Monthly Archives: August 2005

I’m back in Ithaca from the expo. I thought today was a bit better than yesterday, but both Beth and Marty ended up skipping the con entirely to goto a museum (well, Beth lost her badge, but she was planning on skipping it anyway, I think).

I didn’t do anything even remotely animesque today; instead I saw Zombie Night, which is pretty much the worst zombie film I’ve ever seen (really this time!). It featured zombies that only come out at night, “gore” falling out of a zombie’s mouth (actually, gummy worms [at least they were orange and red]), horrible acting (while being bit by a zombie: “Ahhhh.” [louder] “Ahhhh.”), inconsistently stupid plot hoes, and gems such as the following line: “Under normal circumstances, I may have hired you to tile my bathroom floor. At best.” (keeping in mind that at no pont was the non-speaking character’s profession disclosed). It was so completely bad, it may even have been worth missing the ‘Toxic Zombie Workshop’ to catch the end of it and the character yelling “Answer me, Goddammit!” to God during a funeral prayer.

I went to the dealer room again, too, but didn’t buy too much this time- just a plushie and some other small stuff :)

A bit after that, I caught Jhonen Vasquez’s ‘unplugged’ talk, which you may recall I was looking forward to. Jhonen wasn’t really what I expected… don’t get me wrong, he was still hilarious and abrasive, I just kinda expected him to be a bit more openly anti-fan than he was, but he really hid it quite well. He started his talk by telling us he felt sick because of Toronto’s hotdog stench (which I previously hadn’t noticed), and that to him Toronto would always be associated with cigarrette smoke and weenies. Then he got tired of answering the interviewer’s questions halfway through the first one, so decided to ask the audience instead: “You- what is my inspiration for my work? …. No, that’s wrong. You?” and then went straight to answering mostly boring audience questions. I oftentimes think that these things would be more interesting if the questions could all be forwarded to the interviewee ahead of time and they could pick the most entertaining ones to answer, but meh. It was worth the questions just to hear him refer to some guy as “You, in the grey shirt. With the face.” and to hear his anecdote about drawing aliens as a child and not growing up to explode out of people’s chests :)

The last thing I saw at the con was a showcase of short horror films, some of which were really quite good, and some just left everyone going “Wha?”. I didn’t get to see all of them because Beth wanted to leave, but out of the ones I did see, one titled Oh My God was particularly entertaining. In it, a redneck returned home to work to find his wife, and later his son, both brutally murdered. He managed to get his fingerprints over all the murder weapons (including all the bullets from the gun), stab his already dead wife again (trying to stop the bleeding), stab himself in the leg with the same knife, and accidentally shoot his already dead son. The entire time he repeats “Oh my God! … How did this happen?!” ever three seconds or so. The next time you see him, he’s getting the chair. The film ends with an “educational” message along the following lines:

Every year, it is estimated that 6 Americans are wrongly executed.

3 of these are from Texas.

Of these, one has an IQ under 70.

STOP KILLING INNOCENT RETARDED TEXANS

STOP THIS INSANITY

I’d love to buy a copy of the disk that had these short films on it, as I really want to see the rest of them!

Oh, and on the way back to New York, we went to Niagara Falls. Sorta. We didn’t get out of the car, actually, as parking was way too expensive for just a quick jaunt. But, the others decided that since I had never seen the falls before, I proably should. And I did, just from the window of a moving car :)

And on the way back into New York, the border nazi (Can I zee yer paaperz?!) searched our trunk. Marty blames the hair. Whatever. The guy also thought Beth‘s NY license plates were from Ohio, so chances are he couldn’t see well enough to note the hair color (or, he was just testing us… hmmm…).

I want to go to another convention soon, though I think I’d like to go to a horror convention next- if the way this convention compared to other anime conventions is any judge, I think I would really love a real horror convention. Unfortunately, Beth and Marty hated this trip so much that they’ll probably never consider doing anything I suggest (even though it wasn’t my idea) ever again, and I don’t think that any of my other friends are even vaguely into horror (‘cept Peter, but he has to work all the time) so I may have to go it alone next time :(

I’m in Canada (first time!) and just got back from my first day at the Canadian National Expo. I’m a bit disappointed, actually- they’re not really showing much of anything, because out of the five combined conventions they only have 6 viewing rooms. Also, there is only one workshop room, where all the panels and workshops for all the conventions are, meaning there’s even less of them.

The only anime I got to catch today was Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, which I thought was quite fun. I saw a bit more horror, namely, Feeding the Masses (which had both the overacting I love and the zombies I crave, with a bit of dystopic politics, to boot) and Happy Tree Friends – Overkill (which I was previously familiar with thanks to Peter. Other things I caught include the first bit of the Toe Tag Effects Make-up demo (which was boring as you couldn’t see any details from the back of the room and they didn’t give you many verbal cues about what they were doing) and the second half of an interactive with Clive Barker. Tomorrow I have a few things I’m looking forward to, mainly a Jhonen Vasquez talk (w007!).

One thing that really sucks about this convention (besides the general lack of stuff compared to other cons I’ve been to) is the program- each separate convention just has a list of events with start times and locations- no end times, and no easy comparison to other convention’s events. So basically, it’s nearly impossible to effectively plan what to do (also, the program doesn’t give event descriptions, which doesn’t help). Since there are only effectively seven rooms where stuff happens, it wouldn’t have been particularly hard to make a graph of everything… Also, nothing interesting happens past about 20:00, which is when the masquerade started (like I said earlier, the schedule didn’t say when things ended). Speaking of which, you needed tickets to attend the masquerade (they were free), and I didn’t get them in time (shame, ‘cuz I really wanted to go and see some more sci-fi and horror costumes, but meh…).

On the other hand, one good thing about this convention is the dealer “room” (actually, it’s a whole floor, effectively making up a full half of the convention center centre). The prices were all at normal list prices, but as this is Canadia they expected to recieve Canadian monies, which is effectly a 20% discount on everything for Americans. w007! I cleaned up a bit, buying a few awesome figures (Vash and a McFarlane dragon) and the Full Metal Alchemist collectible box set and the first four discs.