Saturday:
Tis the only day I went.
Arrival at the Convention center after getting confused by there being two Marriot hotels within the same area. Plus, I found out how confused the Covington KY people got when I said I was looking for the Cincinnati Marriot but it was on the southern side of the river. Must be some kind of rivalry down there....
Parked in the garage with probably the oddest space configuration I've ever seen. Then the elevator to the lobby in the garage goes up even though I was already on the 3rd floor I think.
Con reg line was non-existent and took no time at all. The reg girl asked me why would someone name a town Frazeysburg. (the town I put down as my location ;P ..well, what the heck is with "Covington"? Some prissy rich boy's name? ) So I had to explain my hometown's history. She seemed very interested
Her fault for asking.I see the AMV contest doesn't start until 11 Am, and by this time it was 10 AM. So what else is there to do but go to the dealer's room? It was still small as far as dealer room go but a heck of a lot bigger than last year's room. I bought and looked at a number of things so I'll just get that out of the way now. I ended up with a Tokyo Underground poster; A really cool Rei (from Eva) poster with her dressed up as characters from other anime, including but not limited to: Battle Athletes, Kenshin, Digi Charat, Love Hina, etc. Some old vhs tapes of Video girl Ai and Nadia...and the CUTEST shivering puppies purse.
Of course, I bought all that in the many many trips I made back to the dealers room throughout the day. You see, this year's sugoicon seemed pretty boring so the dealer's room was the happening place to be.
I get to the Main programming room about 15 minutes early, although that was completely unnecessary. At 5 mintues after the hour, there was still only about 10 people in the room. This gave me a chance to look at my Game show ballot....I'm not geek enough to compete in that. I got maybe 4 answers right for sure, guessed the rest then all but forgot about my ballot. I'm not into that anyway.
So here goes the contest. It starts out with some rather amatuer-ish amvs. But everyone starts somewhere and they had their good parts. I really don't remember any of the videos in particular by title. I liked the Lupin 3rd amv. The audience got into the action and comedy videos the most. I didn't think it was that bad.
After the contest, Kevin and I were getting pretty hungry. So we try and figure out were to go for eats. To make a long story short, we end up at Applebees right behind the hotel...it happens to be sitting on a floating barge. Apparently the river was incredibly high, and we walked up the ramp when normally we would have walked down to the restaurant. Of course there was a game going on that I had totally forgotten about...the OSU- MI game. You see how much I cared...I was glad to be in Kentucky, relatively neutral ground.
During lunch, we watched a crappy game with lots of fumbles and missed catches. Michigan won. No bowl for OSU.
Back to the con. Sugoicon must be given the award for crossdressers this year. Kevin came out of the men's room and said "It's pretty bad when you think you walked into the wrong restroom, even when you see urinals." Time to go watch some anime.
Tried some Risky Safety....cute but empty. Went to Full Metal Panic and found the dub playing. I gave it a chance, but walked out nearly in tears from the pain. Walked around some more, and found an unattended comment card on a con suite table. It had someone's comments about what they thought about the con. They had said the staff seemed like they didn't care about the con. I said that's pretty much what I think.
The lack of info on their site is bad, but I could have been suprised by the con. The video programming information outside the video rooms was non-existent or illegible.
By this time it's 5 and we go over to the video game rooms which happens to be in the hotel itself and not the convention center. They are connected by a skywalk though. The line for the DDR machine was long and it is the same one they have at Easton anyway. And that one never has a line
There wasn't much there but fighting games and only about 6 systems anyway.We go back to the dealer's room for awhile, bought some stuff....yeah....
Over to the video rooms again. We go to watch the goldenboy dub. Never seen it before, but I liked it. Well, I couldn't stand the dubbed voices (I know there are good dubs out there....these were not them) but it was still funny though Kentaro's voice nearly inspired me to violence.
There was nothing else going on so we go to cosplay. This was the first one I have ever seen, always ignored them but there was nothing else to do since my dealer's room haven had closed. It was only karaoke, the cosplayers had no skits and the judges were in another area.
ahhhhh
Ok, it got better. We sat beside a 'parent'.
We talked a lot about a lot of things. Their daughter was cosplaying as the little girl from Noir. They though last year's was better too. The father was an actor (an older man) and he was in Naked Gun 1 1/2.....he was the waiter who brings "the strongest thing in the house" 
It was neat talking to them. Kevin left and I stayed for the amv contest winners. The mom left and it was just me and the actor guy. I talked about my degree and then they announced the cosplay winners. His daughter starts walking out the door and he called to her (I was sitting next to him still) and she gave the funniest look 
Probably wondering who the heck I was. They forgot about the contest winners so I had to go up and remind them. Then I am talking to the coordinator who happens to be the former Lara Hoffman who made videos I watched back at the earlt Otakons ^_^ That was cool and I was talking to her when they announced me as a winner. I was flustered and very suprised. Not expecting that...
We finished out the night watching Urusei Yatsura (Lum) and then went on home.
I really hope that the apathy can give way to dedication next year for sugoicon's sake because I really like them. The staff that would rather not be there shouldn't be....hopefully they realize that too ^_^
