Article: Sakura con 2005 fans make the con

Sakura con 2005 fans make the con

I arrived at Sakura con early in the morning around 9am. The pre-registered line was short and the unregistered line was as long as the building. Being the veteran conventioneer that I am I got in quickly. When you get into a convention early (and by early I mean before noon on the first day) you have a few options open to you. The two main ones are to either hit the video rooms or get something to eat while checking over the schedule.

At eleven am I went to the opening ceremonies for the first hour. While there might have been some interesting stuff happening in the second hour the first hour was nothing but various convention staff and the like giving speeches and thanking people. I skipped the rest of the ceremonies to attend a panel on starting anime clubs. There were only four people there including the person holding the panel. Small panels are fun to go to since they allow for more question asking by the people attending. They can also end up being fun off topic discussions as well.

After that I hit the video rooms again. This year at Sakura con there were no fansubs being shown in the video rooms. This makes sense since nowadays it is the licensed stuff that is harder to get than the fansubs. The only thing that was notable for me was Plantes and while I only saw part of the first episode I do plan to see the whole thing in the future.

That brought me up to 4pm and time for the anime music video contest. If you read my earlier convention reports you know this is my favorite thing to do at the convention and like every year it was really fun to go to.

After the contest I realized that there was something wrong with my camera. Namely the batteries popped out and all the pictures I had taken were gone. Even after taping the batteries in place I found that it still wouldn't save pictures. Even though I promised pictures I have none to show. What I can tell you is that Naruto is extremely popular. I saw cosplay of every character except for maybe Ino.

Speaking of Naruto during my late night wanderings I was able to play a few games of a Naruto fighting game. What I do remember is that the game was vaguely like Super Smash brothers and was a lot of fun to play. With the series licensed I really hope that game comes over as well.

Unlike the past couple of years I got a hotel room to stay the night. Getting a room at a convention is good for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that a room allows you to get some sleep and conventions aren't as fun when you are so tired that you can barely stay awake. Shows also start making a whole lot less sense if you doze off for a couple of minutes while watching. The other reason is that hotels that are hosting the convention as have a special channel allowing you to watch shows that non hotel room renters can not. I saw a couple of episodes of Marmalade boy and I am interested in seeing more.

Near the end of my convention stay I went to a reading of fanfics. If you don't know what a fanfic is it is a written work based off of an existing series. I was only able to stay to hear a few but they were fun and I plan to try my hand at it myself.