AnimeNEXT 2009 – Saturday

No, I did not buy everything shown at AnimeNEXT. It’s actually a tease of all the semi-recent goods I’ve gotten but haven’t had the chance to review and thrown in to spice up the post a little.

In any case, today was my first time at AnimeNEXT and overall it was exactly what I expected from a “local” small con. Basically if it wasn’t for the people I was hanging out with, I would have shot myself by now. This is nothing against AnimeNEXT per se, since my main priorities for any con I go to is to see the (Japanese) guests they bring in, but honestly it felt like nothing special. Just an excuse to meet up with like minded individuals I normally don’t get to hang around with, and I guess at the heart of 99% American cons, that’s what it’s really all about. In that regards at least, AnimeNEXT rocked!

How rocking was AnimeNEXT? Well if you don’t count meeting some of the big who’s who in the English-writing anime blogging community, then it sucked royally. However if you think otherwise, it was totally awesome. Of course, I have to start off with the honor of mentioning my co-panelists Omo (aka the Con-sensei), super rats (aka kindred soul in figure spending), and SDS (aka THE Ogiue stalker fan). I don’t think I really need to say much about the three since they’re some of the big names keeping the anime blogging community alive with their unique takes and interest on a sub-culture we’re all deeply involved in. If meeting them wasn’t enough, I also got the chance to hang with the team at Reverse Thieves, Brad Rice at Japanator, one of the guys at welcome datacomp (I think?), and Scott of Anime Almanac. I’ll admit I didn’t really talk much to everyone beside Omo, SDS, and super rats but honestly it was just really cool being together with other people who are interested in the same things as me and whom blogs I read as well.

Anime blogger fandom-ism aside, really not much happened at AnimeNEXT personally for me. Honestly the high points were semi-trying to convince SDS to go to Otakon this year after I told him Yutaka Yamamoto was coming and finding out our panel is being moved to a different location but we don’t know yet. And I’m shooting myself for not taking a photo of the impromptu sign AnimeNEXT posted up on their info desk saying as much; I believe the wording were something like “Anime Blogging Basics – this panel has been moved but we do not know where yet. TBA”. Kicker is none of us knew about this until Reverse Thieves told us after they saw the sign while passing the info desk later in the day.

Am I worrried now that we the panelist nor the con itself know we were are going to be? Not really although I will be laughing if we find out they moved our time slot to earlier in the day before we (well at least me) get there! Well, at least I’ll get a cool panelist badge out of this whole ordeal if anything else…?

… and before I forget, please do check out our panel tomorrow at 2PM somewhere at the con if you’re going to be there! If we can get at least a dozen people to show up and actually stay, for me personally, that will be more than enough to make all the hard work we’re putting into this panel (aka stealing Hinano’s powerpoint presentation and ad-libbing when needed) worth it!