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Nan Desu Kan Author's Notes 2005 These notes were written on Sunday of the convention weekend at O'Hare Airport, but were posted late because of an overbusy time at real-world work, laziness and equipment frustrations. No great profundities this time, just musings on a good convention weekend. Apologies to those who checked this site on Saturday for costumeing pictures, especially from the Saturday night costume contres, and found nothing until mid-day Sunday. The delays were a combination of travel schedules, a lack of wireless internet access, equipment strangeness and a very busy time. For Nan Desu Kan, this site decided to get back to picture taking and sales at a fixed spot in the artists' alley, for which the convention was kind enough to give us a location and space (our photo setup takes twices as much space as a typical artists' table. This writer figured there might be some quiet spots during the Friday and Saturday he spent at the Colorado convention. A few quiet spots were present on Friday, but not on Saturday, when there was a pleasantly constant flow of traffic by out location. The traffic didn't slow down much on Saturday night after the costume contest until around 11 p.m., when we decided to strike the set and get ready to head home. Perhaps we'll get our first-string computer back from the repair shop in a couple of weeks. We stupidly spilled some stuff on the keyboard - okay, drenched is the right word - and while we thought we got the unit turned off in time to let it dry, it wouldn't reboot. So off went the 2002 machine to the repair shop, replaced by the 1997 machine on which this site was started. We learned a hard lesson on how notebook PC performance has imprived in the last eight years; tasks that were instantaneous with the newer machine and its 1.2 gHz processor crawled with the old 133 mHz unit. A famous writer observed that any significantly developed technology is indistinguishable from magic, and we re-learned that lesson with the old computer. The 1997 machine didn't have enough processor strength to handle the processing of color images for the Canon printer we use. The 2002 machine let the printer operate at maximum speed, but the 1997 machine was so weak that the printer had to wait for the computer to feed it picture coding. That meant long delays for the people who purchased prints, and we hope were were apologetic enough forthose values customers. Unfortunately, we'll probably be stuck in the same situation at Anime Weekend Atlanta unless the 2002 machine is fices fast, or unless we find a better-performing used desktop machine to toss in the luggage. We managed to get the major cosplay pages finished by Sunday morning at O'Hare Airport, but that facility didn't have WiFi in the terminal where we were lucky to just find a power outlet. So the full collection of material didn't get online until Sunday afternoon when we used the wired link back at our desk at home. There were a couple of neat moments between actors and fans at the convention. The same girl who was a delightfully tiny Evangelion Asuka in 2003 when the character's voice, Tiffany Grant, attended the event, was a slightly less tiny Excel Saga Hyatt who wore that costume when she got to meet Monica Rial, the character's voice. And Carrie Savage, the voice of Miss Deep in R.O.D the TV, got to meet a Miss Deep costumer. Savage was one of the judges for the Saturday night costume contest, an event that left the loquatious actor Trevor Duvall speechless, but only for a moment. The contest paraded dozens of entrants across the stage, most of them in walk-on appearances. There was a lot of time for stage performances during the two and a half hour show, but not much time was spent for judging. That's because the convention set up a system where, after each entrant appeared onstage, judges gave scoring sheets to a convention staffer who tallied the results so there were overall scores available as soon as the contest was finished. You don't have to wait for judging after a gymastics meet or a boxing match because of the running, cumulative scores that are tallied, and that system speeded up the Colorado event. And if you're wondering why some entrants got several awards; there were separate judging efforts. The main judges chose the major awards, but there were separate juding for specialty awards like J-Rock and traditional Japanese costumers, the audience got to choose their favorites, and the judges picked their awards without necessarily knowing the tallied scores. By the way, the Greenwood Village location is correct. Nan Desu Kan has come close to being in the Denver city limits, but the event had not been in the city during the timed this writer has attended the event. In 2005, Nan Desu Kan couldn't be considered in Denver because it was in the next county to the south and east. Also, there were "Greenwood Village" signs on the interstate just south of the Marriott. So the Denter Tech Center really isn't in Denver, but plenty of fans found Nan Desu Kan's latest location. The dealers' room seemed to be no larger than at the previous location, but the event gained the convenience of shorter distances between its event. The Holiday Inn used for several years had room, but the space was intended to be used from the back of the building, leading to long cisrumnavigations of the outer halls to get to the events. Those walks were far shorter in 2005. We heard some grumbling that female costumers were required to cover up because they went beyond some convention standards, and we spotted one Urd from Oh My Goddess who had to improvise a flesh-colored insert to cover some plunging cleavage. As always, the most scantily-clad costumers were males, not females, especially the strap-clad Shuichi from Gravitation we saw on Saturday. The only blatant case of bare-chestedness was the Ulala from Space Channel Five who was a guy, and had his top torn off at the end of a oontest skit.  Nan Desu Kan Main Page