This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
Friday might have been good if the con was staffed by people whose lives amounted to more than the contents of a mop bucket at Magic City.
Day 1: http://www.crymore.net/2016/09/30/anime-weekend-atlanta-day-1-thursday/
Day 2 Guests of Honor:
- Darais – scanlator
- Darais’s friend – He’s told me his name several times, but all I can remember is that it probably starts with a letter
- Calen – top anime vendor
- SQ – some guy who helped found 4chon or something
- A bunch of Calen’s vendor friends – I’m never gonna see these kids again lol
Friday
This shit made me want to play the violin with my wrist.
11:30 Wake up, write up
Normally don’t like to get up this early, but I figured you deserved it. <3
1:30 Japanese obento
Went to f20 and grabbed some calamari cuz it’s basically sushi.
2:00 Dealer’s Room
I try not to visit this place, because I have zero self-control when it comes to buyfagging. Within 10 minutes I found myself out a hundo.
Had to pull myself away before I found myself roped into an IRL Kaiji. Dealer’s Room, you are a dangerous beast.
3:00 Let’s make friends with randos
tl;dr: I made friends with randos.
4:30 Liquor time
Since everything within a decent distance of the con sucks, I took a 15-minute Lyft to grab some rum and an edible meal.
While the meal barely qualified, I did nab a handle of Sailor’s, so I figured we’d be set for the night at least.
6:30 Back to the Failure
On the way back from the liquor store, my Lyft driver asked me where I was from. When I responded with “Minnesota”, his face shifted into a concerned, knowing look, whereupon he proceeded to play nothing but Christmas carols for the rest of the ride.
I don’t know what life is anymore.
8:15 Shot shots shots
Darais x Darais’s friend x Calen x Me-sama.
In retrospect, we should’ve had way more.
8:45 K-pop Dance
Tons of people in a cramped room, chairs strewn throughout the center, with instructors whose last successful dance was when they got fingered for a minute at middle school prom… No fucking thanks.
We somehow tolerated about 45 minutes of this shit, but after learning nothing other than a newfound hate for K-pop fans, the only option left was a graceful exit. (Much like all our exits are.)
9:30 “If we get drunk enough, maybe we can save this con!”
Calen, myself, and Darais, in a selfless act of salvation, ran back to our hotel room to stock our bloodstreams with poison.
Unfortunately, the elevator broke down, and we waited for 15 minutes in an elevator with a bunch of dirty weebs, only escaping by jumping out of a small hole the maintenance guy could crack open for us.
Good thing none of the people in the overfilled elevator were socially awkward or we would’ve had to endure ten minutes of sweaty weirdos taking a discussion about mecha series way too far.
(I may have presented this scene rather matter-of-factly, but this shit is 100% a matter of fact. Would not /elevator again.)
10:00 Heroism/hotel failure, cont.
With the elevators shut down, we looked around for a staircase to get up to our room on the seventh floor. Unable to find one, we asked the front desk staff where the hell it was, only to be informed that the only one which existed was a service staircase that was inaccessible without being accompanied by a maintenance technician, the person who was currently working on fixing the elevator.
Faced with a choice between waiting for an hour or running back to the con to grabbed mixed drinks from a hotel bar, we decided to see just how good cheap rum and ginger beer would taste. Let’s fast forward, cuz all I can tell you is the result of that did not go well.
11:00 PJ Party
Shit sucked.
11:05+ Partying with SQ & Calen’s crew
Shot the shit with a bunch of people I’d never met before and will likely never meet again. But seeing as how most cons I go to end up devolving into a bunch of people having random discussions about shit for hours on end… well, I can’t say I regret how I spent the night.
Not like there were any panels or a rave to go to instead, cuz as I’ve mentioned before, this con is cancertrash. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Con impressions so far:
- People really liked my Shimoneta shirt
- Like, really liked it
- Ergo, this shit’s too casual and I’m retiring it
-
RIP.
- People also liked my Re:Zero shirt (that I only put on because some guy mentioned his friend was cosplaying Rem and would be hyped to see it)
- One guy liked it to an uncomfortable degree
- Ergo, this shit’s too casual and I’m retiring it
-
RIP.
- Any con with nothing to do on Friday can’t be a good con
Tomorrow I am going to try cosplaying Naruto in an effort to connect with the youth of our nation. And day drinking more. Wish me enough luck that I die in my sleep so that instead I won’t have to suffer this shitcon any longer.
The K-Pop Dance panel was a wreck, and I don’t think Sage’s summary does it justice. The first 20 minutes of the panel were used to “warm up” to two K-pop songs. Half the audience knew the dances and went wild, while those that didn’t know the dances were left standing awkwardly wondering why we needed a warm-up after walking around the con all day.
You may be wondering why two 4-minutes-or-less K-pop songs took 20 minutes. That would be because the audience would not fucking shut up. The panelists resorted to elementary school clapping patterns, but even that was too complicated for the audience. The panelists had a microphone, and I could not hear them standing ten feet in front of the speakers.
The next 25 minutes were spent going over literally two seconds of dance moves. This was made complicated by the panelists not knowing the dance. They had a dance practice YouTube video up on the projector and I learned more from watching it than the instructors. For those interested, the two-second dance starts at 1:06 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2xdOBZ_heg
Highlight of the night – for me at least – was convincing a girl in SQ’s crew that Cory in the House is the best anime. Surprisingly, being stuck on a broken elevator wedged between sweaty Gundam fans (who mostly weren’t socially awkward, surprisingly) wasn’t very high on my list of bad things that happened, which is very telling.
What do you do with the retired T’s? You could get a decent wad of cash ebaying them, with the authentic D_S aroma all over them.
Oh that? It’s just Axe; you can grab your own from a Target bargain bin. I like to douse myself in it to appeal to fujo who secretly have a thing for their middle school-aged brothers. It’s a niche audience, but I make it work.
Sorry you had such a bad time at an anime con! And why would there be K-pop dance instruction at an anime con? Are they confusing asian countries? Just terrible.