Convention Schedule Previous Reports Personality of the Week About this Site Search this Site Racing and More E-Mail the Author

Ushicon Author's Notes 2005 Notes compiled before an early Sunday morning trip home: Ushicon made its second move in its four years, moving from the shadow of the Texas state capitol building to the upscale Arboretum Area six miles north of downtown. It's part of standard 21st-century suburbia; hard to find among a tangle of roads, hidden among shopping malls, and at the end of a construction zone. Highways in Texas, like cathedrals in France, seem never to be finished, and the state lavishes more attention on its beloved football stadiums than on the roads...uh-oh, got to be careful about talking about football in Texas. Even actor Vic Mignogna was up and ready for the Steelers-Patriots NFL game on the convention weekend. Most of the convention was placed in a large basement room of the Renaissance hotel, and that room was divided into two sections by thick foam walls, six foot high, made by convention volunteers. The dealers room went in one half of the area, and the main events hall, fronted by the artists' alley, was placed in the other. That division caused some weekend delays when the events hall had to be rebuilt a couple of times, to switch from game show to dance to videos to the costume show. It was a utilitarian setup, with plenty of room for events but few charms. A couple of business groups used the hotel at the same time, but there was little mixing of the groups that we could see. Traffic to the artists' alley location where the author set up his photo stuff didn't pick up until Saturday afternoon, when the convention's main events started to attract fans. The convention had a tough choice in using that area to find a location for the alley, because surrounding hallways leading to the other basement meeting rooms were too narrow. The solution was the best possible compromise. The Saturday night costume presentation gave the author another odd convention memory. Some cosplaying fans kept coming up to the writer and asked him if he minded if he was turned into a character in their skit. "I don't care what you do as long as you get my name right," was the answer. Then came the skit, where the author pas portrayed by a guy in a yellow and black "kill Bill" jumpsuit - as a defender of anime magical girls with his camera. On top of that, we were told by actor Kyle Hebert provided the voice for this author's character. The skit provided two ego boosts for this writer. It demonstrated that he's prominent enough (or maybe eccentric enough) to be parodied, and the cosplayer did the author a favor by portraying his fictional waistline about ten inches smaller than the real thing. Ushicon was scheduled to have three guests of honor from Japan, but one called off her trip. Manga artist You Higuri stayed home because her father fell ill. In response, the convention filled one of her scheduled panel slots with a gathering where fans could sign a get-well wish for the artist's father. But the convention had a surprise in the appearance of veteran producer Hiroaki Inoue, who used Ushicon as away to promote the World Science Fiction Convention scheduled for Tokyo in 2007. Japanese filmmakers and sci-fi buffs have to be looking forward to the Worldcon as a way to get the world to take their brand of science fiction seriously. Too many people look at Japanese sci-fi and see only 1960's monsters in rubber suits, but the ideas and stories coming from Japan are far more compelling than that. It took Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns" to lift Batman and American comics out of their 1960's camp reputation for most mainstream writers, and Worldcon could have the same effect on Japanese science fiction. Costumers were looking forward to Ushicon because of the hotel's landscaped surroundings, which promised to make great backgrounds for pictures. That lasted all of a day and a half, until a cold front moved through on Saturday afternoon. That's a cold front as in downright cold, not just cold by Texas standards. On Saturday night, temperatures dropped to 30 degrees, typical winter weather for the Midwest, not for Texas. Only the bravest and best-dressed costumers dared venture outside after the cold front arrived. Ironically, one of Ushicon's highlights from 2004 was scheduled to attend another Texas convention in 2005. In early January, singer Koda Kumi, who performed a memorable Ushicon concert and delighted all with her forthright, positive attitude, was announced as a guest for the inaugural KamiKazeCon in March. That announcement might help the new convention live up to its early boast of being "the largest anime convention in Houston," even before the first event was held. The author's rides to and from the airport took him past Ushicon's original home in a Four Seasons hotel, a place that would have easily fit inside the Renaissance hotel's atrium. Both hotels are in the upscale north side of Austin, which has drastically changed with the affluence and power of a major state capitol. The Sunday morning SuperShuttle driver, who has lived in the Austin area for a half-century, said he once hunted doves on the land that now holds the Renaissance. While the north side of Austin is covered in suburban sprawl, the south side and the roads leading to the airport look as if they haven't changed in those same 50 years. Those who think the author of this site has total control over the photo and computer gadgets would have thought twice on the convention's Saturday afternoon. The digital camera goes through four memory cards during a weekend; each card is filled and its contents copied to the laptop PC's hard drive. However, in the rush of getting things done, somehow one of the cards was mistakenly reformatted in the Fuji S7000 before the images were copied. In a calm, frantic, desperate move, the author used a wireless link to search the Internet for quickly downloadable file recovery software. He found it in Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery, a download of less than one megabyte. That program recovered all of the images from the mistakenly reformatted CompactFlash card, letting you look at the pictures of the Saturday afternoon InuYasha and J-rock cosplay groups, among others. This neat program was a great reputation save for this site, and we'd recommend that you try the program if you're in similar trouble. Ushicon Main Page