Otakon 2010 Report
OOOOOTAAAAAKOOOONNNN~ <3
It was a fantastic con, as usual. Here are the highlights of my con activities from early Friday to late Sunday (mostly) in order.
THE LINES
As my sarcastic friend always reminds me: "The best part of Otakon is the rides. And there's only ever one ride: the line!"
While the registration lines were quite decent this year (on Friday we arrived at about 8:30am to the end of the pre-reg line and were in by 10:00am), the staff were not clearing out the rooms at the end of scheduled events. There were some panels I wanted to go to where I lines up 45 minutes early and STILL did not get in. This was extremely disappointing as I had to miss three different panels on Friday due to rooms being at full capacity and not being cleared between events. By Saturday I forced myself to surrender hours of time so that I could line up at least an hour early for the two events on my must-see list (AMV contest and Making Comics From Concept to Publication).
THE HOTEL
This year I booked my room around February, though already all of the double-bed rooms were taken and my largest room occupant number choice was 2. I chose the Radisson Lord Plaza Baltimore, despite it being a bit of a walk (about 17 minutes) from the con, because it was the cheapest available at $145/night. To my surprise, the Radisson was by far the BEST hotel I have ever stayed in at Otakon. The staff were amazingly friendly, fun, and helpful, the room was spacious and well-stocked (though that may be because I got some kind of free upgrade-room-swap), and the noise levels from con-goers was relatively unnoticeable.
Though I booked a room with two single beds, for some reason I was given - without explanation - a larger room with two double beds. This worked out wonderfully since I kept the real number of occupants (7) lower than previous years. We had plenty of space in the room for everyone to sleep comfortable on beds or sleeping bags and still be able to hoard purchases from the con and have space to walk in the room. I think this was a special suite of some sort, because it was literally the first room outside of the elevators and right around the corner from the ice & soda machines (close enough to reach easily but not hear others using them).
The food in their little coffee shop was delicious and the staff were happy to joke and chat with us while we waited on freshly-made breakfast. (Ick, their oatmeal is GROSS though D: I had to throw it out after a few bites regardless of how much brown sugar I added.) They also provided us with a parking pass at a reasonable price of $15/day. :) Anyway, it's safe to say I will definitely be grabbing one of their rooms next year as well.
THE RESTAURANTS
This year was also the first year that I did not eat fast food at a con. I'm abnormally proud of that fact. ;D It worked out very well because I was able to eat healthy food which definitely had an effect on my attitude over the span of the weekend; I felt less tired and moody overall, which was wonderful. For the most part, I ate at the coffee shop inside the Radisson, which was wonderful, the Subway on Charles Street between my hotel and the con, which was mediocre, and a little Quiznos tucked away that my friend spotted and bought me lunch at, which had great sandwiches and TERRIBLE soup. Blech. It was like eating slightly-melted cheese with giant chunks of potato in it.
THE COSPLAYS
Each year seems to have an over-abundance of one anime. Last year, it was Bleach; the year before, Naruto. This year, it was Pokemon.
Don't get me wrong, I love Pokemon. I'm just excessively judgemental toward cosplayers because I spend so much time perfecting my cosplays. But I'll try not to get into that here. It was REALLY cool when I passed by the Pokemon cosplay photoshoot and the 30+ cosplayers were all posing together while singing the more well-known Pokemon songs!
My cosplays this year were two original characters because I got tired of people not recognizing me, or worse, MIS-recognizing me. :|
On Friday I was Pretty Soldier Sailor Button, wearing a hand-made sailor school girl uniform covered in about 120 buttons and carrying my giant Kiki Kitty from Gaiaonline as a backpack. As usual, everyone loooooved Kiki and kept running up to hug her. :) I had also made buttons that said "I was rescued by SAILOR BUTTON and all I got was this lousy button" with little quotes from Sailor Button in a speech bubble beneath the text that read "All the other powers were copyrighted" or "No one appreciates my genre" etc. They were really cute in my opinion, and I handed them out to anyone who asked about my costume. All in all, very successful!
On Saturday my friends and I went as a group of cat girls and wolf girls. Separately, we were rarely pulled aside, though I saw quite a few people taking photos of me from afar without asking. As a group, there were more people who asked for pictures or simply took them as we walked by/stood around in line together. On Sunday, I was too tired to cosplay, and just wore jeans and an AvatarSpirit.Net shirt.
THE STAFF
As I mentioned earlier, the staff disappointed me by not clearing rooms out in between events. However, every staff member I spoke with this year was kind, knowledgeable, and helpful. I saw some of the new staffers being patiently directed by the senior staffers, which I took as a good sign for future years as the Otakon staff is forced to expand to accomodate the increase in attendees. The first aid station was very well staffed - possibly over-staffed - and the staffers there made me laugh a lot because they seemed to overreact to every injury I brought them over the weekend. XD
Speaking of injuries...
THE CON FACILITIES
One of the bathrooms in the Hilton where some panels were being held TRAPPED ME. I couldn't open the door after I finished my business, even though closing it had been easy. I tried jiggling the handle, then shaking the door, then using my foot to try and lift it up and see if that made opening it any easier, then kicking it. Eventually I just decided I'd have to try and slink out from under the door, though I am very grossed out by the thought of crawling on a dirty bathroom floor. As I surrendered with one last frustrated tug at the door, the sliding bar jerked back, opening the door but ripping off a huge chunk of skin at the same time.
It wasn't a terrible wound by any means, but I bleed a lot with any injury for some reason, so it looked superficially horrific and gory. I wrapped a paper towel around my finger and went to the first aid area, where they saw my bloody paper towel and freaked out a little despite my protest that I just needed a little band-aid. After removing the towel, they saw the actual injury and agreed, LOL. It is still sensitive today (Monday) even though I hurt myself early Saturday.
Though I didn't order food from inside the center, I did eat half of my friend's cheeseburger and fries and they were DELICIOUS. Not worth the $10 she paid for it, but delicious. So, from my limited experience, the con food was decent.
THE PANELS
This section is going to be divided up by the panels that I attended or tried to attend. Note that I may word the titles of the panels wrong and approximate the wrong times because I'm writing this all by memory rather than intelligently looking at my con schedule.
~ Classic Lolita Fasion and How to Incorporate it Into Everyday Wear (Fri)
We were running late due to some last-minute craziness at the hotel room while dropping off our luggage, so we showed up about 15 minutes early to the panel. The line was MASSIVE and the room was already full, so there was no chance to attend. I'm not a huge lolita fan, just a casual one, so I wasn't too terribly disappointed. What DID disappoint me was...
~ How To Draw Anime (Fri)
The Lolita panel was moved into the room where this panel was supposed to occur, pushing it back half an hour from its original scheduled time. I would have been okay with this - had the staff cleared the room after the Lolita panel, which they DID NOT. >:( I waited 45 minutes for this panel, since I missed the Lolita one, and ended up not even having a remote chance of getting in.
~ Bad Anime, Bad! (I forget)
Holy crap. The line for this one was so long that it went out of the building. We started trekking toward the panel about half an hour early, hoping that since it was a small fan panel it wouldn't be too crowded, and boy were we wrong. We got there 20 or so minutes early as the end of the line was dispersing from being told the room was already full. (Again, the staff apparently did not clear the room - though this is only what I heard, I didn't see it.)
~ Making Your Manga/Comic from Concept to Publication (Fri)
I don't remember there being a very long line for this one, but Friday kind of blurred for me. This panel was SO GOOD. I loved the humor of the panelists and their advice was wonderful. I can't remember their names, but I have their card somewhere, and I may need to look them up later because they are just that awesome.
~ Happy Hyper Hentai Party 18+ (Fri)
We showed up 45-50 minutes early and still didn't get in. Once again, I was seriously ticked off because I wasn't getting in to ANY of the panels I wanted to attend - and the 18+ panels are the best ones!! >:( Since we couldn't get in, we decided to check out one of the 18+ anime that were playing, which ended up being an awesome choice.
~ Rin ~Daughters of Mnemosyne~
Smooth animation, epic action, delicious gore, and hints at ecchi sprinkled with comedy = I'm definitely going to check out this anime later. I'm intrigued by the vague mystery that could be plot while entertained by the action. The main character is pretty well-written, too. A+ in my book.
~ Artist Alley 101 (Sat)
I dragged myself out of bed hella early to make it to this panel 45 minutes early, only to find that there were barely any people attending. Oh well, I thought, I'm just glad I freaking made it this time. My ex-co-author and friend Eric joined me after speeding through an AMAZINGLY short pre-reg line (an hour or so) and we both greatly enjoyed the panel. I found the panelist's budgeting advice and her advice on displays the best part of the panel. The only slight downside was that she was rather long-winded.
~ Ulimate Lolita Fashion Show (Sat)
We made sure to show up extra early for this one in order to get good seats. It was... alright, in my opinion. A lot of the outfits this year seemed to have some kind of colonial inspiration, which I didn't like in Lolita style. I took video or pictures of every outfit, which I plan on going through later to check out some of the cuter designs.
~ AMV Contest (Sat)
Again, having learned our lesson on Friday, we showed up an hour early for the AMV contest, though our wait was interrupted by a fire alarm. During the fire scare, we popped out to Quiznos (which was slightly hidden, so the lines weren't nearly as long as all the other restaurants being mobbed by the thousands of otaku ejected from the con center) for lunch and then hurried back.
I was disappointed. The calibre of AMVs this year was low; I thought it was even lower than last year's, though my friend disagreed (she hated last year's AMV Contest). The trailer parodies weren't funny at all in my opinion, with most of them being focused on action. Out of all the Comedies, only two seemed even remotely LIKE comedies, while the others should have been filed into the Romance category. The Burger Dance song (or whatever it's titled) was HILARIOUS, though I've already seen a Code Geass-only version done before. Brittania, F**K YEAH! was also pretty funny.
Out of all the others, there were only three that seemed worthy of nomination in my opinion. One was an AMV that, as far as I could tell, was painstakingly crafted by masking anime characters from various anime into beautiful stills of fantasy-world-background artwork. My only problem with this AMV was that there was no cohesion to the clips that I could sense, so it just looked like random pretty animation. Someone did an AMV using Howl's Moving Castle to Vanessa Carlton's "Ordinary Day" which was only mediocre in AMV-creation quality, but I loved it simply because I love both the song and the anime.
~ Sailor Moon Hentai 18+ (Sat)
While enjoyable, there wasn't any SAILOR MOON HENTAI, which kind of disappointed me. I went with a friend of mine who is a huge SM fangirl, and she and I spent the entire panel laughing at the terrible hentai clips they showed that were rip-offs of the Sailor Senshi genre. There was one live action clip they played where Sailor Mercury was getting felt up and slobbered on by some random guy who couldn't figure out that the tongue should go IN the other person's mouth during make outs, but they cut it short before anything was shown due to con policy.
THE DEALER'S ROOM
Sadly, the Dealer's Room had such short hours that I barely had any time to shop. :((((((( I only managed to pick up about a fifth of the manga I needed, since I couldn't find ANY manwha sellers, and that's about half of my current collection of ongoing series. I didn't get any doujinshi either, though the few selections I browsed through seemed sparse. (And no one had any Tales of Symphonia slash doujins, which are the ones I really wanted to check out!)
Side note - the Funimation booth had a free photobooth and cramming in there with my friends for four pics was SO MUCH FUN! I may not have purchased any anime from Funimation this year, but I will happily direct people to their booth as free traffic when they have something so universally fun there. :)
THE ARTIST'S ALLEY
Since I forgot that the Dealer's Room closes ridiculously early, most of my free not-in-a-panel-or-workshop time was spent in the AA. I managed to stop and check out every table, snag a card from 95% of them, and chat with about 50% of the artists, which was fun. I greatly enjoy hearing sales pitches for art, especially sequential art like comics. While I restrained myself from buying toooo many prints like I usually do (my walls are SO FULL now!) I did try to buy SOMETHING from the artists I recognized from online lurkdom, like Mookie of Dominic Deegan, and those who had exceptional skill in their artwork or in their pitch. Seriously - I appreciate a good pitch enough that sometimes I'll just toss a dollar in for whatever they'll give me.
Thanks to all the spiffy cards I now have, I'll be checking out new web comics, artists, bloggers, and slogan sellers (is there a word for people who only sell merchandise with funny slogans on them?) for weeks! @A@ I do love finding new things and making contacts with artists, though. Anyway, I really enjoyed the AA! <3
THE ART AUCTION
The range of quality in artwork was huge this year. I spied some incredibly crappy pieces that looked like a six-year-old made them, and gasped in awe over some of the beautiful one-of-a-kind traditional pieces that were so far above simply "professional" that I'm still in shock. Ones that caught my eye in particular were a painting of Serenity from Sailor Moon hung in a gorgeous, ornate golden frame (sold on Sunday for about $200 and well worth the price tag), and a giant hand-made wall scroll in the style of an ancient Chinese painting (the scroll itself, not the art) of many major and minor cast members of Avatar: the Last Airbender.
I was so overcome by the sheer awesome of the AtLA piece that I dedicated an hour on Saturday to stalking the art until I saw it went to the Sunday live auction and FOUR HOURS on Sunday where I impatiently squirmed in my seat until they put it up for bid. I got into an epic bidding war with an older woman I never saw (my friends tried to describe her to me, but I didn't see her) that put me all the way up to my limit on how much I spend at auction - $500. (Technically, $503 including tax.) By the end of it I was shaking from nerves and I think I looked about ready to cry as I squeed in joy and flailed around, becuase the auctioneer was giggling at me and being overly nice. x) <3
THE TRAFFIC
This year was by far the easiest I've escaped Baltimore. We left around 3:00 and managed to make it back home to the Fairfax area by 4:15, when usually the trip takes 1.5-2.5hrs. Yay!
It was a fantastic con, as usual. Here are the highlights of my con activities from early Friday to late Sunday (mostly) in order.
THE LINES
As my sarcastic friend always reminds me: "The best part of Otakon is the rides. And there's only ever one ride: the line!"
While the registration lines were quite decent this year (on Friday we arrived at about 8:30am to the end of the pre-reg line and were in by 10:00am), the staff were not clearing out the rooms at the end of scheduled events. There were some panels I wanted to go to where I lines up 45 minutes early and STILL did not get in. This was extremely disappointing as I had to miss three different panels on Friday due to rooms being at full capacity and not being cleared between events. By Saturday I forced myself to surrender hours of time so that I could line up at least an hour early for the two events on my must-see list (AMV contest and Making Comics From Concept to Publication).
THE HOTEL
This year I booked my room around February, though already all of the double-bed rooms were taken and my largest room occupant number choice was 2. I chose the Radisson Lord Plaza Baltimore, despite it being a bit of a walk (about 17 minutes) from the con, because it was the cheapest available at $145/night. To my surprise, the Radisson was by far the BEST hotel I have ever stayed in at Otakon. The staff were amazingly friendly, fun, and helpful, the room was spacious and well-stocked (though that may be because I got some kind of free upgrade-room-swap), and the noise levels from con-goers was relatively unnoticeable.
Though I booked a room with two single beds, for some reason I was given - without explanation - a larger room with two double beds. This worked out wonderfully since I kept the real number of occupants (7) lower than previous years. We had plenty of space in the room for everyone to sleep comfortable on beds or sleeping bags and still be able to hoard purchases from the con and have space to walk in the room. I think this was a special suite of some sort, because it was literally the first room outside of the elevators and right around the corner from the ice & soda machines (close enough to reach easily but not hear others using them).
The food in their little coffee shop was delicious and the staff were happy to joke and chat with us while we waited on freshly-made breakfast. (Ick, their oatmeal is GROSS though D: I had to throw it out after a few bites regardless of how much brown sugar I added.) They also provided us with a parking pass at a reasonable price of $15/day. :) Anyway, it's safe to say I will definitely be grabbing one of their rooms next year as well.
THE RESTAURANTS
This year was also the first year that I did not eat fast food at a con. I'm abnormally proud of that fact. ;D It worked out very well because I was able to eat healthy food which definitely had an effect on my attitude over the span of the weekend; I felt less tired and moody overall, which was wonderful. For the most part, I ate at the coffee shop inside the Radisson, which was wonderful, the Subway on Charles Street between my hotel and the con, which was mediocre, and a little Quiznos tucked away that my friend spotted and bought me lunch at, which had great sandwiches and TERRIBLE soup. Blech. It was like eating slightly-melted cheese with giant chunks of potato in it.
THE COSPLAYS
Each year seems to have an over-abundance of one anime. Last year, it was Bleach; the year before, Naruto. This year, it was Pokemon.
Don't get me wrong, I love Pokemon. I'm just excessively judgemental toward cosplayers because I spend so much time perfecting my cosplays. But I'll try not to get into that here. It was REALLY cool when I passed by the Pokemon cosplay photoshoot and the 30+ cosplayers were all posing together while singing the more well-known Pokemon songs!
My cosplays this year were two original characters because I got tired of people not recognizing me, or worse, MIS-recognizing me. :|
On Friday I was Pretty Soldier Sailor Button, wearing a hand-made sailor school girl uniform covered in about 120 buttons and carrying my giant Kiki Kitty from Gaiaonline as a backpack. As usual, everyone loooooved Kiki and kept running up to hug her. :) I had also made buttons that said "I was rescued by SAILOR BUTTON and all I got was this lousy button" with little quotes from Sailor Button in a speech bubble beneath the text that read "All the other powers were copyrighted" or "No one appreciates my genre" etc. They were really cute in my opinion, and I handed them out to anyone who asked about my costume. All in all, very successful!
On Saturday my friends and I went as a group of cat girls and wolf girls. Separately, we were rarely pulled aside, though I saw quite a few people taking photos of me from afar without asking. As a group, there were more people who asked for pictures or simply took them as we walked by/stood around in line together. On Sunday, I was too tired to cosplay, and just wore jeans and an AvatarSpirit.Net shirt.
THE STAFF
As I mentioned earlier, the staff disappointed me by not clearing rooms out in between events. However, every staff member I spoke with this year was kind, knowledgeable, and helpful. I saw some of the new staffers being patiently directed by the senior staffers, which I took as a good sign for future years as the Otakon staff is forced to expand to accomodate the increase in attendees. The first aid station was very well staffed - possibly over-staffed - and the staffers there made me laugh a lot because they seemed to overreact to every injury I brought them over the weekend. XD
Speaking of injuries...
THE CON FACILITIES
One of the bathrooms in the Hilton where some panels were being held TRAPPED ME. I couldn't open the door after I finished my business, even though closing it had been easy. I tried jiggling the handle, then shaking the door, then using my foot to try and lift it up and see if that made opening it any easier, then kicking it. Eventually I just decided I'd have to try and slink out from under the door, though I am very grossed out by the thought of crawling on a dirty bathroom floor. As I surrendered with one last frustrated tug at the door, the sliding bar jerked back, opening the door but ripping off a huge chunk of skin at the same time.
It wasn't a terrible wound by any means, but I bleed a lot with any injury for some reason, so it looked superficially horrific and gory. I wrapped a paper towel around my finger and went to the first aid area, where they saw my bloody paper towel and freaked out a little despite my protest that I just needed a little band-aid. After removing the towel, they saw the actual injury and agreed, LOL. It is still sensitive today (Monday) even though I hurt myself early Saturday.
Though I didn't order food from inside the center, I did eat half of my friend's cheeseburger and fries and they were DELICIOUS. Not worth the $10 she paid for it, but delicious. So, from my limited experience, the con food was decent.
THE PANELS
This section is going to be divided up by the panels that I attended or tried to attend. Note that I may word the titles of the panels wrong and approximate the wrong times because I'm writing this all by memory rather than intelligently looking at my con schedule.
~ Classic Lolita Fasion and How to Incorporate it Into Everyday Wear (Fri)
We were running late due to some last-minute craziness at the hotel room while dropping off our luggage, so we showed up about 15 minutes early to the panel. The line was MASSIVE and the room was already full, so there was no chance to attend. I'm not a huge lolita fan, just a casual one, so I wasn't too terribly disappointed. What DID disappoint me was...
~ How To Draw Anime (Fri)
The Lolita panel was moved into the room where this panel was supposed to occur, pushing it back half an hour from its original scheduled time. I would have been okay with this - had the staff cleared the room after the Lolita panel, which they DID NOT. >:( I waited 45 minutes for this panel, since I missed the Lolita one, and ended up not even having a remote chance of getting in.
~ Bad Anime, Bad! (I forget)
Holy crap. The line for this one was so long that it went out of the building. We started trekking toward the panel about half an hour early, hoping that since it was a small fan panel it wouldn't be too crowded, and boy were we wrong. We got there 20 or so minutes early as the end of the line was dispersing from being told the room was already full. (Again, the staff apparently did not clear the room - though this is only what I heard, I didn't see it.)
~ Making Your Manga/Comic from Concept to Publication (Fri)
I don't remember there being a very long line for this one, but Friday kind of blurred for me. This panel was SO GOOD. I loved the humor of the panelists and their advice was wonderful. I can't remember their names, but I have their card somewhere, and I may need to look them up later because they are just that awesome.
~ Happy Hyper Hentai Party 18+ (Fri)
We showed up 45-50 minutes early and still didn't get in. Once again, I was seriously ticked off because I wasn't getting in to ANY of the panels I wanted to attend - and the 18+ panels are the best ones!! >:( Since we couldn't get in, we decided to check out one of the 18+ anime that were playing, which ended up being an awesome choice.
~ Rin ~Daughters of Mnemosyne~
Smooth animation, epic action, delicious gore, and hints at ecchi sprinkled with comedy = I'm definitely going to check out this anime later. I'm intrigued by the vague mystery that could be plot while entertained by the action. The main character is pretty well-written, too. A+ in my book.
~ Artist Alley 101 (Sat)
I dragged myself out of bed hella early to make it to this panel 45 minutes early, only to find that there were barely any people attending. Oh well, I thought, I'm just glad I freaking made it this time. My ex-co-author and friend Eric joined me after speeding through an AMAZINGLY short pre-reg line (an hour or so) and we both greatly enjoyed the panel. I found the panelist's budgeting advice and her advice on displays the best part of the panel. The only slight downside was that she was rather long-winded.
~ Ulimate Lolita Fashion Show (Sat)
We made sure to show up extra early for this one in order to get good seats. It was... alright, in my opinion. A lot of the outfits this year seemed to have some kind of colonial inspiration, which I didn't like in Lolita style. I took video or pictures of every outfit, which I plan on going through later to check out some of the cuter designs.
~ AMV Contest (Sat)
Again, having learned our lesson on Friday, we showed up an hour early for the AMV contest, though our wait was interrupted by a fire alarm. During the fire scare, we popped out to Quiznos (which was slightly hidden, so the lines weren't nearly as long as all the other restaurants being mobbed by the thousands of otaku ejected from the con center) for lunch and then hurried back.
I was disappointed. The calibre of AMVs this year was low; I thought it was even lower than last year's, though my friend disagreed (she hated last year's AMV Contest). The trailer parodies weren't funny at all in my opinion, with most of them being focused on action. Out of all the Comedies, only two seemed even remotely LIKE comedies, while the others should have been filed into the Romance category. The Burger Dance song (or whatever it's titled) was HILARIOUS, though I've already seen a Code Geass-only version done before. Brittania, F**K YEAH! was also pretty funny.
Out of all the others, there were only three that seemed worthy of nomination in my opinion. One was an AMV that, as far as I could tell, was painstakingly crafted by masking anime characters from various anime into beautiful stills of fantasy-world-background artwork. My only problem with this AMV was that there was no cohesion to the clips that I could sense, so it just looked like random pretty animation. Someone did an AMV using Howl's Moving Castle to Vanessa Carlton's "Ordinary Day" which was only mediocre in AMV-creation quality, but I loved it simply because I love both the song and the anime.
~ Sailor Moon Hentai 18+ (Sat)
While enjoyable, there wasn't any SAILOR MOON HENTAI, which kind of disappointed me. I went with a friend of mine who is a huge SM fangirl, and she and I spent the entire panel laughing at the terrible hentai clips they showed that were rip-offs of the Sailor Senshi genre. There was one live action clip they played where Sailor Mercury was getting felt up and slobbered on by some random guy who couldn't figure out that the tongue should go IN the other person's mouth during make outs, but they cut it short before anything was shown due to con policy.
THE DEALER'S ROOM
Sadly, the Dealer's Room had such short hours that I barely had any time to shop. :((((((( I only managed to pick up about a fifth of the manga I needed, since I couldn't find ANY manwha sellers, and that's about half of my current collection of ongoing series. I didn't get any doujinshi either, though the few selections I browsed through seemed sparse. (And no one had any Tales of Symphonia slash doujins, which are the ones I really wanted to check out!)
Side note - the Funimation booth had a free photobooth and cramming in there with my friends for four pics was SO MUCH FUN! I may not have purchased any anime from Funimation this year, but I will happily direct people to their booth as free traffic when they have something so universally fun there. :)
THE ARTIST'S ALLEY
Since I forgot that the Dealer's Room closes ridiculously early, most of my free not-in-a-panel-or-workshop time was spent in the AA. I managed to stop and check out every table, snag a card from 95% of them, and chat with about 50% of the artists, which was fun. I greatly enjoy hearing sales pitches for art, especially sequential art like comics. While I restrained myself from buying toooo many prints like I usually do (my walls are SO FULL now!) I did try to buy SOMETHING from the artists I recognized from online lurkdom, like Mookie of Dominic Deegan, and those who had exceptional skill in their artwork or in their pitch. Seriously - I appreciate a good pitch enough that sometimes I'll just toss a dollar in for whatever they'll give me.
Thanks to all the spiffy cards I now have, I'll be checking out new web comics, artists, bloggers, and slogan sellers (is there a word for people who only sell merchandise with funny slogans on them?) for weeks! @A@ I do love finding new things and making contacts with artists, though. Anyway, I really enjoyed the AA! <3
THE ART AUCTION
The range of quality in artwork was huge this year. I spied some incredibly crappy pieces that looked like a six-year-old made them, and gasped in awe over some of the beautiful one-of-a-kind traditional pieces that were so far above simply "professional" that I'm still in shock. Ones that caught my eye in particular were a painting of Serenity from Sailor Moon hung in a gorgeous, ornate golden frame (sold on Sunday for about $200 and well worth the price tag), and a giant hand-made wall scroll in the style of an ancient Chinese painting (the scroll itself, not the art) of many major and minor cast members of Avatar: the Last Airbender.
I was so overcome by the sheer awesome of the AtLA piece that I dedicated an hour on Saturday to stalking the art until I saw it went to the Sunday live auction and FOUR HOURS on Sunday where I impatiently squirmed in my seat until they put it up for bid. I got into an epic bidding war with an older woman I never saw (my friends tried to describe her to me, but I didn't see her) that put me all the way up to my limit on how much I spend at auction - $500. (Technically, $503 including tax.) By the end of it I was shaking from nerves and I think I looked about ready to cry as I squeed in joy and flailed around, becuase the auctioneer was giggling at me and being overly nice. x) <3
THE TRAFFIC
This year was by far the easiest I've escaped Baltimore. We left around 3:00 and managed to make it back home to the Fairfax area by 4:15, when usually the trip takes 1.5-2.5hrs. Yay!