You’re getting this pretty much unvarnished, straight out of the text file I typed on all weekend. Well, Friday and Saturday anyway. Sunday I packed up the laptop, but there wasn’t much to write about other than packing to leave anyway.

9am Friday

The ride up with James-not-Robert and his wife Jessica went well, though I suffered a mild case of cat-fur poisoning. Bah. Upon arrival I discovered that I had some time to wait, and so I did, attempting to acclimate. Futile attempt, perhaps, but what the hey. Eventually my roomies arrived, I was shown to the room and after a while we all decided to crash out.

Lucky for me, God’s own alarm clock shone forth at 6:30am, stirring us all into motion. After (slowly, ever so slowly) rising, shining and getting cleaned up, we all marched forth to see how the Con was coming along. Pictures were taken, meeting-and-greeting was engaged in.

And now it’s time to sally forth once more, for the Con is about to officially start…

11:40am Saturday

So what was Friday like? Hectic and boring by turns. Running back and forth, snapping pictures, hanging out between bouts of running back and forth snapping pictures. Opening ceremony went pretty well, including a few cool bits of video.

My camera has certain… limitations. For one thing, I haven’t figured out how to make flash work at any sort of distance. Long shots with flash turn out too dark to use, while long shots without flash usually turn out blurry. Dammit. I’ve played with manual exposure compensation a bit, but that isn’t helping the long flash shots one bit. I suspect this is a “feature” and not something fixable by continued tinkering. Again, dammit.

For a day and a half I’ve been Dawn’s shadow, her pet photo monkey. There are worse ways to spend a con, mind you. Were I not tasked with the photography, I’d probably be spending all three days just milling around, or sitting idly and people-watching. Feh. I mean, it’s not like I’m spending money in the merchandising room, or playing video games, or engaging in panel discussions. (Do I feel horribly out of my depth as an anime fan in this environment? Oh hell yes. I’m not half the geeky fanboy most of the rest of these people are. At this point I’m just keeping my mouth shut so as not to reveal the depth of my otaku-wimpiness. Feh.)

Friday night was the Anime Music Videos contest. Oh my. 38 videos, most of them Action or Drama. Not that you could tell the difference, usually. Out of the 30 dramaction videos, maybe three or four didn’t suck horribly. Yes, it was that bad. During several videos our row engaged in MSTie action. A number of videos were based on the premise that “my favorite song right now” plus “dramatic (spoiler) sequence from my favorite anime right now” equals “great idea for an AMV.” Sadly, this was disproved over and over and over. Honorable mentions go to:

The video based on the “gore is cool, guys in black outfits are also cool” premise.

The video based on the “sort of like watching fast-forward search on the DVD player” premise.

Two videos that could have been so much better had effort been properly applied, as the concepts and audio-visual source matches should have been sure-fire gold-medal stuff. Instead, the videos were mangled beyond recognition. For instance, Linkin Park’s “Crawling” done as a character study of poor Dilandau from the Escaflowne series.

What was good? A few of the comedy bits, especially the two movie-trailer parodies. (If Pikadiator doesn’t win its category I’ll be quite disappointed.) A surprisingly good video, given my distaste of the source material, was the Spriggan vid. The creator used a small selection of simple effects, but the effects were used consistently. Consistency + Tight Editing + Good Sources = Worthwhile Video, most of the time.

What was bad, on top of the general video badness? We were stuck in there for over two hours. Ack. We started at 9pm and left the room close to 11:30. Many bailed partway through… the lucky bastards.

Anyway. We escaped, we took more pictures, we eventually sacked out for the night. And now it’s noon on Saturday and I must go forth once again to snap pictures and pray they don’t turn out too crappily.

Don’t worry, I have plenty of material for the Gallery. Oh my yes.

1:00pm Saturday

I forgot to mention my carding. Yes, after the debacle that was the AMV contest, some of us landed in the hotel bar to hang out and nibble on french fries. I, however, was carded. Flattering perhaps to some, I tend to find this only mildly amusing. Last night it became downright tedious, as the officious waitress stared at my Oregon ID for a full minute and said, “Do you have anything newer?”

See, it turns out that my ID officially expired on my birthday. Last year. Oops.

So I was turned out, dumped on my backside and left to wander… up to the room for some sleep. No harm done, really, but it was a strange experience and therefore I’m sharing it with you. Aren’t I nice?

8:45am Sunday

Half a day goes by, no update. It’s okay, there’s not much to write about.

I got a couple of emails from Mari yesterday, letting me know that she planned to do dinner with Lil’ and Geoffrey that evening and making sure I brought home souvenirs. I hope dinner came off, and I did pick something up for the Imperial Princess of Cute. (She later rescinded the request for trinkets, but it was too late… mwahahaha…)

Most of the rest of the day Saturday was spent marching around taking pictures, much like the rest of the weekend. I still managed to enjoy quite a few laughs, so don’t think I was suffering or anything like that.

Saturday evening saw the Cosplay event. Yes, that’s right, for about an hour groups of people dressed in silly outfits got on stage and acted foolishly for the entertainment of the masses. Lucky me, I was once again front-row for the frivolity. The cosplay itself came off almost without a hitch, but the “halftime” video show had some technical difficulties. My own minor crisis was the draining of my “good” battery, which forced me to switch to the only-halfway-charged spare. Self-confidence waned a bit as I worried about being able to finish the photo shoot. The Lithium-Ion gods smiled upon me that evening, however. The copious proof will be in the Gallery as soon as I can upload it all…

Once Cosplay was done so were my duties for the day. I returned to the room, unloaded my camera and set a battery in the charger. For grins and chuckles Dawn and I went across the hall to the “anime music party” for silly songs, tub-chilled soda and good anime-riffing fun. (One of the CCTV channels was on with the sound off; it’s amazing how well that worked at times. During the other times, of course, we just made MSTie meat of whatever was on.)

The highlight of the party was Anime Jeopardy. Names were picked out of a box, one of which was that of Yours Truly. “Great,” I’m thinking, “I don’t know beans about most anime series.” Oddly enough I managed to rack up a somewhat-impressive 2000 points, only to lose it all in Final Jeopardy since the question (in the Spaceships category, one for which I felt a certain amount of self-confidence) was about the Captain Harlock Saga. My snarky answer, phrased in the form of a question, was “What… am I doing here?!?” Much laughter ensued, so it wasn’t a total loss. Besides, I still managed to come in second (yes, with zero points) a netted a consolation prize consisting of a t-shirt, a handful of pens and a DVD sampler. Yay, me!

Once Isaac’s Con-Running Round Table concluded in our room, sleep was sought and attained. At this point I’m waiting for someone to arrive for whom I’ll be offloading pics and burning a CD. I’ve become CD-RW Man. Not sure how that happened. This’ll be the second disc I’ve burned for someone who’s not Me. That’s me, always the helpful one. Right? Right? Hey, I can hear you laughing. Stop that. Thppppt.

And that about sums up the weekend. Of course, I’ll write up more details as they come to mind. You’ll just have to be patient with me, I’m still recovering…

I’m baaaaaaaaack!

Photos, half-baked con-spawned journal entries and other assorted silliness will ensue during the next 24 hours. First, however, I must eat dinner with my family, kiss on my wife for a while, snuggle my kids and enjoy a relatively stress-free environment for a few hours.

Then I need to check on the computers at work to see if Daylight Savings broke anything, and start processing photos.

Lots of photos. Yeah.

I’ll be with you folks shortly. Thank you for your patience.

SakuraCon was great. It’s good to be home. Hell yeah.

So Wendi and I settled once again into the computer room for a nice, relaxing evening spent online. I fired up a web browser and AIM, she launched her present gaming addiction, The Sims Online. This is pretty typical, really, which tells you a lot about what kind of rock-and-roll lifestyle we lead at the Kerezman abode.

Wendi’s been playing “TSO” for many months. She’s quite devoted to it, having taken last year’s beta-testing duties to heart and possessing a sincere interest in the success of the game, as well as those aspects that detract from its success. In order to keep her property among the higher-rated places in her chosen “city,” she plays often.

Tonight she was in her property, welcoming newbies and building skills. At one point she took a bit of a break to trim Alex’s hair. Her Sim character was set a skill-building task, which is usually good for a few minutes if you need to step away from the computer. I, of course, don’t often pay much attention to the game, having burned out on the concept of The Sims quite some time ago during a week’s experience with the original game.

So you can imagine my surprise when I glance over and see this:

“Uh, honey?”

“Yes?”

“Uh, what exactly is your character doing?”

“Building a skill, why?”

“Uh, she just grabbed the top of the cage, pulled herself up, and started making humping motions. Is that normal?”

“Yep.”

“Oooookay…”

I swear to you that I am not making this up. I suspect that if more lonely geeks knew that there were interactive cage-dancing avatars running amok in this game, they’d be signing over their paychecks to EA Games in droves.

Let’s just say that this is a side of Wendi’s personality I never expected to see, and leave it at that.

I’ve been told that my face is next to the word “gullible” in the dictionary. I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’m afraid to look to confirm or deny the statement…

• Right off the bat this morning, I fell for one of Slashdot‘s April Fool’s pranks. Bonus points to the person who can spot which one. (And no telling, Lilith!) I even knew that they were running prank stories, and I still fell for it. Gah.
  
• Marconi and Tiny hijacked Jaime Cooley’s email and sent out an “I quit” message to the all-staff group. I fell for it. Then again, I really do think Jaime deserves better than to have to put up with those two, but…
  
• Beyond the aforementioned spammer event, other work-related absurdity included a computer that refused to install a simple piece of software. I checked the computer for broken system files, I ran spyware removal (found lots of nastiness), I tinkered and fiddled to no avail. As a last-ditch effort I forcibly extracted the files from the installer into a directory. Lo and behold, it worked perfectly. That’s two hours of my life I want back, dammit.
  
• My day took a marked turn for the better shortly after 2:00 in the afternoon, when Lilith showed up for our lunch date. She chose the venue, a little bento-ish place just off Milwaukie and Powell. We ate teriyaki chicken and took turns ranting and raving and cracking wise. I wasn’t “all better” when we left, but I was well on my way to it.
  
• Luckily, nothing much happened for the rest of my workday, after which I went home and engaged Alexander in a half-dozen rounds of Slavemaster CTF Unreal Tournament. Not only is UT a great form of digital mayhem and destruction, but the Slavemaster mod means that we enslave those we destroy until they bring us enough stuff to earn their freedom. I won’t play UT any other way, folks. Hell yes.
  
• Wendi fixed spaghetti, and tonight we actually have parmesan cheese for it. Woo hoo! Now if only we can find my shaver…

And that’s the rest of my day, in a nutshell. Which is, as always, an appropriate receptacle. I can’t wait for Thursday when I leave for SakuraCon. Yeah.