Well, the new layout has pretty much been finished with the addition of my lovely pictures. Don't I just look as cute as can be? ^_^ Any further changes will prob be just to work out the bugs in the system so to speak, or to add other nifty features, so welcome to your new home, my precious blog!

Anyways, as promised, here is the newest entry. And, boy have I got a lot to tell.

"So Jason, what did you do last week?"

Oh, I just went down to participate in a little shindig known as ANIME EXPO 2003!!!!

Being the big anime fan I am and having made the decision to try and make this the best possible summer, I made the decision a few months ago to head down to LA to take part in Anime Expo, the second largest anime convention in the nation, with a couple of my close buddies, Justin and Brice, and share in the celebration of anime, one of the biggest and most popular aspects of dork-dom in the United States. Having gone to Fanime 2003, a few weeks ago, I had some idea of what to expect. Little did I know that as big and cool as Fanime was, it would be absolutly nothing compared to AX. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start at the beginning of the story....

Wednesday:

After agonizing over plans on how to get down to the SoCal region a few weeks ago, luck happened to run by us in the form of Justin's parents. I'm not entirely sure whether they had business down there or they were looking to take a small vacation at around the same time as us or they were concerned for Justin's safety (we had been considering Greyhouding it down to LA), but Justin's parents had graciously offered us a ride down to Los Angeles. The ride down was a bit cramped, but we managed to pass the time by going over the AX schedule we had printed out and playin GBA. My god though, the Simon Says game in Megaman Battle Network 3 was so freakin irritating!! Trying to input 99 commands in a timeframe of one minute is not easy, especially when we come so close!!! The closest any of us got (which was set by yours truly ^_~) was 97. 2 off.... Man, that's depressing. Anyways, the first day we got in, we went to get our badges. Brice and I had already paid for our registration, so we were luckily able to join a short, fairly fast moving line and got our badges and goodie bags in a matter of 10 or 15 minutes. Unfortunately, Justin had failed to pay for his registration by mail and was forced to stand in the "pre-reg, unpaid" line.

The line was unbelievably long.

I'm talkin, DISNEYLAND line long. Easily 400-500 people in line. And keep in mind that we got there at about 8, and registration had been goin on for a good portion of the day. That's when it finally hit me how big this convention was going to be. So many people of all kind....many of them cosplaying...BADLY cosplaying, I might add (I'll get into that later).

Anyways, we were gonna stay with a guy Brice knew down in LA, Chris, and we told him we'd call him when we got to registration. After telling him how long the line was, the response we received was a simple "Fuck it," leaving us to wait for Justin. 2 hours and 4 interesting conversations later, Justin finally emerged with his badge and bag. Tired from all the waiting we had done in the entire day, we headed over to Chris, who was less that ecstatic that we had arrived so late (especially since we got lost trying to get to his house). Nonetheless, he seemed like a really cool guy and even seemed to take on some bastardly qualities of Brice ;) Well, after chattin about various things and checkin out the house and such, it was time to get ready for the next day...


Thursday:

Damn, getting up was hard, since I only got like 3 hours of sleep. Because Chris hadn't gotten his badge yet, we had to get to the convention center early so we could avoid the mad rush for the line. WE arrived about an hour before registration began and the line was pretty long even at that point. Still, the wait for Chris, once the line started to move, was a bit shorter than Justin's wait. With that, we headed off to wait in line for the Opening Ceremonies (although there was really no point, since the showroom easily had enough room to fit everybody). It took a while for ceremonies to begin, which began to get on my nerves since we were waiting for about a halfhour and they didn't have the courtesy to at least tell us that there was going to be a delay of some kind. Nonetheless, once things got started and they started talking about the guests of honor we'd be able to see at Q&A panels, it got me really excited for the upcoming 3 days. One of the guests of honor was the composer of the soundtrack for Noir and the .hack series. She was going to have a concert on Friday and gave us a sample by playing a song from the .hack//SIGN soundtrack, "Fake Wings" (very good song, highly recommended). Sadly, i couldn't go to her concert, but it was very beautifully played.

Well, afterwards, we were just really busy. Chris went off to join a group of cosplayers he promised to meet up with, as he was cosplaying himself (as a character from Naruto). Brice and Justin went off to catch a panel with the directors of You're Under Arrest, as well as some others (Kenshin and Ranma 1/2, to name a few) As interesting as that sounded, I wanted to check out a Studio Gonzo panel instead, as I wanted to inquire about the new season of Full Metal Panic. However, instead, they mostly talked about their latest show, Last Exile. While it looked interesting, they played the first episode in raw Japanese, and I knew they would be showing it later at the con with subtitles, so instead I decided to check out the dealer's room, as it had finally opened and the line had subsided.

my god....

I thought the dealer's room at Fanime was huge, but it was absolutely NOTHING compared to the one at AX. So many booths, so many vendors, so many things to buy, so many free goodies to get and quesitons to ask... it was easily the size of a Costco. I quickly crowded around the ADV Films (a company taht releases anime in the US) booth, which was getting the crowd to chant stuff like "ADV!" or "Suncoast!" and throwing stuff into the audience, like shirts, posters, and even panties. As I went on to other booths, I could only look on with amazement at the sheer amount of anime and videogame related merchandise to buy. The sheer amount of purchasables at that place were absolutley mind-boggling! I quickly jumped on some deals, such as soundtracks for 8 bux per CD and some cheap posters, but I knew that I'd have to do some smart shopping to get the best deals, as a lot of the actual anime I could get for cheaper off of bestbuy.com.

2 hours went by pretty quickly and it was time for me to go to what I really wanted to see: the yoshitoshi ABe panel (yes, he spells his name like that). He is the famed director of Serial Experiments: Lain and Niea Under 7. Unfortunately, his panel wasnt as interesting as I had hoped, as the discussion and Q&A was mainly about his newer series, and I hadn't seen them yet. In fact, they hadn't even been released in the US! One of his recent works, Haibane Renmei, was debuting in a videoroom later in the con, so I made a mental note to be sure to check it out. (more on that later).

Since the dealer's room was about to close at that point, I decided to meet up with Justin and Brice there. The rest of the day was spent with a combination of checkin out the arcade and various anime screenings, as well as simply chillin out on the various chairs laid out in the hotels and cahttin with other con-goers about anime-related issues.

Anyways, I"m tired of writin, it's been a while and I'm kinda rusty at it. I'll post the other days events later, as well as my own personal reviews of the standout anime we watched. I'll be discussing 5 series: "Please Teacher", "Haibane-Renmei", "Infinite Ryvius", "Last Exile", and "I! My! Me! Strawberry Eggs!" All of these were awesome and i definitely hope to see more of them.

Quote of the day: "Yeah, you didn't call me back yesterday, which really defeats the purpose of having a cell phone...." -my sister