Come Joins Us At Tekko 2017!

As some of you may already know I will be attending Tekko as a panelist again this year. I’ve got 5 panels…well 4 panels and a live show in one of the panel rooms. I welcome you all to attend and here’s the run-down of what I’m bringing to the convention this year:

-Friday, April 7th-

Noon Tekko Gakkou Room – Japanese Heraldry: The History of the Mon. We’ll discuss what Kamon are, how they were utilized, how they are still utilized, where you’ve seen them, and compare them to similar Western Ideas.

2:00pm 18+ Panel Room – How To Write MORE Dirty Stuff. All you adult-y type folks interested in writing, or simply laughing at me comment on sexy gifs, can join me in the 18+ Panel Room for a lesson on Writing Dirty. We’ll address purple language again briefly before touching on setting up a scene, fore and after play.

11:00pm Panel Room 1 – Samurai Gaiden Presents: Live Rakugo! My first ever live Rakugo performance (totally *not* nervous, BTW… 0_0 ). I’ll be giving some information about Rakugo, what it is, and how it works in between my three chosen stories: Xiahou Dun’s Eye, Botan Doro ‘Peony Lantern’, and the Gyurokushujo Monogatari ‘Tale of Orihime and Hikoboshi’.

-Saturday, April 8th-

1:30pm Workshop Room – The Art of Renga – Linked Verse Samurai Poetry Workshop. Come join us and make poetry with us! We’ll give a brief overview of Waka poetry, particularly the Tanka and Renga styles and then we’ll help you to produce Renga poetry together with us! Don’t have a pen or paper? Don’t be silly; free pens and notepads will be provided for the workshop at no cost to you.

4:00 pm Tekko Gakkou Room – Waka – The Classical Japanese Poetry of the Samurai. Did you know that poetry was one of the samurai warrior’s favorite pastimes? Come learn about the poetry of Japan including Tanka, Renga, Bussokusekika, and we’ll even touch on the redheaded step child of Waka: The Haiku.

If you aren’t already going to Tekko this year, maybe considering taking a trip this weekend and visiting with us in between panels. Also a surprising request was made of me this year: I *will* autograph copies of my book if you have one and approach me with it (between panels, of course).

~Rich

Tekko 2016 Review: Saturday

We’ve talked about Friday at Tekko 2016, but what about Saturday?  Well that’s what we’re talking about, today!

Saturday started around noon for us, after checking in with Con Ops we hit the lounge to fuel up for the day. We caught the better part of Nancy Kepner’s “How to Explain Anime to Your Parents”. One of the funniest selections from her routine was talking about her conservative religious aunt telling her, “Your Grandmother would be so ashamed of what you’re doing!” because in her song ‘Sexy Asians Dancing’ she uses the line, “Oh my God, sexy Asians!”

So once we were done fueling up and Nancy’s show was over, we headed to our home away from home, the Tekkou Gakkou room for our final panel of the weekend: Samurai Mythconceptions. In it we discussed the common tropes of the modern media portrayal of a samurai as well as various myths associated with samurai. If you were there for that and liked any part of it, you will definitely enjoy our Samurai Gaiden series on YouTube.

Once that was all said and done we dropped off our gear since we were done running panels and we hit Jimmy Johns again, but unlike the first time…this time they were packed. The line wound around the interior of the building and you had to pass the line in order to get to the end of it.

But Jimmy Johns is incredibly fast and we were trough the line and had our food within ten or so minutes. We headed back to the convention center and ate in the Premium Lounge, watching the opening portion of the masquerade on the lounge’s closed-circuit TVs. We got to see the fantastic Castiel cosplay that the young lady with the extendable wings; that was pretty cool to see. Aaron Fristik of Snap-Fit Comedy’s final Masquerade stand-up was about the last thing we saw before heading out from the lounge and headed to the what would be our first panel that we planned to attend and only the second panel of the weekend we attended.

What panel was it? Games to Film: Issues of Adaptation run by the guys who do the Inciting Incident podcast. They recorded the panel live and you can find it on their podcast here (the panels starts at the 32 minute mark). They discussed some interesting points and were pretty entertaining; seemed to know what they were talking about as well.

I really enjoyed their deconstruction of the old Super Mario Brothers movie and how they were able to look at it with an entertaining way and deduced the problems that created it. One thing that was interesting was how they were able to critically cite the flaws and issues with various video games movies, even though they liked them (their comments on Street Fighter is a great example).

We then went to the Game Room and watched a few people play some pachinko and arcade games before checking out the table games on the other side of the room. It was nice that they expanded the game room this year; I can’t wait to see what it looks like next year with even more stuff to fill the room.

The wife enjoyed watching some of the Japanese games that looked flashy, even though she couldn’t read enough of it to have any idea what the game was or what the hell was going on. She did get a kick out of the Taiko Drumming game. But we didn’t stick around long enough to play anything and never made it back to the room with everything else going on.

The final panel we attended was the Japanese Mythology in Anime and Games 101. They had some interesting information, although the girl leading the panel had a problem with her countenance at first. When the panel started out she was clearly trying to hide how nervous she was, because she couldn’t complete a sentence without stammering and repeating herself. She would start the sentence…she would start the sentence and then stammer…she would start the sentence and then stammer a bit before being able to finish her thought.

But to her credit she seemed to smooth the problem out by the mid-way point of the panel and was able to talk in a more confident style and the panel improved a bit there. They had a few bits of trivia that I’d argue were incorrect, but the overall information was good.

Unfortunately at that point we hadn’t eaten in about five hours and couldn’t contain ourselves for the rest of the panel and headed out to scrounge up some food. We spent the rest of the night sitting around, watching the Sleeping Samurai stuff and chatting with the guy who owned it while he was making a foam sword.

~RCS

Tekko 2016 Review: Friday Part 2

So the other day we talked about what we did on the first half of Friday at Tekko 2016. Today we’ll talk about the second half of Friday. After the East vs. West panel we went out to grab some food at the local Jimmy Johns around the corner to the convention center. That is very convenient! Good food, fast service…perfect for a place attached to the convention center!

Anyway after food we lounged a bit again to get ready for the next panel and then we headed to our destination. This would prove to be the hardest panel for us to do: How to Write Dirty Stuff. It was hard because it wasn’t history related, like all the other ones were. I’m a history nerd, so it’s much easier to talk about history than explaining to people how to effectively write sex scenes.

Unfortunately given the material and the fact that the entire panel was just commenting on porn gifs, we didn’t bother to record it…Youtube wouldn’t have let us upload that, sorry.

We are extra sorry about that one, because just as we were finishing up…a gentleman came in saying that he had really hoped to attend the panel, but got caught up at work and left too late to make it. We felt so bad, but if there’s a lot of interest we will definitely bring it or something close to it back next year. I do have some semblance of experience in the topic, what with my book, Escort being a dirty book.

Subtle, no?

With a little bit of time to kill before our next panel we headed into the dealer’s room to check it out. It was a much bigger space than previous years, which was definitely a cool thing. There were still a few places to get hung up on in tight alleys, but overall it was much easier to get around.

We got a chocolate covered marshmallow thing from the fudge shop in the middle; that was pretty tasty. Then we headed back to the Tekko Gakkou room for our final panel of Friday night: Four Classic Novels: China’s Literary Effect on Japanese Anime and Games.

Below you can see the first video for that panel and the second one will go up tomorrow.

After that panel we were exhausted and headed home.  Set to be back by early Saturday afternoon for our final panel!  We were so excited we barely slept…no just kidding, we trudged home and sacked out after grabbing some dinner.

And where did we grab dinner from on the way home?  You know where…

It’s almost a tradition at this point.

~RCS

Tekko 2016 East vs. West Panel Part 2 Live!

As you might have guessed from the title, today is Day 2 of the review and video upload process.  So Part 2 of the East vs. West panel is now live!  You can find it clicking on the picture below!

~RCS

Tekko 2016 Review: Friday Part 1

Another year has come and another Tekko has come to pass. The following two days will be our standard post-convention review; this time for Tekko 2016! We generally have too much setting up and preparation to do to attend the first day of Tekko, Thursday, which is generally just a video day. So we’ll be discussing Friday, Saturday, and Sunday’s affairs both fun and not-so-fun.

We had some panels to run this year and our first one was 3:30pm on Friday, so we planned to get there by 2:00pm to make sure we had time to register, meet with Con Ops to get set up and get to the panel room in time to set up and get the first set of jittery nerves out of the way.

We actually wound up being exhausted from Thursday’s work and I managed to pull a muscle in my back after the vacuum cleaner broke while trying to vacuum the steps. So…we went to bed early Thursday evening and wound up waking up super early Friday, so we actually got in around noon. We got our badges; we preregistered so it took about five minutes to get through.

We did the Premium Badge again this year and one thing I have to say is that the Premium goody bag…kind of sucked. It had a nifty little portable speaker in it, but other than that it was just some marketing materials from Funimation in a DBZ bag…and the bag was about an inch too short because the posters in the bag cut the hell out of my fingers while trying to carry the bag. No treats or anything like that.

‘Bluetooth’ is not a state of mind.

The speaker was a nifty little toy, much like the battery backup devices they doled out last year, but the whole thing just seemed so half-assed compared to last year. Especially since it was downright fraudulent in its labeling. The box says “Bluetooth Speaker”, but it’s not Bluetooth; it’s not even remotely wireless. The directions clearly say you have to plug the silly thing into the device you want to play from. The only thing ‘wireless’ about it was that you can plug it in and charge it and then play from it on battery power; but it’s certainly not Bluetooth.

At least it looks cool…shame it’s almost useless to me.

I don’t know if this year’s stuff was sucky or last year’s was just that awesome. Either way, we were disappointed in the goody bag.

So on to actually getting into the convention. We roamed around a bit and tried to gain our bearing and figure out how the building was set up this year. We checked in with Con Ops and took a sweep through the Premium Lounge.

Allow me to digress for a moment. A few years ago when we looked at getting the Premium badges, we saw that one of the features was access to the ‘Premium Lounge’. A little place where Premium badge holders could go to sit around and waste away the time.

We thought that was just the stupidest little idea. Who would go to a con just to sit around and maybe watch a live-feed of whatever was going on in the main event stage? Is that worth the extra money? No way.

Fast-forward to the first time we got the Premium badges after the lounge was founded…

…god damn do we spend a lot of time in that lounge, now. It’s a great little place to unwind in between things. Got a panel at 7 and another at 9? Hit the lounge from 8-8:30 to unwind and stock up on complimentary bottles of water; you’ll need ’em for all that talking in the panel.

Anyway, back to the review at hand! We figured that we had some time to kill so we watched the first Nancy Kepner show in the lounge. Nancy can be a little awkward at times, but she’s a nerd musician in a room full of nerds; she was probably the least awkward person in that room. Nancy’s sweet and adorable, though, and she’s got some hilarious songs. The wife really enjoys her Yaoi Song and her Crossplay Song. I always enjoy the Weeabo Song and this year every time the wife and I passed the J-Pop Music vendors in the Dealer’s Room we would turn to each other and sing the chorus of her Sexy Asian’s Dancing Song.

Once the show was over we headed to the Tekkou Gakkou room where our first panel would be…in about an hour or two. We sat in on the Sides of the Spectrum: LGBT in Anime panel. They discussed a few anime we weren’t familiar with, but didn’t flood it with spoilers, so that was nice.

The opening of the panel was informative and I’m sure we could have gotten more out of it if we were more familiar with the anime they referenced. We got the Madohka and Sailor Moon references, but many of the other references were lost on us. Our fault, not theirs, really.

Click me to watch the East vs. West Panel Main video!

The next thing we did was set up for our own panel, East vs. West: Arms, Armor, and Lifestyles of the Knights of Europe and Samurai of Japan.

With this first review post we will begin debuting the videos of our panels. There are 5 videos in total, we decided to split them into 2 parts: Panel Main and Q&A, rather than split them into 10-minute mini-vids and then a full-on panel video as well. The exception is the final video which is about an hour long, but only has 8 minutes of Q&A, we just put the whole thing together in one video.

As this review is up here on Sunday, we will be releasing a video every day this week, culminating with the May Samurai Gaiden video ending the week on Friday. This month we’ll be talking about one of the guys I mentioned in the Samurai Mythconception panel and going a little more in-depth with his life. Come back again every day this coming week for more Tekko 2016 videos and reviews.

~RCS

Tekko 2016 Update

Hey folks, just wanted to let you know what we’re up to what with all this quiet!

Ice cream of course; it’s warm out again around here.

I am in the process of editing the panel videos and they should be up somewhere within the week…ish.  I figure in the next few days I will start uploading them, then within a week or two they should all be up. The full written review should be up around that time, as well.

That’s…really all I had to say. Just wanted to give everyone a head’s up on that. Sorry everything’s taking so long.

~RCS

Tekko 2015: Day 2, Saturday

As I mentioned yesterday, Day 2 started awfully early for us.  9:30 am.

There’s a 9:30…in the morning, too?

Our young ward met up with her friends and went to a panel about an anime that the wife and I are too out of the loop to know anything about (they did a group cosplay from the anime, and we had no idea who either of them were supposed to be).  We decided to throw on our Hitatare outfits and wore them to the convention.

So, while our ward was away, we decided to head over to the Godfathers of Anime panel that my nameless friend I mentioned yesterday (the guy who ran the RTK panel a few years ago).  We walked in around halfway through because 9:30 was strenuous enough, there was no way I was getting there before 9:00.  He had some pretty good information, I wish we’d have been able to see the whole thing.  Definitely interesting.

We were going to hang around and chat with him and his ladyfriend afterward, but a big group approached him to chat and we were…well, still not entirely awake.

Us at 10:00 am.

Next up we wandered around the convention center again, checked out the gaming area, trying to wake ourselves up some.  It didn’t work.  So we figured we would go veg out in the Premium Lounge for a few hours until Uncle Yo’s Magical Girl Bootcamp panel started.  It was 10:00 and the panel didn’t start until 12:30.  Good God, what were we going to do?

We zombie-crawled our way into the Premium Lounge (one of the perks of getting Premium Badges, and actually a pretty nice feature we have to admit).  We figured we could grab a bottle of water and get a few snacks, maybe try to get some fluids and food through us to try to wake ourselves up.  While we were there the Maid of Hearts Café group was running one of their events.

We were invited to play a game of Bullshit with the maids and a few other attendees.  I won.  Thus proving that every time I say that I can’t lie I am apparently lying.  We played a second round with a bigger group and I’m still going to claim victory, because at the end of the game I had the fewest cards of the group.

It was actually pretty fun and it helped to wake us up a lot, too.  The Maids were very interesting and fun to hang out with.  And they gave us a few trinkets before we left.  The wife got a plastic folding fan and I took a nifty Pop Art Disney Princess Bag, as they called it.

It pays to be a good Bullshitter in a café full of maids.

Yes, that’s Jasmine, Ariel, Belle, and Pocahontas in teary-eyed mode.

Jasmine says, “I didn’t even know his name!” Which, taken out of context, is a pretty whorey line.

Ariel says, “But Daddy…I love him!”

Belle says, in all her Stockholm Syndrome glory, “Please don’t leave me…I love you!”

And we finish it off with Pocahontas saying, “I can’t leave you!”

And on the side of the bag it even says, “It’s tough being a princess!”

The wife says I’m creepy, but I find it amusing.

So then we went to Uncle Yo’s Magical Girl Bootcamp panel.  I’m not sure what I was expecting from this panel.  It was Uncle Yo, so I figured it would be hilarious.  I thought he’d just riff on Magical Girl Anime.

I was wrong.

It was better than that!

It was an intellectual panel on women’s equality, as told through the allegory of magical girl.  It was as hilarious as I expected from Uncle Yo, but it was also very poignant and thought-provoking.  I strongly recommend attending it in the future, if you have the chance.

We took a lunch break with our ward and a few of her friends.  Any guess where we took the poor girls to?

No, seriously. Why have I not approached them for ad revenue, yet?

With a lunch break in we did a quick jaunt through the dealer’s room and artist alley (which they have combined and are just calling the Exhibition Hall now) to see what we might be interested in purchasing later.  After that we decided there were no panels we were interested in.  Well, no, that’s not true.  We actually decided there were no panels we could stay awake through.  We made a quick trip back to the parking garage and slept for an hour and a half in my van.  With a good nap we made our way back to the convention and attended the Disability in Video Games panel.

The panel was hosted by a pair of women, I do not remember their names.  In my defense…I had just awoken from a nap and I’m generally bad with names any way.  One of the women suffered from anxiety issues and the other suffered from a deformed right hand.  At a few times in their panel they came off as a little whiny, but I’ll give them a pass because…in their situation I probably would have whine twice as much as them.

Being a game developer I have to say that I’m glad I attended the panel.  They talked about lack of positive portrayals of disabled people and disabilities as a whole in games.  I wholeheartedly agree with that, but I was already thinking of that kind of stuff.  What they brought up in the second section of the panel, however, was something that I had never thought of as an Indie Developer: Accessibility.

I make computer games so I don’t have to deal with how useless a Playstation controller is to a person with only one hand or arm.  However placing keyboard shortcuts far from each other lowers the accessibility for disabled players, same with requiring the mouse and keyboard to be used at the same time.  I’ll definitely take that into consideration in future titles.  This is especially important in RPGs and Visual Novels, the most likely titles for Nic3Ntertainment to produce.

After the disability panel was over we collected our ward and went home, because we were all sleep deprived and the nap had only let us make it as far as we had gotten.  So we missed the surprise fire drill that happened about a half hour or so after we left.

And that was Saturday.  Tomorrow we’ll talk about Sunday and the overall review of the convention this year.

~RCS

Tekko 2015: Day 1, Friday

So our day started out around 11:30 a.m.  We got into the convention center and, since we had pre-registered, walked right up to the registration booth.  We had our badges and were inside the convention within 5 minutes.

I must say, Tekko has really impressed me with how organized they’ve gotten.  They seem to have improved every year since we started going again.  This year was no different, at least as far as getting inside.

The first thing we did was walk into Con Ops, because both of my panels this year were on Friday.  We checked in and had a little scare.  You see, I had been informed that two of my panels proposals were accepted and that one was on the maybe list.  But when the time came for the convention to start, I had not received anything saying that my maybe was accepted.

So lo and behold when the guy at Con Ops says, “Okay, so you’ve got…3 panels, right?”

“‘Scuse me, wha…?”

I searched the schedule, the Wife searched the schedule, he searched the schedule, he called another woman over to search the schedule, and none of us could find the third panel listed.  So we finally decided that their list must not differentiate between okayed panels and maybe list panels.

So, after a touch of a scare, we got everything checked in and wandered around for a bit until the panel before ours ended.  Then we headed to Panel Room #3 and set up for the How To Avoid Bad Writing Panel.

Now last year I ran two panels and they were fairly average as far as attendance went.  One panel had about fifteen people in it and the other had about twenty.  More than I had expected, certainly, but still nothing super great.

But this year?  There was probably around 40-50 people in each panel.  The only panel we went to that had more people in it than my panels was one of the celeb panels, Uncle Yo’s Magical Girl Bootcamp.  I’ll get to more about that panel in tomorrow’s post.

So, anyway, the panel went off without much of a hitch.  We had a great audience, a lot of great questions were asked in the Q&A section of the panel.  Ultimately I was very pleased with how things went.

Several people approached at the end of the panel and the next panel’s host actually wound up having to chase me out of the room because I was still answering fantastic questions and chatting with people.

As a matter of fact people came up to me all day long to talk about their own writing, ask me for advice on how to handle this event, that style, this character, or simply to ask what I thought about one of their works-in-progress.  It was great!

The next thing we did was a little more roaming to get the lay of the convention center better before going into Panel Room #1 to host the History of Sengoku Japan panel.  Now what we should have done was change out my camcorder’s battery, because I hadn’t realized it only had 30 minutes of recording time left on it.

So we set up for the second panel and once again…room was pretty full.  The writing panel definitely had more people in it, but the Sengoku panel was certainly not empty by any means, a little closer to 40 than 50 in this one.

Once again a few good questions, but for the most part they just let me tell interesting stories about samurai.  And once again a group of people came up to me and chatted about the topic.

I was re-introduced to the fellow who did the RTK panel I watched a few years back.  His panel style is actually what my own are based off of.  I watched what he did and copied it, then modified the system to suit my own presentation style.  And through the whole thing I forgot to ask his name.  Go me, for derping on that.

We hit the restroom and popped a squat in the panel room we had just presented in for the How to Hibachi panel.  The Hibachi chef that was running the panel, Josh I believe, worked for Shogun in Monroeville, PA if I remember correctly.

A regular trick, the Onion Volcano. Always cool to watch.

It was pretty nifty to watch him do some of the tricks and to give us the low-down on some of the tricks of the trade.  He explained what all the items on the cart were, how much butter and vodka they go through every night (the vodka is for cleaning and setting fires), and how they modified their tools to let them do their tricks.

He had some pretty good jokes and a decent presentation skill.  He ended on this one…

What sound does a White Chicken make? Bak, bak, bak!

What sound does a Chinese Chicken make?  Meow, meow…

Overall it was informative and entertaining, which is how panels should be.  And it made me hungry for a Hibachi dinner.  So, mission accomplished if the restaurant sent him there to represent them.

After that was dinner.  Can you guess where?

You’re goddamn right we ate there!

Of course it was.  During the weekend the wife’s younger cousin was staying with us and we treated her to some delicious Sharp Edge food.  Got her addicted to the delicious pudding.  Yumm…y’know I really should start charging them for the advertising at this stage.

Anyway, we went back to the convention and sat in on the “I Know Where to Put It” Complications of Rule 34 panel.  In case you aren’t aware the panel is referencing Internet Rule #34: If it exists…here is porn of it on the Internet.

They showed strange occurrences within the porno-sphere of the internet.  Things like Maleficent holding Tinkerbell by the wings, dangling the little faerie above her mouth while she ate Tinkerbell out.  Which was strangely arousing in a weird sort of way (it was very well drawn).

There was some weird shit in that panel.  But the wife and I discovered that we are apparently pretty freaky.  There were people who walked out of the panel in disgust.  The wife’s brother was one of them; he hit his limit when they showed the General Lee (the  car from Dukes of Hazard) ass-raping Boss Hogg.  Yeah, like I said…weird shit.

But it’s nothing as bad as we’ve seen on the internet.  These people have clearly never heard of Shadman, Spazkid, or eFukt.

If you’re at work…please do not do a Google Search with those terms.

All in all Friday was a fantastic day.  Tekko was definitely starting to show how much they had improved over the years.  Not without hiccups, but nothing major that went wrong.

So, come back tomorrow and see what we did and what we thought of Day 2.  Which started pretty early for us because our ward for the weekend wanted to see a panel at 9:30 in the morning.

~RCS

Tekko 2015 Wrap-Up

All right folks, unfortunately Tekkoshocon 2015 is over.  But fortunately it was pretty good this year.  We did two panels this year (How To Avoid Bad Writing and History of Sengoku Japan) and, to be honest, I was worried about the turnout since we were on Friday and the largest number of attendees comes in on Saturday.

But both rooms were super-packed!

 

Okay, so…maybe it wasn’t that packed.  But still, the rooms were way more full than I was expecting.  Thanks, again for showing up.  I should have my full review and my merchandise review (i.e. a list of the stuff we bought) in a few days.  I’ve got some time off this week, so I should be able to get them done in a timely fashion (for once).

As always, thanks for coming folks.  And not just to my panels, but thanks everyone for showing up to the con as a whole.  It was a fantastic year.  It seems like each year Tekko has fewer and fewer hiccups, this year was no exception.  Well, except for the surprise fire drill, but that’s another story.  I should also have some video up on the Youtube channel before too super long.

~RCS

Tekko 2014 Review: Day 3 and Final!

Update: Monday, Tuesday…same thing, right?  I know I said this would go up on Monday, but apparently I read my calendar wrong and the 6th was Tuesday, not Monday.  Sorry, my bad.

 

Sunday started early, but not early enough to catch the Anime That Might Actually Teach You Something or the Final Fantasy Through the Years panels.  We got into the convention late morning/early afternoon and hit the dealer’s room.

We tried to keep away from the art, since that’s almost entirely what we bought last year at Otakon and we still haven’t even gotten the stuff in frames.

We got a sewn linen bookmark, a couple nice stickers of Loki, Sailor Jupiter, and, of course, Dick Gumshoe.  Really, you think I could walk away from a discounted sticker of the cop from Phoenix Wright named Dick?  Do you even know the name of this site?

Anyway, we also picked up a cute bunny pillow, some jewelry, but I’ll give you a merch rundown tomorrow.

After we got our fill of merchantry for the year, we headed up to see our only panel for Sunday, the How to Get The Guy — About Otome Games panel.  Otome games are games designed for girls, generally romantic visual novels, but they may also be dating sims, princess-makers, etc.  It’s a little gay, but I actually enjoy these games and wish there was a bigger market for male-centric versions of these games that aren’t simply story-less pornography (not that I’m no willing to play those, too, of course).  I’m also interested in the Otome genre because I’ve designed a few of them and I wanted to see the panel to gather some ideas for new designs.

The panel was interesting and informative, even though the woman running it had a laptop screw the pooch and she had to make do without her power point presentation.  It actually showed that she really knew what she was talking about, since she didn’t really miss a beat without the power point.

—-Final Review!—

What do I think of Tekkoshocon 2014?

On the whole?  Good, better than it’s ever been, maybe; at least the best its been for a few years.

Improvements?  A few, mostly regarding lines for entrance into a panel.  I think that each panel room should have a serpentine-style line assembly taped out in masking tape in front of each entrance door.  They do it for the main event area, but I think if this was done in front of each panel room it would make forming and maintaining lines much more efficient.

That’s really it, the rest of the issues we had were administrative problems.  Something as big as Tekko you just have to expect a few things like that.  Con Ops had a stage, 6 panel rooms, 3 video rooms, a lounge, registration, tons of open space, and over 5,000 people.  The fact that we only had two major hiccups in our journey is pretty much par, if not better than par.

So, like I said, making lines before they are needed would be my main improvement for next year.

 

So all in all, I’d say it was definitely worth going.  As far as I know we’ll be heading to it again next year, with a few more panels up our sleeves.  And this time I might actually be ready with DickJutsu swag for sale and such.

~RCS