complich8’s journal

Jeesh, I’ve just realized that I haven’t written a blog post in almost 2 months. Then, I haven’t written a substantial forum post in months either.

Work is busy. The last couple weeks me and my office mate and the other linux-specialist sysadmin have been crazy-busy getting ready for this big redhat enterprise 5 migration, and this week was the big upgrade crunch-time. It was nuts… lots of random scripting, cluster-defining, close to 100 nearly-identical redhat installs between the three of us, work on the provisioning server to make it all work, dealing with random problems, pains and disparities. It’s been … busy. The devs have it bad too … with one of the project managers letting me know today that he’s at 50 hours for the week as of Thursday night, and looking at probably a 12 hour day Friday. I’ve had a nine, two tens and an eleven, so I’m taking Friday off this week to take care of my sanity and some stuff I’ve been putting off for lack of time the last couple weeks. It’s fun though, we really kicked a lot of ass on the upgrades and just generally making things work, so I’ve got a pretty high level of job satisfaction right now.

In other news, I went to Otakon last weekend with my roommate and a couple other Boilermaker-Anime/Kawaii-Radio friends. It was an interesting experience. There were tons of anime nerds, 10-15% in costume, and just throngs of people. I missed out on a couple things I wanted to see because of long lines and overcrowding, but saw other less-crowded stuff instead.

Overall, my impression of the Otakon experience is characterized primarily by consumption and materialism, which I don’t think is totally a positive impression. We had fun, we ate good food, we saw interesting things, and the other people I was with bought a bunch of stuff. I left with a freebie Haruhi poster and nothing else. Incidentally, the cosplay ranged from pretty pitiful to pretty damned good. The best I saw was probably a really impressive Ryuk, with an excellent makeup job and just a great costume overall. I should have taken more cosplayer pictures, but I wasn’t really in photographer mode, so I didn’t get any the first day and left my camera home the second.

At the con, we saw Death Note live action movie 1 in the HD theater, but the lack of stadium seating, the unimpressive sound, and the low-hanging subtitles obscured by the heads of people in rows ahead of us made the experience pretty bad — made worse by the fact that the people operating the projector clearly hadn’t had the chance to do something like a dry run before they started it up. I think the viewing experience is definitely better in my room on my computer, or in the living room on the TV over tv-out though, which is a bit of a shame.

We also caught 5cm Per Second — a movie about drifting apart and being disconnected. That viewing experience was a bit better, partly because it was a dub and partly because it was in a wider, shallower room — meaning fewer rows of people to look over and no craning necks to see subtitles. Nice art and a pretty tolerable dub, but the theme of the movie was basically loneliness and depression over failures to connect. Usually movies with similar themes try to end on a hopeful note, but 5cm shrugs off the burden of normal, to end in pretty much one of the most depressing places it can land.

We missed out on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, because the convention staff decided to be dickish about enforcing the “no bookbags or recording devices” rule in the HD Theater on Saturday. Which was annoying, since it was like a 20 minute round trip walking to the car and back to drop off backpacks. Since I wasn’t buying stuff, it wouldn’t have affected me, but I didn’t really want to go see it alone and the line mechanics were such that the group probably could have made it back in time to see the movie, but definitely wouldn’t have gotten decent seats and couldn’t have rejoined me where I was. So we bailed on that in favor of trying to catch this dude’s Rakugou performance, but the line for that was way beyond the capacity of the room it was in… so we ended up checking out the gaming room instead. That was … sort of so-so for me … got to see some SC4, which was cool, but the lines to play were like 20 people long on any given game, so I got bored spectating and bailed on that too.

We ended up Saturday night by going to the Cosplay Masquerade. It was in a hockey arena, with probably 7000-8000 people attending. We saw a “junior” category cosplaying singer who pretty much froze onstage, then 40 participants in the masquerade in various levels. I would say about 25 of them were just eye-gougingly terrible skits, 10 more were bad but not really terrible, and maybe 5 were worth seeing. It was … very odd, and mostly terrible.

So, overall Otakon was a mixed bag. Saw some decent deals in the dealer room, but nothing much better than bargain-hunting online would get you, and the shopping experience was pretty unappealing to me. Saw some good cosplay, went to some good panels, saw some good shows, but also saw some pretty bad cosplay, went to some not-so-great shows, and spent inordinate amounts of time in lines for things, which kinda sucked.

I guess I’m on the fence about whether I’ll go back next year. I mean, it was interesting and distinct, but not really all that great. Definitely a little too crowded, if nothing else. I don’t regret having gone, but … I just haven’t decided whether or not I want to make a habit of it.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 4:26 am and is filed under life and times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.