Who else is going to Anime Expo?

[danth]

The last thing you wanna hear in line to AX: "I shoulda worn deodorant"

[danth]

It's been two hours and I'm getting close to the end of the line. It keeps twisting and turning; I feel like I'm in an intestine.

[danth]

I think I'm nearing the colon!

[danth]

So I was finally shat out into the convention center after about 3 hours in line. Then my phone died.

Overall things weren't too bad. There wasn't much of the obnoxious behavior I was afraid of, although I did get hit in the face once with a large butterfly wing. I'd say if anything it was kind of boring.

There's a huge vendor room that I didn't finish exploring that I will return to today. Nothing else really interests me; there are a bunch of anime viewing rooms, and panels that don't have much to do with anime or manga. The one very cool thing that I did get to do was attend a Q & A session with Toshio Maeda, the creator of La Blue Girl and Urotsukidoji. That guy is hilarious. The questions were pretty lame though, with the worst one being "At what age did you discover masturbation," which was answered with "I do not speak English." One cool thing I learned from him was that Yoshinobu Nishizaki was a total asshole and scumbag and that his death was celebrated by Maeda.

[usamimi]

Yeah, I've been hearing on twitter that other than a few announcements here and there, there hasn't been much going on other than the appearance of Toshio Maeda (who I've heard is actually a super nice guy, and apparently if you pay to join his online club, if you fly to Japan he will like...hang out with you! http://www.urotsukidoji.jp/en/sp.html )

[danth]

So I finished exploring the dealers room. The coolest thing I saw were lots of anime cels. Pretty cool ones too. I was hoping to find some out of print DVDs, old anime magazines, or some Macross toys but struck out there. I did get an old U-jin art book. So Toshio Maeda and U-Jin are the only things I cared about so far -- I swear I'm not a pervert.

Also the people at the Discotek booth were total dicks. That made me sad. They cussed out a guy that tried to use his phone to price compare some of their DVDs. A simple "we ask that you don't do that please" would have sufficed.

[usamimi]

oh wow, that's harsh, man. D: I price-checked stuff on my phone at A-kon constantly, though I was a bit more discreet about it (I'd leave, go stand in front of a different booth to check, then come back, lol) I can understand their frustration a LITTLE, but....that's definitely no way to treat customers. I hope they where just booth helpers and not actual Discotek staff, that would make me sad.

Awww, U-jin has such a cute style, though! I love his work, regardless of it being pervy or not, lol. Nice find! Too bad you struck out on the other stuff.

There was one booth at A-kon that had a decent selection of cells....I kinda miss the days when there were tons of people at cons selling them. I always loved looking through them, even though I couldn't afford many. (I do have a few, though nothing as impressive as some of my friends!)

[danth]

Usamimi, I'm glad you understand why I like U-Jin. It's really the attractiveness of his art style; the same reason I like Kenichi Sonoda or Haruhiko Mikimoto or anyone else. It just happens to be that he mostly does porn. And also the hentai I've seen with character designs by him have all been awesome in terms of either animation quality or just being entertaining because of their ridiculousness.

The most expensive cel I saw today had an asking price of 2k and it was an image of Gigi from Kiki's Delivery Service. I saw some really cool Tenchi Muyo, Macross, and Bubblegum Crisis cels, but if I bought one I wouldn't know what to do with it.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I went to something called "All the laserdiscs" last night, but it was just a room showing anime on laserdisc. You couldn't actually, like, rifle through laserdiscs or anything. They showed Tenchi Muyo and Moldiver though which was cool.

So I went to reddit to see if there were any reddit meetups or anything. There are two threads on AX and they're both just pictures of cosplay. Like, Anime Expo is really primarily a cosplay event now in the eyes of most attendees, I think.

[greg]

This is a rather late response, since I haven't looked at this section of the forum for a couple of months. Anyhow, reading your impressions was interesting to me, Danth. I really don't think that I am missing much from this convention at all. My friend faithfully attended for about 11 years, but a few years back when they switched to the Staples Convention Center, he decided it was time to quit the con before he got mugged or something. With his over a decade of experience attending AX, he observed the gradual decline in the con. Not just cosplayers standing around doing nothing but posing for pictures, but just the general attendees not knowing much about anime, especially not the older classics (they usually think that Evangelion is a retro classic and as far back as they're willing to go). To make it worse, the focus went from the Japanese creators and voice talents to the North American production teams and English voice actors and such. People started ignoring Japanese guests, not even knowing how important they are. Sad.