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Otakon - Author's Notes - 2006 Repeating patterns and tempting fate: on the last weekend of December, this site's author drove northeast from his home, went to a motorsports event and stayed at a motel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The next weekend, he went to an anime convention and suffered a heart attack. On the last weekend of July, this site's author again drove northeast from his home, went to a motorsports event and stayed at the same motel in Fort Wayne. The next weekend, he went to an anime convention and...nothing close to that happened. We had a couple of sore spots from carrying a new backpack that was overloaded with equipment, but no health trouble at all. There were a couple of other people, presumably younger and fitter, that did need medical attention during the Otakon weekend - at least that we spotted. One young woman apparently dropped to the floor of the Baltimore convention center, and it was interesting to watch how the center's staff handled the situation. As opposed to other panic-prone conventions, there were no screams, no shouts, no demands that people get out of the way. Some med techs just knelt down and took care of the woman while foot traffic milled by, uninterrupted. Amazing how there's no drama when professionals are in charge. Overall, Otakon had a pleasant shortage of volunteers telling people what to do. We felt sorry for the poor guys at the information desk, though - it looked like they had too much business all weekend. With panel and video rooms scattered across three convention center levels, you needed careful and repeated readings of the Otakon map to find places. At least the pressure on the registration volunteers lasted only a few hours. The Friday rush was over by around noon, and there were few other major reigstration waits that we could spot for the rest of the weekend. Despite tempting fate, that race trip - to the Indy Racing League event at the Michigan International Speedway, was more than worth the effort. If you saw the delayed ESPN2 cablecast of the race, understand that the TV show didn't capture the intensity of the event. We spent the first two-thirds of the race in the south turn, where lap after lap, cars came blasting through in packs, wheel to wheel and side by side, a couple of feet apart at more than 200 miles per hour.  Search through our pictures of the race and you'll eventually find the images of the amazing mid-race restart where the cars went from single-file at the start line to nearly four abreast when they charged through the turn. Yes, anime fans could care less about auto racing that isn't linked to Initial D, but the author cares and goes to too many races. Besides, it's how we learned how to take pictures and developed all of our get-the-shot-or-else habits. For that Indy Car race, the weather broke from 90-degree heat just in time. The price of a cooler event was a thunderstorm and a two-hour rain delay. For Otakon, the weather also broke just in time. The convention week started with an excessive heat warning from the National Weather Service, and temperatures in the days before the convention flirted with the 100-degree mark. Then, storms blew through on Thursday and daytime highs were a more moderate 90 during the convention weekend. Most fans still stayed indoors for most of the weekend: the second-level outdoor deck was sparsely used and among the few we saw who spent any time outside was producer Yasuyuki Ueda, who had to follow the convention center's no-smoking rule. Ueda's appearance at the convention was a surprise to us, although it should have been expected because he's been closely identified with Hellsing and Hirano since he produced the first animated series, and appeared with Hirano at Anime Expo in 2005 when the second animated Hellsing was announced. One person in that Hellsing group whose appearance was not announced was Yoshiyuki Fudetani, chief editor of Young King Ours. That publication has produced plenty of manga that have been turned into popular anime, and we wish we had gotten a chance to speak to him about how the publication works and how they attract and cultivate the stories that go into print. This year's downtown sports distraction was the end of an Orioles home stand at Camden Yards. The Orioles started the convention weekend with the fourth-worst record in the American League, and matters weren't helped by having to play the Yankees while Otakon was in town - especially since New York needed to win every game to stay ahead of the Red Sox in the AL East. The Yankees took the first and third games of  the series, and dropped the middle game on a one-hit shutout. We encountered Yankee fans from the beginning of our convention trip. We stayed far south of Baltimore in a hotel along the city's commuter rail line, and Yankee fans were on the train when we rode downtown to start our convention work. They said it was less expensive to travel to Baltimore and see the Yankees than it was to stay home and watch the team at Yankee Stadium. For the last three years, we've stayed in Anne Arundel County instead of the Inner Harbor, because inexpensive lodging is easier to find near Thur good Marshall International Airport than downtown. That might change in coming years, now that construction had finally begun on the long-planned and promised major convention hotel. The site is just north of Oriole Park and west of the convention center, and it's intended to overcome the convention center's space shortcomings. It'll be interesting to learn how the hotel and convention center are attached, especially with a street and the light rail in the way. This site's author had considered rushing home on Sunday for the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, but chose to take it easy and spend all three days at the convention. We posted fewer costuming pictures in 2006 than in 2005, partially because we lost time on Saturday morning: forgetting some photo equipment, we tried to make a fast taxicab dash back to the hotel, only to have the ride turn into an hour-long ordeal when the cab driver couldn't find the hotel and missed it by several miles. We also used our Anime Expo strategy of putting a greater emphasis on material with guests of honor, which took away some costume picture time. We have stories on all of the guests of honor except singer Nana Kitade, who we missed when her scheduled panel was mysteriously moved ahead one hour from the time listed in the convention's printed schedule. The only way you could have known of the schedule change would have been to show up an hour early. Since we weren't on the music promoter's list of people allowed to interview Kitade, that took away another opportunity. Otakon's organizers chose not to have open interview sessions with the guests, saying they were "poorly attended" in 2005. That says more about the "reporters' than the sessions: we sat and listened to two guys in the press room talk about how they couldn't figure out how to use a Nikon digital SLR, and there were too other "press" types who barged into the costume contest late, loudly complaining that costume contests never started on time. We almost missed the contest as well, not because we were late but because we were turned away at the front door at first by a person who said we were using the wrong equipment. Otakon moved the costume contest from the convention center to the First Mariner Arena, the city's downtown basketball and hockey hall that has a stage at one end and can hold about 10,000.  One of the hired security people at the arena said we couldn't go in because we had a "professional camera" - a Canon Digital Rebel, for what it's worth. That person also said it was Otakon's policy against having those cameras in the arena. We trudged back to the convention center and let Otakon staff know what had happened, and they had to send a convention representative to the arena to get us inside. We never heard attendance numbers, but the convention felt smaller in 2006 than in 2005. It's probably unfair to mention something that subjective, because the center's southwest lobby was nearly overstuffed on Saturday by people trying to get into a hall for the music video contest, and that area was packed other times on Saturday by costumers and their fans. The attendance cap never was reached, as far as we knew, and hallways that seemed packed last year weren't quite as crowded. One person with some connections to Otakon said the Yankees might have been a factor, because baseball fans booked up Inner Harbor hotel rooms that might have otherwise been used by anime fans. The previous week's searing hundred-plus heat might also have been a factor, he speculated. On the other hand, there was a Sunday morning surprise. We thought we'd make one pass through the dealer's room at that time and looked for the entrance, only to find that a few thousand people already had the same idea and were lined up on the convention center's middle level, walking back and forth in lines to get downstairs. On that Sunday we spotted competing autograph lines in what the convention called the "industry area," with J-rocker Yoshiki at one end and Megatokyo author Fred Gallagher at the other end. In between were the anime company booths, with ADV Films' sales booth being operated this time by Best Buy employees. Many people asked us about our upcoming convention plans: there's home town Gen Con first, with a a lot of interest about the gaming convention's attempts to attract anime fans. Then we have to decide if we're going to try to go to Anime Vegas, AnimeFEST or both on the Labor Day weekend. Otakon Main Page