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Washington D.C. Weekend - Author's Notes Things must be going well when, two Sunday afternoons in a row, you find yourself out of town in a seafood restaurant after attending an anime convention. The previous weekend, this writer looked outside the hotel where Ikkicon was being held and spotted a seafood restaurant. On the double-event weekend that followed, this writer looked outside the cab taking him across the Potomac and spotted Legal Sea Foods, a branch of the restaurant where he had eaten the previous April after Anime Boston. And that's why you didn't see this writer at Katsucon after mid-afternoon Sunday. We'd planned to "watch" the start of the Daytona 500 by keeping track of scoring on our notebook PC, then watch the finish at the Omni Shoreham's bar. Instead, we made an early exit and watched the start of the race at Legal Sea Foods while finishing a Caesar and shrimp salad. We watched the finish at the Crystal City Radisson where we stayed for the weekend; the Radisson's room rates were half of those at the Omni. The President's Day weekend was the first time this writer had attended two events on the same day since the previous October, when we traveled from a late model stock car race at Winchester, Indiana to a midget race at Anderson, Indiana. We're still committed to getting as much as possible out of our weekend travels, and this weekend was special because there were two Japanese animation events in the same city, a couple of miles apart. The most rewarding event was the "Japan! Culture + Hyperculture" event at the Kennedy Center. While this site has a reputation as a cosplay site, it's been interested in all forms of creativity that are part of the world of Japanese animation. When we learned of the Kennedy Center event and the planned presence of three leading animation directors, we decided to spend part of the weekend at the film and cultural festival, hopefully learning from the directors about their roles in the "Genius Party" animated anthology. So we called the press office at the Kennedy Center and said we were interested in interview sessions with the directors. At most, we figured we'd have a chance to sit in on a news conference with the filmmakers or attend a panel discussion on "Genius Party." Instead, the center's press relations person said she'd try to make the directors available on Friday afternoon. At the appointed time, we were met by the P.R. person and ushered into a Kennedy Center rehearsal room. There, we got 20-minute interviews with Koji Morimoto, Shinichiro Watanabe and Mahiro Maeda. It was everything we could have hoped for and more, and we owe a lot of thanks to the Kennedy Center for making the interviews possible. In the ten years and more than 200 conventions we've attended, that triple interview day was one of the high points of creating this site. It's been a few years since Katsucon had creative people on hand of the prominence of the directors we met at the Kennedy Center. Ten years earlier, Dirty Pair creator Haruka Takachiho was a Katsucon guest in 1998, followed by Macross character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto in 1999, artists Hiroyuki Utatane and Yoshitaka Amano in 2000, director Noboru Ishiguro and actor Maria Kawamura in 2002, artists Kazuki Kotobuki, Tsukasa Kotobuki, Satoshi Shiki and producer Hiroaki Inoue in 2003, animator Takeshi Honda and artist Hidenori Matsubara in 2004, and artist Range Murata in 2005. Murata was the last major Japanese artist or animator to appear at Katsucon. The artistic guests in 2008 came from the web comics world; despite their talents, they didn't inspire or excite fans like the top-rank Japanese creators who appeared in previous years. That made the contrast between the Katsucon guests and the Japanese directors at the Kennedy Center event the more obvious. Thanks to Corey for letting us take pictures backstage of the entrants of the costume contest entrants, and to the Funimation guysfor letting us use their lobby booth as our weekend uploading and production base. Katsucon could have a rough time in 2009. The convention is moving back to the Hyatt Regency Crystal City they stopped using after the 2004 event. In 2008, Katsucon attracted around 7,000 people, and the Hyatt can't hold that many people unless half of them stand outside in the cold. We'll guess that the convention is going to have to make some tough decisions about how many people are allowed to attend. Having fewer people is going to make the convention less valuable to dealers, and with the return of the don't stand there because you might be in someone's way attitude from the staff, the event might be less attractive to fans, too. This writer was getting ready to watch the Daytona qualifying races on the day before Katsucon began when the cell phone rang. It was a worker from another office across the hall, asking if we were supposed to get a UPS package. We jumped up and scurried down the hall until we spotted the brown-clad delivery man with the box we'd anticipated for more than a week, the final piece in the puzzle of finishing our notebook computer change. Since the Gateway computer had only an ExpressCard slot and our Sprint EV-DO device was a PCMCIA card, we needed an adapter and fast. Fortunately, Addonics of San Jose had an adapter for a reasonable price, so we made the order. The adapter arrived just in time; one day later and we would have had to wait until after our Katsucon trip to use it. The adapter leaves the card vulnerable, hanging a few inches outside the notebook case, but it works and the EV-DO card operates at full speed. That brings us back into the world of nearly universal, wireless broadband internet access, and means we won't have to deal with the motley collection of WiFi pay providers - as long as we don't slip and break the adapter. Having the new toys didn't mean we knew what we were doing with them. We got Saturday's uploads wrong and that day's costuming pictures weren't accessible until we corrected the error on Saturday night. Thanks to the fan who sent us an E-mail message letting us know of the error; we were checking our messages after uploading the last of the costume contest pictures, and had just enough time to repair the mistake before the contest award presentation was finished. Again, the EV-DO and PCMCIA adapter hardware made that possible. Now that Ryan Newman has won the Daytona 500, we'll do a little name-dropping: 11 years ago, we were waiting to go into the Daytona speedway for the qualifying races, and bumped into a couple of Indiana race fans who also were waiting to get into the track to watch the races. They were Newman and his father. 10 years ago, we were working a midget race at Winchester, back when Newman was still racing midgets. Newman won the feature (he's in the #39 at the bottom of this racing picture page). A few years after that, we were standing on the starting grid for the Allstate 400 stock car race and found Newman's father again, and as Newman was introduced to the crowd, we agreed that it was amazing how Newman's career had progressed. Advance to Sunday, and this writer got to sit in his hotel room and watch a couple of racers he's met - former USAC champions and native-born Hoosiers Newman and Tony Stewart - battle for the win at Daytona. One last irony: we watched the race telecast from a hotel room on U.S. 1, the same highway that runs south to Florida and into Daytona Beach, a few miles from the stock car track. Katsucon Main Page