Well, I was able to make it to OTAKON '99 this year!
Yay!.... All in all, it was a good experience,
although I wish I had not made a fool of myself in
front of the allmighty fanfiction authors who were
there.
I got up around 7:00 AM and went downstairs to the
lobby to eat that nice artery clogging breakfast I am
so fond of. We were staying at this motel called the
'Susse Chalet'. Sounds fancy enough, but it was cheap
and small. Not too bad, really.
My group (which consisted of 4 other people, all
insane and the boys all had dirty minds) and I got in
the car and drove about 15 minutes to the inner harbor
to go to the convention center. I entertained them in
the car by turning my seat around backwards and
dancing to some music.
We got there, and were suprised by the building
itself. It looked like a giant greenhouse of sorts. My
friend Austin commented that it looked like it would
be easy to rescue hostages in a situation because of
the many glass windows... I didn't ask how that came
up.
We got inside, and registered. There was no line
(lucky for us) and we goth through quickly. Then, we
wondered around the building, trying to find out where
everything was. At 9:00 AM I got in line to register
my group for the cos-play. We waited until 9:30 AM
until they finally let us in, and then I found out
that that the rest of my group had to be there as
well!... How annoying. So, I filled out the paperwork,
ran upstairs, grabbed them and pulled them down the
escalator and into the main event room where I
registered them and we practiced out skit.
After we practiced, it was a mad rush to get to the
Fanfiction panel, where I met lots of the more
prolific authors, such as Sean Gaffney, Stefan
"Twoflower" Gagne, Jeff Hosmer, Richard Lawson, Zen,
John Walter Biles, and many others. It was actually
funny at first when Sean introduced himself. It was
then that I realized just who he was, and I found
myself pointing at him and saying, "YOU!". Ha ha. I
did that with just about every other author who was
there, much to peoples entertainment. Then, it started
to get annoying so I stopped. Oh yes, I annoyed them
as well by snapping pictures of them. heh.
After the panel, I rushed off to see episodes 9-13 of
Sailor Moon S. That was fun. The S season is much
funnier than the other ones.
We went to the Dealers room, and I got almost half-way
through when there was a fire drill. Oh joy. So, we
were made to go outside, where we decided it was a
good time to have lunch.
We walked down to the inner harbor, to the Galleria, I
think it was called, and found suitable eating
facilities. We then walked back to the convention
center to browse through the rest of the dealer's
room. I found some Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2 posters,
a Chibi-Moon pin, and a cool little super sailor Mars
figure that sits on a black base which lights up red.
It is pretty snazzy (although I lost the red light
filter in the car somewhere >P).
After that, I dragged everyone to the Kareoke room to
have our costumes judged. Not much happened there,
except the boys wandered off. I then went to the Art
room. Nice stuff in there too. I really liked those
tin foil figures of the DB and SM characters.
I found the rest of my group in the lounge area, where
they more or less told me that they were NOT doing the
costume play. Great. So, I went to the judge people
and told them that I would not be there. Needless to
say, I was not very thrilled. Well, I got over it and
just went to see more episodes of Sailor Moon S. They
were the ones where Chibiusa comes back. They were the
best episodes yet.
After that, we wondered back down to the inner harbor
to have dinner. We all ate the exact same food as we
did during lunch, and ran into my parents in the
Discovery Channel store. We told them that we would
not be staying until 12:00 as planned, but would like
to leave at 10:00.
We shopped around, bought nothing (except I bought a
large cup of Dippin' Dots, those little frozen ice
cream pellets.. YUM!) and then waited for my parents
to come get us.
All in all, it was a good trip, although it could have
been planned better (Ok, so I found out about it a
week before... big deal! :), and I could have done a
better job on the costume, but hey, that's life. I am
just going to be ready for Animazement 2000! Hopefully
some more people will wander down to Raleigh, NC, to
go there too.
Thank you for reading this E-mail. It makes me very
happy. The Blue monkeys have lost their wheels. ......
May the Eternal Cuttlefish continue to project His
lovely shade of Perplexed,
-Shadra
PS: Does anyone know why the Daimons always (well
almost always) say "Lovely" when they are hit by the
Moon Spiral Heart Attack? Heh... everyone in the
theatre would groan when Sailor Moon started that
attack or transformed. Bai!
===
"The Blue Monkey of East Chapel Hill High School"
~~~~~
"Mathematics: The use of non-existant figures to explain stuff in our universe"
~~~~~
"Mind over matter... but we have no mind, so it doesn't matter... nevermind" - ilac
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