Event: Kumori Con 2004

Date: 2004.09.04~06

Location: Downtown Marriott, Portland, Oregon

Written: 2005.03.23

In my previous con experiences, I had always had to leave the city (or even the country, in the case of Comiket to get my raging otaku fix. However, in 2004, I was finally blessed with the experience of having a con in my home town. 2004 was actually the second year of Kumori Con, but the first year it had been in another city and I hadn't heard anything about it. This time, though, I saw advertising for it at Sakura Con 2004 a few months earlier, so I knew it was coming. Though it was by far the smallest con I've been to (only about 1200 total came, compared with over 4000 at the latest Sakura Con and who knows how many thousands at Comiket) and it wasn't a 24 hour con, I still had a really fun time, and I look forward to seeing it grow in the future.

The hotel where the con was located was conveniently located only about seven blocks away from my mom's work, meaning I could use her parking pass and avoid the hassle/cost of trying to park downtown to attend the con. The first day of the con, only Josh and I made the trek downtown (we were the only ones of our group of friends to have pre-registered, anyway). As we were picking up our badges, we found that some people were already being turned away from making new registrations because the con was filling up so fast. After obtaining our badges, we looked around a bit to see where everything was. We made a visit to the dealer's room, which was actually pretty barren. The room wasn't that big, and there were quite a few more tables than actual dealers there. One booth, though, was one I recognized as being the same one I had bought the Azumanga Daiou manga series from at the previous Sakura Con. You may recall that that same booth had also been selling a $60 1/5 scale fully assembled PVC Fuu model with base and sword, and on the last day when I finally broke down and decided to buy it, I didn't have enough cash on me. Well, here at Kumori Con, she was at that booth once again, and this time I was prepared. I'd gotten money from an ATM right before the con, so I wasn't lacking cash this time. Fuu was finally mine! The funny thing is, the girl working at the booth (the one who had made good on her promise to bring more manga for me to buy the second day of Sakura Con) recognized me as the one who'd wanted to buy the Fuu model before, and she sadly said goodbye to the model that had accompanied her for so long.

Once our first shopping trip was done, Josh and I made our way up to where the RPG stuff was happening. He signed up to participate in something that was happening later, and we tried to navigate our way back down to the main con area. The way things were connected was a bit tricky, as there was no stairway directly connecting the main event area to the floor where the RPG room and a couple of screening rooms were, meaning we had to depend on the elevators, which after only a few hours were really slowing down due to the increased traffic. There was a way to take the stairs down to the main level, but those stairs actually led outside and forced congoers to walk down the block a bit to re-enter the building. I would definitely recommend that the con be in a building that makes it easier for congoers to get around, since curious otaku have a tendancy to flit from place to place, and it'd be much more convenient to have the con in a place that allows that to happen smoothly. Anyway, once back to the main area, we made our way down to the gaming room, which contained mostly console gaming (even games that are usually arcade, like DDR and Para Para, were the console versions). One good thing about Kumori Con being a small con is that the lines to play games weren't nearly as long as those at Sakura Con. Hell, there were times when I would get through a full turn on Para Para and find there was no one in line behind me and I could just play through another game! We also played some Mario Party (Josh, Mr. Superstitious Dice Man, had some really bad luck with the electronic dice in that game....he kept rolling low, and even got sent back to the start at one point ^o^) Around 2PM the auditions for karaoke were set to begin, so I went off to do that while Josh went back up to the RPG room. The auditions started a bit late, but then I finally got my turn to get up and sing a snippet of the song Every Heart by Boa for the judges. I stupidly forgot the words to one of the lines because I got nervous and wasn't concentrating hard enough, but when the judges posted the results a while later I found that I'd made it into the contest. Finally, after missing the opportunity to sign up twice at Sakura Con, I was going to participate in my first karaoke contest! I then caught the end of a panel by Portland State University professor Antonia Levi, from whom I took anime classes from in the summers of 2002 and 2003 (clicking on the links will lead you to the final essays I wrote for each of those classes). After some more DDR and Para Para in the game room, I met up with Josh again (who was playing the card game Munchkin) and we got something to eat. Soon after, it was time for me to give it my all in my first karaoke contest.

The host of the contest, Brad DeMoss, was a pretty funny guy. He even sang It's Raining Men and at the end of the contest while we waited for the judging results. But anyway, I was a bit nervous before it was my turn to go up. Once I actually got up there and sang, things mostly went pretty well, though, just like in my audition, there was one part where I spaced out and kind of forgot a line >_< Since it was a slow song, many people mimiced the motion where they pull out a lighter and wave it back and forth. Several people used their cell phones as a source of light, one woman used her Game Boy, and someone was even waving a soda cup ^_^;; (Pictures of this, taken from Obsessed With Anime, can be found at the bottom of the page. Overall, I thought my performance went pretty well. However, soon after my turn there were a couple of pretty amazing singers, so I began to doubt that I would actually win any prizes. There was an interesting intermission during the contest when the cosplay troupe known as Bakazoku got up and did some songs and stuff. They're a really funny and crazy group ^_^ Anyway, after all was said and done, I ended up not winning anything, but I still had a really fun time.

After the contest, I found Josh in a nearby room watching the live action version of GTO. It seems that they had been having computer trouble throughout, and every once in a while they'd had to call in a tech person to get the file playing again. I stayed with him in the room until midnight, when the con closed and we headed back to our homes to rest up for the next day.

The next day we made it to the con around noon with Josh's friend Nate in tow. He hadn't pre-registered and we were hoping that we could get him in, but we found out that the daily quota had once again been filled up. After that, we ended up sneaking Nate around the con for awhile ^_^;; We even got into the dealer's room when the person guarding it didn't seem to be paying attention. Nate didn't buy anything anyway, but I ended up getting some Detective Conan trading cards. Josh then took Nate up to the RPG room, where they played things that I don't care about while I went to do other things (Josh tells me they were almost caught by a security guard who gave them a funny look when he noticed Nate didn't have a badge, but he seemed to be busy with something else and didn't do anything about it).

I didn't do too many exciting things as I wandered the con by myself for a couple hours. I played some Para Para, watched a little anime (I think it was called Twin Spica), and attended another Antonia Levi panel. Later in the afternoon I met up with Josh and Nate and we went to the nearby Subway to get some dinner (and I'm sure that Subway'd had it's fill of wacky cosplayers that weekend!) At this point Nate left and Josh and I went to go watch the cosplay competition. Another bonus of being at a small con was that it wasn't as difficult to hear the skits as it had been at Sakura Con. Unfortunately, since I'm fairly short, I did have trouble seeing them ^_^;; Oh well, a good time was had by all. Later that evening, I wanted to go see the DDR project music video. It was set up in a room that had dance space and everything (though we were only there to watch, not dance). They ended up playing two of them, each were about an hour long, and as we were watching Josh and I had a contest of who could recognize the most anime being used in the videos the quickest (because when you're in love, everything's a contest :P) The most impressive one he got (which I'll never admit to his face because I'm a bitch ^_^) was when a video with Moldiver in it came up, and he got it from the shoe of the main character's costume. The shoe! That bastard :P After watching both of the videos, it was getting fairly late, so Josh and I went to (where else?) the game room. We played the game Bloody Roar, which is a fighting game where the fighters can turn into various animals after powering up enough. Kinda strange, but it was fun. At midnight we had to stop playing and return to our homes.

On Monday morning Josh and I decided to go to the con a little earlier than usual because there was supposed to be an anime trivia contest at 11AM. Well, we got there right around 11 and found a bunch of people in the room where it was being held who wanted to participate, but no one there running the actual contest. Josh found out at the information booth that the contest had been pushed back to noon, so while we were all in the room anyway we decided to have our own impromptu warm up trivia session. The people running the contest were a bit surprised when they entered the room to start the contest only to find that everyone was already answering trivia questions ^_^;; The rules of the actual contest were quite different from our impromptu contest and the one at Sakura Con. Instead of a question being asked to the whole room and those who knew the answers jumping up in hopes of beating out the others, the questions were asked to specific people selected to be in each round. There were three rounds with three contestents each, and the top point getter in each round would advance to the final round to compete against the other two winners. So instead of it being a contest seeing who knew the most in general, there was also a bit of luck involved because if you couldn't answer the specific questions asked of you, you wouldn't get any points, even if you knew the answers to the questions that other contestants missed (I really wish there would have been a way to "steal" the points if the person being asked didn't know the answer, but it didn't work that way). I ended up in the second group of three contestants, and out of the five questions asked of me, I only got one right -_-;; The one I got right was a multiple choice question about the name of Umi's Mashin in Magic Knight Rayearth (I answered before the host even gave the options ^_^), but every other question involved series I had never seen. The types of questions they had were kind of interesting in that not all of them were straight out questions; one of them involved listening to a music clip and guessing which anime it was from (I don't remember what mine was from, but I guessed InuYasha, which was wrong). Another type of trivia was hearing a description of a show's premise and the contestant having to say which anime it was (the show described to me was Please Save My Earth, which I haven't seen, though Josh thought I had and told me that I should know it!) The answers to one of the questions that I missed was very fitting to me: The question was to name Shuuichi's band in Gravitation (it's one of my favorite series now, but I hadn't seen any of it at the time!), and the answer was Bad Luck ^_^ It was especially fitting since if I had been sitting in either of the two chairs next to me I would have been able to get 4 or 5 points, since I knew almost all of my opponents' questions. Oh, well.

Pretty much the only other major thing we did that day was attend the closing ceremonies (which I had actually never done before, so it was a new experience). We saw awards handed out to all the winners of the various contests, and even got to watch the winners of the AMV contest in full. There was also a little Whose Line game (best line from the Questions Only game, asked of a InuYasha cosplayer: So, do you like to do it doggy style?) We also got to watch the trailer for Ghost in the Shell: Innoncence (it played in art house theatres in Portland a couple of months later, and was pretty awesome!) I bought some little Detective Conan figurines from the dealer's room (I got Haibara, Heiji, and Ran's mother), and then the con was pretty much over, so we went home. Overall, though there were some space and navigation problems and the dealer's room was pretty small, a fun time was had by all, and I hope this small con will aspire to become bigger and better in the years to come.

Pictures

Pic 1: Me singing in my first real karaoke contest!

Pic 2: Another pic of me singing....pretty much the same as the first one, except I'm looking more to the right ^_^;;

Pic 3: Another karaoke pic, this one where you can see the various things people were waving in place of lighters ^o^