Super Bowl XLIV prediction

Colts 30, Saints 17
MVP: Peyton Manning

Ohayocon 10

My eighth all-time convention, and largest ever, was Ohayocon 10, in ’10. There were OVER 9000 con-goers at this one, literally. Want to take a trip into Cardcaptor Sakura nostalgia, Haruhi-mania, and game show obsession? Then hang around for the remainder of this post.

Friday:

We arrived at the con at 3:00 pm. Right then was a Haruhi panel, but since the convention center was three times the size of Pittsburgh’s, it took 15 minutes to finally reach the panel. So it was Haruhi-time, where I got to see two LoliGoths do the Hare Hare Yukai, the whole thing, all 3 and a half minutes of it. I made my love for Tsuruya-san’s seiyuu known, which got a curious response from Benson (the panelist).

So it was off to an autograph session with Tiffany Grant. You know how much I love Asuka – I brought an Asuka mirror keychain, an Asuka giant plushie, and my Neon Genesis Evangelion Platinum DVD set for her to sign, not to mention the program. But as much as I poured out my love for Tiffany – “I came to this con because of you” – I also touched a nerve with her that only came as a result of some innocent fandom. I began to ask her a question – “Are you going-” and she answered “Don’t know yet,” knowing I was asking about a potential role for her as Asuka in Evangelion 2.0. I took this as simply her being asked this question a bunch of times. But I went further with it, innocently saying, “I was just asking because Rei got a new voice actress” and she broke in with “I don’t even want to talk about it.” So obviously with the fall of ADV and Funimation taking over Evangelion and kicking out Amanda Winn-Lee, she’s not too happy with all that’s gone on. She added that she has no control over it. Sorry, Tiffany, didn’t mean to touch that nerve, just some curiosity from an Evangelion fan.

Opening ceremonies for the con occurred at 5:00 pm. Bizarre to have opening ceremonies in the middle of the day, but it probably got more attendance due to lots of people arriving later. They introduced the guests, including the super secret guest, who just so happened to be another one of my favorites, Stephanie Sheh. This meant that quite possibly my three favorite VAs were all at the same con – Tiffany, Stephanie and Lisa Ortiz.

After that came an epic fail by the con, where they had a sign that told us that Stephanie’s panel was moved to the other side of the convention center. Upon reaching that other side of the building, we got informed that the sign was a lie and that her panel really was in the original room. That was a waste of half an hour of walking for me, and I missed some of her panel because of that. It was great; usually you’ve got a whole bunch of fangirls for a male VA; this time it was a whole bunch of fanboys for Stephanie. I asked her about Endless Eight, and she said that she’d like to do a joke dub of the episodes, with her getting to voice different characters. If that happens, Endless Eight dub will be SO worth watching.

Then came the con’s second epic fail. I had hoped to go to the Fantasy Ball for a little while before going to get Lisa’s autograph. Unfortunately, they didn’t open it up for us for at least half an hour past the time it was supposed to start, so I had to bail out in order to get into the autograph line in time. It was pretty disappointing to miss out on that, especially considering I had dressed up for it (I was in a cheap Kyon cosplay on Friday).

So I then got to see Lisa, who voiced Sabrina in Pokémon. I brought a Lina Inverse plushie for her to sign as well as a couple pictures of Sabrina – one for me, one for my friend in Germany who loves Sabrina more than any other character. I even tried to get her to talk in Sabrina’s voice, and she came close, but she said she’d have to watch the episodes in order to get her voice right.

After that came the third time for Anime Millionaire. At Colossalcon it wasn’t so good, but at Matsuricon it was a lot better. Here again it was great, with the Millionaire music, great hosting and hilarious antics from the audience, who purposely gave a contestant a wrong answer on a 100-point question. Then a phone-a-friend gave a wrong answer, not on purpose, but that led to jokes about the lifelines being useless. At one point, another phone-a-friend gave the right answer, and the contestant didn’t believe him! He thought it was a joke. Fortunately for him, he reconsidered and went with the correct phone-a-friend answer. The final contestant went for it all, making it to the 500,000-point question but getting it wrong. He was a fantastic contestant that got the audience into it.

That’s all she wrote for Day One of Ohayocon.

Saturday

I got up early because I wanted to try out for Anime Press Your Luck. As it turns out, due to the fact that I had talked with host Greggo before the con, he didn’t think it would be fair to choose me as a contestant, since he knew me already. So I was ineligible to play, but I would make sure to watch it later.

I headed to the dealers’ room for my first wasting of money for the con. I bought a Hinata plushie for Stephanie to sign, but I was disappointed by the dealers’ room in general, noticing that it was no bigger than the ones at the smaller Colossalcon and Tekkoshocon. Notably, I was interested in buying a Japanese Haruhi Suzumiya game, but I was told I would have to mod my Wii in order to play it. That ruled out buying one of those. Still, I bought a bunch of stuff when I came back later.

I went to a VA panel where they talked about getting into voice acting. I’m not interested in that, but it was a pretty informative panel nonetheless. Then I visited the end of Anime Jeopardy, where all the contestants did poorly, with someone needing to be given 10 bonus points just to make it into Final Jeopardy. The Final Jeopardy question was impossible, which I didn’t really understand; most Final Jeopardy questions are hard, but not next-to-impossible. Only one person didn’t risk all their points, and that’s why they won.

I went back to the dealers’ room and bought some goodies, including a Cardcaptors board game. I forgot to mention – I was cosplaying Li Syaoran from Cardcaptor Sakura on Saturday, and it was probably my most popular cosplay ever. I got tons of people to take my picture, which always makes me happy. One girl even started singing the Cardcaptors dub theme song when she saw me – “Cardcaptors, a mystic adventure, Cardcaptors, a quest for all time.” And one girl glomped me HARD. She took my breath away while nearly knocking me over, coming from behind. It was the best glomp I’ve ever gotten, but could have hurt badly. She just loved my cosplay.

Next came Anime Password, hosted by Greggo in Super Password style (the best Password version, by the way). “It’s Password. It’s ah-nee-may Password!” Greggo uses the original pronunciation of “anime,” not the Americanized version we all use. So there was a guest and his wife who were the two “celebrities,” and then two contestants who played along with them. The fun of it was figuring out what the answer to the puzzle was before the contestants would, and amazingly enough, the audience played it right and didn’t yell out the answer. “S.O.S.,” by the way, is not a valid clue, since it’s technically three words. One guest tried using that as a clue for “Brigade,” a clue that pretty much the entire audience was begging him to use.

Before the reboot of Anime Tic Tac Dough, which had apparently “epic failed” the day before, I went to the CLAMP photoshoot. Now here I am, not knowing 90% of these characters. Apparently Chobits is a CLAMP anime. Yeah, I don’t know anything about Chobits except that thing that is Ryo-ohki’s rival in the “cute mascot” department, Mokona. But there was a Sakura and a Madison/Tomoyo there, and one photographer forced me to take off my glasses for part of the shoot. “Li doesn’t have glasses.” Of course not, but most cosplayers don’t get that technical.

So Anime Tic Tac Dough turned into a second fail when Greggo’s computer (with Vista) crashed. But it worked just enough to go in super slow mode, so the audience played a half-hour game of “find the dragon.” There was a dragon hiding behind one of the nine panels of the tic-tac-toe grid, and whoever would find the dragon would get the prize. Unfortunately for Greggo, it took forever to find the dragon. Before that, a girl tried to play the bonus game, but since the computer crashed, Greggo did a Bob Barker and just gave her the prizes.

Was there a fan fiction panel going on then? Rats, I would have liked to go to that, but when it’s a big con, you’re going to have to miss some stuff. I totally forgot about the Otaku Dating panel too. After Anime Tic Tac Dough I ate some Chinese (sweet-and-sour chicken) and liked it, as the smell and the peer pressure forced me into it. Then I waited for Stephanie Sheh to sign my racy Haruhi Suzumiya wall scroll, featuring the main five girls from Haruhi in swimsuits. She also signed another Hinata plushie, which I bought earlier in the day along with the wall scroll.

Okay, so my only migraine of the weekend kicked in, but for once I actually thought ahead and brought my medicine with me, so I took it and got rid of the migraine after not much time. While waiting for the migraine to go away, I listened to a panel which amounted to what I called “Buy a PC! Buy a PC!” You know that Mac vs. PC commercial where the PC guy keeps going “Buy a PC! Buy a PC!” while holding up starbursts that say “Amazing” and “Totally Cool”? It was like that, very unsubtle advertising for the anime industry. I understand that fansubs are killing the industry, in fact I agree with them. But it amounted to basically preaching – Matt Greenfield even used the word “evangelizing.” Imagine going to anime church where the pastor tells you that you have to buy anime DVDs to save the industry. That’s basically what it was like. Hey, I don’t fansub, the only fansubs I’ve ever watched to actually watch a series were Endless Eight (and episode 1 of Haruhi season 2), and I also used fansubs for my AMV, but I had already watched those episodes anyway. Still, I don’t know if “Buy a PC! Buy a PC!” is the way to get people to stop fansubbing. Certainly that’s not the method I’d use if I were evangelizing Christianity.

I tried going to the Cosplay next, but the line was so long that I gave up on it. Instead I went to see a version of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” called “Win the Dunce’s DVDs.” Most of the categories were incredibly sexual puns, stuff I don’t think the show could have gotten away with. A girl named Brio was an excellent contestant and made the show very fun to watch. Brio… Brio… I know I had toys from a company named Brio like 20 years ago… were they wooden trains? I can’t remember. (Looked it up – yes, they were.) Anyway, Brio won, even if the job of the “dunce” or Ben Stein counterpart was pretty much useless because he didn’t affect what she won in the end. It was still pretty funny, though.

Next came Anime Press Your Luck by Greggo again. At least two of the contestants who were supposed to play didn’t show up, so he had to pick other people to play. He was using someone else’s computer for it, which meant he didn’t have all the fonts installed. He copied over most of the fonts – save for one, the one used on the Big Board itself. That meant that instead of reading “Big Bucks,” the square read “Big Uck.” And that meant that pretty much the whole time, the guys up there with Greggo kept on chanting “Big Uck No Whammy.” It was hilarious. A guy won a whole lot of stuff in a very exciting game of Press Your Luck tempered only by a Whammy that cost one girl the game – I was rooting for her. She ended up Whammying out on her final spin.

Okay, so after that I was kind of clueless on what to do. I stepped in on Anime Name That Tune for a few minutes, sitting in a back corner, where people named tunes I had never heard, until the very end, when they pulled out “D-tecnolife” from Bleach and “Tank!” from Cowboy Bebop. That made it 6 game shows in one day for me. What came next was the biggest surprise of the con.

There was this panel named “Anime’s Deadliest Warriors,” which started off as simply people going through PowerPoint slides on the skills of different strong anime characters. Boring, right? (Although they animated a couple fights with what they called “Reading Rainbow pictures,” which was pretty neat.) But they ran out of material quickly and decided that they would have random people come up and suggest random characters to “fight,” and then people would line up in support of which character they thought would win. It was brilliant. You have the competition of debate with the spice of anime as well as the different personalities of the people who came up to debate, ranging from a young boy who liked Naruto, to a college girl who loved Dragon Ball, to other guys who were just brilliant arguers. It was sort of chaotic yet just organized enough to be great. After every debate, there would be an audience vote on who would win the battle. At the end, an ultimate battle was held between some guy from Dragon Ball Z and Sosuke Aizen. Aizen won the fans’ vote on that one, basically making him the strongest anime character ever. I’d rank him second to Haruhi Suzumiya, but that’s another story.

I stopped into a panel called “Manly Screaming Mecha Pilots,” but I guess you’ve got to be a REAL mecha fan to enjoy that. I’m just a fan of Evangelion, which may be the best mecha anime ever but doesn’t quite have manly screaming pilots. I then wanted to join the Death Note Mafia game, but by the time I found it, it was too late to join, so I just sat in on anime karaoke for the rest of the night.

Sunday all I really did was buy another Haruhi wall scroll, pass up an adorable Churuya-san figure which was $50 (way too expensive), and then sit in on an anime dubbing panel where the guy who’s now in charge of Pokémon pretty much told people what not to put on a demo if they were trying to get into dubbing. The strange thing was that he said more about what not to put on it than what actually to put on it, so I didn’t have much clue on it. It’s not like I’m going to be a voice actor anyway. I wanted to stay for an Evangelion panel next, but since I wasn’t driving, we had to go then. We stopped at Cracker Barrel on the way home, the only thing that interrupted my sleep.

So the question is, after all the dust has settled, was Ohayocon the best con I’ve ever gone to? That’s one I can’t quite answer yet. If I had to pick one going into Ohayocon, it would have been last year’s Colossalcon, which I think won thanks to its sheer length, as I got every ounce of enjoyment out of that one. Time will tell where this one stands, who knows, maybe even a future con will be better. Still, it was well worth the money, especially all the love I got from the picture-takers who loved my cosplay. And that glomp I just can’t forget. That’s why I go to cons, to feel loved. What can I say, I’m Shinji Ikari at heart, I want people to love me.

Conference Championships

Conference Championship Predictions

AFC - N.Y. Jets at Indianapolis - Indianapolis 31, N.Y. Jets 13

NFC - Minnesota at New Orleans - New Orleans 34, Minnesota 20

Yeah, I'm feeling depressed right now, so no reasons for these predictions.

Super Bowl Trivia Rank

Fun game... did pretty well.

Rank: Fourth-Year Captain
Points: 77
Yards: 942
Think you can do better? Test your football knowledge with NFL 2-Minute Trivia.

Anime Bowl 3rd podcast

Time for a third podcast, which is a bit longer and contains all anime-related CRAP from 3:00 in.
Download

Divisional round

Divisional round picks

The NFL is a bore now that the Packers are out. I used up every bit of my excitement for the league last weekend, though I would have been sure to come back with more had the Packers pulled that one out. How did I go 1-3 in my picks last week? It has nothing to do with my poor prediction skills; it has everything to do with "Steelers luck." You see, the Steelers and their fans mysteriously get things to go their way, and in this case, it was teams Steelers fans hate more losing last weekend. On that note, I'm going to make all my predictions this weekend based on who Steelers fans hate less.

NFC - #4 Cardinals at #1 Saints - Tough one. Steelers fans don't really hate either team, though some are on the Saints bandwagon. On the other hand, a Cardinals Super Bowl win would validate last year's Super Bowl win. I think I'll take the Cards in a close, high-scoring one.
Cardinals 48, Saints 45

AFC - #6 Ravens at #1 Colts - Steelers fans may not like the Colts, but they absolutely hate the Ravens. No doubt who I'm going with here.
Colts 31, Ravens 13

NFC - #3 Cowboys at #2 Vikings - Steelers fans are mixed on Favre, but they would hate for the Cowboys to tie them in championships in the Super Bowl era with 6. That's why I see the Vikings ending the Cowboys' hot streak.
Vikings 27, Cowboys 17

AFC - #5 Jets at #2 Chargers - For some reason, Steelers fans like the Jets. I don't know what it is about them, they're probably the one AFC team Steelers fans don't hate. Whereas I as a Packers fan will show love for a bunch of other teams as long as they aren't playing the Packers (Jaguars, Giants, Raiders to name a few), Steelers fans seem to hate everyone, including the Chargers. I'm going with a stunning Jets upset, just on "Steelers luck."
Jets 20, Chargers 17

Packing it in

So with the season over, what's to do? Well, I'll still have atrocious predictions for the rest of the NFL playoffs. Here's a hint: "Steelers luck." I may even go through with that "Steelers are the worst fans in all of sports" post I was going to put up in late December.

As for anime, I may be going to Ohayocon, where I would get to meet Lisa Ortiz and see the best VA in all of dubbing again. You don't know who that is? What are you, stupid? It would also be the biggest con of my life. That would be two weeks from this weekend. So we'll see on that.