Highlights

Time seems to fly even when I don't think I have a lot of activities lined up at this convention. Friday I sat in the Ugetsu Hakua panel. He is the creator of Bakuretsu Tenshi and was reasonably entertaining. I then attended Kazue Yamamoto's panel. She is an illustrator and the president of her own company. I went to her panel without knowing a thing about her, solely on her personality at opening ceremonies. She claims to be shy, but loves to talk. Someone would ask her a question, and she'd talk for five minutes before letting the translator actually translate. She's pretty cool. She is a heavy-set middle-aged woman, and looks like she'd be at home running a home-style restaurant. But very personable.

Alan and I did a tour of the con looking for good costumes to take pictures of. Alan has been doing that at several conventions over the years, and he is very blase about it. I just followed him and 'parasitically' snapped photos. I'm going to go out today and try to take some photos on my own. I havve trouble asking folk to pose. I guess I like candid photography because I don't have to talk to anyone.

One series of photos I took Friday may not look impressive, but they're pretty cool to me. I was in the dealer's room, where all the anime companies hawk their wares. I was quite impressed by the size of the place. It just gets larger every time I go. So I noticed that AD Vision had a skybox at their booth location, and asked one of the AD Vision folk "what would it take for me to get up there and take some pictures?" The guy told me they were having a meeting up there, but if I came back in ten minutes, he'd walk me up himself. So I did a round of the floor, and when I came back, he escorted me up. The resulting photos are on my Flickr page, but the banner photo is one of the better crowd shots.

Today the gang took a lazier approach to getting started. We lounged around in the room in the morning, then wandered over to catch the Geneon panel. This is a company that is making deals for some of the more popular anime, so we went to catch the clips. After that, I went to see the live action movie version of Tetsujin 28. This is the origin of one of my childhood cartoons, known in America as Gigantor. I even wore my Gigantor T-shirt.

After that, I walked upstairs to the KOTOKO concert. She's an idol singer being promoted by Geneon. It's been years since I've been to any sort of concert, so I thought it would be fun. She opened with some techno-beat J-pop, moved on to basic J-pop, and transitioned into a ballad. Around this time, the whole front section started waving light wands and glow sticks overhead. It appeared as if they'd all brought them, or been given them before the concert. Not to be outdone, other sections began to wave their cellphones and PDAs around with the backlights on. I looked around, and this was happening all over the room! I don't know if this is common practice now, but it was new to me.

I'm back in the room now, writing things up for a break. Next it's off to try to snag a photo or two. Bye!