malice

As promised (well, not exactly), here's my Anime North coverage (it's LOOOONG...you have been warned):

Thursday night I barely slept due to my fear of sleeping through my alarm (since I hadn't woken up to it in ages), and a long string of coughing fits.

Friday morning came too soon, but at least this was one of the few occasions that I actually got up and ready long before having to leave. Damn it felt good not to rush.

I called up my buddy to tell him that I was ready to go, but he had slept through his alarm HA!

After he rushed his ass to get ready, we packed up the car and started our journey to pick up his girlfriend, and then make our way over to the land of geekery.

When we got there, we got our passes, and eventually met up with the rest of our hotel-mates.

Friday wasn't all that eventful. We did some shopping in the Dealer's room until we couldn't handle the grossness of that place anymore (someone had failed to adjust the air conditioning the necessitate that many people). We tried to plan our evening, but couldn't find all that many things that we wanted to go to.

Later that evening was our first trip over to the Yaoi room, which fortunately enough, was in our hotel. I was still sick, so I had my Hot Toddy in tow.

I was so out of it, and the drink was putting me to sleep, so I decided to head to bed early. I was still having coughing fits, so I finally just got up and grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel's to take swigs from, which made the coughing go away for a little while, and put me to sleep.


Saturday started with me waiting for a couple of hours to gain access to the washroom. I finally got in and ready by...1:30p.m.

It wasn't really a big deal besides the fact that the maid was pissed off that she had to wait to clean our room.

Again, there wasn't a whole lot that I wanted to go to on Saturday. We did a bit of shopping, which got me this...



...fine piece of perversion.

I ended up at the Anime Music Video competition a bit later which was quite entertaining, though I think that the dramatic/sad/emo videos got me down a bit (damn mushy/sad stuff).

We went out for a nice big dinner at Jack Astor's a bit later so that we were prepared for the inevitable Saturday night drinking!

After dinner we returned to the hotel, and then I went with a couple of my friends/hotel-mates over to the J-Pop Dance for a while. They really tightened up security this year, cops and metal detectors...yeesh. I guess that after last year's incidents they had to so the dance wouldn't get canceled for good by the convention centre. Rumour has it that last year there were drug sales outside, someone set a garbage can on fire (the fire dept. showed up as I recall), and apparently someone reported getting sexually assaulted at the dance itself. Of course, none of this could have been prevented by metal detectors, so it seemed pretty pointless.

After the dance we headed back to the hotel room for some "refreshments" and more Yaoi. Apparently 3a.m. was the magical smut hour. They played the most explicit yaoi I've ever seen, it was actually pretty hilarious to see how the audience reacted. Oh, and if you wanna know, it was
Sensitive Pornograph. One of the girls in our group popped her "yaoi cherry" to this one...it won't be easily forgotten I'm sure

I went to bed afterward, but I was up having even more coughing fits that night (sorry roomies). I drank some of my now cold Hot Toddy, and eventually got to sleep. Arg.


Sunday morning I was supposed to join my buddy and his girlfriend for Trigun Donut Decorating (also a competition). I was just too tired, so I told them to leave my poor sick-ass in bed, and go on without me. I was sad to have missed it, but I really couldn't have handled eating all that sugar at that hour anyway. They came back in about an hour with their mounds of donut and icing, and had won the competition

We all packed up the cars, checked out from the hotel, and headed over to the Haruhi Suzumiya Dance Competition to see the ending. I captured this rather amusing video of all the competitors doing the dance at the very end...




For those of you that don't know the original, here it is:




After that we went to the Dealer's Room for one last look around, and a few final purchases. There wasn't a lot to do Sunday, so we went over to the charity auction for a while, and a couple of us broke off to watch the AMV competition again.

We all parted ways and headed home late that afternoon. I was exhausted.


Overall it was an o.k. weekend. I really didn't have as good a time as I normally do though. I'd blame it on getting older, but as I've seen, fandom is not limited to a younger age group. I guess that I'm just getting a whole pile of jaded, and kind of envious of the energy that all the younger fans seem to have.


As for the what I purchased...I got the entire series of Serial Experiments Lain for $20, and my boob mouse pad. I didn't have the money to buy a whole lot this year, but I think that my friends more than made up for that with all of their purchases


I know, it's the Friday following the convention...I've had a busy week so I haven't gotten a chance to post something about AN until now.