So…Anime Expo 2007.

Yeah, that about says it all if you were there. Going through the various blogs, forums, reposted emails, and what-have-you, the consensus was pretty much on the order of: What the flying fuck, over? For my own personal experience, this year’s convention has the most unique dichotomy; it was both the very best convention I’ve been to…and the very very worst. It was so bad, in fact, that I don’t know if I’m going back next year.

My reports on Anime Expo this year are going to be broken up into a few overlapping categories. I’m going to do a day by day report, a report on the SKIN concert, a report on the Transformers movie showing, and finally, a report on all the shit that went on this year that really REALLY fucked it all to Hell.

Day 0

This year was a lot better for me. I hadn’t ordered any devices, my costumes were all appropriately sized, and I had long since acquired all the consumables I needed, such as 80/120 minute DV tapes.

As I said in my Fanime report, my tripod finally bit it, so I was forced to get a new one. At first I wanted another ultra compact one, however, going to the camera shop at Mission Valley Mall; I was treated to a demonstration of a far larger tripod when I told the young lady what it was I wanted to do with it. While much bulkier than my last one, she showed me that a larger tripod had far greater stability all around, thus, it could actually be more column-like when it was extended; taking up far less space. Also with a really good one, I wouldn’t need my mechanical turret if I tuned the grip to my liking, which was also a plus. I was rather impressed; however, the tripod she wanted me to buy was about $250+…which I was not able to pay with a convention just around the corner. Oddly enough I found what I was looking for when I went across the street to the Best Buy and found a Sunpak 7500 pro for about $79. The irony of this is that Mayhem jokingly said I should get one of those when we went to Best Buy shortly after Fanime, which it turns out, I should have and did. The only problem is that it didn’t come with a carry case of any sort. With a bit of research, I found an affordable solution in the Giottos padded 31” tripod case for about $30 dollars at Adorama and BH Photo Video. I would have bought the Adorama house brand, which was comparable, but that one was sold out, and I needed one rather quickly. Every other solution seemed to have a name brand problem, and ran well into the $100+ category, which I found to be complete and utter bullshit…I’m not paying for a case worth more than my goddamn tripod. I wound up ordering from BH Photo Video, having a good relationship with that store, and when it came, it fit my 29” long (collapsed) 5” diameter tripod very well. It was padded pretty well too, as it was advertised, and offered a reasonable degree of protection for my new tripod; hopefully I could avoid what happened to my last one.

Gathering up all the usual gear needed for a convention and putting it into my truck, I included one of those 48 bottle cases of water from Costco and some Gatorade as well as some Captain Morgan and Bacardi that Mayhem gave me at Fanime. I expected this Anime Expo was going to be one where we would all wind up drinking a bit, and my gut feeling did not disappoint…though it wasn’t quite how I imagined it to be. I actually wound up taking off from at a reasonable time of around 10:00 am. My first stop was to get some gas, and pick up some snacks and meal bars at Walmart which was generally uneventful. As expected those meal bars came in REAL handy.

Then it was off to Long Beach. Taking the I-5 North, I figured I’d just run it straight to LAX. First order of business was to pick up Navaash, whom we haven’t seen in a couple years. Given that it was only Thursday, July 4th wasn’t ‘til the middle of next week, and it was the middle of the day, I gambled that traffic wouldn’t be that bad. Big mistake on my part…I had forgotten that I-5 turns into a two lane highway shortly into the LA area. Given road construction and the occasional accident, I was slowed considerably; what should have been a two hour trip, took about three. Fortunately salvation arrived in the form of the toll road bypass, which I took unhesitatingly right into Long Beach, and thus, to LA. It actually worked out pretty well; I got to LAX just as Navaash’s plane landed, so I wound up not having any wait at all.

After that, off to the Long Beach convention center. Despite a couple of wrong turns once we entered Long Beach proper, we managed to get there in short order. The great thing about Long Beach now, was that empty lot that used to be across from the convention center has now been filled with places to eat. In fact, the entire area has restaurants all around it, so we wouldn’t be too hungry…though it WAS missing fast food for the most part. This proved to be problematic later on down the road.

Parking was not an issue…we followed the sign that said “Anime Parking” on the road next to the center. Disembarking, it was time for the first photo of the convention: a rather humorous shot of the aforementioned Navaash. It was here we discovered just how bad the first problem of the convention was.

They didn’t mail out the prereg badges in time. Only people in parts of Southern California got them. This meant that there was a huge amount of people that needed their prereg tickets printed out, and the line wound around and around and stretched out well past the convention center proper onto the sidewalk and down the road. This actually wasn’t as bad as it could have been; it only took about an hour to get through all of that. If you actually HAD your badge, there was this poorly marked entrance you could just walk up to...if you saw it that is. On the way out I noted to Nav that at least these lanyard clasps wouldn’t allow our badges to slip off like last year; one of the con goers overheard and showed Nav the lanyard in question.

Given it was about 4:00pm or so at this point, we decided to hit up Island’s, which is a Hawaiian hamburger joint, while we waited for Gensao and company to show up. We killed a couple plates of chips while we waited for our order at the bar, and was hit up in a conversation with a guy who…you know, this is the type of socially inept person that scares people and tends to give fans of all stripes a bad name. Everyone has met this guy before; completely unable to read the body language of ‘not interested’ as he drones on about whatever he gives a damn about…in this case anime, and eventually you get this guy’s life story; which we were not interested in hearing. This guy was so fucked up, that he told the waitress she had a beautiful smile, and then, while she was still in ear shot, turned to us and said quite loudly, “Asian women are so hot,” in that really sickening soft creepy tone of voice you tend to associate with guys like this. As a rule of thumb, you don’t talk to people who really don’t seem all that interested in conversing with you (this goes for striking up a conversation with them as well.) Another is you don’t hit on good looking girls who couldn’t give a damn about what you were just loudly talking about and then turn to said complete stranger in that ultra geek way and proclaim loudly you had a fondness for the girls of the same ethnicity of the girl you were hitting on…and you just know she had to hear you. This guy was so fucking annoying the bartenders avoided our end of the bar for quite some time, driving me up the wall cause he would NOT SHUT UP! I’d wonder if this guy was on drugs, but that’d be giving him too much credit. Finally managed to flag down one of them, got our check paid, and we beat feet out of there to meet Gensao and co who were in the middle of that huge as fuck line.

We met them shortly after they got out of registration while we were waiting in line for our premium tickets. Navaash had, by this point, regaled me of a tale of an entire department of mostly Something Awful goons who had quit over the premium ticket situation. He wasn’t sure of the particulars himself, but he planned on hitting up the Something Awful gathering the night of Day 1 at the Rock Bottom, getting totally blitzed, and hearing what the flying fuck was going on. We also noticed the line was growing in size, but not really moving that much. Given how many people bought their tickets, and how big this line was, we were growing concerned. At this point we heard that they were only giving out tickets to two events, neither of which I was going to (nor was anyone else except Navaash, who stayed in line), so most of us decided to go wander around for awhile before we went over to Lenny’s condo to crash for the night. It saves money to not be at the convention center hotels on night 0, heh. Here, I took my first cosplay pics of the convention of a lovely Lacus and a witch, whose series I didn’t know of.

I then realized I had none of the cards I so painstakingly made and printed out. This had to be rectified, therefore I headed over to my truck to grab a handful of them…and start distributing.

Found that Lacus and witch cosplayer again in short order, after taking pics of a FLCL cosplay group, with the intention of handing her a card so she could see her pic online, if she wanted. I only expound upon this, because when I said “Hiya!” to the girl in question, I must have done so a little too loud. That poor girl jumped about 20 feet into the air, she was so startled, causing me and Mayhem to start chuckling. I handed her my card, told her she could see her pics there if she wanted, made a quick apology, and took off.

I took a few more pics, and headed up to a small quick mart across the street from the convention center that was still there after all these years, heh. Got some drinks and headed back to relieve Navaash of his thirst. In that heat, things to drink tended to disappear inside you, which is even worse while standing in line. A line that hadn't moved maybe 20 feet? A line that was stretched back to the parking lot and triple wound in front of the ticket booth? A booth which closed at 8 and it was maybe 6? What the Hell was the hold up?

I grabbed everyone's information, their badges, and their driver's licenses to pick their tickets up because about the middle of this they decided they were going to give out tickets to everything, not just those other two events. This allowed them to go eat, since Nav and I already had, so we hung out in line for awhile, commenting on how slowly it was going, and then they capped the line. No problem, we were ahead of the cap. Then one of the non uniformed AX staff, started announcing that the booth would close at 8, finished or not. Bad idea, considering they capped the line and gave a very good indication they were going to finish regardless. We had people in line reporting on this real time, as you can see in the Somethingawful thread, so, it was rather amusing to hear. As she kept talking, NO ONE moved...I get the feeling someone above her came out and told them to finish the line that was there, as they did. This saved the entire group a lot of time and heartache, which was good because there was plenty of that already on the way.

Wound up heading over to the area across from the convention center after this was done, and grabbing another quick bite to eat at a fast food mexican place. While we were there, we were witness to an extremely gorgeous Mikuru cosplayer, and witness to what was to be the overwhelming majority of the status of girls we saw there. Hey, I'm a single heterosexual guy...I'm going to look, heh. What I mean though, is as before, the year after mating season...couples abounded. This con was saturated with couples, and the girls that weren't attached didn't seem all that interested this year. Ah well...so be it.

There was a minor scare while eating that I might have picked up the wrong tickets for Peo, one of our group, but fortunately that turned out not to be the case. After eating, we gathered up the rest of our group, who were across the street at the video arcade, and we headed out to hit up Food For Less for some supplies, and then off to Lenny's to crash for the night. None of us knew what we were in store for in the next four days.