This is going to be really rambly. I'm totally out of it right now, hopefully others can fill things in.
Thursday night:
Got packed and took care of some food issues (mostly baking and making sandwiches). Vic showed up around 8ish, we were up until 2:30 working on things for Weakest Link and just hanging out. Insomnia struck me and I didn't fall asleep until 3:30 or so.
Friday:
Vic wakes me up at 6:15 by coming into my room and singing Oha Rock! by Shingo Mama. We strike my computer, bag up everything that could take in water (it had been raining since Thursday afternoon) and head over to Plato's (a diner in College Park) for breakfast. The car was totally full of stuff to the point where Vic's busted suspension didn't matter - the car was heavy enough to take hits from just about anything.
We got done with breakfast around 8 and hit the road. We managed to screw up bigtime though as Vic was in the wrong lane on an access road to get to the hotel and we had to go all the way out to Dulles and double back to get to the hotel (we were about 2 blocks away when this happened), causing us to get there about an hour later than we thought. Met up with Waldo and dji. Walked around a bit, talked a lot to Duane Johnson, confirmed that he's no longer on Otakon staff, talked with Steve Bennett for a bit about manga on both sides of the Atlantic, and did generic Friday things like visiting the con suite.
The AMV contest was...something I didn't see most of. IMHO I'm just as well off. I'm so burned out now on AMV just from what I've seen this weekend. What I saw was, for the most part, pretty good. The crowd was small and dead Friday. Didn't go to the screening Saturday (slept, saw people, did a panel instead), more people were there, heard crowd was better.
There was some generic AMV screening beforehand. Met up with Nightowl there, much bitching about b-ko and functionality ensued. Someone else can remember the tech issues better than I can.
AMV panels Friday:
Overview - kind of a waste. Vic and I played some stuff, took a few questions, mostly used it to plug the other panels.
Beginner's Corner - took this one on my own with Vic around to point things out as he was re-configuring his computer for Codecs. Good turnout, made it through concept to distribution encoding in an hour. Dji showed up at about 50 min. into it.
Codecs - Vic showed what was good and bad in video encoding. Smaller turnout, pretty technical, but well done and some good examples.
Post-Panel screening - the Waldo archive and B-Ko showed up, and videos were played first from Waldo's because B-Ko broke (again) and needed to be fixed. B-Ko also apparently can't run her CD drive while the RAID is turned on, so pat's piss-poor copy of daicon IV from the old JACO days couldn't be replaced with newly filtered MPEG-2 hotness.
Saturday:
AMV contest time is covered above.
Showcase/Inspiration:
Vic had a great crowd. Alan had a thinning but good crowd. I had four people to talk in front of. Joy. Lack of food and audience made irribility high on my part. Got pizza afterwards, felt slightly better.
Old School: RYS and Duane Johnson were mostly the ones talking and playing videos (again rather loudly) for the hour. Not bad.
Digital Age: Cancelled because cosplay ran short and it was time for the AMV awards. There were a bunch of them, and as my video sucked ass I knew well in advance that I wouldn't be getting anything so I ducked out and played on my computer for a bit. After awards ended it was time to set up...
The Weakest Link: This was the highlight of all the programming. Words can not describe the hilarity and mayhem that ensued, fortunately the video of it will be online within a couple days. Sadly I had to pump the audio so that it could be heard as the dance was in the room next to ours and the sound was bleeding through.
Party time: No seal of approval from Hsien! Plenty of alcohol into nightowl, dji got some great footage. There was this fucked up scary dude in the lobby. Reminds me why I hate drunken alcoholics.
Sleep: Sleep was good. the hotel had shitty alarm clocks though. I had no idea how to turn the alarm off. Got to sleep in a bed Saturday, best sleep I've had in ages but not enough of it.
Sunday:
Slept until about 11, didn't even bother with AMV screening. Went to the anime tractor pull and won a mini valkyrie figure (american edition, POS, can't believe they charge $7 for this thing but oh well i didn't pay for it) and a wicked city tshirt. Played a song of DDR with Vic and we loaded up the car and came back to college park.
Overall, this con was, at least for me, way too much work and not enough play. Definately fewer panels next year and I'm tempted to just burn a ton of CDs for myself of anything I'd want to play for people and just leave my computer at home. If it wasn't for the people (when they actually showed up at the stuff they were supposed to) and Weakest Link and Saturday drunkenness to watch, this wouldn't have been worth it.
The worst thing is probably that my speakers were used at all these panels, and at the smaller room screening they were turned up LOUD AS FUCK. I'm trying to get them reconfigured and adjusted, but it looks like this weekend has taken a lot out of them. I'm not sure yet if it's just me being tired and not making everything out or if they were blasted for too long too many times in too short a time and something doesn't want to go now. The bass is a bit lacking, which makes me question the sub the most. Will eventually figure it out.
In the meantime, it's 7PM and I feel like I could go to sleep for the night now.





