Rough Draft

Ohayocon 4

A bunch of us from Case went to Ohayocon at the Hyatt in Columbus from January 23-25. This was the first anime convention I've been to. I've been wanting to get down to Otakon in Baltimore with Mike the last few years, but haven't yet.

We arrived Friday afternoon and went to the J-Rock panel where we heard some samples of J-Rock music and talked some about various J-Rock bands. After that Lynn and I watched the first 5 episodes of Kodocha no Omocha (Child's Toy). Then we went to Who's Line is it Anime? which provided a good bit of entertainment. They had several professional voice actors performing there. I don't watch much dubbed anime, and therefore am not too familiar with the voice actors, except for the DBZ one's that MIke has mentioned to me. Indeed, one of the voice actors there was Scott McNeil, who voiced Piccolo in the DBZ dub. After Who's Line Is It Anime?, we went swimming in the hotel's pool and played some Marco Polo which is something I hadn't actually done before.

On Saturday, Lynn and I got up and went to the Anime Music Video Contest at 11. We got there early enough that we got front row seats, which was cool. There were quite a few good videos, including one done to Yatta. After that we went to the Dealer's Room. There was a lot of interesting stuff there, though I resisted purchasing anything. The main thing I was interested in was a Kenshin wall scroll. After wandering around the Dealer's Room for a while we went back to the room for some lunch and then hung out at the pool for a while.

Saturday evening we went to the Cosplay for bit. The skits were really rather boring, so we didn't stay too long before heading over to the DDR tournament. We got there shortly before the semi-finals started, and wow did we see some amazing players. The best combo we saw was by the person who ended up getting second and it was a 1129 (coincidentally, the same as our room number, weird eh?). All of the semi-finalists racked up 500+ combos several times. That was fun to watch, just because the people playing were so insanely good.

At 10 Lynn and I went to see Millenium Actress which I really enjoyed. It had shown at the Cinematheque last semester, but Jeff, Lynn, and I went to see Bend it Like Beckham instead, so I was glad we got to see it. There was supposed to be a 5 hour dance in the ballroom starting at 11:30, but the live band Blood didn't finish until after that. Lynn and I waited around until about 1 while they were setting up for the dance, but we got tired and just went back to the room. We found out the next day that it didn't end up starting until 2:30, so I'm glad we didn't wait that long.

Besides all the events, there were a lot of people with really good costumes. A huge amount of pictures can be seen here. Lynn dressed up as Jubei Chan on Saturday and 5 people took her picture (3 of them in the span of a few minutes). Her picture can be seen here.

All in all it was a really fun weekend.

Wonderful Days

Matt sent me this trailer (the site is really slow, but it's worth the wait) of one of the most beautifully animated pieces I have ever seen. The movie itself is available on the BitTorrent tracker Supernova.