AX07: The Bloodenating
Current Mood: 
Towel
It’s a terrible picture, but there you have it. And I’ll explain it after THE BLOODENATING.
Alrighty then, I arrived in Long Beach only 30 minutes late - a minor plane delay, all in all - only to find that the Long Beach airport is more or less a mobile unit that occasionally has people walk through it between an airplane and the rest of Long Beach. Leading me to wonder why I didn’t just fly into LAX, which is approximately a 20 minute drive away from Long Beach. But whatever.As I deplane I am informed via voice mail that not only is my boss stuck in Phoenix overnight - making my Friday morning suddenly seem much busier - but that my good friend / partner-in-crime Rathany won’t be making it to the con at all as she’s been hospitalized. She’s fine, just wasn’t up to travelling. Unfortunately she was set to do an interview which I am now going to try and cover her for, woefully unprepared.
But life goes on! I checked into my hotel, which is nice, if somewhat further from the con than I’d like to be. I check news nonsense and crash.
Day 1: Friday
Biggest announcement - Seven Seas declares it’ll be doing yaoi…and childrens’ novels. Excellent.
But the most fun part of my day was probably the Suzumiya Haruhi seiyuu panel. Aya Hirano, Yuko Goto, and Minori Chihara are so damn cute. (I wanted to take Aya home with me. T_T)
In the evening I (finally!) managed to hook up with the boss and my coworker Dale, who I had yet to actually meet in person. He looks way younger than he is! We had fun swapping “I got carded…” stories.
Day 2: Saturday
Biggest announcement - ADV’s acquisition of Gurren Lagann, definitely. DMP nabbing the Speed Racer manga is pretty spiffy too.
Much of this day is actually devoted to the Haruhi concert. The concert itself…well, the bits with the Japanese seiyuu were awesome. The nonsense with the American voice actors was heavily scripted and poorly practiced, so meh, coulda skipped on that. We were seated in the press/industry section, and everyone else there just sat and watched; I wished I’d shelled out for a premiere seat so I could have geeked out with everyone. Dale and I did jump around for Hare Hare Yukai and God Knows though.
The Ayanator said she’d be back, so, awesome.
Day 3: Sunday
Biggest announcement - FUNimation getting Darker than Black, Dark Horse getting Gantz and the Blood+ manga/novels. (Finally, I’ll get around to buying Dark Horse stuff! Huzzah for local businesses!)
By this time, I was starting to get pretty damn tired. We had our interview with the Haruhi seiyuu, but it was too short! Not that I can really blame anyone; they were just SLIGHTLY in high demand, y’know.
Day 4 - Monday
Biggest announcement - Manga Entertainment nabs Strait Jacket
According to our schedules I was only supposed to have only one panel to handle - but SURPRISE! Tokyopop had a panel after all! (Since they had no booth and no scheduled panel, the word was that they weren’t at AX at all; apparently not true!) I got to have lunch with Lillian, a Tokyopop editor, afterwards, which was really awesome - she’s fantastic.
After that I hung around with Gan-chan for a couple of hours before I headed out to my hotel to grab my bags and then to Long Beach.
So that was pretty much it. Yes, the con was pretty poorly run from behind the scenes, it seems. But at least we weren’t all losing our damn badges like last year. Next year’s at the LA Convention Center, which is slightly worrisome (though the people freaking out saying they’ll be shot for cosplaying seem a bit over the top to me).
Now comes the bit about the photo! I have no idea how this could have panned out so well. Now, Alaska runs ONLY flights from Long Beach to Seattle at that particular airport, and the flight before ours was cancelled for unknown reasons. All those passengers were getting pushed onto our flight.
So they were naturally looking for people to take bumps. I jumped at the chance and said that if they could get me direct to Portland, I’d happily take the bump - and the free Alaska ticket. They said YES PLEAZE AND WE GIVE YOU FIRST CLASS SEAT TOO! And on top of that, my flight from LAX to Portland was actually landing EARLIER than my original flight (which went Long Beach -> Seattle -> Portland). My bag was still stuck on the original flight, so I had to wait around for it, but eh - whatever.
So the photo is me in first class having a rum and coke. (My boss told me that if I didn’t drink, he would never forgive me.) It was actually my first time in first class, which the other first classers seemed to find really amusing…(-_-;) It’s a horrible, horrible photo. I was going to do a “bye-bee!” sign but I forgot because the girl sitting next to me who offered to take the photo was super cute. Oops.
Hokay, after this I’m going to get some more work done and then I’ll post the almighty SWAGPOST. And then a catch-up on anime series.
P.S. it’s freakin’ hot.
hee. a gia is cute.