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

Samurai Gaiden: Maeda Matsu

For those of you haven’t heard, yesterday the Supreme Court put a pretty heavy hand on permitting Marriage Equality.  It was a shame that we had to utilize the Supreme Court, rather than our Congressional Powers, but a step in the right direction is a step in the right direction.  Right?  Right!

Those of you familiar with the Women’s Suffrage movement of the last century might remember that it actually went the opposite way.  In 1875 the Supreme Court rules that women did not have the right to vote.  But Congress, in 1920, gave women the right to vote thanks to the 19th Amendment.

You could argue we’re celebrating Women’s Suffrage a little early in June, since the 19th Amendment wasn’t ratified until August…but on June 4th, 1919 it was voted on and passed by the Senate (having passed the House in May).  So we have decided to celebrate U.S. ladies getting the right to vote in June with a Samurai Gaiden episode about a prominent woman of the later Sengoku Period: Maeda Matsu.

Matsu’s husband was a great man, at one point the most powerful man in Japan just before his death.  His abilities as a general, warrior, and politician are legendary.  And even more legendary?  His luck in marrying one of the brightest minds of the Sengoku period.  If you’d like to know more about Maeda Matsu, feel free to click on the link below and you’ll follow it along to our Samurai Gaiden video about her.

 

Congratulations to all my non-traditional fans who can now get married.  I’ve heard a lot of people since the decision spouting vitriol about Traditional Marriage.  Tradition is something to be considered, and possibly even revered, but it should be tradition because of the honor it evokes…not because it enforces discrimination.

Technically speaking, anyway, Traditional Marriage was an act where a Groom and his Best Man (or Men, as the case may have been) stealthily assaulted another family’s home and kidnapped one of the women.  That was followed by the Honey Moon wherein the Best Man would guard the door of the Groom’s bedroom and keep the newly kidnapped Bride from escaping or being rescued by her family until the Groom could rape her.  She was thusforth ruined in the eyes of her family and ideally would be raped to pregnancy by the time she was allowed free roam of her new home (generally this lasted about 28 days…hence the term Honey Moon).

So I’m okay with moving away from Traditional Marriage.  Especially since the woman I fell in love with is way more badass than I am.  There’s no way I would have been able to kidnap and rape her; she’d have whooped my ass.

Oh? You want to get married, huh? Great, I can’t wait to deflower your butthole every day for a whole month!

Every step we take away from ‘Traditional’ marriage is a positive step in my book.

~RCS

And yes, the word book links to my published work.  I’m positively shameless.

Cover Yourself!

As I’ve mentioned somewhat recently, this site is ostensibly to promote my writing.  It’s really no secret.  However, aside from a few free games that really aren’t making a whole lot of money (we are currently about $500 in the hole for Monster and Dynasty Heroes), there’s no writing here to really market, is there?

 

Well guess what Mother Smuckers?

Okay so “Mother+Smuckers” doesn’t get much besides jelly recipes on Google…

To be released in April of 2015, my first published book will be released.  It is called Escort.  It is a collection of three short stories revolving around the escort mission trope.  Each story consists of a subversion of an escort mission.  In the first story, a philandering samurai must escort a virgin princess to a holy temple without letting her be wounded or deflowered.  The second story is a little more historical; taking part in the middle of the 13th century in what is now Egypt and Saudi Arabia as a female mercenary is hired to escort the Sultan’s wife to Mecca for the Hajj.  The final story is a dark tale of a Scottish baron’s daughter being kidnapped and dragged across the border into England by an English baron’s son.  The only person who can rescue her?  A Welsh master huntsman who has fled his homeland and serves the Scottish baron.

In each of these tales there is also a hidden penis.

Not unlike Disney films.

In this case, however, it is that in each story one of the characters lives with a terrible secret (or an awesome secret, depending on your political party).  And that secret is that, one character from each story is intersex.  Without spoiling any of the fun…one of the characters is a female with a penis, the other is androgynous but identifies as a tomboyish woman, and another is a man with a vagina (who is forced to identify as female by his family).  If you are familiar with the Japanese term Futanari then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on (the link is NSFW…uhh, not that much of anything I’m talking about in this paragraph really is SFW, actually).

And yes, the stories are all erotic romances, but they also have action, political intrigue, adventure, and humor.  With all the recent news about transgender and intersex people right now, what with CNN devoting half their day’s news to Bruce Jenner’s transformation into a woman and the recent suicide of Leelah Alcorn still fresh in everybody’s mind I hope that my book can help be a bridging point.  It’s not just something to read while squatting on a sybian (ridiculously NSFW link!) or ‘rubbing in some lotion’.  It’s a set of three stories with as close to real people as I can portray in writing.  Real people with androgynous features and enough extra genitalia to confuse CPAC for a decade.

So remember me and Escort come April when it is released!

That’s my name on ‘at sonuva-gunn! 🙂

~RCS

Now you know why my updates have been a bit irregular.  Of course, regular updates from me might be kind of irregular around here, actually.