Okay, so in July I went to Anime Expo in Anaheim California. It was over the Fourth of July weekend, and yes, I realise that was over a month ago. >_< (and I never even blogged about Anime North I went to in MAY! Why? I had so much fun and was on a panel and everything!) Man, I'm so bad at this! Why am I so bad at this? I like writing, and I like talking (too much sometimes my friends tell me) so why doesn't it occur to me to blog more often? I get to tell stories and to people who actually want to hear them (or, at least I assume they do...) I don't know... I always end up being prodded into it. So this post is dedicated to Pelli, who asked about my trip ^_^ So, AX is the largest anime convention in the country. I was really, really, really excited about going. Not only did I have an Artist Alley table in the largest convention in the country I was planning to meet up with a bunch of the girls from the RosettaStone Cafe ( a neat little mailing list to discuss anime, manga and manwha). I'd even made up new pins to give out for Furuba Fans (from FruityGroup and here at RandomFandom), and a special one for the RosettaStone girls. I'd worked really hard before the con. I'd made over 3,000 pins, 2 dolls (Haru and Momiji) for the artshow. I had 2 zodiac sets, 2 tic-tac-toe boards, all sorts of good stuff! Then came time for the actual trip, I wish I would have had more time but I only get so many days off from the bank you-know-who, so I couldn't leave until Thursday (June 30th). Here is how it was supposed to work. I was going to take a 7 pm flight, fly to DC, transfer and get into San Francisco around midnight. There Cat, Suey, Van and a bunch of other girls and I were going to road-trip the 7 or so hours to Anaheim. Of course, that didn't work out. My first flight was delayed an hour, and then the second flight was delayed too... I didn't get in until after 2 am! >_< But I got to meet Cat, Van and Suey (who were holding up a sign with my name on it at the airport) and we piled into the car to start our trip. I was in and out but the highlights were Van's Ipod with 1001 songs on it, Van's dramatic reading of some book and some yaoi title, and driving through just beautiful countryside. There was one point where we came around this curve and we could see this valley full of clouds that kind of hugged the side of the roads with wispy tendrils across the actual road... Then we drove into it... and couldn't see anything. Does anyone remember the old Atari game "Enduro?" It was an endurance race game where you drove through different weather conditions. When you got to fog the screen would go white and all you saw was taillights just before you were about to run into someone. That was what it was like. So you could imagine that slowed us down a little. We didn't get to Anaheim until around 9 o'clock. We stopped at off at Cat and my hotel room, which was pretty cool it had a little kitchen and everything. It was kind of far from the convention center so we had to drive down. I lugged all my stuff down and then we had to try to find registation. OK. AX is the largest convention in the country. You'd think they'd be pretty organized right? They've been in this convention center for a while, so you'd think they'd know where to put signs up to direct people, educate their staff on where to direct people. Yeah, no. not at all. We asked like 8 people (as I'm carrying around my 80 pound box of AA stuff) where Artist Alley registration was and where general registration was. We got a different answer each time. We finally stumbled into where the AA registration was and Cat, Suey and Van seperated out to go down to general registration. And thats where things went wrong. I got up to the front of the AA line and ws told that they had my Art Show registration, but despite sending me a confirmation and cashing my check I had NO Artist Alley table and was in fact on the waiting list. Now I don't swear very often but, WTF!?! So I calmly, but firmly, explained to the very confused AA staff person, that I'd spent $400 on a plane ticket, $40 on an AA table, $45 on the con ticket, money on a hotel room and other travel expenses, and made over $4000 in merchandise. And that I'd be expecting that $5,000 in compensation from the convention. Now I've missed out at AA tables before. I had a similar situatation at Katsucon 04, but that was my fault. My check wasn't cashed, I hadn't gotten a definitive confirmation, so I didn't blame the AA much at all. That was on me. In this case, when I'd sent in my AA registration I was *really* close to the deadline. First I called the con (they had a phone number on their website) and asked if they were sold out in the AA and was told no, and that they pretty much just expected to keep adding tables for the amount of artists registered. That sounded a little odd, so I put my home phone number, my cell phone number, my work number, my work email, 2 private email addresses and said if there was any problem to please contact me along with my registration info. Now they knew before the convention that they had over-sold the AA. IF they hadn't cashed my check, if they hadn't sent me a confirmation, if they had contacted me in the month between when they cashed my check and when I got on that plane then it would have been my problem. But since they had done all those things, I explained, that put the problem square on their feet and I expected them to fix it or compensate me for the problem. I didn't yell, I didn't swear, I was just very, very firm on this point. I'm only 5'2" tall, I don't think I'm very intimidating. Apparently I'm wrong. The AA guy looked like he was about to faint. He looked pretty shell-shocked so I said, basically, that I knew he was just the guy supposed to be taking names and giving out table numbers, and that he didn't have the authority to help me, but I was sure he could escalate this to someone, AA head, Legal Aide, someone who could help me. He said he'd try to get in touch with "Joy" (I think) and asked me to step aside, I took roughly 4 steps to the side (enough to let the line progress) and plopped my stuff down. He started to give me a look and say something, but I pointed out that this was much too important to risk being forgotten about, so I'd stay right there, thank you very much. And that is where things started to go right again. I'd managed to plop my stuff down next to Mishi and Rod Basler, of Basler Arts. It turned out that I was *not* the only artist who'd this had happened to. From my estimation, AX had oversold the artist alley by about 35-40 artists. They'd had around 50 spaces available, they managed to fit over 70 in, and then there were more beyond that who they couldn't fit in. As I sat there commiserating with Rod and Mishi for being in the same situation I was in we heard several other artists being turned away and having the same problem. Unbelievable. But at this point all we could do was wait so Rod, Mishi and I talked about the kind of art we do and how we'd gotten to the covention and things. (Mishi does these really neat expressive paintings, Rod does body airbrushing and had lots of photos of women he'd made up to look like cheetah schoolgirls, earth mother cat-women and other equally cool things) They had another friend coming, Eric, who did commissions and also sold art supplies. It turns out that Mishi and Rod were friends with Lynn (I think ^^; I'm so bad with names) the head of the Dealer's Room. It also turned out that someone didn't claim their table in the Dealer's room. Lynn said Rod and Mishi could take the table, and set up on Saturday morning. The table was right next to the Anime Insider booth, and couldn't have been more than 6 feet long, and even though there were 3 of them sharing it already, Mishi and Rod invited me to join them. Can I just tell you how COOL these 2 were? They totally could have just said, sorry, hope it works out, we're really tight on space, etc, but no, they reached out a hand and helped me out. Too awesome, for words, really. This is why I love going to cons, by the way, because the people I meet are just the best people on earth. But, this meant that I had the rest of the day free. So I called up Cat and explained everything that had gone on, found out that they where still in line for registration (this is over an hour later). So I basically sat on my heavy box and waited. Turns out that Mishi and Rod know a lot of people, I got to meet Raven, the very goth dj (I think he was doing the dance at the con, but I'm not sure) He promised to bring up our situation at the gripe session at the end of the con. Once Suey, Van and Cat had gotten through the registration line and we'd reunited we decided to go get lunch and then check out some of the local Japanese bookstores. I wanted to see the AMV contest, which is a ticketed event, but I heard it was easy to get into last minute. That didn't really work out. We got so distracted by the bookstores (we went to Book-off, a used Japanese bookstore and Sanseido... which we found by accident while looking for Kinokuyia) we totally missed the contest. Van went nuts, as expected, spending over $200 at the two stores. Since I can't read Japanese I was pretty good. At Book-off I found a couple of cool Japanese beading books (they have the coolest craftbooks, even if you can't read the words the diagrams are so well done you can easily follow along anyway) at Sansiedo I found Fruits Basket vol 17 (Hana-chan on the cover, yay!). We got back around 9, just in time to watch the fireworks over Disneyland from Van and Suey's room. I was really and amazing show, and we had just a perfect view. Then we went to grab some food and head off to bed. I should mention that Cat was running on no sleep, I was just amazed that she remained standing. I think Suey managed to stay up even later, going to watch some anime with a penpal. Van sensibly crashed. And that was Friday... This is really long, so I'm going to continue the rest of it a little later. REALLY! I promise. I will talk about Saturday and Sunday too. I will, I will, I will, I will!