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Anime Punch - Author's Notes - 2007 Back on the road again, with our second trip of the year to a convention in Columbus, Ohio. Deja vu: when we attended Ohayocon in January, Ohio State's football team played that same weekend for the college football championship against Florida, and Ohio State lost. On the Anime Punch weekend, Ohio State's basketball team played for the college basketball championship against Florida, and Ohio State lost again. More deja vu: the layout of the Marriott where Anime Punch was held was nearly the same as the Holiday Inn where SugoiCon had been held, five months earlier, down to the location of the atrium fountain, the largest meeting rooms and the swimming pool. Further irony: both hotels are next door to airports. We had only Sunday open for this weekend's convention trip, and we were tempted by the idea of heading west to St. Louis and Costume-Con, but the road east to Anime Punch was shorter by about two hours, so we took the lazy approach. Poor Chase Watkins spent an uncomfortable weekend with a knee injury on top of the pain from freshly-pulled wisdom teeth. He gutted out the weekend in spite of a shortage of the kind of painkillers we would have wanted. The odd sight of the weekend was one of those personal remote-controlled blimps that had drifted off course and gotten stuck against an atrium exhaust vent. It took a hotel worker and a tall vertical lift to free the wayward airship, which was then displayed at the closing ceremonies - where it seemed as if half the audience went on stage when the volunteer staff was called to take a bow. At those ceremonies, Anime Punch's organizers announced 2007 attendance of 1,300, around 300 more than one year earlier. Those numbers once meant you'd had a big anime convention, and that total would still be on the large side for a sci-fi con, but that attendance now is on the small side for an anime show. These events are so popular that already, nine months in advance, there are plans for three conventions on the first weekend of January of 2008, including another Ohayocon in Columbus. After spending a month away from conventions, we're hoping to get to several events over the next few weekends. including nearly all of next weekend's Sakura Con. Then, stuck with only Sunday for a convention trip, we have to decide whether we'll head to Tekkoshocon or the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention. We'd hoped to be able to return to Minnesota for Anime Detour, but we missed the show. Our regular job kept us home on Friday and Saturday of the convention weekend, and plane fare was too expensive to make a Sunday-only trip. We still managed to get the most out of the weekend, because we attended parts of both of Saturday's major downtown sporting events - the state high school basketball finals and the supercross indoor dirt motorcycle races. Good thing for use that the basketball game and the motorcycle races were three blocks apart. That meant a busy start to Saturday: head downtown and find a space in a parking garage, then walk over to the dome and buy a supercross ticket. Then stroll over to the camera store and get the repaired Canon Digital Rebel body that blew a shutter blade in California in January (the repair cost only half as much as we expected). Another short walk brought us to the fieldhouse where we bought a basketball ticket and trudged up to the balcony where we watched the game: good thing we brought our 75-300mm telephoto lens, since our seat was so far from the floor, it might as well have been across the street. That's the problem with modern stadiums that are packed with luxury suites. Each suite level pushes the seats above another 20-30 feet from the stadium floor. We left the ball game in the middle of the fourth quarter to make the walk to the dome for motorcycle practice. There was no complaint about being too far from the racing action, because, even though we bought the ticket a few hours before the dome opened, we got a front-row seat. We were so close to the indoor course's first straightaway that the telephoto lens was nearly too long to tightly frame the action. We saw lots of practice, getting a very close look at top riders James Stewart and Chad Reed, but missed the racing. At work, we had to sneakily listen to an online radio broadcast of the races. Stewart came from next to last to beat Reed, win the feature race and get closer to winning the twin supercross championships. Yes, we're different than others who take pictures at anime conventions. We warm up for the conventions by taking sports action shots, believing that it's easier to take pictures of things that don't move very much when you're used to taking pictures of things that move quickly and unexpectedly - like basketball players and leaping motorcycles. We had the basketball and supercross pictures online a couple of hours after they were taken. However, it took us far longer to repair one of this site's major shortcomings, the nonworking search page. At this writing, the Fan's View site contains nearly four gigabytes of files, and the old CGI search script couldn't handle the volume. After a couple of years of procrastination, we set up a custom Google search engine for the site, and it really works. Of course, a 4 GB web site is tiny by Google standards, so the Google search is fast. Anime Punch Main Page