Tikkabik

Bonnie and I spent the bulk of the day on Saturday bouncing from workshop to panel to panel, with some time spent in the dealer room as well. We got some great souvenirs of our time at Anime Boston.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to do the one thing Bonnie really wanted -- attend a concert of The Pillows, a J-Rock band that we became familiar with through their soundtrack work on a series we watched a while back called FLCL (Fooly Cooly). Again, it came back to a resounding problem that everyone we'd spoken to noticed this weekend -- crowd control. The New England Anime Society, to their credit, managed to pull off this event, but they managed to alienate a hell of a lot of us who have been with this event from the start, at least as attendees.

The day wasn't a waste, by any stretch of the imagination -- we did have a good time, especially at one event called "Extreme Geek." It's an import from a con that happens up in Maine, and it's basically a game show for nerds. I got a new nickname -- "Angry Bald Guy" -- after I acted in mock rage when they started playing "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. (I took umbrage with the audience being rickrolled.)

We actually didn't get back to the room to go to bed until well past 2AM -- there were a few 18+ events that happened in the wee hours. One of them was called Hentai Dubbing. In the main events room, they showed hentai (anime porn) while members of the audience called up on stage dubbed in new dialogue. Some followed the scripts provided, and the results were funny, but many others freestyled, including two girls that were hilarious -- one pretended to climax when she got her badge after waiting in line for 10 hours, the other riffed a series of candy references that had the audience in stitches.

Bonnie paid for our registration for the Providence Anime Conference, an event happening in October. We're really looking forward to it -- it's the first con I'm aware of that's specifically for adults. And given that I feel, anyway, the median age of this event has dropped to high school age in the past few years (18+ events not withstanding), that's a good thing.