Event: Sakura Con 2004

Date: 2004.04.23~25

Location: SeaTac Hilton, WA

Written: 2005.03.23 (yeah, yeah, it's late, so sue me!)

After my first awesome full weekend con experience at Sakura Con 2003 I was very excited to go for another full weekend trip the next year. This time, in fact, my fiance and I left Thursday evening before the con started just to make sure we had a full day experience on Friday. I picked him up at a local hobby store called Bridgetown that hosts wargaming battles (and other things I'm not interested in :P) on Thursday nights at about 9PM and we arrived in SeaTac around midnight (going 80mph down the freeway will do that ^_-). Tara, Kristen, and Kristen's brother Stephen had arrived earlier in the day and already had the hotel room. We pretty much went right to sleep so we could get an early start the next day.

We awoke at around 9AM and made our way over to the registration booth to pick up our badges, which ended up taking a substantial chunk of time. Since we were around the area anyway, we decided to get in line to watch the opening ceremonies, something I'd never done before since I'd never been to a con early enough on the first day to see them. It was pretty interesting, since we got to see all of the guests briefly (though I've never actually gone to a guest panel ^_^;; I was tempted by the fact that Scott McNeil was there, but I ended up missing his panel the following morning ^_^;;). We also got to watch some traditional Japanese dance (though I've seen plenty through the Japanese cultural classes I took at Portland State University). After the ceremony, I went to the information booth to ask about signing up for the karaoke contest, but was told that the contest had already been filled....two years in a row where I'd have to settle for open mic ;_; After learning this, Josh and I made our way over to the dealer's room, where at long last I bought the Sailormoon first season uncut DVD box set. I also bought a Jpop compilation CD, and had a laugh at the Japanese man working at the booth (I think it was Kinokuniya) telling the lady running the cash register that I was buying a "shiri" (ass), which, in Japanese, is very close to the pronunciation of CD ^_^ At another booth I bought volumes 1 & 2 of the Azumanga Daiou manga (when I bought them, the girl working at the booth said she would bring the other two volumes the next day if I wanted them). That same booth contained an item of major temptation: a 1/5 scale fully assembled PVC model of Fuu from Magic Knight Rayearth, including her sword and a base stand. The price? $60! I decided that was a bit too rich for my blood and instead bought a little Fuu plushie. Following our first of many dealer's room trips we returned to our room for awhile to get some food (which proved quite easy, what with the rice cooker, water boiler, and noodle bowls we'd brought along ^_^) and watched a little bit of anime on TV (I think the show was Yamamoto Yohko, though I don't really remember what it was about ^_^;; I DO remember it had cheesy dubbing!)

Since I couldn't participate in the karaoke contest, I decided to go watch the AMV contest with Josh that evening (another con thing I'd never done before). It was quite interesting, since, due to my slow Internet connection, I don't really watch many AMVs in the first place. I found in strange that in the same category (I think it was drama) out of the 8 entries, two were from the same show, one I'd never heard of before no less (I later learned it was Saikano) and the two videos made it seem like two different shows, one of them seeming to be about a 30-year-old guy sleeping with a preteen girl (if you watch the show the two chracters are actually the same age, but I and many others in the audience got a very different impression based on the characters' looks), while the other made it seemed like a really action-packed world-blowing-up show. I really enjoyed the humor and parody videos, especially the one using "I Just Can't Wait to be King" from "The Lion King" with footage from Escaflowne (I've only seen the Escaflowne movie and not the TV series, but I still found the video to be really funny). We got to vote on the ones we liked best, and....well, I never found out the results, so I don't know whether my favorites won or not ^_^;;

Later that night we made our way over to The Wired (AKA, the computer/arcade gaming area located across the street at the Marriott), where this year's anime music guessing game contest was being held. If you read my editorial from Sakura Con 2003, you'll know that I did incredibly well at the contest the year before (and if you didn't read that editorial, that was sarcasm :P). I didn't do much better at my second attempt....out of about 60 songs, I ended up getting only one point, the opening theme to Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, and I didn't get the extra point because I didn't know the name of the song. There were a couple other songs I recognized but didn't know what they were from, but mostly I hadn't heard them at all. One of the problems with this contest is that it was in a noisy room, what with all the arcade gaming around it, and it was often hard to tell who was actually participating since there were people wandering all over the room, and some would occasionally wander over to see what was happening. The announcer couldn't always tell who was actually trying to answer and who was just wandering by and making noise, so sometimes people were given free points for things that they said they knew but, for one reason or another, they hadn't been given a chance to answer. I would highly recommend having the contest in an isolated room like it had been the year before. It makes it so much easier since there's not the distraction of all the other noises in the room, and it's easy to tell who's seriously playing since there won't be a bunch of random people drifting in and out of the playing area.

After losing horribly at the contest, we stuck around in the gaming area for awhile to check out what they had. There was DDR and Para Para just like the year before (with an additional console DDR up on the stage area behind the video screen), and there was also another rhythm game called Pop 'n' Music, where you used your hands to push a combination of nine colored buttons as those colors reached the bottom of the screen. I discovered that the game was quite a bit harder than it looked, and didn't do very well at all. Josh decided to try out a shooting game called Police 911, where you have to actually move your body around to duck behind buildings and such. He seemed to have fun, but he would pay the price later....

As the night went on, Josh and I made our way over to where the karaoke was being held, hoping I would get a chance at open mic soon since the contest was over. However, it turned out there was a second contest going on called Battle Karaoke, where groups of people not only sang songs, but also had to do treasure hunt type things like go find a cosplayer from a certain series and bring them back to the room. It was obvious that the contest was more about fun than singing ability ^_^;; The contest ended not too long after we got there, and I went to sign up for open mic. I ended up being pretty far down on the list since many people had already signed up earlier, and I had to wait about an hour for my turn. Before me were several people who seemed to believe the most important singing quality was volume >_< There was also one person who had the strange idea of listening to the song they were singing on headphones while it was also playing out of the speakers of the system. Since it's pretty hard to sync up two things and have them play at exactly the same time, they were usually a bit off rhythm....and the problem only got worse when the CD playing in the karaoke system skipped or something, and, since the person was wearing the headphones and couldn't hear it, they ended up being way way off where the song actually was. It didn't seem worth the trouble, since the version playing in the system wasn't the karaoke version anyway, so it's not like they wouldn't be able to hear the words without the headphones. Anyway, after some waiting I finally got my turn and sang the song "Itsuka Tenshi ni Naru" from Magic Knight Rayearth (there's a lovely pic of me singing at the bottom of this page, once again from Obsessed With Anime, this time without the glowing demon eyes *_*). I think it was about 1AM by the time I got to sing, and after that Josh and I both did some (now traditional ^_^) late night gaming for awhile before going back to the room to sleep.

Josh, Tara and I awoke not quite so early the next morning (Kristen and Stephen had gotten up early to get tickets for a concert by the Jpop artist hiro). We eventually made our way to the dealer's room, where I came across a rather bizarre item: a Super Saiyan Trunks window plushie holding a sign that said "Super Safe Driving." It was so cute and so bizarre, but I wasn't sure whether I wanted it or not. I bought an awesome set of Dragonball capsules that included one with Gotenks and his Kamikaze ghosts, and I picked up the second two volumes of the Azumanga Daiou manga series (the girl at the booth where I'd bought the first two had indeed brought the second two the next day as promised....how nice!) We left the dealer's room and went to the gaming area, but shortly after we got there Josh went back to the dealer's room for a little while, and when he came back I discovered he had bought the Trunks plushie for me (all together now: Awwww....so nice when two people in love buy each other all sorts of useless (but too cute to resist!) merchandise ^_^). We met up with Tara in the gaming room, and the three of us decided to attempt Pop 'n' Music together, with each of us in charge of three buttons. We discovered that even with all our powers combined, we still sucked ^_^;; While still in that same room, we caught the final rounds of the DDR contest, which were just freakin' amazing. One of the guys in the final round had a super high combo going on Max 300 (I think he got over 500!) and his competitor dropped out in the middle of the song due to a stomach cramp. Though I practice DDR a lot, I find it hard to believe I could ever reach that level....I'm a former sprinter, my body just doesn't have the endurance to keep going through a whole difficult song sometimes, even if my brain can process all the steps....

After that, we headed over to the room where they had a ring set up for sumo wrestling matches (I'm sure you've all seen them, where people don bulky sumo suits and proceed to beat the crap out of each other ^_^). Everyone was encouraging two guys dressed up as Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter to get up there and fight each other, and they happily obliged. They even attempted to do some moves from the game as they fought (which was quite difficult in the heavy suits, but it was entertaining nonetheless ^_^) Josh, Tara and I decided to battle it out between the three of us to see who was the ultimate sumo master. Since I'm pretty short, I kinda had troubles fitting into the costume....my arms didn't even go all the way to the end of the sleeves! The first matchup was between Josh and myself, and out of three battles....I lost all three -_-;; I then went up against Tara....and lost all three matches again! In the battle of Josh versus Tara, he won all three times. So, at the end the record stood as Josh 6-0, Tara 3-3, and me 0-6....man, I really suck at physical matchups!

After I was slaughtered at sumo, Josh and I went out for some (expensive, compared to our favorite restaurant in Portland) sushi with his sister, and made it back just in time for the anime trivia contest, which was held in the game room like the anime music contest had been (and it had the same problems with the noise level and people wandering around). The way the contest worked is that the question would come up on the big screen. If someone knew the answer, they would jump up and give their guess. If no one jumped up at first a clue would be provided. If more than one person jumped up at the same time, everyone who wanted to attempt a guess would jan-ken-pon for the right to answer the question. If the person who won the jan-ken-pon battle answered incorrectly, then those who had lost the jan-ken-pon battles would get to attempt to answer. Each correct answer was worth one point. I must say, though there were quite a few tough questions that I didn't know, this contest was much better suited to me than the music contest. I got into a few jan-ken-pon battles and answered a couple of questions that way. There was one question about which two idol roles a certain singer had played in different anime. I knew right away that one of them was from Perfect Blue, but I didn't know who the second one was. Apparently no one else did either, because a hint was given. When the hint mentioned a character needing 30,000 friends, I knew immediately that the other role was from Key the Metal Idol, and I was the only one to even attempt to answer the question, so I consider that to be a well-earned point ^_^ There were a couple of times when Josh wanted to jump up and answer questions. However, he had been playing too much Police 911 and his legs were too sore to barely even walk! (he doesn't play phycical games like DDR and such, so he wasn't used to all the movement). He tried to give a couple answers to me to go up and give, but in those cases I usually was on the losing end of a jan-ken-pon battle. There was one question that listed a bunch of odd sounding anime and the object was to pick out which one was not real, and in a list of titles like Twilight of the Cockroaches and something about Santa Claus, the fake one turned out to be the unassuming Flower Boy :P Very tricksy of them! There was one question I was tempted to take a random guess at: it had something to do with a naming theme of high schools in a specific episode of an anime I had never seen, but the hint was water, so I was going to guess fish (someone guessed types of water....what the hell does that mean?) Josh thought that was probably the answer too, but I didn't make it up to the front in time before the host stopped taking answers. The answer indeed turned out to be fish. Bleh. Anyway, after all was said and done, I ended up in a five-way tie for third with 3 points (there was also a tie for first between two people with 5 points each). Since the people running the contest were out of questions, they began asking members of the audience for questions to break the various ties. They started with questions for the two tied for first, and it took a couple of questions to determine the winner (of course, as my luck goes, I knew the answers to the questions they were asked....one of them was even a Dragonball question about which movie Gokuu used the Dragon Fist technique in....man, I could have recited the full thing in Japanese :P). Josh attempted to get in another question about Dragonball when it was time for the third place tiebreaker, but since no one had gotten the first Dragonball question, they said they weren't going to ask any more :P The question that ended up getting asked to our group was about the main naming theme present in Bastard! I've never seen that show, but I knew it had something to do with music, but before I could come up with the right answer one of the other contestants got it (the answer was heavy metal bands). And all the tiebreaker crap could have been avoided if I'd only gone up and gave my correct (though fairly random) guess to that one question....aw, well, as one of the top finishers, I got some little promotional poster dealy and stuff, but I would have greatly preferred to have been solidly in third place rather than settling for a four-way tie for fourth :P

The three of us stayed in the game room for awhile, deciding to try out Pop 'n' Music again. There was a guy playing at the machine who showed us that there was an easy mode in the game that used five buttons instead of nine, and he advised us on how to effectively move our hands around to hit the buttons. Finally, we stopped totally sucking at the game, and I was even able to pass some of the easy levels playing by myself. Huzzah!

Later that evening, Tara, Kristen and I decided to watch some of the GTO DVDs that Tara had bought, so we went over to her friend Mike's room since he had a laptop. We eventually ended up bringing the laptop back to our room and finished watching the first DVD there. I thought it was pretty funny (though I still haven't seen the rest of it....oh, Taraaaaa). We were planning to go do some late night gaming around midnight, but then someone turned on the TV and we were puzzled by the sight of a show called Oh! Mikey. It's hard to explain why, but it was totally fucking hilarious, and we just couldn't stop watching until it was over about an hour later. The show appeared to be a parody of the All American family sitcom with the gorgeous blond housewife, the hard working father, and their young son Mikey. Thing is, it was a totally Japanese production....and all of the roles were played by mannequins. The episodes were all just a few minutes long and were basically a sequence of random everyday and not-so-everyday situations....it's really hard to explain why it was so funny, but I was laughing so hard that I was crying a couple of times. You'd just have to see it for yourselves.

After Oh! Mikey was finally over and we had all regained our sanity again, Josh, Tara and I were off for some late night gaming. We ended up spending most of our time in the console gaming room, where we played Mario Kart Double Dash on the Game Cube. I haven't really played many Game Cube games, but I do consider myself to be an expert at the original SNES Mario Kart (which I still have!) so the game was fairly easy to pick up. After awhile another person joined us, and we decided to try out some of the games in Battle Mode. It was me and Tara controlling one kart (ususally with me driving and her attacking) versus Josh and the other person (with Josh driving most of the time, I think). I think in the end we came up pretty evenly matched, and we were having so much fun that it was after 3AM when we finally stopped.

Most of the next morning was spent packing up our stuff and getting ready to leave. We (of course!) couldn't resist making one last trip to the dealer's room, where I picked up the first volume of the Azumanga anime (the version with the collector's box). I finally broke down and decided I was going to buy the Fuu model that I'd seen at the booth where I'd bought the Azumanga manga. I only had $5 left, so I asked if the booth took credit cards....and they said they took cash only! Waaaah, my Fuu-chan! (The story of my quest for Fuu was not over, as you'll see in my report of Kumori Con 2004. While I was breaking down to go buy Fuu, Josh had his own break down of will power and decided to buy the Zeon flag he had been considering the whole weekend (actually, I think his break down was what triggered my decision to go buy Fuu in the first place). Last minute dealer's room trips can break even the toughest resolve ^_^;;

And then it was over. Josh and I packed my mom's minivan with hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise we didn't really need (sticking the Trunks plushie on the window ^_^) and made our way back to Portland that afternoon. It was an incredible trip, and me and my friends all had a blast. Before leaving, Josh and I had even signed up for the next year since we were so sure we wanted to come again (plus, it was only $25....that's a lot better than paying $50 at the door!) Since I'm so late in writing up these reports, Sakura Con 2005 is only a couple of weeks away, and I just can't wait for the fun to begin again!

Pictures

Pic 1: Here's me at open mic karaoke....don't I just look so excited?