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Nan Desu Kan - Author's Notes - 2006 Notes finished way early on Monday morning before a flight home: So, sometimes you run out of time and the real world gets in the way. We wanted to spend most of the weekend at Nan Desu Kan and had an artists' alley space ready and waiting, but the real world interfered. On the convention's Saturday night, we had to keep track of a post-football game crowd that could have gotten out of hand. There was no riot (mounted police had a nice calming impact just by being there), but the extra work kept us hundreds of miles from Colorado at a time when we'd rather have been taking pictures of the costume contest. So it was time to rise early Sunday morning and head to the airport for a couple of flights that took us to the Denver International Airport, knowing that if everything worked right we'd have about five hours to accomplish what we typically do in two or three days. The flight to Colorado arrived a half-hour late, but we still got to the Marriott Denver Tech Center with enough time to get some work done. We found we weren't the only person with odd travel experiences with Nan Desu Kan. Masao Maruyama of Mad House had to skip the event, apparently because he was busy with promotions of the Paprika feature film in Europe. That could be a good sign if Paprika needs more attention because people want to watch the Satoshi Kon-directed movie. Seiji Mizushima, the Fullmetal Alchemist director, was on hand and was a featured guest at an Alchemist photoshoot on Sunday morning; we missed it by 90 minutes. From what we were told, Nan Desu Kan was packed with fans on the Friday and Saturday that we missed. The Sunday crowd looked larger than the Friday attendance on the first of the Colorado conventions we attended, back when the event was still called Nan Desu Kon. After a short lull, costumers started wandering by our photo booth and we stayed busy for most of the afternoon. We hope we managed to give you a representative sample of what the weekend was like, especially Beverly's detailed Nausicca costume. We do have plans to spend an entire weekend at Sugoi Con at the end of the month. Then we have to decide how we're going to handle the weekend that has Youmacon and NekoCon running at the same time. We confess that we slipped away from the booth for a couple of minutes on Sunday afternoon and found the TV set at the bar that showed the closing laps of the NASCAR race from Talladega. Brian Vickers' wrecking Jimmy Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. to win looked just like the move that Darrell Waltrip once put on Terry Labonte and Dale Sr. to win at Martinsville. Another odd observation, made after watching the astonishing, Katamari Damacy-based television commercial for the Travelers insurance company, a spot that proves that what happens at conventions is rapidly moving into the mainstream: This writer finally moved into the 21st century when he got a MP3 player. Before, the author still thought the ultimate in portable music was a 1980's-style compact disc player, but a compulsive purchase of a SanDisk Sansa C140 changed our mind. CNet didn't like the Sansa, but we were impressed. It took no expertise or experience to get the unit up and running, and we easily transferred files from our notebook PC using Windows Media Player 10. We bought the Sansa because it uses a AAA battery (it really needs Energizer lithium cells) instead of needing to be plugged into a recharger. The sound was better than we expected for the single-cell power source; we only wish it was easier to organize the music tracks, and that buying a Windows XP-based player didn't cut you off from easy transfer of iTunes tracks. We didn't consider an iPod, since the store where we shopped didn't have any 1GB units available. Yes, we're so locked into 20th-century habits that we still shop in stores. Nan Desu Kan Main Page