Check out some pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22341520@N08/sets/72157621803186565/

Day One

Team Fortress 2 Cosplayer Count: Over 9000

3:15 – Arrival

After a relatively short 30 minute wait to buy a badge at the door (the pre-registration line was shorter still), I checked into my hotel room and had a nice flop on the bed for a few minutes. Wandered around a little while and checked out the dealer's room. I found the Detroit Metal City Revoltechs I've been wanting for a reasonable price.

6:00 Checked out a panel on learning Japanese for a bit while waiting for the mecha panel taking place next door.

6:30 Hell yeah, ran into Clarissa, Gerald and Max. Gerald, who had a mecha panel later in the day, suggested to “check out the competition.” Oh hey, guess what, the panelist didn't show up! There was still an audience though; I guess they were just talking amongst themselves. So Gerald just got up and started improvising a panel. People would call out names of robot shows, Gerald would talk about them. Seemed to work pretty well. Except for maybe that Nazi that showed up.

More dealer's room, found a Fist of the North Star mug. You're already dead. With the timer.

8:00 – Black Jack, Tezuka's Dark Doctor
Clarissa gave a panel on Black Jack and the various Black Jack productions over the years. Do you like House? He and Black Jack are rather similar, except Black Jack is not quite as big of a jerk most of the time. It also provided vital counter-programming for Vic Mignogna singing show-tunes, because really, would you go to that? That live action version looked weirdly terrible though (so of course I want to see it anyway).

Went out to dinner with everyone.

OXG THE CUTEST KITTEN EVAR was found outside the hotel.

11:00 – Robot Rumbles and Mecha Mayhem
Gerald's “other” Mecha Panel with Larry Furry. Since Gerald talked (mostly) about good robots earlier, they decided to devote this panel to talking about crappy robots. Some options include: pretty much any individual component to a combining robot, 7-Zark-7, the Guntank, the list goes on.
After a while, one of the con staffers (“Nice of you to remember my name, sir!”) came in and talked about Force Five, a syndicated block featuring the giant robot anime Danguard Ace, Gaiking, Grandizer, Starvengers (Getter Robo G) and Spaceketeers (Starzinger). The toys for these were released by Mattel as “Shogun Warriors” hence the airing of the shows.

12:00 Anime That Sucks
Daryl showed up pretty much just in time to present “Anime That Sucks,” also known as “Anime That's Secretly Awesome.” Clips from Fist of the North Star and Angel Cop were shown in glorious How-They-Lied-o-Vision. Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman made its Anime That Sucks debut. Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight (I insist on always typing the full, misspelled, unabridged title for the full, unabridged movie) featured prominently, because Loudness is soooooo damn 80s metal. (Disclaimer: I own two Loudness albums. On LP in fact. I'm also an vinyl nerd.) Baoh, in fact, had a laser cannon. Half of these things had characters talking while being impaled or stabbed in the head or something. This is truly the hallmark of something being entertainingly bad. We all once again wondered, goddammit, where the hell Jack was, the fucking chickenshit.

Day Two

10:00 AM -Yet another giant robot panel got canceled. Watched dub voice actors talk about crap for a few minutes instead. Much to their credit, they reminded the audience that if you want to voice act, you first have to know how to act, like maybe on a stage in front of people. I think this is a fact that is lost on a lot of delusional fanpersons.

Hit the dealer's room again. Found some Yamato gachapon this time. They gave Dessler a GOBLET~! How cool is that?

11:30 - All About Dragon Ball
Only stayed for a bit of this since Daryl had a panel at 12:00, but I liked what I saw. The panelists were enthusiastic about the Dragon Ball universe, one was even cosplaying. Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but Dragon Ball Z is one of those things that, for a while, a lot of people would hate on just because they thought it was cool to do so. I was probably guilty of this myself at some point or another. Happily, that's no longer in vogue, and we can once again enjoy it for what it is: really powerful dudes throwing chi blasts at each other and punching and talking about power levels going through the roof and stuff. And at this point, even the US release is old enough that people can begin to wax nostalgic about it. It was the first anime for a lot of people after all.
We used to see the “cool to hate” behavior with a little thing called Fist of the North Star, but at this point shockingly few people have even seen any of that (please take up SA ADTRW's Hokuto no Ken Challenge if you haven't already died... done so).
Naruto is in this category now, but the “filler arc” on that show, most of the fans would likely agree, really is shitty. Or pissy if it's that one episode...

12:00 Otaku- What are they REALLY?

This is where Daryl blew everyone's mind. People couldn't handle the truth.

More dealer's room, didn't buy anything myself. Went to lunch. Amanda cosplaying as Farfello from White Cross posed eating a fruit cup with a razor blade. Hilarty ensued.

6:00 Some Guys Talk About Tokusatsu Show Toys
Yeah. 

9:00 Doujin World
Clarissa and Gerald give a good introduction to the amazing, terrifying, and sometimes hilarious world of doujinshi. They cleared up the misconception that it's all fan-made manga porn. There's also videos, games, music, you name it. It's not all porn either, we swear. Clarissa even had a towel with Jotaro drawn like a Lego minifig. They brought up those awesome books with Fist of the North Star crossed with Other Stuff from AYA/Ojou no Yokushitsu.

Day Three

9:ish AM – HOLY SHIT THAT WAS LOUD! Somebody pulled the fire alarm. I jumped about six feet in the air. I was already up and pretty much ready to check out, just chilling drinking a coffee and eating a granola bar. But still. What's up with people pulling the fire alarm at cons?

10:00 – Cataloging and Displaying Your Collection
Clarissa tried out a new panel on keeping track of your anime and manga collections using various online tools. There were maybe two people there other than people that know her. Which is sad; I personally had no idea what was out there in terms of tracking books and this would have helped me a great deal on a few occasions. Wait, did I preorder this volume already? Am I missing this volume or that volume? Is this book on my damn shelf right now? I'm sure others have been in the same situation. I'd chalk it up more to the horrible time slot than a lack of interest though. I've only done a little bit with DVD Profiler so far, but the Cue Cat bar code scanner will help immensely. I'll sign up for LibraryThing once I'm done with the DVDs.

11:00 Anime You Should Watch
Daryl talks about... anime you should watch. From the classics to the new hotness. At the end, I think one guy in the audience was suggesting horrible shows on purpose, like Gunslinger Girl. Nobody made the “Maniax” joke though.

After that, we went to lunch at the IHOP. The IHOP has mysterious button-detaching powers. Then it was time to go home. See you all at AWA!

Pics here: http://picasaweb.google.com/jlehr2001/EXPCon2008#

Joker Count: 2

Facilities: This first-year con took place in the Renaissance World Golf Village resort and the adjacent St. Johns County Convention Center in St. Augustine, FL. The facilities had tons of room, probably far more than what was needed. Generally speaking, the panels looked sparsely attended but this was partially an illusion given by the oversize rooms. To give a comparison, the three panel rooms and video room were probably two or three times larger than the “standard” size panel/video room at Anime Weekend Atlanta's hotel (that is to say, the ones other than Main Events and Kennesaw).

Only attended on Saturday, so...

Registration:

No line whatsoever at right around 10:00 AM for either pre-reg or walk-in. An addendum to the schedule printed in the guide was available.

Shoujo and the Male Otaku:

I was really looking forward to see what was to be presented, as this is a subject highly relevant to my interests, but unfortunately technical difficulties caused them to scuttle the whole panel. Technical difficulties would be a recurring theme...

Otaku Showdown: I was hoping this would be like, ten paces and draw your pistols or something, but apparently this was just yet another trivia contest. If you like game shows, this is probably the best convention ever. The game apparently ended way early (I arrived at 10 past the hour and it seemed like I missed half of it!) Because of this, the presenter opened up the remaining questions to the audience. Some of the questions were way easy and others quite obscure (Which came first? The Odyssey, Channel F or Studio II? If you said Channel F you got it wrong because they said Odyssey instead of Odyssey 2 like I thought :P The original Odyssey was basically a glorified Pong with removable carts that only acted as jumpers for built in games that used discrete logic; the Channel F was in fact the first programmable system. But I digress.) By the way, there still wasn't a set of speakers in there to play audio from a computer.

Daryl “Most Dangerous” Surat presented the following:

Video Games from Anime: They don't all suck!

In general, good anime games tend to be in the action/fighter/shooter genres.

Metal Wolf Chaos (Xbox), while not an anime, should be one. The Japanese take on what our news is actually like was surprisingly accurate...

Berserk (PS2) leaves off where the anime ended. You're Guts, you have a huge sword, and therefore you have huge guts, and you swing your huge sword at giant demons. The voice actors from the anime reprise their roles in this game. Import only, regrettably.

The First Funky Fighter: In here because it's hilarious. You play as a guy that looks like Kenshiro and you beat up sharks and alligators, who kidnapped your girlfriend for some reason. The arcade game control scheme uses nine buttons that correspond with the nine parts of the screen, so it actually works well with a keyboard! Perhaps the precursor to Fighting Mania.

Fist of the North Star (Genesis): This was to show how far we've come. “Okay, let's go to the Coliseum where you fight... Hulk Hogan.” You CAN jump, by the way.

Fist of the North Star (Arcade/PS2): The time of retribution is at hand. Decide the destiny! Made by the Guilty Gear team, but it's better since it's easier than the Guilty Gear games. I'm actually pretty lousy at games to be honest.

Tetsujin 28 (PS2): Made by the same developers as R.A.D., you control Tetsujin 28 (AKA Gigantor) using the analog sticks, watching the action from Shotaro's point of view. Pick up entire buildings and listen to bad guys scream for mercy as you hurl them about.

Area 88/UN Squadron (Arcade/SNES): This is one of my favorite games of all time. I used to play the coin-op at the Cost Cutters in Middletown, New Jersey. I would like to think that this is one contributing factor in what laid the seeds to my demise.

Anime That Sucks: Video Game Adaptation Edition!

Ninja Gaiden: Falling off buildings doesn't kill you, it would seem.

Spectral Force: ADV licensed this expecting the game which never came out in the US to be a hit. Uses very bad CG backgrounds.

SiN: ADV FINANCED this piece of crap. The dialog is completely different in English and Japanese, so much so that the “Collecter's Edition” makes this a marketing point. You know, they could have made a movie about that scientist with a crowbar...

Tekken The Motion Picture: ADV again. Terrible hair and invisible dinosaurs. Gonna clean my room, pick up groceries, kill Dad...

Chrono Trigger OAV: Shown in its 15-minute entirety.

The Angry Video Game Nerds:

They didn't just die a lot and scream “Diarrhea fuckfarts!” constantly like I thought they would. They instead screamed nearly every spoken word! They had two hours so they were able go go into a fair amount of depth on why these games were so bad.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest: While this game is notorious for being bad, I doubt there'd be so much hate for it if not for the “Final Fantasy” name on the marquee. Nevertheless, there are two extremely cheap aspects to this game: the very first fight, and the final battle. It is possible to lose the first fight. Not just possible, but fairly likely! The last fight: a cure does around 12,000 damage to the boss.

Home Alone on the NES: Not much to say about this one, other than that the player could not manage to live for more than about a minute and a half. You win if you can somehow survive for twenty.

Battletoads: 2 player mode.

Castlevania Adventure on the original Game Boy (presented on Super Game Boy!): You lose your power-up every time you get hit AND walk like an old man.

Devil May Cry 2: The submachine gun has no equal.

Sonic The Hedgehog (360/PS3) Bugs bugs bugs bugs bugs bugs bugs.

FMV lag, bad shadows, you get stuck to the top of loops, you can run off of the side of loops, you supposedly used to be able to DIE INSTANTLY if you so much as touched water on a beach stage, but I guess this was patched. You could “miss” while running and die instantly. That's just the technical problems. The story rips off Dragon Ball and features furry necrophilia.

Kazuo Koike is a world famous manga author

He's a great person to the max

Ryoichi Ikegami is an incomparable manga artist

He really whips a domesticated ostrich's ass

They have collaborated on many awesome comic books

Kazuo Koike

Ryoichi Ikegami

Kazuo Koike

Ryoichi Ikegami

Offered is about an Olympic Track Star

He's the biological son of Gilgamesh

Hitler's granddaughter tries to have his baby

His brother is a stupid asshole

Kazuo Koike

Ryoichi Ikegami

Kazuo Koike

Ryoichi Ikegami

Crying Freeman is about a potter

He is wicked good at martial arts

He's the head of the 108 Dragons

The Yakuza wants to murder his ass

Kazuo Koike

Ryoichi Ikegami

Kazuo Koike

Ryoichi Ikegami

Wounded Man lives up to the test

Someone is naked on nearly every page

A crocodile's head was made into a bomb

They dental cemented a dead man's dick

Kazuo Koike

Ryoichi Ikegami

Kazuo Koike

Ryoichi Ikegami

Rock over London, Rock on Chicago, GPX, it's God's Pornographic X-Rated films!

Current Music: Aria in G

Check out my pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/jlehr2001/AnimeWeekendAtlanta2008#

Thursday – I arrived in Atlanta around 10:00 PM, unfortunately just missing early badge pickup and the Super Happy Fun Sell event. This is basically an Anime Flea Market. Some friends of mine picked up a few rare import LPs and LDs as well as some out of print graphic novels and other miscellany. I'm a bit upset I missed this, but I intend on planning a bit better next year, maybe get rid of some of my own crap in order to buy new crap. It's a fantastic idea and I'd like to see it at more conventions.

An astute observer might have seen many of the conventions' guests and panelists milling about the Waverly lobby area at this time as well. The LCD event boards had a “Welcome ANIME” card which amusingly featured Wiki-tan and art from Go Nagai's Hard Gay manga.

Friday –
Registration line: I entered the line just before 11:00 and received my badge just after 12:00. By that time, the line was snaking all the way around the room. I know conventions feel they need to offer personalized badges because it's been the practice for oh so long, but it seems like most of the waiting is because of these. This was fine when there were maybe two or three thousand attendees at these events, but AWA's attendance last year was literally over 9000. Personally, I'd do away with them. Maybe instead get one of the anime companies to offer up pens with their logo in the goody bag.

Opening Ceremonies Friday 12:00 PM
This was the first time I've actually been at the con in time to see this, though I still missed the very beginning due to the badge thing. Came in just in time to see Dave (accidentally) hit a cosplayer right in the face with candy. Mostly this serves as an introduction to the guests and some of the panelists, and they talk about their events. It was pretty sparsely attended. I imagine that aside from people not having badges yet, the Main Events room is right next to the aforementioned registration line, and there was a white fence on the other side of the line. It could have made it unclear that there was anything going on back there.

2008 Anime Season presented by Anime World Order Friday 1:00 PM
Daryl, Clarissa and Gerald presented a selection of shows debuting in 2008. Aside from some technical difficulties (apparently, the equipment in the panel rooms was all-new for this year) which were more or less sorted out, it went pretty well. It went in the format of playing the PV/OP video and talking about the featured show as it ran. I'm particularly looking forward to Tytania. The original creator is Yoshiki Tanaka (author of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes novels) and it's being directed by a legend himself, Noburo Ishiguro of Yamato/Macross/Megazone 23/Legend of the Galactic Heroes fame.

Anime's Craziest Deaths 2:00 PM
Daryl Surat hosted this to a packed room, in spite of the conspiracies against him. One, the Naruto Trivia panel was moved up an hour. Secondly, just as things were about to get started, some fine upstanding young person pulls a fire alarm. Nobody took it seriously, so we were sitting around for a few minutes until it was announced that we had to clear the room. A few minutes later, this was announced as being a false alarm; in all that killed another 15 minutes off. In spite of being truncated, the crowd was very hot for the violence.

Totally Lame Anime 8:00 PM
Our host, professional translator and all-around awesome dude Neil Nadelman, promised us never before seen footage for this year's TLA, and he did deliver. Rather than playing Dracula mugging a guy and eating a hamburger, he played OTHER lame clips from Dracula. Dracula, Sovereign of Lameness. Other new material included In The Aftermath, a terrible version of Angel's Egg which mixes in Live action footage, and poorly written dialog (the original was mostly silent.) At one point the girl says “My brother was too lenient with me. He should have spanked me with asteroids.” which got a tremendous reaction, so much so that the audience demanded that the clip be replayed.
He also played the Harlock clips from the ZIV dub previously seen in Bad American Dubbing. We were searching for Odin MY LOVE~! and got to find out God is a space grub from Crystal Triangle. Also included were some clips from the bizarre South Korean anime ripoff/Anti-Communist propaganda piece Solar Adventure. Overall, most of the audience just wanted to see the same clips from the last few years... but I think the new clips were generally well received. We gotta, gotta put more fight, We were born to be hell fire soldier.

Anime Hell 10:00 PM
Immediately following Totally Lame Anime is Dave Merrill's Anime Hell. A very popular event; the room was at capacity. I dared to have to get up after Totally Lame and couldn't get back in at first, so I screwed around for 45 minutes and then caught the tail end. Some of what was played:
Incredible Japanese Fanta commercials
Dr. Tran again (I'm sick of this guy)
Ninja Robots's amazing theme song (dub of Ninja Senshi Tobikage) which was stuck in my head all night. The lyrics are basically just a summary of what the show is about.
TV Champion: dress as Char and quote his line the fastest

Saturday
Legend of the Galactic Heroes Introduction 11:00 AM
Your hosts Walt Amos and Rob Fenelon. Gave a brief overview of LoGH, and some history and classical music lessons to boot.

Message from Space 1:00PM
Dave Merrill and TV's Patrick Macias talked about this incredible movie from 1978 about magical space walnuts. There's this thing called the “Toho Bus” where they'd round up white/black people to use in Japanese movies. Most of the white people in this film were from a production of “Grease.” Vic Morrow was drunk a lot- all of the time. It was one of the highest budget Japanese movies when made, which was apparent from the relatively high quality of the sets, models and special effects.

Writing about Anime: 2:00 PM
Jonathan Tarbox (former editor of Animerica), Patrick Macias (current editor of Otaku USA), Daryl Surat and Dave Merrill were our hosts. Basically, if you want to write about anime, go write about anime! For better or worse, there's nothing stopping you these days. I've been inspired.

20 Years of Dark Horse Manga 3:00 PM
The Indomitable Carl Gustav Horn presiding. Mostly talked about upcoming releases (mostly new volumes of things currently running, Wind Named Amnesia novel) hinted at a few more things to be announced at New York Anime Festival. More details about the Mangettes from CLAMP (this is the name of the format, not the book itself, also William Flanagan from DelRey will be the editor). Handed out super-cool posters with covers from their titles on one side and a sumi-e version of the Dark Horse logo by Yoshitaka Amano on the other. It's pretty pimp.

Anime Podcast Roundtable 6:00 PM
This was swapped with the Funimation panel time-wise, but even so people did stick around to hear it. Featured AWO, Paul Chapman of “Greatest Movie EVER!”, Basil and DJ Inubito from OSMcast and http://www.akibaren.org/
They talked about the different recording methods they used; OSMcast is done all in one room while Greatest Movie EVER! And AWO are done over Skype with everyone recording their own audio, which is then edited together. They went into the equipment that was used and what you should get if you're just starting out (USB Headset!)

The Panel of DOOM 7:00 PM
The theme this year was sex and violence (When isn't that the theme of the Panel of DOOM?) Hits included Green Porno featuring Isabella Rossellini, clips from Death Race 2000 (the original), Speed Racer Goes Crazy, Pedo-files, an English Mandom ad from the Philippines market, and some Japanese movie in which “you get a phone call, then you beat up your parents.” By popular demand “GARBAGE DAY” was played even though everyone including my parents knows about this. I didn't get a phone call telling me to beat them up. There was an issue with the sound mix from the “Better Living with the B&J Supersquad “clip but if anything that just made it even weirder. Best summer EVER!

Dave Merrill's Old School Classroom 11:00 PM
Caught an episode of a show called: GROIZER X! This show, in a word, sucked. Believe it or not, the original creator was Go Nagai. The robot actually belonged to the alien girl, but was piloted by the hot-blooded Earth teenage boy. Both of them had ridiculous helmets, which elicited laughs nearly every time they were shown on screen. For some stupid reason, the robot is launched off of a runway that has to COME UP OUT OF THE WATER~! and KILLS HUNDREDS OF FISH~! every time it is deployed. Moving the base back a few hundred feet was too easy? They animated an “X wipe” transition between scenes. Apparently, this robot is freaking huge; their chairs are on monorails. They also have a small vehicle to fly from one part of the robot to another part of the robot. At some point AWO's Clarissa and I pondered what Mandom actually smelled like. Our theory was sweat with a hint of gunpowder and whiskey.

Sunday
Tim Eldred's Anime Treasure Chest 11:00AM
I didn't catch the entire panel since I had to check out and put my stuff in my car, but I did see the infamous tokusatsu version of Spider-Man. They give Spider-Man a flying car, and a ship called THE MARVELLER~! which transformed into a giant robot: LEOPARDON~! It's a Leopardon, Charlie! It has spoken! It has told us the way!

Other Thoughts:

Go to Abdullah the Butcher's House of Ribs and Chinese Food. It's about 15 minutes down I-285, get off exit 5B, make a left on Fairburn (just make sure you're in the correct lanes :P) You can feed your whole crew for cheap. Sometimes the man himself is there and he'll pose for pictures of him putting a fork to your forehead (sadly he wasn't there when we went).

I much preferred going up Thursday afternoon/night as opposed to stupidly early on Friday morning like the previous times I went. It makes the “going to bed at 3:00 AM” thing that's vital at cons far easier.

WT Snacks had a ridiculous purple sequin vest which was quite awesome.