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 | The
author of this site wishes to apologize for not posting these notes
until nearly 24 hours after he left Ikasucon and headed for home. A
bunch of other things got in the way, including a trip to a place where
a seven foot bulldog and a strange green thing hung out. Also,
apologies for once again posting a bunch of cheerful notes about how
things went right. No teeth-baring rants this time, which probably
shows this writer's bad taste as much as anything else. The author
actually ate twice at a Waffle House and liked the food, even the hash
browns. And he was happy that the food was served up in record time
when he was hungry at 2:30 on Sunday morning and nothing else was open. The author was late to his meal because of another one of the good things that happened at Ikasucon. This convention was another picture sales experiment for the author. On Saturday night after the costume contest was over, things looked slow around midnight, so it was time to pack up the big red case and get ready to head for the motel. No sooner had the printer gone into the bag than...hey, the author just remembered something for rant fans everywhere! The place was TOO HOT! There was a pool in the atrium and that made it hot, and all of the room air conditioners vented into the atrium and that made it hotter, and the hotel never turned on whatever A/C they had if they had anything so it was sweat, sweat and swear all weekend. Hey! make it COOLER next time...oh, back to the dull good news story. Yeah, the printer had just been put in the bag when a bunch of costumers walked up and wanted to buy pictures. So out again came the printer and the computer and the camera, and it was back to work. The costumers' late-night arrival was a great validation of this author's idea of taking the stuff to conventions and selling printers of pictures to costumers for $5. And it was something like the third time this year that the terribly impatient author has started to pack up on a Saturday night and had more customers show up. We'll have to learn to be a lot more patient about leaving on Saturday nights, because you don't take that sort of positive reaction for granted. In 2003, Ikasucon was barely there, a runt of an event in a large downtown Cincinnati convention center. In 2004, people actually showed up and had fun in when the event was moved to a smaller hotel. Maybe the trick was to move the convention out of Cincinnati, the place where fandom events go to die - or at least go to sleep. The event was billed as being in Cincinnati, but it actually was in the northern suburb of Blue Ash, in an area that had what seems to be one huge shopping mall along all of I-275. Some people just don't like downtown Cincinnati (ask them about Over-the-Rhine), and it might have made a difference to get the convention away from the city. After all, the area's autumn convention, Sugoi Con, always has been in Kentucky, not in the carefully regulated no fun zone of Cincinnati, where the year's hot event was the cicada invasion. On Sugoi Con: the author was warned by a volunteer for that convention that hotel and motel rooms are going to be tough to find. The NFL messed up the Nov. 19-21 weekend for anime fans when they scheduled a Bengals-Steelers game into Paul Brown Stadium on that Sunday. The football stadium looms across the Ohio River from Sugoi Con's convention's hotel in Covington, Ky., and if the river was paved, you could walk to the football game without breaking a sweat. After being warned of the conflict, the author tried to book a room into his favorite Newport, Ky. cheap motel, only to find it was booked solid. So the author found an even cheaper motel a couple of miles away and booked his rooms there. Hint: if you're willing to stay near the airport, you can find some really inexpensive rooms, and you might have to do that because Sugoi Con's Marriott was nearly full at this writing, with no chance of a larger convention room block because of football fans (probably Steelers fans). Oh no, half-sober football fans and half-crazy anime fans in the same hotel on the same weekend... ...uh, back to Ikasucon. After a slow start to the registration line, things got off to a decent start. The big question was whether the cancellation of the event's big guests would discourage fans from showing up. There had to be some disappointment when producer Toshifumi Yoshida and actors Monica Rial and Richard Cox came off the guest list, but there was no way to tell if anyone used that as a reason to stay home. Ikasucon had enough people in 2004 that it felt like a convention instead of a coincidence. It even had the mandatory horde of Naruto costumers entered in the costume contest, and Corey Gough's game shows that turned barely normal fans into uncontrollable geeks, with rice replacing chicken heads. We're assuming that all of the people seen with henna-painted hands got that way courtesy of henna fan Jan April Scott Frazier. We saw Steve Bennett finishing a drawing for a fan that defies description. Greg Ayres spent plenty of time in the bar, making up for the absence of the other actors. And Robert DeJesus may have actually looked up three or four times from his drawing duties in the dealers' room. Neat move of the weekend by the Clarion hotel where the convention was held: their Wi-Fi access actually was free. At Anime Expo it was $5 per hour, and it wasn't as fast as the free service in Ohio. It was wonderful to be able to plug in the card and use the net like the laptop was tethered to a RJ-45 line, and that made it very easy to upload the weekend's material. What next for the author of this site? We don't like making promises, but...on the day before Ikasucon, we booked a plane ticket for Baltimore, so an Otakon trip is certain. That'll probably be the last major trip for a while, although we'll slip over to the Gen Con Game Fair a couple of times to look for costumers. The big trips probably will continue in September with emphasis on AnimeIowa and Anime Weekend Atlanta. Of course, all of that is subject to change, depending on capricious fate and cash on hand. Oh, the best part of the overtime cosplay picture printing story? Precisely at 12:58 a.m., the hotel turned out the atrium lights. Nobody left. The author dug into his bag, fished out a flashlight, and kept going until the last customer was satisfied. Then he went to the Waffle House. |
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