Back from Anime Next and not too backlogged at work, so I thought I’d do a quick report.

First of all, yay ANext staff, you are da bomb. With the exception of a few complete blights on humanity, the entire staff of ANext is a great group of people.

And yay my wonderful Yuricon staff. I would absolutely NOT be able to do this without you all.

Thursday night all the Yuricon staffers arrived at my home. We all went out for some late-night Indian food. Friday I had to work a half-day, but I told everyone to be ready by noon to leave – and they were.

I am on the staff of Anime Next as a teeny-weeny little piece of the Publicity pie (thank you Shelly for letting me help out)…I was coordinating “Con Row”, which is a thing that has come about largely because of a mailing list where con chairs gather to talk, share ideas and advice, and vent. The ACML, as it’s called, has really helped with cons developing mutual rapport, and as a result, they often offer other cons free tables for promotion. Not all cons do, but it’s an easy way to fill a hole in a DR for smaller cons, or have a row of tables somewhere at larger ones. In this case, we had 5 cons who wanted tables. (7 really, but two never got back to me.) Because I was “in charge” I had arranged ahead of time where and when to get the badges – so the badges thing went easily, and we set up.

Let me digress here for a sec. People who have never done it, seem to think volunteering or staffing cons is simple – and that they’d do it better, but you know…it’s not. It’s hard. I’m a pretty experienced person with volunteering and I’ve helped out at cons doing a gazillion things – and I *still* managed to screw up. LOL When I left for the evening Friday, I took the unclaimed badges with me. Two of the cons showed after I’d left and there was no one to check them in. Obviously, the intelligent thing would have been to leave the badges at Con Ops…but it just slipped my mind. Now, okay, not a big screw-up, but I should have known better. Con Ops just issued badges and when I got in, seven people verbally slapped my wrist, and I took it with good grace, because it was my screw-up, totally. :-) Let this be a lesson to you – even the most experienced person can slip up. That’s why all cons need a little leeway from the attendees. It’ll never be perfect, not as long as humans run things. Next time you go to a con and you’re whining about why things aren’t smoother – now you know why. Because we humans are horribly, painfully fallible. :-)

In any case, in Con Row, Yuricon sat between Connecticon, who are a lovely bunch of people – I even shared my homemade, made with love by my wife, rice balls with them – and I-Con, who seem nice, but we didn’t talk much. Also taking part was Dexcon and Ubercon. Ubercon is a local gaming con which had three lovely young ladies to represent the con, so you know I approved. :-)

Because Con Row at ANext is not in the Dealer’s Room, but outside it, I had to pack and unpack every day, which was a drag, but I lived. :-)

Anime Next is a very general, very young crowd. We never do really well there, so this year we tried something new for ANext – yuri-themed grab bags. I had made a bunch at $1, $2, $5 and $10. By *Friday* at 8PM, they were all gone. Next year I’ll see if I can do more. Basically I was cleaning out my office, which had accumulated an inordinate amount of cool yuri-type stuff I had no use for. The $10 bags were especially good deals, as they had perhaps $30 worth of manga and comics, plus other random stuff. I don’t really get the appeal of grab bags – I want to know what I’m spending my money on, but everyone seemed really happy with what they got.

Because of a snafu, my panels were not listed in the program schedule (not a snafu on my side – I had applied for them months ago, was assured repeatedly that they were happening and sent in descriptions which *did* make it into the program book. I wasn’t the only person this happened to. That panels person will not be returning next year…). So we did tell folks where and when the panel was but not surprisingly, there was a small turnout. However, it was a fine and dandy crowd. Bruce and Serge assisted me with opinions and thoughts about current yuri series, and we morphed at the end of the discussion to talking about Takarazuka, which was fun. (Both Bruce and Serge were with me in Tokyo and both were there to see Elizabeth. So they know how cool it can be.) There’s going to be a TK panel at Otakon this year. I’m going to try and attend.

Before you ask – yes, there’s a Yuri Panel at Otakon. It’s been on the Yuricon Events Page for weeks. lol Friday, August, 4 at 9PM. But really, get in the habit of checking that Events page! I add stuff there *first*. Long before I think to mention it elsewhere.

Saturday went along as Saturdays do. It was alternately fun and annoying, part sales, part promotion and part anger therapy. I had an extremely large number of people ask me about Yaoi-con, or if we sold yaoi, which I found bizarre. The funniest thing to me was the girl dressed as Sailor Neptune who saw our sign, turned quickly and sharply away as if we might bite her and ignored us while I kept calling after her that Neptune was gay and she has a girlfriend. It’s *always* women cosplaying Neptune who react that way – never any of the other Senshi. Ever. Just Neptunes. Why is that, I wonder?

Saturday night I had a Fanfiction writing workshop to do. I told the staff to go, but they stayed anyway, so were forced to hear me wax opinionated and pompous on the fine (coughcough) art of writing Fanfic. Considering it hadn’t made it onto the schedule and wasn’t on the sign, we had a lovely crowd – about 10 people who got there early and stayed for every last second. Freaks. LOL

Sunday’s always a short day. Thank the gods. Because when you’re selling, the day goes like this:

“How much is this?”

“We’re doing a special sale today! It’s only x dollars.”

“Oh, I have no money.”

Repeat for 5 hours. And then have those same people have friends run up and say, “I found a xx character purse!” and they all run off to not buy that too and annoy the vendor. Many of the dealers in the DR are my friends at this point and I always make a point, if I can find anything to get, to buy *something* on Sunday, because that’s the day when I know I want to throttle the masses myself.

I spend a fairly significant amount of time at cons teaching people really basic social skills and telling people to stop blocking doors (I don’t know why people constantly need to stand in front of doors. I know I do it too, so it must be something really lizard brain.. LOL) Let me stress several things to you all:

1) When someone says “Hello”, you respond with “Hello.”

2) When someone says “How are you?” the ONLY proper response in a general social setting is “Fine, thank you. How are you?” Sighing, groaning, making faces or complaining about your ankle, knee, back, head, stomach, exhaustion, colostomy, whatever, is NOT appropriate. Ever.

And here is my bonus lesson taken from years and years of working freak-show retail at anime cons and RenFaires and the like:

1) The person behind the table is NOT your friend. They are only your friend when you give them money. They do not care why you don’t like Shiori. Really. They will listen with a smile because they hope you might buy something. If you have no intention of buying something, don’t require them to care about your theories, or your gender issues or your difficult upbringing. Most other vendors will keep smiling and nodding because they do this for a living and can’t afford to offend. I will tell you to shut up and go away because I have a day job and you are not paying me $250/hour to listen. (If you WANT to give me $250/hour to listen, I will. I still won’t care, but I can fake it beautifully.)

So take pity on the other vendors and just don’t. Ask the price, ask about other items, etc…don’t opine.

But for a Sunday the day went well, I think. We made a few sales, nothing world shaking (yes, yes, pun intended), but a few folks seemed very happy to buy what they got. My favorite sale of the day was one girl who wanted to get something so badly that she dug the change out of her purse to buy a postcard. That dollar in change was the best dollar I got all weekend. :-)

But the best part, not surprisingly, was my staff. Serge, Donna, Kelli and Bruce – with a surprise appearance by the First Lady – really helped out alot and improved both my mood and my snappy comebacks. :-) So many thanks to them. And special kudos to Donna for all the fun craptastic movies from the Donna collection.

Next up is Connecticon – Sean and I will be up there on Saturday July 8th – in Con Row! Yuri panel is slated for 7:30 PM Saturday. (It should be on the schedule this time. lol)

It’s once again time for Yuricon to play with our buddies at Anime Next!

We’ll be at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in Secaucus, NJ from Friday, June 16 – Sunday, June 18.

Yuricon and ALC Publishing will have a table just inside the MEC on the left of the main entrance in Con Row.

In honor of ANext, ALC Publishing is holding a $10/book sale on all 100% yuri publications, and we have a fun new special just for ANext – Yuri-themed grab bags! For $1, $2, $5 or $10 you can get at *least* that amount’s worth of yuri-related random fun things. Very limited quantities, so get ’em fast!

And don’t miss our panels for this con, either:

Yuri Panel: 6pm Friday

Fanfiction Writing Workshop: 8pm Saturday

I and a bunch of the Yuricon staff will be there, so be sure to stop by!

The picture to the left here, graced the badges and program book at Sakuracon. We all commented that they must be a yuri couple as they are next to each other and touching. LOL (Little inside joke there from the Yuricon Mailing List.)

I’m going to be blunt here – Seattle is an odd city. The people, especially the panhandlers, were very creepy and had no sense of a sufficient personal space so as not to arouse the wrath of east coast visitors. I figure that in New York the homeless and/or crazy are so busy trying to survive that they don’t really have time or energy to get into my face. In Seattle, clearly they have plenty of time and energy…and get into my face, they did.

The city itself is pleasant enough. Through no one’s fault, the museum I wanted most to visit was closed, so that was a bit of a bummer. But we did manage to do lots of touristy stuff, which is always goofy fun.

“We” in this case included an unusual appearance by my wife. She almost never does cons with me. She and I were joined by Donna, Serge and Bruce; Yuricon staffers/supporters/minions/etc and people I am pleased to count among my dear friends.

We arrived on Wednesday, and met up with Donna and Serge. After dinner, we went on an adventure to Archie McPhee’s, where, as I mentioned, I bought bandages that look like bacon strips, got a friend a hula girl duster, some other friends pirate and rubber ducky goods, and myself some Tiki packing tape. Also, I picked up some heinous things to put in the yuri grab bags we’re going to be making for Anime Next.

Thursday AM, the wife and I set out to see the Seattle Space Needle. I, used to massive tourist lines, was shocked to find that we were able to go right up. We could see our hotel, and took in some nice views of the surrounding mountains and water. It had started sunny; by the time we got to the Space Needle it was cloudy over the city, but the mountains were still sunny. It looked quite cool. We have nice hills around here, but no real mountains and I’m always happy to spend an longish while looking out at really huge hunks of earth that stand out so massively from the rest of the scenery.

Next up was the Science Fiction Museum. It looked really ugly from outside – sort of a conglomeration of blue and metallic lumps. Inside, it was so impossibly geeky that I absolutely loved it. It’s essentially a warehouse house for Paul Allen’s private collection of sci-fi crap. As he has more money than god, it means that it’s a really super-sophisticated, well put-together warehouse for his sci-fi crap.

Note the utterly, totally dork-a-riffic levels of membership:

And the signs on the bathroom doors. Could they be *any* more nerdish?

Needless to say, we had a great time there. :-)

We decided that as we were all togther by Thursday evening, we’d wander over to the conference center and get our badges. The first person we asked had the right answer, but for the wrong reasons. The second person we asked seemed to have the exclusive job of sending everyone over to the most overworked person in the room, which would have been fine, except the right person was in that room too. Once again – you get what you pay for with volunteers. :-) But, be that as it may, we did get in touch with our host, Sean Larson, Programming Director of Sakuracon, who had invited us out in the first place. He got us our badges and had to bail, which we totally understood. We headed over to the Marketplace, took a look at our table, introduced ourselves to our neighbors and left to do some dinner.

Let me digress here for a second. I want to mention that, at every con/event I have a table at, I do my best to befriend my immediate neighbors. I find that it makes the whole event a better thing when you and the businesses that surround you all get along. In this case, we had “Toys for Freaks and Geeks” on the right, CL Enterprises (I think that was their name) on the left and YesJapan.com in front of us. All were perfectly wonderful to be near. YesJapan is a “language” website, which sort of sells the idea that geeky guys can have cute Japanese girls as friends to practice language skills with. They played videos all weekend of basically, the guys who work there shooting the breeze with Japanese women, talking about useless and insanse things – interspersed with hard Japanese rock bands videos. They were hysterically funny, but somehow really awful too. :-)

Friday started with a nice, relaxed morning. Pattie and Donna headed out to Chinatown and Bruce, Serge and I went right to the Marketplace to set up. We were doing a rock-bottom sale on yuri manga from ALC, so sales were brisk and we had a fast day. The joke was that while all vendors are there to sell and are, therefore, only your friends as long as you give them money, we were the only ones who were open about it. When people bought a book, we’d say stuff like, “Buy a book and we’ll be your friend five dollars worth!” LOL Serge got caught in a prolonged conversation that was going nowhere with someone who had bought a book. When the guy went away, he turned to me and said, “That was ten dollars worth of friendship for five dollars.” It kept us laughing all weekend.

A few friends stopped by – Jen, and her friend Jahana and Devon and unexpectedly Derek and Diana – as well as a bunch of folks from the ML, which was a genuine pleasure. Especially Sara, who was very energetic and bouncy and made us laugh – and she brought lots of people by, which was great. So, thanks Sara! And the young lady who is cosplaying Chloe here, who was very cute. Thanks to her too. ;-)

Friday night we went out to Chinatown to Uwajimaya, a pan-asian market and mall, with a very large Kinokuniya bookstore. I wasn’t feeling great, so managed to not spend anything. The wife and I went back to our room to crash.

Saturday was, for me, more of the same – the con in a dealer’s room looks the same for most of the day. LOL The crowd changes as the new waves of people come in, that’s about it. There wasn’t any anime I needed/wanted to see, and games and the like aren’t my cup of tea. We did have a friend, Hillary, drop by and later went to dinner with her, in the teeny space we had between marketplace and Yuri Panel.

The Yuri Panel was quite nice – about 50-60 people showed. The questions were pretty decent and everyone was very earnest. Serge and Bruce were GREAT on the panel and had a lot of good things to say. Interestingly, Serge was more up on anime, and Bruce on manga, so that worked out really well. We went back to the hotel and watched a brilliantly bizarre live-action movie called Survival Style 5. It’s by the same director who did Kamikaze Girls and boy can you tell. It had alot of the same actors and tropes, but was really funny and weird in a whole new way. I think we all liked the storyline of the guy who kept killing this girl, but she kept coming back, and eventually they kind of fall in love, best. I recommend it for a healthy dose of surreal humor.

Sunday we made an appearance briefly at the table, then bailed to do some more sight-seeing. This time it was the Asian Art Museum, followed by a quick turn aroud Pike St. Market, so I could get my hairdresser the salmon I promised her. lol

The last night we were there was the wife’s birthday, so we went out to celebrate, following that up with a Korean kung-fu (no joke – it was really a kung-fu movie, just filmed in Korea. Trust me, I know the difference) comedy. It was pretty funny, so it was a good end to a good trip. :-)

I can’t thank Donna, Serge, Bruce and Pattie enough for coming out with me. It would not have been nearly as fun as it was without them. Thanks, guys. :-)

Our next event will be Anime Next, June 16-18, 2006 in Secaucus, NJ. I’ll be doing the yuri panel and a fanfic writer’s workshop. I’ll let you know when they are scheduled.

See you there!

First let me thank the following people without whom I would have never been able to make this trip and presentation. The UIUC East Asian Language Center for sponsoring me, Karen Kelsky for her invitation, Bob Tierney for being a fantastic guide and all-around wonderful guy, Rick Partin for setting up all the arrangements and James Welker for being an unexpected gem.

Okay, so I left my house at about 1PM on Wednesday. My first flight was to Detroit where, in order to change to the terminal for my next flight I had to walk down the hall o’weird.
This hallway lay between Concourse C and A, and was filled with music. The walls changed color along with the music. Which all would have been lovely if the music hadn’t been super bizarro-evil violin riffs which made the walls green and red and pulse-y and awful.  My first thought upon entering the hallways was “OMG! I’ve entered a Kenneth Greenaway movie!” Which is only funny if you know what I mean – and if you do, you will totally understand what I mean. My next thought was that I was trapped in a piece of fiber optics fiber.

I arrived at Concourse A with no harm to body or mind, although my spirit was a bit bludgeoned by the horror-house violin riff. I wandered about a bit and saw this:

He is, of course, the “Spririt of Detroit” and I am sure he only coincidentally looks awfully Statue of Liberty-esque. He was also parked in fron of a food court, which I quite liked. I felt free to choose any of the fast food chains inside. I chose to eat at none of them.

I completely lack people in my pictures. That is simply because everytime I was with the people I will mention, they were so delightful and fun and engaging, I totally forgot to take their pictures. I’m totally serious. So I’ll try and link a few pics from other places.

Bob Tierney picked me up at the airport and we laughed back to the hotel, where I laughed some more, because the place was eccentric in exactly the right kind of way.

Yes, I didn’t bother flipping the picture for you. The Historic Lincoln Hotel is almost completely unlike the website makes it out to be. For one thing, it wasn’t skanky at all. It had coffee service in the rooms and wireless in the common areas (and on the last night the wireless worked in my bedroom, so I got some good downloading done for the trip home. Heheh.) Bob provided me dinner company, good conversation, car rides and a host of above-and-beyond behaviors that I thank him for greatly from the bottom of my heart.

My bedroom had no less than three completely dissimilar, complex and colorful patterns on walls, floor and bedding. I loved it. The elevators had tapestry wallpaper. I didn’t upload all the pictures I took, because if you weren’t there, it wouldn’t resolve itself into anything meaningful, I think.

The next morning I rose at an ungodly hour with one of the worst migraines of my entire life. I stumbled down to the “Library Room” for breakfast.
I shared my breakfast with these fine creatures, and promptly got very ill (only partially because of breakfast – the food was not to blame however. I had the best bacon I’d ever had at that meal.) I spent most of the morning asking the gods to kill me. Eventually I rousted myself up, grabbed my bag and caught a bus for the campus where I was to meet Dan Kim, and lecture to the Introduction to Japanese Culture class. I forgot to get a picture of the class, but there were probably 200 students or so out of 375. About 60 paid attention – of them, 15 were actually interested. There was one actual otaku in the group and a bunch of cute fanboys/girls, who did come down and ask questions. They almost all introduced themselves, which was a pleasant surprise. The one real otaku didn’t come over or introduce himself. :-)

I went back to the hotel after the lecture, because I had about 90 minutes until the next thing, which was a meeting of the CQS Reading club – a g/l/b/t book club.

On the way back to campus I saw OMG! Banana! and Ape! They were stumping for a showing of King Kong that night. Earlier, there had been a protest or something of some kind. The chant was complex and the chanters kept screwing up, so I hope it wasn’t anything important.

I met Bob at his office and we walked over to where the CQS reading club met. It was more than a little weird to think that at least some of these folks had read Shoujoai ni Bouken: The Adventures of Yuriko, with no real context for the idea of a con, a mascot for that con, or the usual gamut of a priori information most anime/manga fans have. However, one of the group members was an English professor who, while having none of the usual Japanese info, understood fan fiction, which was SO cool. And everyone had clearly at least attempted to read the story. The questions were fun, I felt very odd talking about *my* book. I had brought copies for everyone as gifts. (Honestly, I was torn between that seeming nice, or pompous. ^_^; Everyone seemed happy enough with them, so I guess “nice” won.)

Bob and I and James went out. I was going on and on about this great dissertation on Japanese lesbian history that I got from Rica Takshima that I used for historical info for Friday’s lecture and James says, “I wrote that.”

The funny thing, when he introduced himself, the name rang a bell, but I was too addled to put it together. So, James and I were like, “yappity yappity” the entire two days.  Because how many people follow this kind of thing? He was absolutely lovely, btw. He sent me some links to his writings online, which I will be adding to the Yuricon Essays page.

More than anything, James’ kind words and generous gifts of information really made me feel as if I ought to really write some of this stuff down – something I’ve really never wanted to do before.

I crashed at about 10PM and don’t you know it, was up at 5 *again*! I hate that, when I have all morning to sleep. I decided to take a long walk aroun downtown Urbana. I stopped at Schnucks, a supermarket not too far from the hotel where I encountered a sign that said that it was “Kosher Awareness Week”. I did take a picture, but with my phone, so it’s not here and I’m too lazy to send it to myself. It was just a sign – picture it. Anyway, I found that sign unexpected. But then, Schnucks sold soy protein drinks, so maybe not so much.

This time James offered me a ride, and we got to the Foreign Languages Building with time for me to find that of course, my computer did not work with their equipment, and to meet my host, Karen Keslky, department chair of the EALC. Karen is exceptionally delightful and I’m still pleased to have made her acquaintance. She laughed at all the right jokes in my lecture, and had great questions. Some of the anime club kids came to the lecture as well, and they also had good, if awfully difficult questions. (I’m always asked questions I can’t answer like, “What do the Japanese think of…?” As I am not Japanese I can only offer my analysis, which is based on experience, common sense, research and a host of questions I asked Rica Takashima before I left so I could answer! )

There was a gentleman in the front row with Karen who I later learned was a well-known historian, Ron Toby. I am so very glad I did not know who he was before the lecture, let me tell you. He was lovely and very complimentary, so between James and Karen saying “you should publish” and Ron saying that my lecture did not suck, my ego is quite replete for a little while. :-) There were about 15-20 people present for the formal lecture, in case you wondered.

Karen graciously took me to dinner with Bob, James and James’ boyfriend and we had a great time. Wonderful conversation – and I have a host of copying and scanning to do for everyone. And reading to do for me.

The next morning Bob gave me a ride back to the airport. Here is a view from the waiting room window.

To be fair, this was also pretty much the view from the Detroit terminal (more planes) and Albany (mountains in the distance.) But as I’m used to an urban background, it freaked me out a bit. Usually, when I fly, the terrain seems like mystical letters or symbols that are trying to tell me something. In the air between Illinois and Detroit, everything just seemed flat.

Lastly, in the Albany terminal, I was buying an unhealthy coffee slushy-type drink when this fundraising cannister caught my eye. Note the art the local high school is using. I felt that, somehow, it capped off my trip. :-)And I think someone stole my character design for Yuriko there on the left. ^_^

So, once again, my sincere gratitude to the folks at UIUC. I hope to visit one day again – sooner rather than later!

If you have a university with a gender studies/Japanese department that is looking for lecturers – I feel pretty confident about my stuff now, so I’m available for hire.  ^_^