Over the weekend, I took my first vacation in 6 months, wandered out of NYC for once, and flew over to LA to visit Anime Expo. This makes it the second time I’ve gone to AX, in as many years. 4 days of convention, and somehow I managed to participate in absolutely NO anime-related events during the whole time. Whee!

Team #denpa

This year, team #denpa had a really strong showing at AX. Counted together we had:

1. Agilis
2. cyanoacry
3. Zalas
4. Kyousuke
5. Ayu
6. Shinji
7. dovac
8. Shinikenshi
9. W-gen
10. alamone
11. Kouryuu
12. … plus a number of friends they brought over…

This may have been the largest gathering the channel has put together. Since AX we’ve picked up more channel members and things have been getting even more busy lately.

Hanging around

So why fly so far to do nothing? Well, primarily to attend visual-novel related events. Effectively this meant that I spent the vast majority of my time in exhibitor’s hall, especially the Hen Da Ne booth, and the Mangagamer booth.

Hen Da Ne, which most people that go to the major cons know as “the booth that’s always got someone screaming the word ‘yaoi’”, also has a Touhou/Eroge section that’s headed by Shinikenshi. I spend much of my time behind the table there helping people with Touhou or eroge related questions. This year, I also handed out Narcissu 2 English Edition CDs to people randomly whenever I felt like it.

Mangagamer this year had a huge amount of booth space, 2 full islands and tons of companies and people. Thanks to knowing Kouryuu from Gemot and #denpa, and just from hanging around there so much, many people from the staff side wound up knowing me at least by face over the course of the 4 days. More on what I did at the booth’s later. For the 50-odd people who randomly picked up a free CD copy of Narcissu 2 English ED from Mangagamer at some point, that was me leaving some stock with them.

Panels

I just went to 1 panel the entire time I was there, and of course it was the Mangagamer panel. Now it’s true that JAST also had a panel that is eroge related, but I couldn’t go to that one due to the epic dinner party that happened.

At the Mangagamer panel, I gave up my glowstick to cyanoacry and took
up the Canon 5d instead since our novelnews staff camera was left abandoned in favor of a big wotagei section during the panel. It was lots of fun running around with a hugely expensive camera. I wasn’t really familiar enough with the controls of the Canon 5d Mk2, so I had to do lots of ad-libbing, but we came out with a few good shots (still waiting on those…).

Too bad the panel too far too long and they had to cut it short before I could talk to the guests.

Next up: The concerts, and goods