San Francisco and SacAnime!

[pacificpikachu]

Okay, covering San Francisco and SacAnime now! Feel no obligation to read this--I'm mostly just writing it for my own memories. :)

archaneah and wao, if I forgot anything interesting please let me know! I don't like forgetting things, but I'm entirely sure I did. I'm making this rather quick for at least a small amount of brevity and because I don't have a whole lot of time, though.

I was working on my Pokémon sculptures when KK came over on Thursday night, and we spent a while having miscellaneous discussions. Once my brother and dad went to sleep, we watched V for Vendetta. We attempted to keep the volume fairly low, but apparently our plan didn't go over so well because my dad said the volume was loud in the morning. Oops. Anyway, I enjoyed it quite a bit. There were some minor complaints I had about it, but overall I thought it was a very intriguing and artistic movie. I give it a...B+ or A-!

After we finished V for Vendetta, we went to bed. And by bed I mean...we went in bed and talked for the entire night. KK and I are so awful at keeping things short, hahaha. We started off having an interesting debate about whether fanfiction can, under any circumstances, be considered true art, and from there we discussed our nostalgic pasts and how amazing of a shoujo (or more like josei, rather) anime our whole high school experience and drama would be if we made it into one. I had a similar discussion with Nicole a while back and the consensus among the three of us is that it would seriously make an incredible series. We have all these brilliant ideas for how the story would be set up and how certain scenes would mesh together, what would serve as symbols and metaphor, and it was just...one of those things you can talk about for hours and hours. And we did.

Well, 7 AM came without any sleep at all, so we woke up and milled around my house for a little while, got ready, and left. We were both a little nervous about the drive without any sleep, but in actuality the drive went well. We hardly got lost at all and it was just smooth in general. We listened to KK's iPod on shuffle mostly, which produced interesting results. (The best was when American Pie came up and we had a rousing singalong to it!)

When we got there, we had some parking difficulties but eventually got it figured out...sort of. KK and I went to the aquarium from there, where we spent a while looking at the fish. Our favorite areas were definitely the shark tunnel and other fish tunnel, where we lingered and stared for quite a while talking about how much we love being Biology majors. I took some videos of it, but only one turned out good enough to post. Here it is:

Er, those are two eels. Not that anyone can tell, but they are!

After we finished our journey through the aquarium, we decided to go out to lunch to try and get a stamp on our parking stub thing so we wouldn't have to pay for it. Well, uh, this was unsuccessful because it turned out after we paid and everything that we were too far from our parking lot and that one didn't count. orz And we couldn't eat all of our food on top of that! But oh well--it was a nice day to be eating in San Francisco sunshine so whatever.

After that we headed off to Japantown to find wao! While we waited for her to show up, KK struck ridiculous poses and I took pictures of said ridiculous poses, and KK went on a ridiculous tangent about pigeons and disease ("They have AIDS! And hepatitis! And rabies! And the black plague! And leprosy!") while I laughed. Meanwhile we watched two pigeons snuggling, which was cute:





Then we found wao and all was well! We did a brief introduction, hit it off quite quickly if I do say so myself, and then headed into the Japantown mall. First we went to Japan Video, where we looked at the Cherry Blossom Parade pictures (we spotted me and several of my friends) and I patted the big Totoro plush like I always do when I'm there. We spent quite a while looking through the various anime series and commenting on which ones were great, fun, bad, hilariously bad, what we want to see, and so on.

I can't quite remember the order we did things in, but I know we went by the store that has a bunch of Pokémon items, we went to Kinokuniya and had a grand time looking though the yaoi section and laughing at the many ridiculous titles and covers there, got delicious crepes, wandered in and out of a great number of shops, and went out to dinner at my favorite restaurant there. It was wonderful as always and I think we all enjoyed our dinner despite the fact that the servings were too large to reasonably finish. :D

Once we were done with dinner we headed back to our hotel to check in and find parking (we eventually settled for the ridiculously expensive hotel parking, ugh). In the hotel room, we mostly just lazed around because we were all so tired. KK and wao both had food left over from dinner, so we filled the sink with ice and situated the food in there. We're such geniuses. :P We were going to go out later, but the exhaustion set in so it's better that we didn't. KK and wao had a good time talking about Berserk, though, and then this somehow went into a discussion about education in our respective countries and then the ridiculousness of the religious right here in the USA. We went and read some of Revelations aloud and were particularly amused by the description of the locusts as quoted below:

"Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth; they were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those of mankind who have not the seal of God upon their foreheads; they were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion, when it stings a man. And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, and death will fly from them.

In appearance the locusts were like horses arrayed for battle; on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women's hair, and their teeth like lions' teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails like scorpions, and stings, and their power of hurting men for five months lies in their tails. They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon."

I mean, it's certainly interesting as metaphor, but when you verge into taking this literally... YEEEAH.

Anyway, it was a great conversation and the three of us went to bed early because we were so dead tired. We woke up at around 9:30 AM, took showers, and headed down for complimentary breakfast buffet. Unfortunately, the lady at the buffet was a jerk and didn't let wao have even a bite or sip of the buffet food (the free food was for two people only), but honestly the food was crummy and kind of gross anyway so whatever. Still, I didn't like that. :/

We did some wandering in and around Pier 39 after breakfast. Lots of sights and sounds, and it was an absolutely beautiful day in the city! We spotted one of the gold painted men doing street acts, found some people on the street playing music and trying to convert everyone to Christianity by singing "Bad to the Bone" (they made some hilarious comment about this but I can't remember what it was at the moment), went to see the sea lions, went in some stores to buy souvenirs, and just generally enjoyed the weather and the sights.











We stopped by a cafe for some food and talked more about anime and things in general (the lady there was a bit curt with wao when it came time to pay, which is too bad because otherwise she was very friendly and accommodating and gave us free fruit). From there it was mostly just checking out of the hotel, getting things ready, and so on. On our way out of San Francisco we dropped wao off in Japantown after some goodbyes. :(

wao, it was seriously awesome getting to meet you and hang out with you! ♥ I think you need to give yourself more credit because you're a pleasant person to be around and I love hearing what you have to say about things. :) It was a lot of fun and I'm really glad we got to meet IRL and spend time together! I sincerely hope we get to meet again someday--perhaps for a convention next time. :D

Next came the task of getting back to the Eastern part of California. Again, amazingly enough we managed to not get lost and have a smooth journey. I only had a $100 bill with me and tolls were coming up, so to get change we pulled off to the side of the highway into this ADORABLE little town called Crockett. SO CUTE. It was next to the ocean (or a bay or something, I don't know exactly) and it was just this small place with pleasant architecture and... I'm not sure why I was so attracted to it but I felt like I just wanted to go live there, haha. It reminded me quite a bit of a Ghibli movie.

After a few uneventful hours of driving we reached SacAnime. We registered and spent most of our time just wandering the Dealer's Room, looking around, and sat in the little square of open land so KK could eat her leftover food and talked for a bit about fandom.

SacAnime is a strange convention for me, because close to every time I've been there in the last two or three years the same thing happens:

1. Mingling with the general crowd, I begin to feel unpleasant about anime fandom in general. I'm not sure why this is, because it's specific to this convention and not others, but perhaps it's just the nature of the attendees there? For some reason the fans there seem to be younger, unfamiliar with more recent series (or great older series for that matter), be more concerned with dubs/fangirling dub voice actors than your average anime fans, and a larger majority of them seem to be sporting awful costumes from overcosplayed series. I cannot pinpoint why this is, but it confuses me.

2. I go to Masquerade, and no matter how bad and/or silly it is, I completely regain my faith in anime fandom and feel all happy and amused. This is despite the fact that I generally don't enjoy Masquerade as a whole too much.

YEAH. I DON'T EVEN KNOW. More on Masquerade later, though!

I said hello to centimetre quickly at her art table and hoped to see her again later (but I can never find her afterwards :<), and KK talked me into buying a Gurren Lagann Figumate from the series I was trying to get Timeskip!Simon from. It was the last one from that set available and I really didn't want to take my chances, but KK convinced me anyway and... Guess what? IT WAS TIMESKIP!SIMON. Yesss! That was pretty awesome.

We went to see what anime was showing and KK and I sat in on Vampire Knight for slightly over an episode and cringed at how bad it is.

When we decided we couldn't handle watching it any more, we got in line for Masquerade and sat there reading manga/comics while we waited for the line to move. We ended up with fairly decent seats, which was nice. A lot of people had to stand for all of Masquerade due to the lack of seats, so it was a good thing we lost enthusiasm for making fun of Vampire Knight as quickly as we did.

The hosts (aside from Bartboy, who was himself as usual XD) were cosplaying everyone's favorite wank series: Hetalia! And they did a fantastic job of it. I always love this group of hosts. They always do a great job on their costumes and manage to keep the audience entertained and upbeat between all of the Masquerade skits. :D The Techgod decided to be merciful this time as well, and Masquerade ran almost entirely smoothly with only a few small blips.

The first section was nothing but walk-ons and KK and I grew concerned that there would be nothing but walk-ons, but then it occurred to me that they were doing the walk-ons first. Which is common sense and I've seen many Masquerades set up that way, so I'm not sure why I didn't realize this sooner. *Facepalm*

As usual at a con, skits ranged from embarrassingly bad/WTF to...awesome. There was one serious Tsubasa skit that was completely amazing. Not only were their costumes gorgeous, they choreographed their skit's fight scenes to the music and it was just...great. The audience went completely wild for about five minutes straight, and the audience is normally pretty lukewarm to serious skits. I'll be sure to post it and any other amusing/awesome skits once AC Paradise posts them. There are current videos on Youtube, but they're from the middle of the audience and don't do the skits justice at all...

There was also an incredibly strange Death Note skit that made me laugh way too much for some reason, a pretty cool/entertaining Silent Hill skit, and a number of other things I'm forgetting.

As I was saying earlier, I felt all cynical and kind of like the old guard anime fan amongst a bunch of irritating new fans while just amidst the crowds, but by the end of Masquerade I was smiling and enjoying myself and feeling great about being an anime fan. I think it has something to do with how well Masquerade is generally put together at SacAnime, as well as the incredible amount of audience enthusiasm and participation... Honestly, though, overall I'm not sure what it is that makes SacAnime's Masquerade so great. The skits are generally about par for a convention, and it's not like there's anything particularly different about it. I guess it just has good spirit, or something.

From there we just went back home, and that's about all! It was a great weekend. :D

I'd better get to bed--I need to get up tomorrow so I can try to add some classes and get working on Chem homework. (Yes, already.)