Anime Expo 2011 Made My Legs Explode Part the First

The story of Anime Expo: A bunch of Asians and a random Mexican.

So, I got back from yet another great Anime Expo on Monday, but I have been so damn busy since then contributing to Behind the Nihon Review’s convention coverage that I haven’t had time to sit down and write any personal thoughts about the whole event! (Also, I’ve watched exactly two episodes of anime in the past week.) But now most of my contributions are in the can and waiting to be published, so it’s time for . . . more writing about Anime Expo! Hooray!

This was the year of a few of firsts for me: My first time attending all four days of the convention (been going for seven years prior, and I’d always attended for one or two days at most), my first time attending as press (thanks to The Nihon Review being a much bigger, more established site than this rinky dink operation), and my first time staying at a hotel for the convention (usually I’d just bum a ride from someone). The latter two especially made this convention experience vastly different than any other time I have gone to Anime Expo, which is a good thing. You need to switch things up every so often so that you don’t get burned out on things (which almost happened to me after a couple of years of going to AX).

So anyway, I’ll be going through the day-by-day skinny of the event, which means that this will be a horribly bloated nightmare of a post, but fuck it, I’ve waited too long to write to justify making separate posts for separate groups of days except I totally did it, anyway, because Jesus Christ this took forever to write.

Finalizing Anime Expo 2011 Plans

We’re getting down to the wire here, so I should probably set everything in stone with a decent amount of time left before the con so that everyone knows what’s going on.

Meetups! I threw around the idea of a Day 0 meetup, but I didn’t really give a specific time or place. As it turns out, another Day 0 meetup is being planned, and it seems as if a decent amount of people will be there, so why not piggyback that? All the details are on the page I linked — just be sure to RSVP, and if you’re not familiar with the organizer, Alex Leavitt, then just shoot him a quick introductory email as I did!

Anime Expo 2011 Meet-Up Plans

Now that Anime Expo has finally put out daily schedules, we can finally do some meet-up planning! I’ve already got something going on the ol’ SCCSAV site, but hopefully this will get the ball rolling even more.

This year I’ll actually be staying at a hotel and going all four days of the convention for the first time, so I’ll have a lot of free time on my hands (when I’m not doing press-related stuff for The Nihon Review, anyway). And with that extra free time, I’ve decided it would be a good idea to try and organize multiple meet-ups. The big problem with scheduling one meet-up is that because everyone has different interests and wants to do different things at different times during the convention, it’s basically impossible to come up with a time that will suit everyone. Poor omo missed out on the meet-up I threw together last year, for instance, because it was at the same time as the Trigun flick.

So, why not try to circumvent the problem by having more than one get together? Hopefully everyone interested will be able to make at least one — and I encourage people to organize their own, if they wish! I’m just tossing ideas into the wind here.

Anime Expo 2010: Circle Jerk City

A warning beforehand: Don’t expect anything of substance from this post. My aim going to Anime Expo was to have fun; I did that and nothing beyond that, and I hope this post reflects that purpose. ANN has good coverage of everything of worth that went down at the convention, and Anime Diet has some cool interviews and videos that you won’t get elsewhere. (Plus, the Anime Diet crew are a bunch of cool dudes, so you should visit their site out of principle.) Basically I’m just some geek who went to an anime con and thinks people care about his opinion of what he saw at the event. Good times!

(Also, I want to get this over with so that I can go back to writing about, you know, anime, so I’ll cram everything into this post. I’ll try and cut down on the extraneous blabber as much as possible, but no promises. I think by now my readers know what they’re getting into when I post. :X)

Anime Expo 2010: Saturday (July 3) Meet-Up Final Planning

One more post on this because I am an attention whore because I think it would be good to have a post with a definite plan. It would be good to get this solidified as soon as possible since I don’t know who will have Internet access at Anime Expo — we should have our plans in place at least by the time the con begins, yeah?

Judging from the comments in yesterday’s post, everyone seems relatively cool with initially meeting up at the Starbucks in the L.A. Convention Center’s West Hall around 5 p.m., hanging around a bit for introductions and a bit of talk and then going off to . . . somewhere to eat afterward. (Again, there’s a list of restaurants here.) The Levy Restaurants near the Staples Center are within a solid walking distance; everything else listed seems best reached via bus or rail. I’m definitely open to that, however. Not like it will be difficult to have the change needed to catch a couple of rides, after all.

Anime Expo 2010: Saturday (July 3) Meet-Up

There is a Friday meet-up for bloggers/Twitter folk/anime fans/whoever else planned by Deb Aoki, and I thought about hitting it up, myself (though it would involve a bit of juggling for me since I can attend just one day and planned on Saturday being it). Luckily for my selfish self, however, omo expressed some concern with how much stuff there is to do Friday, while CCY wondered how ginormous the whole affair would be.

With that in mind, CCY has started planning a smaller get-together for everyone on Saturday, and I wanted to help out by providing a concrete post to organize the planning, seeing as there are but a few precious days remaining until Anime Expo kicks off.