asian-invasion

It was the official beginning of Otakon. After a whole two hours of sleep the night before, I was prepared to drag myself everywhere for the next 16 or so hours. I usually find some kind of second and third wind to get me through.

The day began with everyone making last-minute preparations with their costumes before heading up to the Cloud Club for breakfast. Afterward, we all began our journey following whatever schedules we had planned for ourselves. I had forgotten to bring the list of photo shoots I wanted to attend so that part of the weekend would be given to improvisation.

I had also given up trying to make it to every panel or event I had planned for since I know how plans tend to go. There were so many outstanding costumes to photograph and I had only so much battery power and storage on my camera’s memory cards. Before the day was half done, I had burned through nearly 200 frames. I don’t like to downgrade the photo quality for the sake of increasing the number of frames I have available, but sometimes compromises must be made.

During the early afternoon, my wife walked with Elian through the dealer hall while I went back to the room to change into another costume. The one I was wearing at the time had already seen its respective photo shoot and I had another scheduled. When I returned to BCC, I ran into the pair as they came out of the Gaia Online panel. I managed to see about the last half-hour of it when the web site’s upcoming MMORPG (Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game), zOMG, was being unveiled.

The second shoot I was to take part in never happened because no one else showed up but me and two other characters from Ouran High School Host Club. No matter because my next task was to check myself and my wife in for Saturday’s Masquerade event. More on that next time.

We found our friends from Norfolk (Matt, Jen, and Joy) after I returned from First Mariner Arena and we relaxed for a bit. The next hour would be dedicated to figuring out what our plans for food would entail. Everyone had finally settled on Subway but no one was sure how to get there. We had two to choose from: the overcrowded food court at the end of the BCC skywalk or the shop just north of the Arena. By grace of someone’s iPhone and its navigational system, we found the latter Subway in less than a half-hour.

By the time we arrived, it was around 8:pm and, all the while, I was missing the JAM Project concert Otakon was presenting at the Arena. It would have been my first time seeing a Japanese musical act performing live and I wanted to go, but the urge wasn’t enough to rush my evening meal. I had to compromise my sandwich because this particular Subway had run out of lettuce and pickles. I got more than a 50-cent break on the price because they had also run out of change.

It was almost 9:pm and we all decided to head back to BCC. My video project, AMV Salad 2, was scheduled to be among the fan-produced parodies starting in another hour and I wanted to gauge reaction from the viewing audience. I separated from the pack and set off to find the event location.

After being misdirected several times, I had finally found the place where the funnies were being shown. The tech crew were having trouble with the VCR (I know…”wtf?”) so the whole thing was delayed by about a half-hour. Just before my cell phone died, I called Matt since he would have been (as far as I knew) nearest to my wife and told him to pass along the message that I’d be there a bit longer than expected. After Dr. Tran and some mediocre-to-very bad videos, it was finally time for mine to be shown. I am happy to announce that reactions were better than for last year’s project (AMV Salad: With More Crunchy Bits).

It had to be close to midnight by the time I got back to the hotel. Alex was downstairs and informed me that my wife wasn’t happy that I was gone for so long. I guess she didn’t get the message. Anyway, we went to the 7-11 around the corner and picked up a few things before retiring to the room for the night. I found out that Jessica, after being awed in some way by a dead rat in the street, had turned her ankle pretty badly when trying to cross the street. It didn’t help that her boots were heeled. We put her on the couch for the night with a bag of ice and drugs.

I got marginally more sleep than thee night before. The funny thing is that sleep becomes irrelevant when one is attending convention, especially when the next day is Saturday and there’s tons more to be done…

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