Tekko 2015 Video Upload Schedule

Hey folks, as promised the videos of our panels are going up across the next two weeks!  Starting tomorrow with the upload of Part 1 of my How To Avoid Bad Writing panel.  And ultimately it will culminate in the premiere of our new feature on YouTube: Samurai Gaiden!

Based on the feedback from the History of Sengoku Japan we have decided to start a new series on YouTube.  Each episode will concentrate on a particular person or event and highlight anecdotes in an educational and interesting way.

Because of the battery issue we had that cut the recording off in the middle of Ashikaga Yoshiteru’s story, he will be our first choice.  At any time feel free to comment on the Samurai Gaiden videos (once they start) and suggest someone or something you want to hear about.

We may also put in a few interesting ‘special features’ of some sorts, like talking about weapons or armor of the Samurai or maybe lifestyle…y’know whatever you folks are interested in hearing and I’m interested in telling you.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves!  The first video goes up tomorrow morning!

~RCS

Tekko 2015 Merch Post

The wife’s been keeping the site going with her nifty comics while I finished the videos and this stuff.  This should be the last official post on Tekko 2015.

So as has become the norm after a convention, I’m putting up all the nifty stuff we got this year.  First of all, a quick rundown of the things we got Far East Boutique in its going-out-of-business sale.  We got an awesome wall fan (it takes up half the couch in the photo), two samurai statues, a bag of assorted bento box parts, a nifty coin-purse kind of bag, and a cute kitty bag to go along with the kitty clutch purse the wife got last year from them.

 

Next up are a few cute little chibi post-card style pictures made by Lily Cernak.

Castiel because we’re huge Supernatural fans, Dr. Horrible because that’s one of the best short series I’ve ever seen, and Loki because he arouses my wife. 😉

And from the same booth as Lily was Alan Cernak.  I’m not sure which one did the following pictures, but they aren’t listed on Lily’s deviant art so I’ll just assume it was Alan for now.  Either way, I like the old woodblock-style art of the latter two a lot.

 

Here’s a Fluttershy scarf from Nightengale Needles.  They caught our eye because they had some pride stuff on their stall and then the wife looked at the scarves.  It’s long enough that you can actually wrap it around you and make the ends hang at your hips like a cutey mark.

 

And here we have, clockwise from top-left, the Goddesses of Eternity, Death, Moon, Remembrance, Sun, and Rebirth by Carriations.

 

And when we passed Miho Studios she was having a sale on prints, buy two get two free.  So we got four prints.  The wife wanted the Jack Frost one because she got insta-horny looking at it.  She keeps asking to put it in a glass frame so she can kiss it without ruining the picture.  And of course, Thor and Loki holding hands in the first picture.

Those were the two we bought, then the free two were Queen Elsa from Frozen and Sailor Moon.

 

The last store we hit was Knights of the Classroom.  They make all things chainmail and have a pretty cool presentation available, too.  When the wife was working with the Boy Scouts she got to witness one of their educational shows.  We bought a set of earrings and a new stretch-chainmail bracelet for the wife.

 

At that point we ran out of money, so we left the Exhibition Hall before we could try to buy anything else.

So that’s everything we bought this year.  Walked away with some nifty art and an armload of oriental knickknacks, so the merch was definitely a good end to the weekend.

~RCS

Tekko 2015: Day 3, Sunday and Final Overview

Sunday did not start anywhere near as early as Saturday.  Thank God in Heaven!

Praise the Merciful Lord of Flighty Deliciousness!

We got in around noon, maybe a little later.  There weren’t in particular panels we were gunning to see but we always wait until Sunday to hit the dealer’s room.  We headed straight for the dealer’s room and picked up all the merch we had been eying up the day before, which we quickly hauled back to the van.

Unfortunately one of the places we frequent for purchases, Far East Boutique, has decided to go out of business.  They decided it was just too much and they were getting too old for the convention circuit.  So we went back closer to closing time and got some huge deals from them.  On the one hand it sucked that they were closing down, on the other hand…we got bunch of stuff for way less than we normally would have.  And I finally got the statues they’ve been selling for years that I figured were too expensive.  Yay, me!

So, what did we do while we were waiting for things to get a little nearer to closing time?

Yup, just lounged around in the Premium…well, Lounge.  While we were in there a local act, a lady by the name of Nancy Kepner, was going on.  We’ve heard about her and one of our friends actually has a huge crush on her and wanted to ask her out a few years ago, but he backed out of hitting on her at the last-minute.  Needless to say, we’ve never actually managed to make it to one of her shows.

She was rather amusing, a bunch of humorous songs.  I think my favorite was her song about filler episodes with the awesome line about, “…following a ninja ostrich up a hill…” but she had a bunch of great songs in her repertoire.  Highly suggest giving her a listen if you have any interest in Anime, Humor, and/or Music.

And that was pretty much Sunday for us.  I always like Sunday being kind of an easy-going day to recuperate and ease out of the convention atmosphere.

So that brings us to the overall review of Tekko 2015!

Ultimately it was pretty cool.  There was a limited number of panels we were interested in, but that was mostly our own fault.  We are so far behind on watching new anime that we couldn’t go to half of the panels because they were about shows we haven’t seen, yet.  Like Attack on Titan, Madoka Magica (which are watching right now to fix that issue), or Kill la Kill.  Hell, we just finally watched Death Note like three months ago.

The panels we did attend were done well, there weren’t any crap-panels and the only panel that seemed to have any unaddressed tech issues was the one we watched at 9:00 am when the staff was trying to get everything else fixed up.

Actually our main problem was that the Premium Lounge didn’t seem to be stocked properly.  Almost every time we went there for a snack or a drink it was empty, especially if you were looking for a bottle of water.  So, since our biggest complaint was that the Premium Lounge was poorly stocked, I think the folks at Tekko have definitely improved greatly from what they were just a few short years ago.

The staff seemed professional and helpful.  I had an issue with my first panel on Friday that I needed a staffer to answer a question.  The issue was whether or not each panel room had separately registered lighting; you see the last year there was some issues that Panel Room 2 would try to lower their lights for a video presentation and the lights in Panel Room 1 would shut off.  I wanted to make my presentation easier to view, but didn’t want to shut the lights off on other panelists.

They had already learned from last year’s kerfluffle and each room had their lights separated.  The wife went to Con Ops while I was setting everything up and they had a staffer there to help me out in a matter of minutes.  Much better than I’d seen in past years.  The staffer knew what he was talking about, too; that’s always nice.

So yeah, overall only superficial issues.  I hope that Tekko continues to remain at this level in coming years.  I really can’t even think of anything for them to improve upon for next year, except for a better system of keeping the Premium Lounge well-stocked with victuals for the foppish pricks full of first-world problems like myself.

So, that’s it.  We enjoyed the convention immensely this year and can’t wait for next year.  The videos and the merch post will begin going up some time this coming week.

Thanks, again all!

~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