after the company added characters, because the works became not just about the music, but mainly about the character. Showed parts of some of Supercell’s vids but didn’t mention them by name. Could’ve been a great example, as they became professionals due to it, even getting a real anime produced based on one of their their videos (Black Rock Shooter, which was recently revealed to have Miyuki Sawashiro and Kana Hanzawa as main roles). And their fame and success came precisely because others on Nico Nico Douga took their music and did their own things with them (e.g. Nagi, also known as Gazelle, their current singer, got her start by posting videos onto Nico Nico Douga of her singing Supercell’s songs – most famously Melt – and to this day ppl continue to post themselves playing them, including their professional releases, with real instruments), thus extending the phenomenon seen in Touhou and Vocaloid. He showed bits of the PSP game Project Diva, a rhythm game starring Hatsune Miku. It made me want to get a PSP and import that game, as it seems to have at least a few of Supercell’s songs.

I was surprised he didn’t talk about 4chan too much, as that’s where so many memes, at least in the US, started. Did mention visual novels and particularly Katawa Shoujo, an American amateur production from the folks on 4chan. And like the other examples he mentioned, it had its genesis in fans taking someone’s work and applying their own twist on it.

Besides that talk, most notable for me was the concert. I stuck around for just the first part, featuring the Video Game Orchestra (VGO). I’m a big fan of classical music, so I had to see it. The highlights for me: a wonderful rendition of the Super Mario theme; the Chocobo theme from Final Fantasy, which had a great light mood with highlights from the saxophone and flute; a very embellished and metal-ish arrangement of the Final Fantasy VII battle theme; a surprise vocal appearance, as a singer from the local Berklee music school sang Snake Eater, which was sandwiched by a very dramatic performance of the MGS theme. Overall, they had a great mix of classical music with their orchestral instruments and more modern rock/metal music with electric guitar, keyboard, and drums.

I’ve got some videos from the concert that I’ll upload to YouTube, but tomorrow, as it’s way past my bedtime already, and I need to wake up early for the final day of PAX East tomorrow.

But what of the cosplay? That’s probably what you really care about. Well, I was a bit underwhelmed by the amount. I saw more video game cosplay in Anime Boston last year (which is being held next weekend, same place, Hynes Convention Center). Seriously, I saw 1 Snake, whereas at Anime Boston, there were at least a dozen. Still, there were enough to make a nice album – I’ve interspersed this post with some of them. But I don’t want to deal with WordPress’s slow file upload system, so I’m providing a link to my Picasa album of most the cosplay photos I took today. Some unexpected ones are Green Man (Charlie) from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and C.C. from Code Geass.