Ah, A-kon.  This is the first time I've been back to a con.  A-kon 8 was a
lot of fun; I was really looking forward to A-kon 9.

Please note:  These are just my personal reactions to the con.  All opinions
are strictly my own.

For this con I had Lara Bartram as my con-going buddy.  I picked her up at
the Minneapolis airport and we began our twenty-hour drive from Minneapolis
to Dallas.  The weather was hot and sticky, making rest well-nigh
impossible.  We listened to CD's and admired the Milky Way and talked about
steaming guts and compared dead animals our cats had produced for us.

Got to the hotel at about 10am on Friday, before Zen arrived.  I slept for
an hour or so on a couch.  We took a first pass through the dealer's room.
Wide aisles, easy access to the merchandise - I thought it well-designed.  I
was too tired to do more than glance at the stuff.

Eventually we met Nick Leifker, and he let us use the shower in his room.

Finally, we met Zen and company.  He had his huge Ukyo spatula, which he
carried with him always.  The thing is six feet long and made out of a
single piece of metal.  It's very well-balanced, too.  I could see Ukyo
wielding this thing.

In the elevator - ah, the elevator.  There were four elevators, and they
were *always* being used.  It was anywhere from a five to fifteen minute
wait to go from floor to floor.  The stairs were usually locked, so it was
the elevator or nothing.  This was quite frustrating, and certainly made
floor-to-floor travel much more of a chore than it usually is.  At other
cons I spent a fair amount of time in the con suite chatting with people; I
never made it to this year's con suite, which was a shame.

Anyway, in the elevator a large man saw my name on my badge and shook my
hand, telling me how much he liked my Nuku Nuku fanfics and saying "I love
you!".  He also mentioned that he was hoping to meet Nick, and when I
pointed him out in another part of the elevator, he said "Oh, wow!" and went
to effuse all over him as well.

Took a second pass through the dealer's room.  I found some new Nuku Nuku
CD's, based on the TV series.  They were a bit expensive, and I wasn't sure
if the voice actors for the TV series were the same as the ones from the
OAV's, so I decided against buying them.  I did sift through some anime and
made some preliminary purchase plans.

The main lobby in front of the dealer's room was lined with tables.  Above
one of the tables was one of the hotel's paintings.  Taped to the wall next
to the painting was a hand-written sign, "This is an ugly painting".  Later,
another hand-written sign was placed above the first piece of paper which
said, "This is an understatement".  :)

Registration was quick and efficient.  Nice badges with excellent artwork
were produced in seconds for the con-goers.

I tried to enter one of the video rooms.  The room was *way* too small,
*way* too crowded, and I could smell it from ten feet away.  I didn't even
try to get in.

I found Lara with Zen and a couple of other people in the hotel's
restaurant.  I tried to steal one of her onion rings, but her advanced
security system confounded me - the onion ring crumbled in my lap.
Unfortunately for her, the advanced security also affected her own attempts
to eat the rings.

A bunch of fanfic authors got together at 7pm to go out to an
all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant.  It was expensive - $20 a head - but you
could really eat all the Japanese food you wanted, including all the sushi
your heart desired.  During the trip there, Lara was crushed in the back of
Nick's car between me and Zen.  I thought furiously of baseball stats during
each trip.

I crashed in Zen's room at about 9pm - I was just too tired.

I was also the last up, and the last to shower.  I played Tekken 3 with Lara
and won nine games out of ten.  We then went out and joined the con.

At one point I got spatula'd in the rear by Zen.  Oh, and Nick is bi-shonen.
Ah, the randomness of con conversations.

Looked at the displays in the art show, which had some really good stuff,
much better than last year's.  There was a picture of Ukyo in a Hooter's
shirt.  A bunch of us decided to bid on it and give it to Zen, but the price
got too high at the art auction.

I finally decided to make my purchases in the dealer's room.  I bought the
first and second KOR movies, the first volume of Key the Metal Idol, and a
drama-on-CD staring Misa from Macross.  Anyone who can point me to a
translation of this CD will win my eternal gratitude.

Lara and I braved the stench to watch part one of Ruroni Kenshin.  It was
quite different from what I thought it was going to be.  Not great, but not
bad either.  I may give it another look when it's released commercially.

At 2pm the fanfic panel started.  I got to meet lots of people I'd only
known through the ether.  Among them was Blade and Lurker.  I'd been looking
forward to meeting Krista Perry too, but she was a last-minute no-show at
A-kon.

The subjects varied widely, from the revenge wars to lemons to plagiarism to
unfinished fanfics.  Nick made an unintentionally egotistical statement, and
I was forced to take Zen's spatula and chastise him.  :)  (Actually, I'd
made a similarly unintentional egotistical statement at Anime Central, so
Nick had my sympathies.)  One big tip was making sure you know all of the
source material before writing a fanfic.  This especially applies to
Evangelion.

After two hours the panel broke up.  A lot of people hung around afterwards
and I talked with them for a while.  One guy had bound all of Thy Inward
Love together and wanted me to autograph it.  I was more than happy to
oblige, egotist that I am.  :)  The talk was interesting and pleasant, and
was the highlight of the con for me.

Afterwards, Lara and I went out and had dinner at Chili's.  We went back to
the con and messed around for a while.

Then came the cosplay.  We didn't feel like standing in line for hours, so
we went to the overflow room, which had a big screen where we could see a
live feed of the cosplay.  The sound wasn't the greatest but there was lots
of space and the room was cool.

Studio Ironcat handed out free issues of their new project "Cutie Honey".
If you like naked bodies, this one's got a lot of them.  They aren't my
particular cup of tea.

The cosplay had lots of Ruroni Kenshin characters, making me glad I'd just
seen the anime.  Among the other entrants was a Parappa the Rappa skit, Kuno
and the Men in Black, a variation of Monty Python's dead parrot sketch, this
one involving a dead Klingon, and a Final Fantasy VII skit.  I don't know
FF7, but the audience seemed to like it.

One of the skits ended with an on-stage, authentic surprise proposal between
one of the entrants and a woman in the audience.  She accepted to accolades.
:)

Someone came wearing an Ukyo outfit, complete with spatula (which was much
less impressive than Zen's).  There was an interminable DoCo sketch, with
bad singing that went on and on.  The skit was more interesting for the
overflow audience, who were entertained by the camera operator using his
fingers to crush the heads of the singers.  ^_^

Blade showed up in the overflow audience wearing a *very* good (what else?)
Pantyhose Taro costume.  Next year we're going to force him to enter the
cosplay with it.

The best skit started with two people in martial arts outfits, facing each
other preparing to do battle.  Their martial arts moves as they warmed up
were authentic; these guys knew their stuff.  Then the music to Mortal
Kombat began to play, and they moved towards each other.  Just as they were
about to attack, the music screeched to a halt and was replaced by 1920's
dance music.  The combatants immediately began doing the Charleston (and
quite well, too).  The music screeched to a halt again, and was replaced
this time (to the combatant's dismay) by the Marcarena.  They were forced to
do this dance for agonizing seconds before finally the music went back to
Mortal Kombat.  They finished their fight to cheers from the audience.  The
whole thing was very well staged and executed, and got big laughs from the
audience.  This skit was awarded the Best in Show.

After the cosplay, Lara and I went to the main video room, which was much
larger than its smaller counterparts and well-ventilated.  We watched an
episode of Vampire Princess Miyu, which I had never seen before.  I found
that I liked it.  I'm going to have to get a hold of the OAV's one of these
days.  After VPM, they began the Hentai fest.  I had no desire to watch it
and (believe it or not) neither did Lara.

Lara and I watched the Tekken 3 contest, then wandered around the con some
more.  It was now late at night.  A dance was being held, but my efforts to
persuade Lara to come dancing with me proved to be in vain (it doesn't help
that I have the rhythm of an arthritic elephant).

We lay on a couch together and watched the people go by.  One man was having
amazing success finding Lara Croft-proportioned women and persuading them to
pose on a couch for him while he snapped some pictures.  Every time he got
them posed, other fanboys would come by and snap their own set of pictures.
Even Steven Bennett wandered by and posed with two of the women.

Random comment overheard as we went back to the hotel room:  "Is the room
still on fire?"

Slept, got up, packed.

Lara and I decided to make one last pass through the dealer's room.  We
wandered right in to the room unchallenged and wandered down the aisles.
The room was eerily silent, but at least Lara and I got to browse through
the merchandise in peace.  I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for the
dealers when suddenly an announcement blared over the loudspeakers - "Okay,
I'm letting them in."  This was followed by con-goers flooding into the
room, filling it rather quickly.  Lara and I had managed to sneak in before
the room was officially open.

We had a final lunch at the hotel restaurant with Zen, Nick, and a bunch of
other people.  During lunch the hotel's fire alarm went off.  We watched as
the hotel was evacuated in front of us while we ate.  Firemen began
wandering through the halls.  We were just about to leave ourselves when the
fire alarm died.

Lara and I threw our bags in the car.  We said one final goodbye to Zen and
Nick, then drove back home.  The journey home was shorter - seventeen hours
only - and cooler.  We made it back to my apartment at 6:30am Monday morning
and immediately crashed for a long, long time.  I eventually dropped Lara
off at the airport.

A-kon 9 was not as fun for me as A-kon 8 was.  There weren't a lot of fun
activities; there seemed to be a great deal of live-aciton roleplaying going
on, which didn't interest me in the slightest.  Other than that, there were
some panels and the overcrowded video rooms.

Still, the fun of these cons is always the people, and I had lots of fun
with Nick, Zen, and especially Lara.  Spending time with them is always what
I treasure most.  I sure hope I can get together with some other people at
Otakon; I'm certainly going to try.  :)

-Richard Lawson
6/2/98