A-Kon Debriefing

The original plan was the Ninja Hell squad would stay at my place. I had meal plans for this: chicken tikka masala with palak paneer and naan Thursday night, lunch in the tunnels on Friday, leg of lamb with tabbouleh that night, and that wonderful beef tenderloin Saturday before the show with Sushiworld afterwards.

That was not to be.

Not that I mind. I'm not the Hell den-mom.

The Ninjas actually scored a hotel room in the West End and I went to meet them Thursday night. We were going to walk over to the Old Spaghetti Warehouse, but went to Sushiworld instead.

"This food is perfect and you have ruined me by bringing me here," Tsuba-kun said. "This is too good that there cannot be some kind of karmic retribution later."

We discovered that retribution on Friday, when it took us four hours to get our badges. I do not blame the con for this. I know who's to blame, because things could have been handled early on and they weren't. I am not going to go into detail on that here, because it is mean gossip and that's not what this blog is about.

On Saturday, Kuba-kun, who was staying at my place, was walking down to the train station and found a trove of Betamax tapes that one of my neighbors had put out for bulk-trash pickup. Most of these tapes are industry training videos (and the masters!) and, oddly enough, I also have the manuals and scripts for these. There is so much information here that we will most likely be creating a second website for this material alone. Hell, I might write a book.

The show started on time! This was very exciting. None of the issues from last year happened this year. We even had control over the house lights.

We started with a car crash. Our audience loves pain.

Clips included the cat\dog fight from "The Cat" and In My Merry Oldsmobile. I have talked to Dan about editing out the live-action section of the Oldsmobile bit so we can keep the energy up (if they sing along and clap, that's a good sign).

Also included were "It Only Takes a Second" and "Life is for Living". Did I mention the pain thing?

We threw candy cigarettes (more popular than I thought they would be). Wonderful wonderful Kris at White Lightning Productions provided some prizes. I think the "Hard Gay" pose-off included 30 people. The "Camay" walk had a robot division (Crow won).

And, of course, the reindeer. Someone had requested it. It's almost tradition. We actually had worked with a local film student who wanted to do a documentary about Anime Hell and, invariably, everyone talked about the reindeer clip. It was even mentioned in the blurb.

Katie gave away some panties. You missed it.

At midnight, we switched over to Ninja Hell. Kogaku had a mild issue with the video input, but Katie stuck around and told a couple of stories that got us through the 15 minutes. Seriously, 15 minutes is nothing for set-up. I applaud the Ninjas for working that out so quickly.

The Ninjas did Ninja Squad. They work out scripts in advance, so they pretty much have a joke for every minute of the film.

However, there is a five minute section of the film where they can't think of anything. This is where a very clever bit of showmanship took over.

Kubu-kun wanted to do the 13 x 7 = 28 routine. I had offered the use of a whiteboard for this, but it was forgotten at the last minute. How were we going to pull it off?

Tsuba-kun suggested we just write on his back. This works, because he's got a lot of back.

However, what was done instead, they pulled a raver-girl from the audience and her belly was used for the first calculation. Her back was used for the second one. Suddenly, we're out of girl to write on.

A second audience member volunteered and let them write the final calculation on her. There is a kid from A-Kon right now, covered in 13s.

Rubbing alcohol, my dear. It will come right off.