Subatomic Brainfreeze

Blazblue CS Notepad: WHY IS LITCHI STRONG?

I figured I wouldn't get too much into "how to play" stuff, because the post would be way too long, and it's kind of redundant with the volume of tutorials and guides out there online. Aksys has a good video guide up for Tsubaki anyway.

Lately, I switched up from Tsubaki to my old main, Litchi, in ranked matches. Tsubaki is a weak character for reasons we got into last time: her range is extremely short, her damage is poor, and she's faced with the choice of either constantly giving up the initiative or doing even less damage than she does normally.

Meanwhile, by many player measures, Litchi is the second best character in the game. (In case you were wondering, Bang is the strongest, and Ragna is below Litchi in the top three.) By contrast to Tsubaki, her range is very long: she fights with a big stick, after all. Litchi's damage is very (perhaps too) high, and she can get big damage from almost any distance. Her close-up rush isn't as versatile as Tsubaki's, but unlike Tsubaki she can actually cause serious damage every time she manages to get a hit in. Finally, if Litchi hits she will keep you pinned down, much more so than in the original game. She gains Heat really fast, and at the end of any combo, she's in a situation where the opponent is knocked down and she can use one of her super moves to keep them blocking as they get up. It's really ugly.

Being "strong" in a game like this is a matter of being the most efficient tool in the shed. On the extreme end, a character that can win in a single hit via some ridiculous, unaccounted-for combo is probably the strongest in their respective game. On the more extreme end, every character in the very broken Hokuto no Ken fighting game has a 100% combo. In that game, how good the character is isn't a matter of merely having such a combo, it's a matter of how easily and in how many ways the player is able to land it. As that game progressed, only one character appeared good, until all the players worked and worked and found out that while that guy was indeed the best, everybody else was just broken on different levels.

In games where you can't kill in a touch, it's still a matter of efficiency. You still want a character who can do the most damage the most easily. It's about fundamentals: one of the many reasons Bang is so good is that his simple standing jab is so damned strong. Often, characters who are too gimmicky, like Tsubaki, are inefficient as a result. Litchi's pretty gimmicky and complex herself, but she's got stronger fundamentals.

I started winning much, much more when I went to Litchi in ranked matches, and I haven't even put in the hours in practice mode to learn all her best combos yet. I put in a ton of work in with Tsubaki, but the amount of work a player puts in just can't overcome inherent character strength. I could get even better with Tsubaki and I wouldn't be as good as I was playing Litchi at about half of her potential. That's just the way it is.

Slum Online: HER HAMBURGER-SHOP SMILE

I don't know if you guys realize that Viz's Haikasoru line of translated Japanese novels exists. Like most stuff in the US J-pop industry-- especially in the further reaches-- it's not like anyone can afford publicity anymore.

You know what you probably really don't know? One of the novels in this lineup, Slum Online, is about fighting games. Not only that, but the guy's been there. He actually knows what he's talking about. This book has been on my list since I read the excerpt, in which the author simply describes what any genre aficionado worth his Sanwa can tell you is a round of Virtua Fighter.

If you've read the book, you might wonder what the real-life analog to the game the protagonist is obsessed with is. I can say with certainty that the closest thing is VF: of the many talks about 3D fighting game arcana in the book, quite a few are specific to VF and no other game. Just saying!

Anyway, our narrator is a college freshman and an obsessive, high-ranking player of an online fighting game called Versus Town. Makes me feel a little nostalgic, except the game was Guilty Gear XX and I was only good enough at it to beat all my friends.

The part where the story actually crosses over into fantasy is when a beautiful honor student with a voice like an anime character (no, seriously) takes an interest in this guy. I don't mean a scientific interest (this one girl used to say to me "I'm fascinated by your lifestyle, Dave!"), I mean she runs up to this totally antisocial loner and says "HEY I'M LOOKING FOR A BLUE CAT WANNA GO OUT WITH ME?" The hero is living a double life as many gamers do: by night he seeks a mysterious, legendary player online, and by day he hangs out with his Magical Not-Girlfriend.

The former story is pretty dead-on accurate. The narrator covers, at least in passing, almost every phenomenon in the world of hardcore fighting gamers you can think of. From tier lists to gamers' dog-in-heat reactions when they find out a player is female to the catastrophic effects of differences in elevation on a juggle combo (it's why the ground is usually flat in fighting games), the author is all over the place and he's always essentially correct. You can tell the author's been there because he spends an entire chapter saying what anybody who's ever been addicted to an MMO will say to you after the point: "don't even start".

I wonder whether the fight scenes (and there are many) are exciting to someone who isn't genre-familiar: as someone who is, I can fully visualize every quick movement the players in Versus Town make. The descriptions read straight out into fighting game language. You probably wouldn't exactly be able to tell they're talking about movements in a game here, because it just reads like a fight. Reading these bits really made me miss VF. I wish people cared about that game.

As for the boy-meets-girl story... there's simply nothing going on there. The girl has no life of her own: at first we're presented with a quirky facade and immediately wonder what's beneath. Then the book ends and we realize that, hey, wait a second, that's all there was. She only exists so that the hero can be an indifferent not-boyfriend and realize, as a result of same, What Was Important All Along. I don't think she even spoke about anything that wasn't either the hero or a blue cat. When the guy has his revelation, it rings hollow. Somehow, these two managed to get through a 200-page novel together and fall in love (or at least the hero tells us he is: that the girl's in love is just assumed) without ever having a genuine, convincing interaction.

So yes, Slum Online is a true gamer book. It's thorough and very interesting when it's discussing the most arcane, insignificant details of the weird niche hobby it loves, and it's bad with girls to the point of outright incompetence.

Yotsuba&: THINK LIKE A CHILD, MANCHILD

(I didn't realize the Manga Movable Feast was going on until a few hours ago, so this is going under the wire. I will begin with the words of a great man.)

"The emptier your head is, the more room there is for dreams!"

-Hironobu Kageyama

There is a mindset that runs throughout Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!. It's a simple comic about a strange little girl (she says she comes from "the left") who, every chapter, experiences something mundane and injects it with joy.

And that's it. There isn't a central plot to concentrate on, and the only real mystery-- the green-haired Yotsuba's origin-- is ignored. If you need to know where Yotsuba came from or what things will be like in five years in the Koiwai household, your mind's not in the place that Azuma wants you to be.

The tagline of Yotsuba&! is simply "Enjoy everything." Stop for a second. We're all overloaded with stimuli: the first piece is gone and replaced with a fresh signal too fast for us to appreciate it. Allow yourself to be impressed. One doesn't have to regress towards childhood to simply remember joy, to try and look at the world through its eyes.

Since Yotsuba&! runs in an explicitly otaku-targeted magazine, and because this is an otaku blog, and because if you ask me, the world is going otaku, think about your relationship with media. Geeks of all stripes are in a unique place in this decade: the Internet has absolutely exploded our access. Between a Netflix subscription, Hulu, online retailers, and my hard drive, there is far more video content immediately available to me, right this second, than I can ever possibly finish in my lifetime. My videogame collection contains another several lifetimes.

And that's if I just plopped down on the couch (or perhaps, in ten years, some kind of gigantic, soundproof Facebook-compatible media bubble) and spent the rest of my time as a terrible mockery of life, a media glutton. If our theoretical couch potato's mind is just on getting through it, will the poor spud ever actually get any happiness out of the images flashing in front of his eyes? Isn't beauty worth a pause?

This is one of the reasons I started blogging, actually. I realized how much time I was spending on things like this, so often without really appreciating them. I felt that without pulling anything back out into the world from the experience, without engaging in a conversation, I was just wasting that time. So now otaku culture and I have this friendly arrangement where I try to look deeply and contribute. I think I get more out of the things I love now than I ever did before.

When a new volume of Yotsuba&! comes in, I'm enthusiastic but I try to take it slow. I let my eyes linger on the average, beautiful places Azuma wants to show us. I let myself laugh: at the end of the chapter about making a cake, I just put the book down and fell down laughing for a few minutes. It was all I could do. Yotsuba&! may not have a plot, but it does have a message, one it shows much more often than it tells. It is contagious, and it is something we need to remember.

Hello, new readers: I HOPE YOU STAY

Two days ago I posted about some terrible news, and as it happens the post was picked up by some very popular online news sources. I'm uneasy about the fact that I've gained something from this awful situation, but right now this blog is getting many times more traffic than I've ever seen from it. In a day or two things will probably go back to normal, but I am going to have new readers who I should really serve with some kind of introduction.

Hi, my name's David Cabrera. I like otaku stuff, including but not limited to videogames (arcade-style, particularly fighting games) and anime/manga (the manly, the girly, and robots). I write about geek issues at a number of spots online in addition to this blog. I'm Anime News Network's toy columnist, a contributor to Otaku USA magazine, and a founding member of Colony Drop. Lately I can be found more often in those places than I can here.

That said, I've been running this blog going on (oh my god) four years, and if you like what you see here rest assured that the backlog runs very, very deep. I hope you enjoy it.

Did I ever tell you guys how THE ANIMATION IN SONIC CD IS KIND OF A MASTERPIECE

I am totally serious about this. I was going through the Sakuga Wiki's list of technically impressive animation, and there it was again. The animation in Sonic CD absolutely blew my mind as a kid: it made me feel like I was right in getting a Sega CD for my birthday (I was right about Sonic CD, of course, just not about the console) and it was one a thousand tiny childhood brushes with anime/manga that planted the seeds of what would become an obsession.

Though this video leaves out a few cuts, it contains most of the animation that Toei and Studio Junio did for the game: an opening, an ending, and the scenes that played over the ending credits. I used the Japanese version music not out of any hate for the US version opening theme, Sonic Boom (quite the contrary!) but out of love for the JP version ending theme, Cosmic Eternity.

Something to keep in mind about this animation is that it absolutely did not need to look as good as it did. I don't mean that because a videogame was somehow unworthy of such high-quality work: I say that because of the Sega CD itself. As one of the first mass-market consoles capable of displaying full-motion video, video playback was very early and very rough.

This is how that animation actually looked in the game. The Sega CD didn't even have powerful enough hardware to display video that filled the screen, so video had to be displayed in small letterboxes and the animation you see on the screen is way scaled down from the original work. In particular, the credits scenes are tiny! I get the feeling that the scenes were animated anticipating this loss-- there isn't a lot of shading on the characters, for example-- and that scaling down the animation for the SCD was likely quite an undertaking itself.

The reason we have high-quality video of these scenes is that Sonic CD was later ported to consoles that could better handle video, and they're a revelation, aren't they? There are all kinds of little details (particularly in the opening) that never would have made it to my eyes from the muddy Sega CD video. One has to wonder why they did all the hard work in the first place, or hell, how they were able to.

Compare this blowout to recent anime studio collaborations on videogames: Studio 4C's totally shameful work on Street Fighter IV, or Gonzo's good but very brief scenes for the Blazblue games. I suppose it was a different time for the Japanese animation industry.

Nothing can survive the way you stay alive!

RIP Satoshi Kon: we're lost without you

1963-2010

After a day of dreadful speculation, it has been confirmed that prolific anime director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Millenium Actress, Paprika, and others) has passed away: the cause of death was pancreatic cancer. Kon was 47.

The title of this post is not hyperbole: I'm not in the business of weighing human lives against each other, but I cannot think of a single person alive in the Japanese animation industry who would have been a greater loss than Mr. Kon. After a long career and a decade in the director's seat of some incredible, reality-bending films, Kon was still in his prime. The man showed no signs of losing his touch; there could have been so many movies ahead of him. Indeed, it remains to be seen what will become of his final project, The Dreaming Machine.

What's also sad is that Kon was the brightest star of a dying breed. There aren't very many people left making big-ticket, mainstream animated films in Japan anymore: established bigshots like Mamoru Oshii and Studio Ghibli (whose work has been in a noticeable decline) appear bored with their jobs. People are whispering in worried tones about what's up with Kon's employers at Madhouse, and those guys just said that Redline (a pet project that, while spectacular, isn't expected to be very popular) was likely to be the last fully 2D film of its caliber ever made. There aren't a lot of people left with the resources or the will to make movies like this.

I'm talking about creators who can afford to work outside the "otaku anime" lines. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be here if I didn't love my otaku stuff, but you can't get by on the same thing over and over again. We've seen the Japanese animation industry begin to swallow itself over the course of the last decade.

Despite no shortage of interest, the US market didn't work out as planned (that can of worms is too big to get into). Putting kids' anime aside, anime is now almost entirely made for otaku, by otaku. Nobody else will work in animation because the pay is unlivable. The success of anime is completely dependent on the sales of DVDs and Blu-Rays, whose exorbitant prices can only be paid by the most fanatical otaku with very specific tastes. The final result is that animation studios have to hope to buy their meals with large volumes of cynical me-too bullshit.

And then there was Satoshi Kon, a guy who actually had the freedom and the financial backing to forge his own path, someone who made films with mass appeal that didn't lean on otaku-friendly cliche. It can't be overstated how rare this is, how many frustrated creators feel trapped by their industry. Masaaki Yuasa is left, Mamoru Hosoda is left, but the field of great anime creators is so thin right now that just losing one-- much less one of Kon's stature-- is absolutely devastating. 

In many ways and by many people, Mr. Kon will be missed. I'm just an animation fan, but I'd like to offer my deepest condolences to those who knew and loved him.

Edit 8/25/10: Wow, thanks to Metafilter and Fark there are more people here today than I've ever had. I have edited the cause of death into the post. While I have your attention, I'd like to link to two more illuminating points of view on this: Anipages Daily and Patrick Macias. Finally, Mr. Kon left a message to be posted on his website after his death, partially translated here and available in Japanese here.

Edit 8/26/10: Kon's final words have been translated in their entirety.

Natsuki Crisis: YOU ARE THE MIGHTY, EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR POWER. BUT SOMETIMES I SAW TEARFUL FACE.

I couldn't be at Anime World Order's panel at Otakon, but I value the guys' opinions so I took a look at their list.

"Natsuki Crisis – girl’s martial arts OAV that has actual cool fight scenes instead of cheap animation and clothes tearing off"

This is what I'm talking about, man! I obviously ran out and watched it right away.

Natsuki Crisis is a short direct-to-video series the likes of which we saw all the time in the 90s: say you have a reasonably popular, long-running manga and you'd like to adapt it to animation, but it's not big enough to go to TV. In these cases, a short OAV-- perhaps two or three episodes but frequently a one-shot-- would be produced and sold to the pre-existing fans of the manga. This is one such production.

  

Natsuki is a high school karate master, and boy does she love fightin'! And non-lethal takedowns! And friendship! Based on a long-running fight manga, but with only an hour running time, Natsuki Crisis stuffs two story arcs into two episodes. It's got all of the people punching each other in the face I demand, with none of the filler. You know how this kind of thing goes: Natsuki fights against progressively stronger opponents, knocks them through walls, learns fancy techniques, and so on.

It's very straightforward, very earnest, and surprisingly modest with the fanservice. That's refreshing: usually anime about girls fighting (well, given the premise...) is sleazy on the level of Ikkitousen or, at worst, completely fucking odious like the recent Master of Martial Hearts.

 

This was handled by Madhouse on a good day, so you get an hour packed with well-made fight scenes. Here and there you'll notice a still frame or an animation repeat, but more often (even in the fights against random losers) you'll see something really fluid and exciting, way past what you're used to in fight anime. One of the reasons guys like me gush about OVAs in the 80s and 90s was that they had actual animation budgets, and it shows like crazy here. You don't have to sit through 40 crappy episodes or hours of money-saving flashback sequences to get to the good stuff here, so give it a look. It'll only take you an hour!

Blazblue Continuum Shift: Tsubaki NOTEPAD 1 - WHY IS TSUBAKI WEAK?

My 360 is red-ringed (and I still haven't sent it in for repairs, shame on me) but I managed to borrow one for a little while because Blazblue: Continuum Shift came out. For most people, the upgrade of last year's 2D fighting game isn't really a big deal. There are only two new characters: well, three more are coming as download content and they cost $8 apiece.

I will address the player outrage on this subject very quickly: small company, niche audience, and a pile of hi-def 2D animation work for each character, work so difficult that nobody else in videogames bothers doing it. The only reason Arc does it is that their people are stubborn 2D lovers and anime/manga fans. This is the cost of being a niche fan.

Anyway, as long-time readers know, I'm the kind of guy who tears apart and devours fighting games from upgrade to upgrade. I'm the core audience, and Continuum Shift is worth the money to me. If you have the first Blazblue version and you weren't too crazy about that, it probably won't be. Though I should note that if you're a first-timer, the game contains excellent beginner-level tutorials exceeding anything in any other 2D fighting game.

In the week I've been able to play Continuum Shift (it will probably be another month before I'm playing it again), I've been focusing on the new character Tsubaki. She's rather weak from a theory point of view, but she's fun to play as so I don't care that much. As I have done before, I will be jotting down my initial thoughts on the character after a few days' play. I have been egregiously wrong in the past (Juri's Feng Shui Engine is in fact her better Ultra by a mile) but what the hell. This post will be so long I'm already splitting it up and I haven't even finished writing it.

Hey guys, I'M WRITING FOR OTAKU USA TOO

Good news, everyone. Otaku USA, the last remaining anime magazine in the States, has taken me on board as a contributor. In fact, my first pieces for the OUSA website have already gone up: a full review of Welcome to the Space Show and the in-depth post about my mahjong panel that I hinted at in the Otakon writeup. I'm also working on a certain something or other for the magazine (oh boy, oh boy, my name in print), so look forward to it!

And don't worry, I'll post on this blog soon sometime too! But in the meantime keep reading Colony Drop (ESPECIALLY TOMORROW) and Astro Toy and OUSA and you'll make us all very happy.

Otakon 2010: Saturday and Sunday - STILL DOIN' THANGS

Alright guys, let's see if I still remember. Saturday morning I was hitting the dealer's and game rooms again, getting breakfast, waiting for Space Show.

Welcome to the Space Show was probably the biggest thing going on at the con as far as I cared: it's a new movie by the Read or Die and Kamichu staff. I dunno about it: it wants to be a kids' movie but really it's an animator's movie, and the animators overindulge themselves severely while the plot and characters lie mostly forgotten over two and a half hours. When the movie tries to take itself seriously at the end, it just lands with a thud.

It was also one of the few times I've ever seen a kids' movie actually make a character out of the pedophile in the audience: thankfully they only kept the outright fawning over a seven-year-old to a few scenes but it's really creepy. I don't think they'd be able to give this one a theatrical run in the states. Hope they weren't looking for one!

As the credits rolled for Space Show and we walked out of the theater, we heard an alarm. Now I'd heard a lot of things during Space Show through the thin walls-- the Yoshida Brothers unwittingly contributing some totally harsh shamisen solos to the film's score, the Hetalia fangirls squealing at the top of their lungs for no particular reason-- so I'm thinking "this is just another noise". As you might already be aware, it was in fact a fire alarm. The real thing. We were very calmly and efficiently moved out of the place, though it was seriously hard not to laugh-- even with the possibility of life-threatening danger in my mind-- when the staffer directing me out had fuzzy cat ears on his head.

None of us died, but I might have if I'd had to spend any time with all 30,000 of my fellow meme-yelling Otakon attendees standing out on the same city block. I retreated as fast as I reasonably could to the hotel room, where we all tried to figure out what the hell was going on in the aftermath of the evacuation. The official word was that "a fire alarm was pulled", which isn't very illuminating. Most likely scenario? Some kid pulled it on purpose. Could have been an accident, of course, but the former is more likely. Other scenarios that were going around at the time included basement fires and people in heavy costumes passing out from heat exhaustion. We'll probably never know the whole thing.

To their credit, Otakon and the fire department took care of this situation very quickly. We were all back in the building in an hour, when I'd expected the scare to put us out for at least two, if not three.

Around this time I had to cover the modeling competition for ANN and here's how that went. This is not an event that tends to get any major website coverage, so I thought it would be cool to use what little power I have as The Toy Guy and give it a little attention. Models are kinda like toys.

Unfortunately, after covering the contest I couldn't make it in for AWO's panel scheduled a little later: they were full long before they started anyway.

After that I spent a couple of hours talking with an old friend by the terrace as what Surat might call "THE TRUTH" took place all around us. While I was waiting for her and watching the people around me, I realized I just kind of hated the con crowd. I hadn't really had extended contact up until this point of the day, because I was always in transit from one event to the other or hanging out someplace with friends.

Sitting by the terrace, I got to see that yes, somebody on the con floor really would scream an internet meme as loud as their lungs could manage every two or three minutes, usually followed by ten more kids doing the same. The worst was the self-propagating "buttscratcher" scream, followed closely by impromptu games of Marco Polo. People aren't exaggerating when they tell you about this: the first couple times you brush it off and say "oh, kids", but they never, ever stop. The worst was when I was crossing the bridges, because there were so many people in such a concentrated space. Their voices-- from right behind me-- bounced off the walls, back and forth into my ears, over and over again. It's a serious annoyance.

It's irritating to the point where people wanted an (unenforceable) ban on such behavior even before the con, and it's just what happens whenever anybody has an anime convention anywhere. Otakon is actually pretty strict on annoying anime fan stuff: signs, yaoi paddles and (pre-emptively, after they were rampant at Anime Expo) vuvuzelas were banned as anime fans immediately demonstrated that they could be absoutely fucking unbearable with any one of these implements.

For whatever reason, a lot of the people who will go to anime cons are dead set on being as obnoxious as the con will let them get away with. This is why New York Anime Fest, which has no such rules, can be such a horrifying picture, for example. Signs are everywhere and getting in the way, people are whipping out live steel that they bought in the dealer's room in the middle of a crowded convention hall (someone's going to lose a limb at NYAF and I sincerely hope it isn't me), and the kids are running, screaming and crashing into each other the whole time.

THE TRUTH is the truth. It's not fair to just blame this on the kids, because they're not the only guilty parties. Many anime fans, especially the con-going ones, are just inherently obnoxious. Hell, a lot of con-goers don't even care that much about anime. You can't just make all these people wake up in the morning and decide they're not annoying as hell. They're here to scream unfunny memes and go to the rave, they're here to stay, and they are probably in the majority. This bums me out when the Madhouse panel is barely occupied, but the numbers are not going to change. We've got to live with the nerds we've got, and thankfully they're not all bad.

That said, I didn't really have the kind of strange encounters this weekend that I've had in past years, like Morrigan-who-really-shouldn't-be-wearing-that trying to pick me up, or a grown man not understanding why my friends and I won't vacate the our hotel room so he can bring a 15-year-old girl in for sex, or anything like that. I guess the more downtime you spend at these cons, the more likely something is to go down.

I dropped by wah's panel on Akiyuki Shinbo for a bit but I had to go for uh, reasons, and then we all looked for lunch on the harbor, which was impossible. Thank god for California Tortilla, the only damn fast food place in the area brave enough to remain open past 10 or so. The food was okay, but the important thing was that they were open. We saw some drunk guys, not con-goers, throw water bottles at each other in the line. I also crushed wah's Japanese girlfriend t-shirt dream somewhere in there.

After dinner it was off to drink a bathtub full of Yuengling's at Dave and Joel's party. I believe I'm in Erin's audio of the event for about a few minutes making fun of Ageha magazine with Clarissa and Gerald from AWO. This was very relaxed, despite a physically packed room. It was great to chat up all these people I've been having so many online conversations with in person and, of course, over a couple drinks. That's when the best conversation comes, don't you think?

Dave asked me what my Otakon Dream was and I'd had enough to drink that my answer was obviously "even more to drink!". So I got more to drink, except I just passed out (in an orderly fashion, okay!) in the hotel room when I got there. In the end we just left the extra booze as part of our tip (I actually gave the mousepad to Vertical later) to the wait staff on Sunday morning. Hope you guys enjoyed the Black and Tan!

Sunday is pretty much Out Out Out day: I hit up the dealer's room, scoring a Giant Robo cel and a Megazone 23 Part II poster. I hadn't bought anything all weekend, but the seller that always comes by with cels and 80s/90s posters just broke me. If I'd been weaker I'd have bought one MORE of each, especially that cel from-- NO IF I SAY YOU'LL BUY IT

I dropped my stuff off with Ed at the Vertical table and headed off to the Home Made Kazoku concert. The first thing they played was Shonen Heart, and the press people I was with immediately ran up to the front to snap pictures. Mine all suck, unfortunately, but man, I was up there, and I love that song! It was great! The HMKU guys were a lot of fun, and I regret not being able to stay the whole show (they did Thank You at the end, a song my VF bros got me hooked on back then), but that's how Sunday is. Everybody's really got to get the hell out.

(Anyway, if you're gonna get people who did Naruto theme songs, I would love to see Sambomaster do a con show. You know they'd say yes, Otakon. You know they'd pack the house, and their show is guaranteed to kill.)

We loaded up the Komobile and were on our way. Before actually leaving Baltimore we went and got BBQ at Chaps, which is next to a strip joint, across from a porn warehouse, a few buildings from a cheap motel, and absolutely delicious. The platter is a spectacular combination of the meat of your choice, fries, bread, and enough gravy to make everything melt together into a delicious semi-solid. It was the only thing I ate that day and I still couldn't make it through all those fries. Just be careful what trash can you use: here there be flies.

Despite doing quite a bit of sleeping in the car, I just put down everything and passed out in bed once I got home like I always do. Being so busy and getting so little sleep (I'd say four or five hours a night) for a full weekend really beats you up, not to mention all the drinking I did on Saturday night. A few days later I was sick, and I heard all my roomies got sick too. This is another sacrifice of living well at an anime con. If you get sick, that just means you maxed out. Just like I'm hung over on this fine Sunday!

So yeah, Otakon went great this year. Not Jam Project great, but great. You can tell I only participated in a few of the events, and not a lot of the big ones, but I still had an awesome time. The con's so big that it's hard not to figure something out you're going to enjoy. It's also so big that half my Internet friends on the east coast were present, and I got to hang out with people I hadn't seen in a really long time. There are a lot of reasons to go, even if the con still doesn't announce anything until it's way too late. I'm already in the process of booking a room for next time.