Listen to the Rain

Twenty years of ACEN! Not all of them, of course--I didn't go from 2009-2011 because I was living in Japan, I didn't go in 2013 because I had a bit of a sour experience in 2012 and that was the point where schoolpsychnerd was deep in the throes of grad school and we had very little money, I didn't go in 2020-2021 because thanks to the Plague Years it didn't happen, and I didn't go in 2022-2023 because 2022 required full masks at all times (which I have no moral objection to, it just didn't sound very fun) and because sashagee was too sick to go and I didn't want to go by myself. But last year I went, and now here we are again.

It's been a while since I stayed at a hotel other than the Hyatt. This year, however, my luck finally ran out--when the hotel lottery happened I failed to get a room at the Hyatt, and then I failed to get rooms at the other hotels I tried. Fortunately, Anime Chicago as a community prepares for this. Several people grabbed extra rooms in the knowledge that there would definitely be people who missed out, and I was able to get one at the Embassy Suites. I've never stayed here before--I've stayed at the Doubletree, and at the Hilton, but this was a first...and honestly I'd go back. The rooms are huge and, more importantly for a couple with a four-year-old, they're suites. There's a front room with a couch, an armchair, a table with more chairs, and a little bar area, then a door between the two connecting rooms, so we don't need to turn all the lights out and immediately go to bed when it's time for Laila to go to sleep. I would say "You can't buy that kind of peace for money" but we obviously did.

And now, the daily accounting.

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

And now we're home. We're tired. We're sore. sashagee took a five-hour nap just after lunch. But, she's already decided that Uzaki Hana is going to be the cosplay she sticks with--she's going to work on it a bit, get screen-accurate brown boots, get a tighter shirt (she has lost weight since I got the original for her), and maybe get a wig. She expected to wear it a bit and have some fun and was very surprised when multiple people came up to ask her for her picture.

She did say she was a bit suspicious, though. Uzaki-chan is a romantic comedy, but the shirt specifically says "Super huge!" (sugoi dekai), so whenever someone asked for her picture she was like "Hmm..."

The only downside were all the things we couldn't get to. We didn't get to see the Conbini panel and couldn't get into the Oregon Trail panel. We didn't go to the dance on Friday, which it sounds like might have had more music to sashagee's taste. We didn't get to go back to see lightninglychee and stephen_poon again. We didn't try any of the board games at all. We didn't get to see the AMV contest, which as I've repeatedly mentioned, used to be a central event that I always went to. There's always soon much to do and not enough time to do it.

Laila is going to come back with infinite energy and run both of us over. But we had a lovely time with all our friends. Looking forward to ACEN next year!

A while ago, I met someone at an anime convention. She ended up becoming part of the anime-going friends I had, and I ran into her a couple times at parties after that until I moved to Japan. In Japan, I followed her Livejournal and I learned that she got much closer to another of those anime-going friends, they started dating, got engaged, made a wedding website, and the wedding was scheduled for just before I was going to move back from America. There was a post on her blog with quotes like:

( A lot of quotes interspersed with story below )

I'm glad that I'm a member of Anime Chicago, because on their Discord this morning spacedragon alerted all of us that the ACEN room blocks were going on sale at noon today. Since ACEN 2020 was cancelled due to plague and since this entire year has been weird and atemporal, it completely slipped my mind that room signup was at the end of summer. Good thing we got that arning, because I logged into both the Hyatt and Hilton websites, checked twitter until animecentral tweeted out the room links, and when Hyatt crashed at the payment phase I was already most of the way through booking a room at the Embassy Suites, so I have a room now. I'm told that Embassy Suites has free breakfast and happy hour for only about $20 a night more, too.

Now to hope that ACEN 2021 actually happens. 🧿

An anime convention at a waterpark? At a waterpark resort? Really?

Yes, really. And it was great.

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

I'm weirdly energized now, though I feel like I need to walk roughly a hundred miles because I'm full of alcohol and candy. I was worried about how much I would use either the con or the waterpark facilities, and I feel like I got my money's worth on both of them. I spent Friday at the waterpark, Saturday at the con, and a bunch of time at the villa. I didn't go to the rave, but you know, that's okay.

Looking forward to next year!

(Translator's note: I assume that the name Daisho comes from the 大小 daishō, the matched katana and wakizashi worn by samurai)

This is the first con I've ever gone to alone.

I mean, I'm not really alone. I was considering not going at all, but ACEN is the one time a year that I see a big chunk of my friends. Skipping it would mean not seeing them, and I think that's a pretty high price to pay. So I stuck with it, didn't cancel the hotel room, packed everything up, wrote down all the events I wanted to see, took the day off, and otherwise made all the preparations.

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

So ends ACEN 2018.

I just realized that this is the tenth ACEN I've been to. 05, 06, 07, 08, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, and this year. From 2009 to 2011 I was in Japan, and in 2013 we didn't have the money. Those gaps are why I didn't realize it previously.

People kept asking me if I had a good time, and I really did. It was enough to convince me that whatever, happens, I should come back next year. ACEN is the one time a year that I see some of my friends, which has value that's definitely worth more than the cost of going. And even if I don't watch that much anime anymore and have no idea what series most of the people cosplaying were from, there's still plenty for me to see and do. I was telling klenkers that there are whole sections of the con I don't go to, and that I could spend the weekend in the board games and tabletop section and have a fantastic time. I haven't gone to a con masquerade in a decade now, or to any of the dances in almost as long.

And I'm glad I could get the full con experience of staying up late and waking up early. Even at 35, I haven't lost my edge when it counts!

See you next year, ACEN.
​

You can tell I made that icon in my early twenties.

I've felt a sense of impending doom for the last few days and I'm having a very hard time pinning it down. I suspect some of it is due to Japanese class picking up again today. Aya-sensei was in ConstantinopleIstanbul for a friend's wedding last week, and this week we've scheduled free chat in lieu of reading more from 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ since she'll have a lot to talk about. Free chat is always more nerve-inducing, but I suppose it's payback for me making the final exam for my second-year English conversation students to talk to me for a few minutes. And I need practice asking questions.

I don't like small talk in English, much less in Japanese.

Some of it is probably because ACEN is coming up and I'm never sure how much I'll like it. The first year we went after coming back from Japan was disappointing, but last year was a lot of fun. It's never related to the actual purpose of the con, though. stephen_poon said that he used to think "These are my people" when he went and never does anymore, and I feel the same way. "My people" are the friends who I see when I go. I used to be very confused by people who went to cons and spent the whole time in the hotel bar talking to people, but it's because I didn't understand why they went. Now I do.

Also, they don't even sell 焼き物 in the dealer's room. What the hell? We need more rice bowls to replace the ones we lost in the Great Dish Crash.

Some of it might be work, though here I can't actually point to anything specific. I just feel like something terrible is going to happen, like I'm going to get laid off or have all my duties switched up for no reason or something. There is absolutely no reason I have to expect this, since my evaluations are consistently good and we're making money for the organization hand over fist, but that hasn't prevented them from suddenly tossing people out the door before, so. I suppose there's nothing I can do but my work and see what happens.

Maybe it's that I didn't get to get a manicure because the salon was too crowded? I really don't know.

It's also reflecting in my dreams, too. I had one last night where I was some kind of space marine fighting horrible shapeshifting tentacled monsters, but fortunately schoolpsychnerd going through her morning routine woke me up, and when I went back to sleep I had no dreams until my alarm went off.

I just wish I could pin down what's bothering me.

I mentioned before that I was a bit worried about going to ACEN this year. Last year had been a bit disappointing, and I was worried that this year was going to be a waste of time and money. It turned out to be a completely unfounded fear, and I had a blast. Read on for a recounting of our time at the con in nauseating detail.

( Read more... )

Last weekend was ACEN, which I've been going for nine years at this point, though admittedly not consistently. My interests have changed at this point so that I'm not really all that into anime anymore and barely know what's coming out and what's popular, but ACEN is still a great place to catch up with friends that are scattered around the country (or just out of our non-car-owning transit radius) but meet up for a weekend. Several of the people I saw actually didn't even buy con badges, they just came for the company. Honestly I might be getting to that point myself based on the panel content, but I like wandering around the dealer's room too much to just give up on officially attending. The selection is often more interesting than you can find online, probably because there's a lack of IP lawyers standing around like hawks.

And now, the daily breakdown.

Friday
I took only a half-day off from work, because I didn't think that there would be much I wanted to see in the morning and because the AMA started it's summer half-day program on the day ACEN started, fortunately. I expected that schoolpsychnerd and I would arrive at about the same time, but literally as she was walking out the door a student came in who needed immediate attention and she ended up staying much longer than she intended and not arriving at the hotel until around 5:45. Since I had assumed she would be coming around the same time as I did and because I didn't want to haul a lunchbag to and from the con and because I'm really cheap, I didn't have lunch with me and so I ended up mostly just lounging around the room Friday afternoon. I did wander down to the dealer's room and over to redpikachu's booth (Natural Pop! Made with love) to buy another cute stuffed animal. Last time it was a frog, and this time it was a corgi, and when schoolpsychnerd finally arrived I gave it to her, and, well:


So happy!
We both ate a ton of food, because schoolpsychnerd hadn't gotten to eat lunch either with all the chaos at her school so we stuffed ourselves on apples, bananas, Syrian cheese, olives, almonds, homemade beef jerky, and dark chocolate. Then we went and met fiendishfanfares's husband, who had kindly offered to let us borrow his work laptop to give our panel on Saturday, for info about which see the Saturday section. Then we went back to our room again, powered up the laptop and transferred the presentation over, and ran through it once to make sure that we would be able to pull it off. Having done that successfully and confidently, we headed down to the AMV room.

Watching the AMV contest entries is somewhat of a tradition for schoolpsychnerd and I, though it was most prevalent in 2005-2008, when we were attending multiple cons per year and could see AMVs riffing off of AMVs we had seen at previous cons (like this Azumanga Daioh AMV, made as a parody of this Evangelion AMV which aired six months previous). In 2012 ACEN didn't have any AMV Contest because of some leadership kerfuffle, and since we didn't attend in 2013, and since we hadn't gone from 2009-2011 at all due to the whole living in Japan thing, so I was curious what had become of it and...well, there was barely anything to it. I remember at Otakon they'd have the AMV Contest entry viewings in one of the auditoriums, but this year at ACEN it was in one of the small video rooms and there were never more than a couple dozen people in there at a time. We didn't even get a sheet with the AMVs listed to vote on them like I remember previously. I was glad I managed to identify a VNV Nation just by the style (it was Control, set to a racing anime called Redline), but otherwise the contest was kind of sad, and we only stayed for a bit because a friend had invited us to go to Anime Hell.

We headed over to the place where Anime Hell was supposed to play, but they weren't letting anyone stand in line yet, so we headed up to our room for a bit to wait for the signal. When we got a text, we immediately took the stairs down and walked over to the ballroom, followed the enormous line that had somehow sprung up in the last 15 minutes, and at the very moment that we reached the end of the line, staff announced that the line was closed. While standing off to the side and trying to decide what to do, we ran into stephen_poon and some other people we knew, and after a brief chat, schoolpsychnerd, stephen_poon, and I headed over to the Hyatt's lobby bar for a drink and a chat. We were there for maybe five minutes before they called last call, so after some conversation we headed over to Red Bar for a while.

After a lovely conversation about stephen_poon's trip to Spain, and about Japan with another friend who had come to visit us in 2011, and then schoolpsychnerd said our farewells and headed off to Let's Play Oregon Trail, which we'd been to previously and had a lot of fun watching. It was about an hour in, and while the players this year had done better than last time (where the panicked players had forgotten to buy any weapons and were only able to hunt because the organizers took pity on them and let them buy a pistol), they still kept trying to hunt fast-moving birds with shotguns and not having much luck. After basically everyone starved to death within 30 miles of Independence, Missouri due to chronic incompetence, we succumbed to our tiredness, went back to the room, and slept.

Saturday
We were planning to go to a panel on Chicago's Anime Scene, but we thought that it would be best if we didn't set an alarm, and we woke up just a bit too late to go, so instead we went down to the dealer's room again since schoolpsychnerd had arrived too late on Friday to go before it closed. I had seen that Do Bats Eat Cats had a space in the Artists' Alley, and after seeing their jewelry at a store near us, and now that Japan paid us and we have money, schoolpsychnerd wanted some new earrings.

After getting those, we looked around for a booth selling Japanese tableware to replace the ones we had that have broken over the year, but couldn't find anything. I had figured that somewhere would have chopsticks, or tea cups, or something, but no. The most we found some was kitschy anime mugs. I know we'll be able to get them at the Ginza Festival in August, but it would have been nice to do it now.

Then it was time for our presentation: "Seifuku and Bunkasai: Japanese Education in Anime," which was about the differences in our experience of the Japanese education system vs. how we've seen it portrayed in anime. You can download our slides here if you didn't or couldn't attend, and we have plenty of stories to tell if you want. It's always hard to judge these things, but I think it went well. A few people came up and thanked us afterward, including a guy who had just been shortlisted for JET and was leaving in July, who hadn't been sure he would learn anything in the panel and actually learned a lot, and a woman who asked us about Keion. Also, not many people left during the panel, which is a good sign.

After a break back to our room for lunch (more homemade beef jerky, apples, olives, nuts, and cheese), we went back down to the AMV room and parked in there while waiting on word from one of our friends, and then when we got a text and he was in the General Gaming room, we headed over there and played Once Upon a Time, about which you can read a review I wrote here. A few games of that finished, we went back to the dealer's room again because I wanted an 8-bit Legend of Zelda heart keychain, but while we couldn't find one of those, we found this set of magnets:

Do do do doooo!

On the way back from the dealer's room to the Hyatt, we ran into fiendishfanfares and her family, and while we had missed her daughter's cosplay, we did get to see video of her doing a kamehameha as only a toddler can. Then it was back to the AMV room to catch the re-airing of the contest videos, and while this time the freestyle videos were playing instead of the drama ones, we didn't stay that long because we hadn't eaten lunch in favor of a very large brunch, and they hadn't even handed out a voting card for the AMVs.

Dinner was at the Hyatt's restaurant, which intially looked incredibly expensive for average food, except it turned out that they had a "teriyaki buffet" for $22 that, well:


I was pleasant surprised, considering how much of a hipster foodie snob I am. They also had a dessert bar with cheesecake, which is an excellent way to my heart.

After another brief rest in the room, we headed out to a succession of room parties that lasted the rest of the night, though with one nice interruption. A friend I met in elementary school and have talked to sporadically in the years since then messaged me to let me know that he'd be in Red Bar meeting with some people he knew, and having picked up that I was at ACEN based on my Facebook posts, he asked if we wanted to meet up for a drink.

And we did, and despite all the comments I make about being aloof and having trouble with small talk and blah blah blah, we had no trouble keeping a conversation going despite not really talking in depth since middle school. He also sold us on Wizard World, and while I'm not sure we're going to make it this year due to its proximity, though we might go for the day on Saturday, but we'll certainly try to get there in the future. I've been leery of going to comic conventions, just because I know so little about comics--I had to ask schoolpsychnerd who the Avengers were--but since so much of ACEN was us talking to friends, Wizard World or the various other cons in Chicago could easily be the same thing. And maybe I'd learn something and no longer be a comic Fake Geek Guy.

After a nice conversation and a following succession of room parties and meeting with friends, we elected to skip the rave and the various events happening late at night and went to bed at 12:30.

Sunday
We woke up late and missed the panels we wanted to go to again, including one called "ACEN over 30," which I suspect was placed at 9:15 a.m. because all of us old-timers can't stay up raving until 5 a.m. like the kiddies can. But we slept past it, and after cleaning our room and checking out, we headed down to the dealer's room for one last look around and I managed to find an 8-bit heart keychain. Then we went back to the AMV room, found it was closed, and with nothing further to do and feeling pretty tired, we headed out to the Blue Line and went home.


I'm not sure I'm really the audience for ACEN anymore. I think in the last year we've watched...maybe a dozen episodes of anime, and quite possibly less, because I don't remember when we finished Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It's not that I dislike it or anything, it's just that there's so many things competing for my attention that it tends to fall into a lower tier. I didn't even attend any panels this year other than the one that schoolpsychnerd and I presented.

Despite that, I'm probably going to still keep coming, because it's a great excuse to see people and catch up. Even if I'm not happily going to the various panels and dancing for hours, there's enough there to keep me interested. Maybe we'll even do more panels. I don't care about all the fan panels that take up a big chunk of the schedule, but living in Japan for years does give us a perspective that I suspect a lot of the attendees for ACEN wish they had.

Oh, and cosplay I liked:


Probably the most accurate Sephiroth I've ever seen. Ah, those early Playstation graphics.


Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games, and this is one of my favorite cosplays.


I'm dorchadas and this is my favorite Mass Effect cosplay at ACEN.


I didn't actually see this guy, I just grabbed the photo from Twitter. But that's awesome.

And only five hours later than I should have. I'll post more about what happened tomorrow.

More later.

One of the phrases I've seen about Governor Blagojevich--I think in a letter to the editor--was that he "governed by press release." Before I started working at a newspaper, I had no idea what that meant. Now, I think I would only have one conclusion to draw if we didn't receive 5 or 6 press releases in triplicate from him a day. Clearly, it's because he's been shot.

No, scratch that. If he got shot, we'd probably get twice as many.

Also, I wrote a restaurant...spotlight. It's not exactly a review, but eh. It looks better in the paper, because the entertainment stuff I do is below it, so the page is almost entirely devoted to stuff I wrote ^_^ They're also picking it up and running it in one of the weeklies, which is nice.

ACEN is this weekend. I'll have a longer post about that when I come back on Sunday.