Current mood:

bitchy

MarzGurl Rates Ushicon 2006 (and it's not necessarily pretty)
I came into this convention with knowledge of some things that I was worried were going to tear this convention apart. But I was trying to keep my hopes up about it, I really was. Unfortunately the things I experienced on my own end canceled out a particularly enjoyable experiance. For the most part it was good, but there were some things that were relatively miserable about it.

Friday, January 27th: This was my birthday! My group gathered together at San Antonio College and we promptly left for Ushicon, most of us by 9:00 AM. When we arrived we parked up on the roof and piled our stuff out of our cars. We walked up to the hotel registration desk and and picked up our two rooms.

As the two room boys, Kris and Chris, were picking up the rooms I went over to the convention registration desk. I had two passes waiting for me - Video Staff and Press for Andrew and I. First, to start off with, there was little communication about how the lines at the registration desk were supposed to work. I stood in the long line for several minutes until I was told by the man behind the desk that everyone whose names started with A through K were to stand in line "over there" (wherever "over there" was). So I started standing in a line that I though "over there" was describing, and by the time I got up to the head of the line I found out that this was not in fact the line I was supposed to be standing in at all, so I had to get into a completely separate line entirely. So I stood in that one, waiting very patiently for my badges, and finally I got up to the front of that line. I said, "Hi, I'm looking to pick up Video Staff and Press badges." I was then told that no one at that desk had either one of those kinds of badges. Only Pre-Registration badges were kept at the desk. They then told me to move on down to the other end of the desk. I asked those guys what was up, and they knew nothing. They tried to radio the Vid head on the walkie, but didn't promptly receive anything, so they asked me to stand off to the side. After about 15 minutes of no attendance and no word as to what was going on or where my badges were, I walked into Video Room #1 where I saw that most of the vid staff were setting up. I asked if anyone had seen the staff head, and they all said, "Uh... I'unno... guess he's not back yet or something." So, yeah, he wasn't in the hotel at all. Though another staff member was nice enough to share information with me and help me out. He finally pulled somebody with a walkie and had them radio around about getting ahold of my press badges. As it turned out, the person with the press badges was not in the hotel, either. So I was standing around like a dumbass for over an hour thinking, "Great, I'm never going to see any of these people I need to get ahold of about my badges, and I have a shift in an hour, too. Here's hoping nobody lets a badgless attendee run a video room." But eventually somebody else with access to the press badges gave me the badges under press for Andrew and me. It was still probably at least another hour before I saw the video badge.

I'm thinking, "Okay, this shouldn't say too much about the con. I don't particularly like that the badges weren't easily accessable to me, but that shouldn't say anything about the rest of the convention."

I cosplayed as the Fan's View catgirl Friday evening. That was cool. A small handful of people recognized it, and that was enough to make me happy. Programming was rather lacking, other than the video room set-up. The Pose-Offs were exciting, and Cosplay 101 was about the most informative panel of the entire event. Other than that... Cosplay Underwear? What's up with that? That makes me all uncomfortable and stuff (like a Yaoi panel wouldn't?). I mean... I guess there's enough material that you could use for a panel like that... but most cosplays aren't skimpy enough for people to really need to care about the underwear you're wearing during cosplay.

Video cameras were disallowed inside this year's Dealer's Room. In my own personal opinion, this was a very stupid move, namely because most of the dealers tend to like me and enjoy the free advertisement. At Oni-Con, even ADV stopped me and said, "Hey, you're MarzGurl, right? You're awesome, I really like your videos!" And back at A-Kon, the dude with the awesome humongous CD selection stopped me and wanted to explain his products on camera for me. I was unable to get the chance to promote anyone this time around, sadly, thanks to the rules. I understand that there are some cases where people might not want their stuff to be filmed, such as people who create their own sort of art work and sell it. That's why you never see me filming things like the Comic Markets and such. I know that's inappropriate to film, and I'd like to think that I've been more professional that I have been Papparatzi. But it would seem to apear that not all felt the same way.

There were no musical guests this year. In that respect I felt as though this convention was lacking a bit. But it wasn't exactly a big deal for me seeing as how I'm never allowed to film musical guests as it is anyway.

I have to admit that it was kind of funny that Greg Ayres was playing a CD at the dance that night. The reason why we know he was playing a CD and not hand-mixing his music is because several of my friends say that they have the exact same CD that he was playing that night. I still wish that people would get the bright idea to play anime-related music at an anime convention. To me, that just makes sense. But I also understand why Ushicon would use Greg, because he's a voice actor, and as such the Ushicon members will like it as such, as a privalage to dance to a voice actor's music. It's probably cheaper that way, too.



Saturday, January 28th: I had a video shift at 8:00 am. I could have sworn that I was supposed to work in Vid 2, but then some other schmuck showed up and was working it. So it was like there was one guy extra to work the rooms. We ended up releasing somebody 'cause we couldn't figure out who was actually supposed to be there and who wasn't. But it's all good, 'cause in the long run I ended up getting a free Noir boxed set out of the deal (no, not directly through video staff, but it was still awesome).

I was cosplaying as Tenten from Naruto throughout the day. I got a good deal of photos and junk. I interviewed a small handful of cosplayers for the video and stuff. They were cool. We ended up doing a large Naruto cosplay photo shoot. I had never actually been a part of a large photo shoot before, and it was awesome. I realize that Naruto has been done to death, and chances are I'll never do the cosplay again, but the response from Naruto fans was awesome. I was plenty happy. I just wonder how it is that I'm going to find all of the photos and such because the Ushicon message board has not been alive for several days.

It took a real long time to get any of the members of my cosplay skit to stop and learn their routine. They finally did just in time to perform it, and they all messed up on stage at least once (except me, purely because I actually WANTED to perform this skit, and I had been practicing for months). Andrew did well, though, and the JAC Productions Naruto Girl was actually very good for having learned finishing touches at the last minute. Newbeh also had it down. He seemed to know a lot of Para real well. Go him.

Congratulations to Kim and Danzig.

The Keiichi.net dance was a success, though a lot of the songs often times felt like they might never end and that they continuously looped within themselves. They know how to work a dance, and Kei himself is simply hawt. He know anime dance tracks. Personal opinion, obviously, but I'm happy with it. It just makes sense, again, to play anime music at an anime convention. Happy times all around that evening on that dance floor, all around.

The video game room... was a little lame. There were times when they tried to rotate out the games, but at some point they had Sould Calibur III on two out of five screens and some other fighter (Smash Bros.?) on two more out of those five screens, leaving the last one to Taiko Drum Master. The variety just wasn't there. Not like the staff cared, they didn't want the game room in there to begin with.

Sunday, January 29th: MY SHIFT WAS MIDNIGHT TO 4:00 AM? WTF? Okay, VERY bad lines of communication if I ended up getting am and pm mixed up somewhere in there. What can I say, though, I wasn't informed of my schedule until the very last minute. Luckily, I had a chance to make up my missed shift when someone else didn't show up in Vid 3 for their shift from Noon to 4:00 pm.

Not much else impressive happened on Sunday, HOWEVER, I did end up speaking my mind at Closing Ceremonies. Now, in my view and in the view of a lot of my circle, the Closing Ceremonies was drama all in on itself.

Closing Ceremonies:

I was the first person to speak my mind at this event. I started out by saying, "Hi, I'm Kaylyn Dicksion, and I run a website called MarzGurl Productions..." and suddenly the audience started applauding. Seems my name is bigger than I really knew. I went on saying, "I've always loved Ushicon, it was my first convention two years ago and it holds a lot of memories for me. This was also my 20th birthday..." and again the audience started applauding, and Greg Ayres even turned to me and said Happy Birthday. I also continued on to say, "It was an enjoyable con, but there were things that I felt could have been tweaked for this event." I proceeded to mention things about bad lines of communication, and I watched as the staff head started taking notes. I also found that this was a very appropriate time to bring up some opinions on how things were being handled on the Ushicon BBS/Forum/Message Board. I brought up the situation that people's personal opinions were being deleted, even when it was not hazardous to the convention's well-being, and it was ruining people's rights to personal opinions. I listened as some of the members of staff hid their faces and began laughing. I know they thought that what I was bringing up was nothing more than a big joke.
Their response to my comments:
"We can't have Press and Staff badges up at the registration desk because it's too much of a liability to have people who know so much about these different kinds of badges all in one place, so we leave them with the staff heads. Sorry if you couldn't get ahold of them. And sorry you were having problems getting e-mails through earlier. We weren't the ones responsible, so sorry the other guys who were supposed to be weren't." Okay, dudes, that doesn't impress me when you pass the blame on to someone else. Except for you, chair guy, when you took responsibility for accidentally marking my e-mail as read when it wasn't. Also...
"As to the BBS comment, I believe I know the exact situation you are referring to. We're sorry, but I don't believe you know the full story, and we'd have to discuss this in a more private forum." Bunch of bull, I don't know what was happening, and my entire group agrees you danced around the subject on that one. You have no idea how much I get around, do you? I speak with everyone, and I know what the situations were. These people were making personal opinions, and quite frankly, I know that the hotels and the guests don't read the boards as much as you might like to BS that they do (I know because I've personally asked). There was no danger, there was no threat. Someone on those forums is on a power trip and is thoroughly enjoying threatening people, both online and offline (I know about some choicly worded phone calls that were made, not just private messages. If I wanted to I could slander names and more accurate information all over the place. You're lucky I stick to making you guys look good on film.)

Furthermore, the guests then proceeded to take up the microphone and make comments about how wonderful the convention was. I'll agree, the times I wasn't having problems I was legitimately having fun (or at least not getting pushed around, because let's face it, other than the dances and the video set up this convention was relatively boring). But the guests would say things like, "You ran this place so smoothly, it's one of my favorites to return to each year, etc, etc, etc..." But at this time I'm thinking, yeah, that sounds real nice and touching and all, but are you even allowed to say anything otherwise about an anime convention? You want to get invited back, get paid, and get advertised, right? So no guest in their right mind would ever badmouth a convention. You have to be smart and think about the reasons why people would say the things that they do.

Another comment was made about the Dealers' Room. One of these comments was that many dealers early Sunday morning were saying that they had made more profit over the past two days than they had at A-Kon. Okay, that sounds awesome, but let's think about the reasons why this would be to begin with. First, the dealers' room is almost laughably small. Second, because of this size, there's very little dealers' competition. But otaku want stuff all the same. So with less competition and 2,000 otaku who want stuff, it just makes sense that there'd be that much money exchanged within the dealers' room. But, again, that's me actually using my brain.

And the final set of statements that tickled my brain during the closing ceremonies referred to how Cosplay was set up. Justin asked if there was any better way to line everyone up, because at Ushicon the walk-ons and the skits have almost always been mixed up together, and it's a very unattractive way to set up a cosplay. He asked if there was any way to separate the walk-ons from the skits so that the skits looked very attractive like a runway show so that they weren't blown out of the water by an outrageously good skit. The response was something along the lines of, "Well, our cosplay coordinator handles all the cosplay stuff, and she's the only one who knows anything about it, and she's not here." Well, if Jase isn't there, why the hell aren't you writing anything down? You don't even care how it is the fans would better like it run? Isn't that why you asked these questions to begin with?

And so ended Ushicon Go! 2006.





I wanted to end with a final statement on this convention:
Overall, despite the fact that Ushicon's past carries a lot of memories with me, this was by far my least favorite convention, even under a small convention such as O-ChibiCon. Many others will say differently, but their events were dramatically different from mine.

Also, even though I am becoming mildly famous, I will defend my friends and my fellow fans' rights and freedoms. Today I stood up for right for otaku opinion, and I realize that it may have given me a bad name somewhere within this convention circut. But there's something that I have begun to realize over the past three months that the rest of you need to know:

If you think you're so awesome that you can perform some sort of injustice over a lower-ranked person and blindly get away with it, you're wrong. I hear about a lot. I'm attatched to the Texas Convention Circut in a lot of ways - all good, none bad, thus far. I also have an ever-growing fan circut. My videos are obtaining thousands upon thousands of hits on Video Google alone, and my web site gets thousands more to follow. This may sound selfish of me, but if I catch wind of anything, I may not have direct athority, but I do have a strange amount of power. If I catch bad news and publicly say anything about it, suddenly the entire world knows what is happening. I could open their eyes to some horrible secret truths, if I really wanted to. I could ruin a lot of "good" names. Am I going to? No, typically not, not unless they do something dramatically evil. But you should know that I could, and perhaps you don't know what I find to be particularly evil. Wanna test me?

Closing thought: Even if Keegan wasn't pulling his weight, he was doing a pretty damn good job. I miss the guy. I want my Ushicon back.