Happy Thursday! Another great AX this year, everyone! Good work! Much better than last year. LA convention center is really nice, but the hotels are pretty far away--here, look, here's what's great about Anaheim:
-next to Disneyland
-a thousand hotels within two blocks
-fireworks every night
-everyone knows where everything is
-there are other things; I forgot
Long Beach had none of these things, well, I guess our hotel was right across the street, but I have a thing against those high class hotels. Too small and too fancy and too expensive. Anaheim has the best Best Westerns, which are homey and roomy and have free breakfast and microwaves and bunkbeds and are reasonably priced and don't usually have elevators.
LA didn't have everything that Anaheim has, and the hotels were all super far away, but this allowed for a bus system which actually turned out to be something BETTER than Anaheim, because we didn't have to walk through hot heat LA July weather. But the weather was really nice, anyway, and the walk wouldn't have been that bad anyway (just about 20 minutes long). And similarly, the convention center was ginormous but indoors, so while at Anaheim you have to go to the other hotels to see certain panels, and at Long Beach you have to walk two blocks down to the exhibit hall, everything at LA was under one roof and thoroughly air conditioned.
Plenty of people. We got there early because Carolyn went Day 0 and got all our badges (no three hour line this year, kiddos!) and we ended up sitting on this second level looking at this plaza where the exhibition hall line was forming--at this point it was less of a line and more of a mob, and then we watched them flow in right under us, pointing out all the cosplayers we saw.
Cosplay was pretty good this year. A good amount of really good looking costumes, although I'd say maybe not as many that I recognized. I really haven't been much in the anime loop this last year, besides the super popular shows. I do think, though, that our group was one of the best cosplays of the place, especially because of our size. At one point we had nine of us, give or take some members. One person would stop and take our picture, and then we'd pose, and then thirty more people would flock over and snap snap snap. I'm entirely certain that on the last day we had our picture taken about 200 times. Cosplay is my favorite part, and I think we utterly succeeded this year.
The masks started breaking, though, but mostly they were emergency patched up with buckets of glue and even staples. Mine only needed two repair jobs, but I was immensely stupid and left it on top of Dorothy's car right when we left. So it is no more. But it was really amazing and definitely the high point of all our costumes. Thanks to Carolyn!
The exhibit hall was large, but looked the same as ever. Not so many exciting things to buy, and I'm proud to say I only bought three things for myself: A Naruto watch (with Lee on it), a Squiddy keychain, and a FFXII manga. Altogether that was only $16, a record low I bet. But I also bought stuff for Carolyn and Jacqi's birthdays, and for some school friends. I consider the pictures I take and those that are taken of me to be just as valuable as the nerdy swag I bring home, so I also enjoyed this AX because of the cheapness of the memories.
The shirt booth had the Captain America shirt I want, but they only had it in medium. :[
There was also a Famima!! on the street between the hotel and the convention center, but it was continuously set upon by the plague of locusts masquerading as anime fans, so it was kind of disappointing. The UFO-flavored yakisoba that we cooked with water from the coffee maker was rather good, though.
There was swimming, as usual, and much kids-tv watching-- 4th of July had a Chowder marathon, which is this crazy cartoon I'd never seen before, but now I might be a fan due to the sheer number of episodes I watched consecutively. Rada, rada. Caught the hotdog eating contest, of course, too bad Kobayashi didn't win. Chestnut totally cheated in that tie breaker. I almost recommend The Breed to you, just because it follows the B-horror movie formula very well. Spoiler: the black guy does indeed die first. It also took us three days to discover that there was a giant food court in our hotel.
I haven't put any of the pictures onto my camera yet, but I will. Since my flickr's full, I'll probably just be making Facebook albums. I can give you the public links to those.
Funny stories include me telling people the corndogs had just come out of the onions, Steven asking me what egg rolls were, Carolyn saying her chopsticks were full of staples, that lady in the lobby who just stared and stared and smiled and stared, when me and Steven laughed at each other for half an hour in the middle of the night, when Daniel told Hannah she should cosplay blindfold!Riku with a blind person's cane, and many more.
The rest of this week has been work and my sister and Josh came down to visit. Also, Carolyn turned 21. When we drove down to get them we took PCH and it rained for like 40 seconds. Oh, I also went to the dentist and they didn't tell me anything I hadn't heard before. Watched a lot of Outer Limits this morning, some of it was particularly well-acted.
-Stephanie
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