Subatomic Brainfreeze

I have a confession to make: THE FANDUB OF PRINCE OF TENNIS IS MY ANIME HOLY GRAIL

Well, alright, it's second place, next to an uncensored print of the Fist of the North Star movie suddenly appearing out of nowhere. But every time I recall this oddity, I wish I had it again, and I look for it, and there's nothing.

Yes, it's awful. The fansubbers at Anime-Otakus, who had translated the entire TV series, saw fit to dub an episode, despite lacking things like actors. What resulted was 25 minutes of a fansubber reading his own script emotionlessly for every single guy in the show. There was a girl to cover the two female characters, and did I forget to mention that the fansubber also dubs the opening and ending theme songs?

The great thing about this dub is how strictly it adheres to the rules for fan subtitles, utterly ignoring how things actually sound in English. There is no rewriting of the fansub script, highlighting the fact that the average fansub script sounds nothing like a conversation between human beings. Segments of dialogue are even timed to when one would imagine the subtitles appear on screen. The coup de grace is that the hero's catchphrase, "mada mada da ne"-- which is a "you've got a long way to go" kind of statement-- is left untranslated. It is the absolute height of hilarity to hear this line spoken in English in the middle of conversation. I can't explain it. It's too wonderful.

It's a pretty amazing watch for a bad anime enthusiast like me, and I can't find it anywhere. I just spent the afternoon digging through my archives from around the time it came out, and there's nothing. The only things that come up on Google are little posts like this: the fansubber appears defunct, and I really doubt they were proud of this after the kind of feedback they must have received. Note the comment on that post: apparently there were three episodes of this.

So, in conclusion, I'm putting out a formal call to the entire internet: if you have any or all of Prince of Tennis fandub by Anime-Otakus, kindly hook me up. I miss it so, and the internet will be a better place with it freely available on, say, Youtube or some such.

New York Anime Fest 09: SOUL OF TOMINICA

Obviously the big draw was ol' Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of Mobile Suit Gundam and a ton of other anime. Fans are already very familiar with the guy, and not too many people are going to go see him without knowing who he is, so there were really no surprises when he took the stage for the keynote, or for the Q&A session.

I'm not going to get too deep into the keynote, because, frankly, I'm saving my opinion piece about the keynote for Colony Drop. Look forward to it! There was quite a turnout, though, and people were really excited: they ran a highlight reel of Tomino series over the years before the Q&A and the crowd ate it up. The keynote had serious translation problems, as has been documented. Everybody in the room was mortified for the translator, who couldn't seem to figure out anything Tomino said and had to have his work picked up for him by two other translators. The guy across the aisle from me had his head down because he just didn't want to watch, and I know exactly how he felt. Thankfully they switched up for the Q&A and there were no problems there.

In a characteristically Tomino move, our hero tossed out the questions that Anime News Network had prepared for him from an internet forum thread and demanded to go through the questions of the masses lined up before him, because they were "actually here". I was shooting the major stuff onto the Twitter: this guy is brutally honest in an industry where nobody can afford to be. Whenever anybody asks him any question, he's worth a listen. Tomino's a fan of making vague answers that leave room for the listener to interpret that he is holding back private, intense loathing. In response to "why did you return to Zeta Gundam after all those years?", for example, Tomino simply responded that "people wanted to to make money," confirming everything that critical observers had noticed about those movies. Nobody was safe! Kunio Okawara wasn't safe! Tezuka wasn't safe! We laughed, we applauded him, it was a good time.

I was also lucky enough to receive my second Tomino signature: the first was back in the days of Big Apple Anime Fest, where I brought him an adorable talking Haro alarm clock, and this one was was the vintage Gundam III poster I bought a year ago at Otakon. It's a beautiful poster of the famous Last Shooting scene by Kunio Okawara... that guy whose work Tomino said he didn't care for the day before. Oh well! The crew I was running with all brought progressively more awesome items for Tomino to sign, from an original theatrical program for Gundam III to a Zambot 3 box set to Garzey's Fucking Wing.

That about wraps up NYAF for me on this blog. I do enjoy this con, but given the unsolvable size problem and my interests compared to those of the majority, there's not a ton to do. First priority was obviously Tomino, second was hanging out with people, and the rest I could essentially take or leave. I'll probably do it next year, though I should note that a press badge makes this decision very easy and your personal mileage may vary. Here's hoping their guests are as good.

New York Anime Fest 09: BLOGGER ROUNDTABLE OR "HOW DO I PROMOTE COLONY DROP"

How, indeed. How to go to an anime convention and promote a website that stands firmly against the most firmly held cartoon-related beliefs of nearly all of its attendees? After that panel, I still don't really know. But in any case, I brought fliers that only say the mean things people have said about us on the internet! At the start of the panel I went around the room handing these out and the reactions were interesting. A couple people laughed, someone asked me "did people actually say this stuff?" (they did) and one guy who I thought was saying yes was actually saying no, and insistently refused the flyer. Did he know us? Maybe so!

Let's get to the conditions of the panel: we were up against the Masquerade and the Evangelion movie. Looking out from the panel I saw a sea of red press badges, and when we did a show of hands, it turned out our crowd was composed almost entirely of other bloggers. Some old acquaintances of mine showed up, and they left fast. A lot of people left fast.

So then let's get straight to the issues, which we've talked about at length amongst ourselves since the panel. This was a first shot, so it was rocky. The panel itself was too big (ten people!), and it didn't really help that we all took turns answering questions: I think we got through three out of many, and when we were finished I felt like we'd only really finished our personal introductions. Blogging had only kind of entered the picture by the time we'd finished.

Around the end, we got to the kind of situation we hope to establish on these sites: a utopia where we aren't all broken up into cliques, where have a respectful discourse, tolerant of criticism, that we can all gain something from. Obviously Colony Drop took a couple of shots: the first was "well, you can't just make inflammatory posts and troll!", at which both the audience and the panelists' eyes went to me. Another time it was "you guys can take all the negativity and the rest of us cool kids will have all the productive discussion!" Ah, boy. I guess things like this are part of the job. If you can't read the air with CD, man, there's nothing I can do to help you. I didn't really get a chance to adequately explain (I told the crowd to "troll what you believe in" which doesn't quite say it), so I'll tell you this: we at CD aren't trolling-- we do essentially believe the stuff we say, I really do feel that way about Haruhi and Key-- but we aren't taking ourselves (or anime) overly seriously either. We're having fun. You should be too.

Speaking of which, here is my practical advice to the prospective anime blogger, which I regret not having gotten to in the panel (with the exception of "swear more so that you get hits from people looking for porn"):

Like I just said, have fun. If you aren't having fun, stop what you're doing and try something else. Write to entertain your audience, not to feel good about yourself. Try new things: don't stick yourself in the past, the present, the future, a genre, a weird otaku fetish, whatever. Just don't get stuck. There is always something interesting to post about: you just haven't thought of it yet. Blogging about blogging (like this post) is almost always a bad idea, because unless your audience is entirely bloggers, you will bore the hell out of them.

In any case, it was a good first try. I had a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next one of these: hopefully we'll get a little more done.

New York Anime Fest 09: THINGS THAT AREN'T TOMINO

Well, I'd better get all this out of the way before I forget it happened. New York Anime Fest was last weekend: this is the con's third year, I pretty much knew what to expect coming in, and I got exactly what I thought I would. Let's go through the pros and cons of this convention really quick, as they are the same every year.

As an NYC commuter I'm obviously very happy to be able to go to a con where I don't have to put down a couple hundred for room and board, but the convenient location comes at great cost. Everything that's wrong with NYAF is something that can't really be helped. They don't have enough room in the Javits: to visualize how crowded the place is, imagine Otakon numbers walking around in a space a quarter of Otakon's size at best. Of course, the Javits is really expensive-- during the CPM retrospective our host guessed that it was probably a couple hundred bucks a minute just to be in that room-- and high rent is just a fact of NYC life.

Side note: food prices are through the roof ($2.50 Coke cans!) in the building, so I advise anybody going to anything at the Javits load up on food beforehand. I did this at Go Go Curry on the first day and Subway on the second.

Because this is a for-profit con, the dealer's room is really the main attraction, with panels running on the side. Nothing really unusual there: one booth was selling really obvious bootlegs (HK DVD box sets and Prince of Tennis figures that weren't quite Sader but were really bootleg-ugly) and another had a ton of old VHS that I might have put up the cash for if it had been a buck or two cheaper per tape.

Behind the dealer's room was the World Cyber Games. A pro gaming league-- especially one that deals primarily in real-time strategy and first-person shooters-- is kind of out pf place at an anime convention, and for its part WCG made no attempt to reach out. Anime con people didn't go into WCG, WCG people didn't go into the con, you get the idea. I stopped by here a few times because they were playing nationals for Virtua Fighter 5 and many of the players are friends. I woke up a little too late to catch the finals though. I regret it: just watching the guys play really made me miss the game, and it was an even bigger bummer thinking about what's up with VF5R. It's so bad that every time I talk to one of my old VF buddies, we talk about jumping ship to Tekken 6 when it comes out for consoles. Sega, Sega, look what you've done to yourselves!

On the side, you've got your maid cafe, which has always been peculiar. The law ensures that the maids can't actually serve food or drink, so they're more all-purpose entertainers: last year we chatted with a maid while we rested from the con, and it was nice. This year, probably to avoid crowding, the event stage and the maid cafe were put together, to pretty ugly results. See, having a stage there means having huge, loud speakers there, and this means that the area was no longer a place to relax and get away from the con. We sat down for about ten minutes before getting hit with the maids yelling at people to come up and dance on the speakers, and we left juuust when they started Boom Boom Boom Boom (I Want You In My Room). Later, we would find that escaping the con entirely and sitting at the tables at the closed food court was what the cool kids do.

You kind of want to get away from the con after a couple hours of it, because man, the kids are really out in full force, being as obnoxious as they wanna be. This is a given at any anime con, but it's worse at NYAF because unlike many fan-run cons, nobody's come up with such wise rules as "no hug me signs", "no yaoi paddles", and "stop running and screaming and flailing and swinging that fucking ridiculous thing you bought at the dealer's room around". In summary, a cosplayer raised a sign inviting us to a con orgy on the way out Friday.

The only not-Tomino panel I went to was the CPM Retrospective, which was loads of fun and really deserved to pull more people. Did you know that when CPM hired you, they'd show you a highlight reel of their most atrocious porn (my buddy who used to work for them said he'd seen all these shows before) and then plop a "I am not offended by this" form in front of you? Because that's how they used to roll.

Highlight of the panel was definitely the anecdote about the host, his boss, the CEO, and a lawyer standing around watching Night Shift Nurses and trying to figure out if they were going to sell it. They were on the fence about the pissing, but CEO John O'Donnell decided "If it's in Penthouse, it's fine!", sent a secretary for a Penthouse, and sure enough, there was the pissing. Or maybe the time they took Utena's Kunihiko Ikuhara to a trashy bar where the hot chick bartenders made out with each other, and Ikuhara was all "RESBIANS!!" God, what a company. It really makes you wish they were still in business. Also, there was an apology for the Patlabor dub and that fucked-up Slayers DVD box, which I appreciated. I described this panel as both "owns" on Twitter while I was at it, and then "owned" on Twitter once I had left. This is the proper use of a Web 2.0.

The only anime I saw was Cencoroll: produced by one dude (Atsuya Uki), the story is basically JD Salinger's Pokemon. An antisocial young man and his pet shapeshifter fight another antisocial young man and his pet shapeshifter, and visual fireworks ensue. There's probably more creative animation in this half-hour than there is in many anime TV series' entire runs. People in the crowd after the movie were complaining that everything wasn't explained and spelled out to them, and to these people I say "go back to Jump and leave the animator alone".

I didn't take a ton of pictures but I'm going to go ahead and authoritatively pronounce that Maetel and her luggage (and, yeah, the Bumblebee guy) won cosplay.

Alright, guys, let's go through the New York Anime Fest schedule

When I went to Otakon, I always got there on Thursday, and I advise you always do the same if you can: waiting in a long line to get your badge early means you don't waste valuable convention time in the even-longer lines on Friday. Of course, there is one drawback to this approach: no matter how you spend Thursday, you spend Thursday night waiting for the real fun to start, like a kid on Christmas Eve.

I try to keep a certain jaded-fan decorum around here, but the fact is I would always page excitedly through the Otakon pocket schedules with my friends, plotting a doomed course through the convention. You won't end up doing 100% of what you plan to do unless you have supernatural willpower and are exceptionally boring. Staying on track isn't entirely recommended. With that in mind, I've been looking at the New York Anime Fest schedule, so here's my commentary on what I see, and what I might plan to be at. I'm not planning to go to most of this stuff, I just love my snarky comments. Obviously I will be at the Blogger Roundtable, Saturday, 8PM, Panel 4. Also, have you seen the Colony Drop business card? Damn, it's nice!

Thursday kind of counts: Del Rey is having something involving cake at Dave and Buster's, and I do want to play some Daytona.

Friday:

How to Become Famous on the Internet: NOBODY SHOULD WANT TO DO THIS

Mobile Suit Gundam I is the weakest of the movies, but I guess you gotta show the beginning.

Why Anime: DON'T PUT JAPANESE CARTOONS (JAPANESE AMMUNITION) ON A PEDESTAL AND FORM A GUIDING PHILOSOPHY AROUND IT: YOU COULD BE WATCHING GIANT ROBO INSTEAD

How I Broke Into the Anime/Manga Industry: Yo, any of you guys got a gig? I'll work in your mailroom, file cabinets, whatever bro

Tomino has a keynote, obviously. This is going on the same time as Vertical's panel, which is really sad. Ed's a really chill guy and an absolute treasure trove of manga knowledge, so if you're not interested in hearing from Tomino, I recommend you go see Vertical. Ed needs you. I'll be seeing Tomino. Sorry!

Definitely seeing Cencoroll at the end of the night. You should too: it's short and I've heard nothing but good things about it. Really looking forward to this.

Saturday:

Avoid the Zeta Gundam movies. They were a doomed project from the start, they don't have the time to effectively tell the story, and most importantly they don't make sense to anyone who isn't already very familiar with the original 50-episode series. Sorry, Mr. Tomino.

Blogger Roundtable, on the other hand, is important stuff. I am on this panel. There are so many people on this panel that I'm not going to link everybody. We're running against the Masquerade and Captain Tylor, which I think nails down 99% and the other 1% of the anime con population. Let's see how it goes. I hope you enjoy us!

Sunday:

"Convention War Stories" is always tempting. I love to hear and tell con stories: hell, I'm compiling my own right now.

Do yourself a favor and only watch the last half hour or so of the Gurren Lagann movie. You've missed nothing.

I wonder how the people running the Gegege no Kitaro panel feel about KITARO'S GRAVEYARD GANG?

CPM Retrospective is probably something that I, as a member of the Colony Drop Organization, am obligated to visit.

And that's it! It leaves plenty of wiggle room, and, con aside, I'm pretty sure that I'm booked from Thursday morning to Sunday night. Those of you who are coming to NYAF, have fun! Also, see us at the panel and look out for the Colony Drop flyers I'll be leaving around.

New York Anime Fest 09: I'M GONNA BE AT A PANEL

Here's a heads-up for you: take a look at the events at New York Anime Fest this year. Note the "Blogger Roundtable," going on from 8 to 9 on Saturday night. Note the guests. I'm there, friends are there, I'm sure it'll be a good time. If you're actually still at NYAF at this time, come by! We'll be happy to have you, and you can definitely have a Colony Drop flyer. My own con flier is forthcoming.

Not doing Otakon this year

Last year I did a really big Otakon report, so I'm just putting out a heads-up that I won't be there this time. Why not air out my concerns? First reason is obviously cost: Otakon, as any of you who have been already know, is one of the most expensive anime cons you're going to go to without getting on a plane. The con sells out the hotels of the entire town of Baltimore nine months before it even happens. Rooms are not cheap. Likewise, it's pretty well-known that the merchants of the town all raise prices for Otakon weekend (and I don't blame them). This is putting aside the cost of transit: from here in NYC I can pay out the nose for Amtrak, pay a bit less and suffer with the smell of piss on Greyhound, or pay ten bucks and risk my life on the Chinatown bus. I have a good story about Chinatown buses. Maybe I'll tell you sometime.

The next issue is the whole "nine months in advance" thing, which is an unfortunate side effect of a large con like this. You can't just decide to go to Otakon a month in advance. You can't even find out of there's anything you like there before you commit, because with Otakon you really can't be sure until two weeks before the event (when exactly did they announce Ishiguro for this year?). Unfortunately for you, hotels are sold out long before anybody knows anything about anything, because that's how fans are. If I'm gonna drop that kind of money, I really need to know what I'm paying for.

Last year, for JAM Project Con America '08, I was lucky enough to get in with a regular group of friends. I'm sure they could have worked me in for this year, but between the cost and my general apathy on the event, I didn't bother getting to them. Given the whole year I had to prepare, I certainly could have scrounged up enough cash to go, but since graduation I've been telling myself "these kinds of expenses should wait until you're steadily employed". (Hire me. I'll do whatever and I'll do it cheap.) So there's that. Final blow.

So no Otakon this weekend. I'd rather be there regardless, but that has less to do with the con itself than the fact that all my friends--from real life and from the Internet-- will be there. Have fun, guys!

(I'll miss you too, Scary Rena.)

Anyway, here's a story from one of the first Otakons I went to. Probably the first, maybe the second. The guys and I have a 1 PM bus back to Chinatown, but 1 PM came and went. We knew something was wrong at 1; we knew something was really wrong around 5. We didn't know just how wrong things were until 10, when a minivan bearing our bus company's name rolled by. My friends and I piled in, no questions asked. We knew that if we didn't take this we weren't getting anything at all. The other half of the bus was shit out of luck. We watched them sitting out behind the McDonalds with a bit of shocked pity as we sped out of the lot. And speed we did: the driver was taking our little box home at a consistent 80-90 miles per hour. This includes when he got into the city. When Chiyo-chan steps out of the car with her shivers and her dead-eyed stare, I understand. I, too, was once in the car while Yukari drove like a god damn maniac.

I got third place in a Pac-Man tournament and all I got was this PRICELESS T-SHIRT

In addition to the pile of prizes that I won for making third at Uniqlo NYC's Pac-Man tournament, there was a final and, by far, greatest gift that I had been waiting for until earlier this week: a T-shirt bearing the signature of Mr. Toru Iwatani, the fellow who created Pac-Man all those years ago. These pictures really should have gone up on the site days ago... but they didn't! The shirt came with a nice handwritten note from Uniqlo's marketing dude, and all of it has naturally been locked away in a closet forever on top of my bagged, signed JAM Project shirt. Hey, at least some of the things I hoard are priceless.

Friday I went to 8 On The Break: MY SKILLS HAVE DETERIORATED BY ONE THIRD

In an important personal development, I graduated from college this past Wednesday (hire me). Yes, this explains the slow pace of updates lately: I have been getting my affairs in order and preparing to make an overdue entrance into the adult world (please hire me). After suffering through a three-hour parade of insincere feel-good speeches, my contemporaries and I all needed to have a real celebration. I could have just boozed it up at another grad party, but it was at that 5-shots-for-$10 place. You know how packed that shit is on a Friday night? No thanks. Instead, I took a late suggestion: a trip to Eight on the Break, all the way out in Northern New Jersey. From my front door, the place takes me about two hours and change to get to. Worse than going to Staten Island! As a transitional ceremony, though, a night at the Break made sense.

I used to go to the Break, back when I was a more regular arcade rat. I was really into Bemani stuff, particularly Beatmania IIDX and Pop'n Music. Both of these games offered and continue to offer the absolute bleeding edge of difficulty, both in their genre and, indeed, in videogames period. I like to compare IIDX in particular to Cave's shooting games: here we have a game made specifically for people who are already genre experts, with the rest of the world dismissed as an afterthought. So of course they appealed to me. I'd already banged my head against Dodonpachi Daioujou for a month. At this point in my gaming life, just getting better was the best thing in the world to me.

I played little but IIDX and Pop'n for over two years, blowing my paychecks (hire me) on the ludicrous deluxe controllers, the sequels that came out every nine months. And then I'd spend weekends on IIDX and Pop'n machines in the basement of a Long Island strip mall, the only ones in the state, or I'd head even further out to the Break if I wanted IIDX and fighting games and a cheese steak. Eventually I reached a wall where the amount of effort it took me to get better was greater than the enjoyment I took from getting better. I've never had genre burnout before or since, but this was definitely it. This is a good time to stop on a silly pursuit like playing a videogame, unless you're a Korean Starcraft pro or something, in which case, get money get paid (hire me). I drifted away from the games, and now the giant controllers I used to be so excited about are collecting dust. The Break was an even more distant memory than the games themselves were. I couldn't escape the pull of nostalgia, so of course I agreed to go to the Break. Right after my usual Book-Off visit, of course.

The place itself is as authentic an arcade as you're ever going to see, probably more so than Chinatown Fair. You know why I say this? It's not really the games: in the back, they've got a snack bar, a couple of pool tables, wood-paneled walls. You sit at the bar-- which serves just about anything that can be dumped into a fryer, including deep-fried Oreos-- with your cheese steak and Dr. Pepper as the guy behind the bar tells you an off-color joke, and you look at the noisemakers just outside, and you're at home. For an arcade, the place is really cozy. At CF you can't even sit down, you know, unless you're one of those douchebags who lounge inside of the Sega Super GT machine.

Anyway, the first thing I did was get back to Bemani. For a double nostalgic shock, the very same Pop'n Music machine that I used to play back at the strip mall was standing here in front of me. There are a ton of reasons I never got as into Pop'n Music as I did IIDX: though I actually prefer the simpler interface, there's even less good music in Pop'n than in IIDX (ironically, the music has always been these games' weak point), and the home versions had some the most user-unfriendly unlock systems I've ever seen in a videogame. But unlike IIDX, I had never stopped having fun with Pop'n, because playing Pegasus Fantasy is never not fun. In that spirit, I played nothing but the anime theme songs on my runs at the Break, and I regret nothing.

I say my skill has deteriorated by one third because of Pop'n. The game has a difficulty system that goes from 1 on up to 40-something: I used to be able to do songs as far up as 36, but now I can only get away with 29 or less. That's not a third at all, but when I thought "from thirties to twenties" it made sense. At least on Pop'n I could still remember where the buttons were: over at Beatmania I'd found that my fingers had entirely forgotten where to go or even how to get there. I went from being able to do level 9 songs (IIDX operates on a different scale that tops out at 12) down to struggling with 7. Getting a little worse at Pop'n was fine: that game has some design safety nets where you can screw up and be okay. Screwing up in perfectionist IIDX, where you can easily lose in the final moments of a song, is just a totally demoralizing experience. Again, like a Cave game, IIDX isn't concerned with attracting players or even keeping them. If you want to play that game, you have to really want to play that game. I was on Pop'n a lot more.

Then I killed an hour at the bar with my buddy who'd invited me and his friends from work, who'd come up here from way out in Staten Island. I felt a little time warped: I hadn't sat here in a couple of years, circumstances were very different, and I had a bit less to worry about (hire me). With my hands up on the bar, I remembered another reason I was unlikely to come back to Bemani: the games were a recipe for carpal tunnel. Just after a couple of rounds, my fingers felt stretched out, twisted, and strained in a way that fingers should never have to feel. Then I went for those deep-fried Oreos. They taste how they look: kind of sickening and deadly, but anybody who says they aren't delicious is lying.

And of course, the experience just wasn't complete without waiting at a dark, empty railroad station at midnight for the last train back to New York. This is when you look at the trees and think things over. This is exactly the kind of trip I'm not going to be able to make so arbitrarily in my future, responsible-adult life (hire me). It's not like I'll never go to the Break again: it's just that coming by reminded me of a different time in my life, one that has long passed. I will just never make-- I'll never want to make-- that kind of time investment on a game again. It feels weird, knowing that.

I-Con 09's TRANSFORMATION OF ARMAMENT: or a con report (the rest)

On Saturday I went to the dealer's room and I bought all that Patlabor, and then Otokojuku and Blazing Transfer Student pencilboards from the usual retro anime dealer. This year he had an impressive folder of Japanese promo posters for Hollywood films, the most interesting of which was for The World Is Not Enough: it was just Pierce Brosnan in some kind of wacky locks-around-your-neck contraption with an "oh my" look on his face.

The next panel, Saturday night, was our Cosplay Haters panel. I, as expected, played the all-purpose hater, ice burning my fellow panelists rapid-fire, as we went around the room telling con stories. As always for this sort of panel, the crowd has something to say that's at least as interesting as you do. Except for my buddy Joe's "Man gets arm sliced open by the sword he just bought because a dude claiming to be a EUROPEAN SWORD MASTER wanted to look at it" story. That kind of thing is one of a kind.

Cosplay Haters ran right into MD Anime: I tried to segue by running the end of Ninja Terminator (the greatest five minutes in the history of the Ninja Empire), but we had tech problems and I snuck it in the middle of the panel just because I could. Two of my three featured anime have pretty amazing dubs, so I let everybody know that we were watching the glorious English dubs of these anime. When I got some booing from the crowd I ran that Youtube video of the Black Lion dub. Shut the room right up.

I went through MD Geist and Crystal Triangle really fast to give myself room to run Baoh-- which I only watched recently myself-- in its entirety: I was still able to nail all the good parts of Crystal Triangle, but I probably should have given Geist a little more time. At least the knife-grenade scene. You know, when you remove all the nonsense exposition from Crystal Triangle and just tell your crowd what's going on as fast as you can, there's maybe only half an hour worth of onscreen crazy left to watch. This was a fun one to put a crowd through: the movie just gets more and more amazing as it goes on, and by the end everybody was blank with "what?".

Baoh, on the other hand. When I watched Baoh, I realized I couldn't possibly skip through like I could with Geist or Crystal Triangle. You know why? Baoh has no bad scenes. In any other anime, the scene where the hero and the little psychic girl exchange backgrounds at a bus stop would be totally boring, but in Baoh the little girl draws a picture that turns into blood that turns into a man that screams "BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH", and then the worst assassin ever shows up in the middle of the conversation! The dub is what really raises Baoh to excellence, though: the voice of evil scientist Dr. Kasumi Nome seriously deserves some kind of medal for his insane Cobra Commander overacting. By the end of the show people were yelling "BURRRN IIIIT" over and over again.

Overall, the panel was a huge success. The panel was packed all the way back to standing room, the crowd was laughing their asses off, and I am pretty sure that everybody had an awesome time. It is very likely that next year, I will be running both Most Dangerous Anime and Most Dangerous Anime For Grownups, an 18+ panel where I can run stuff with tits in it. Look forward to that!

Then we went to a cosplay burlesque show, because hey, late night programming! Man, that was kinda awkward. I've never gotten the dude rite where you go with all your buddies to see a strip show: in particular I don't get being tightly packed into a room and left to crane your head around all the other horndogs so that maybe you can actually see the half-naked chick who was a few moments ago dressed like Starbuck or Chii (the latter was creepy, but then the whole idea of Chii is inherently creepy) Ladies, stand on a damn box or something. I will here reprint my Twitter review of the show: "review score: neither my guwange nor my gigawang".

Then, my buddies had something to handle so I did what anybody would do: I drank myself a couple beers and went to play Street Fighter in the game room. This was the first time I'd had to play SF4 on pad, since I have a Virtua Stick at home. Man, how do you people put up with that shit? The FightPad wasn't so terrible, but oh my god, the default 360 pad. My thumb hurt. And then the hours passed. Around 2 or so our guest Kira Buckland showed up and started an impromptu Brawl tourney. Damn, guys. I'm too chill by that time of night to get caught up in some serious fighting game action. Hell, I was playing Fuerte.

The hours were really passing here, so I called up my staffer buddy Joe and it turned out the gang was up above me having a staff gripe-and-drink session. Off I went. On our way out of the Holiday Inn, I really wanted to get an SF match in: you know, now that my drunk points were up. So of course I got in, I managed to get a turn, and as soon as I'd picked Fuerte there was a beeping sound. "Oh man. I hope that's not what I think it is". At least not for the next three minutes. I need to do a Flying Gigabuster here. At Round One Fight, staff came in and told us (and the Brawl tournament) that yes, that was a fire alarm. Everybody out.

So Joe and the gang and I were juuust on our way out, and now there was a fire alarm in the building. Nobody was really concerned about any kind of actual danger: it seemed a lot more probable that somebody had, accidentally or not, set off the damn fire alarm themselves. This turned out to be the case, as far as I know. In any case, the population of the Holiday Inn was now, at three in the morning, cold out front. One dude (drunker than I, mind you) was in an undershirt, and he was hopping all over the place for warmth, doing pushups and jumping jacks and stuff. Ah. I love cons.

So everybody very seriously proceeds to the hotel room and I very seriously head for the last Guinness and forgot that I shook up the case on the way from the car, so I very seriously ran with my exploding Guinness to the bathroom-- which was occupied, it turned out-- and then very, very seriously ran into the other room, and then, when the bottle was in the sink and the situation was averted, triple-seriously cleaned the floor. I'm very nearly sorry that you guys had to see me like that. And at a time like that!

Sunday, nothing really important happened unless you count a TGI Friday's victory dinner. I helped Joe with his last panel, which was more like the "I'm sorry we've got nothing but how did you like I-Con?" panel.

Come to think of it, I did very little event stuff at the con that I wasn't personally involved in. I totally passed Sean Astin in the hallway on the way out, though! I only realized it was him after I'd passed. You know how these things are.