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Li's Otakon 2003 Convention Reports

Otakon 2003 was the debut of Akiko and my new costumes, Akiko as Yaone and I as Lirin from Saiyuki.

Precon

The adventure started for me on Wednesday, when I found that I had missed the UPS truck 3x already, and had to go the store to pickup my package... a 3 hour roundtrip walk in the blazing sun. But the package held Friendly Plastic, the wonderful stuff that I needed to make fangs out of. Despite the heat exhaustion, I managed to make a pair of very nice fangs.

Akiko's adventure also started early, as the week of the con, she was at a biology conference. Double the con adventure for her!

Thursday morning, I met up with Fyre (Discount Candy Warehouse) and Mookie (Dominic Deegan) and spent all afternoon driving down to Baltimore. Arriving around dinner time, we met at the hotel Akiko and Shawn (Stacatto). After throwing our stuff down into our hotel room, we headed out to the little malls by the harbor for some dinner.

After dinner, Mookie decided to wait in line for the early pre-registration, but the rest of us decided the line was too long, and surely Friday morning's line wouldn't be too bad if Thursday night's line was so long. So we returned to our hotel rooms and worked on finishing up the last details of our costumes, the bamboo sign for our art table, and other such things.

Friday

Akiko and I woke up before the alarm, all excited at around 6. We spent the next couple hours getting dressed in our costumes. We reached the con around 9. From previous experience, we figured this would be a good time, as the doors open at 9, so even though we are still waiting in a rather long line, at least the line would be moving, right? Well, the doors for the pre-registered con-goers opened late. We were not pleased that the line for regular registration opened before the pre-reg line. While waiting for the doors to open, I wandered around both lines to snap a few pictures. When I returned to our spot in line to find that we hadn't moved at all, I went back up to the front of the line to see what was up with the lack of open door. As soon as I got up to the doors, they were opened... I think they were frightened by the might of my demonic power. Or something.

Once the doors were opened, the line went by pretty quickly... it took maybe half an hour to reach the registration. But Akiko dropped her badge no more than five minutes later, and someone else must have picked it up and taken it. So we had to slip in to the front of the line once more to get her another one. Whoever it was that took the badge is a bastard, by the way.

Finally badged, Akiko, Fyre, and I returned to our rooms to gather up our art things and made our way to the Artist Alley. Before getting far into the con, we were stopped by a security guard checking badges. Akiko's badge had been in her bag. She had thrown it in there for safe-keeping while we had gathered up our stuff. Now, we understand the need to check for badges, but all of our hands were full of the large bamboo poles and are art suitcases and such. When Akiko threw the badge back into the bag after he checked it, the man responded that she really ought to be wearing the badge since we are "just going to be stopped again." This is valid advice, of course, but the tone of the man was just so snotty and condescending. Of course people will be checking badges, but don't you see that we kind of have our hands full at this precise moment? Finally, reaching the doors to the Alley, we pushed our way to the front of the line so we could enter and set up. One of the guys monitoring the doors didn't want us to go down the escalator with our rolling suitcase, then tried to pick it up, despite my insistence of "don’t." and proceeded to unbalance the stack of bags on top. Grr. (We'll be ranting about staff and how things were run a bit... sorry for the staff members that were nice and competent. We at comiku greatly appreciate the effort of the Otakon staff, but since we did run into a few bad apples that distracted from our enjoyment of the con, we feel the need to complain). Finally getting into the room, Akiko, Fyre, and I tried to quickly set up our big bamboo sign and everything else. We had just gotten over to our table when it is announced that the room will be opening to the public in 8 minutes. Not much more than a minute later, the doors were opened. What happened to the other 7 minutes? Fortunately, we managed to get things up and ready in a quick amount of time, and soon were making our first sales.

The first part of the afternoon flew by. Akiko and I left the Alley for a little bit to see if we could meet up with the "Saiyuki photo shoot" that was supposed to happen that afternoon by the fountains, but we didn't see anyone, so headed back to the Alley un-photographed. Though we did get interviewed by this Sci-fi website.

Back in the Alley, we hung out some more, selling prints. And we got to deal with some of the bad side of the Artist Alley this year. The big one was the art show. The fact that it didn't get set up until nearly noon Saturday (and was ended early Sunday morning) meant that the art show was up for only one day. That didn't give a whole lot of time for people to see the artwork or go about the auction. The slow down with the art show set up was due to the fact that the artist didn't put up their artwork themselves, but rather, the art show staff did. With the lack of adequate staff and help Friday, that REALLY slowed the whole process down.

Then there was the Nazi power-trip woman. The artist in the table next to us hadn't arrived yet. So when our fellow AAF member Ian "Snowpuma" Chase stopped by, we spread out a little onto the table next to us with his binder. That afternoon, the artist who had the table came by to figure out where she was to be. She was lead to the table by the Nazi power-trip woman, who didn't politely ask that we move the binder, but with a great attitude demanded that we immediately move the offending binder for the person who had actually paid for the space. I copped an attitude back. Krista, the wonderful artist whose table it was, tried to say that it was ok, as she wasn't setting up yet, and later appologized to us for our treatment by the woman, saying she had just wanted to know where her table was, and was not worried about setting up at that time.

Akiko and I stayed at the Alley until nearly 11. I headed up to the Anime Theme contest. I didn't make the first cut to become a contestant, but had a lot of fun participating as a member of the audience. There were a lot of songs I didn't know (amazing, considering the LARGE collection of anime mp3s I have. But still, I knew a couple of slightly more obscure ones that the contestants didn't and was thus awarded some "super cool" (pixy-sticks) and a Digi-chara poster. It was a lot of fun.

Back in the hotel room, Akiko stayed up way too late rp'ing (ultimately getting less than 3 hours of sleep) with our Harry Potter RPG group, and I fell quickly to sleep.

Saturday

Waking up early, but not quite as early as before, Akiko and I get ready for the longest day at the con. We got to the Artist's Alley a little before it opened and got ready for another great day.

We got to talk with a lot of cool people during the day. First off, Matt from Connecticon roamed the Alley in his fabulously done Larva costume. It's too bad he couldn't keep the rollerblades on, so he could mysteriously glide around the con. My high school friend stopped by in her Miyu costume, so it was great fun having them pose together.

Akiko and I also had way too much fun chatting with other Saiyuki cosplayers. We ran into 3 groups: the trio of Hakkai, Sanzo, and Gojyo who were a very cute group of girls. A group of the heroes: Hakkai, Sanzo, Gojyo, and Goku. And then the HUGE group of 13 or 14 with EVERYONE in it. Homura stopped by our table a few times and we had fun chatting. By the way, Homura, I will never allow you to keep those Sutras!

Then there was the fantastic Vampire Hunter D. This guy wasn't a cosplayer. He was an actor. He became D. Hell, I had shivers every time he walked by. It was great.

We also ran into Kaji from Animazement. Though he was cosplaying as a Lupin character rather than Kaji, he will forever be considered Kaji, no matter what.

Akiko did manage to attract one fanboy with her well-displayed cleavage. When Akiko declined an invitation to the dance citing her wounded foot, he not-even-attempting subtlety mentioned sex. Then proceeded to lean against the table so his eyes were at breast level. Come now, at least the fanboys at Animazement had some sense of subtlety and class, even if they were desperate.

We packed up early to head up to the Masquerade. Since we weren't hours early, we got a seat in the very back of the room. Still, we were able to see pretty well with the video screens. The show was really well done, though a little short. But unlike other Masquerades, there weren't any skits that totally sucked. All of them were pretty cool.

I was able to recognize a few skits that had also been performed at Anime Boston. I began evilly plotting a skit for Animazement, of which I will force Akiko to join me in.

Well, when we got back to our room, Shawn gave us a note, and we found that the artist alley woman had struck again. She had given each artist a note while we were at the Masquerade. The note was concerning the affidavit, a form we have to fill out for tax reasons. The note started in a very condescending tone about how we artists don't know anything about legal matters and that we should all have read carefully what we signed. We didn't sign anything to be in the alley, and we HAD read and understood the affidavit we had signed that day (which SHOULD have been given to us when we signed in on Friday). The woman clearly had no comprehension of the fact that many of us are PROFESSIONALS, many of whom do the con circuit regularly, and that we should be treated as such.

Sunday

Akiko and I slept a bit later than we intended, having forgotten to set the alarm, but still managed to get to the con pretty early. Only, the Alley was suddenly being opened an hour earlier. The room was also going to close an hour earlier. I called the Nazi power-trip bitch over to explain. At first she was really snotty, declaring that they had the ability to change the times whenever, however they wanted. But she seemed to loose steam in the middle of her speech, as Akiko kept repeating that our customers were expecting to be able to pick up their artwork until 2:00 and was concerned about the early closing for that reason, and how they were handling the notification of the change in schedule? The wear of the con obliviously getting to the woman. Her power-trip ego bubble seemed to have deflated that day. By the end of the conversation, she was apologizing and making excuses about how short-staffed they had been. That much had been blatantly obvious, and we can respect that, however her condescending and unprofessional attitude from the beginning had put us off, and made us less than charatable to her difficult position.

What irritated us more than the Artist Ally time change was the fact that the Art Show and Auction closed at 11. That meant that the art show had not even been open a full day. Furthermore, Akiko and I did not have a chance to really look at the show together, something we had been looking forward to doing. There weren't a lot of bids on each item that we could see, as many people did not have much time to look at the Show. The only good thing about the Art Show this year was the efficiency of the checkout for artists picking up the (many b/c of the short length of the show) unsold items. We were able to pick up our unsold prints quickly enough, and then got a chance to hang out with a few other artists and chat for a while.

Then it was time to hit the road. Mookie entertained Fyre and I with his game "Mookie Asks Questions About You Until He's Bored." We also proved how geeky we are, as we discovered that Middle Earth (Mordor) is actually in Pennsylvania, and Mookie has the ability to talk with Sauron. And, not to be forgotten, Orcs eat at Taco Bell.