Another Anime Convention is a growing anime and gaming convention held annually in southern New Hampshire. It features the standard con fare: panels, concerts, gaming, cosplay contests and performances, a combined artist alley/dealer's room, dance, formal ball, and several 18+ events.
Convention Overview:
For it's fifth anniversary, the convention returned to the Radisson Hotel in Nashua, aptly nicknamed "The Castle." Although once enjoyable, AAC now caters to obnoxious teenaged attendees and a largely 4-chan membered staff who refuse to recognize their own faults and fail to enact changes. Instead of improving with age, its organization continues to deteriorate. The schedule was packed with events in the late afternoon all three days, leaving people wandering aimlessly from morning through 2pm. Due to printing errors, only attendees who arrived on Thursday received a program guide, which was useless anyway as many panels changed times, rooms, or those running them did not show up. None of the panel rooms had signs or schedules posted outside unless the panelist made the sign themselves, which most did not. The convention's security were downright rude to people who were behaving, but did nothing about those blasting music from boom boxes which drowned out panelists, or who destroyed property of others, including burning a Hetalia cosplayer's flag. If that wasn't bad enough, the treatment of the guests was obscene; many were wandering on their own with no staff member helping them get food, find their panels, or make sure they got a decent audience, and at least one was in poor health and was stumbling around totally lost the few times I encountered him. Finally, the masquerade was an absolute disaster; the director failed to organize, test, or many cases even UNZIP the audio files for the skits ahead of time. During the show at least half of the skits had to be restarted or delayed due to audio problems, and the director had the unprofessionalism to announce this halfway through the show. Although much of these problems would be blamed due to the lighting failures or lack of rehearsal, the fact remains that the audio should have been unzipped, tested, and organized weeks ahead of time and ready for playback before the show. There is no excuse for that but sheer laziness and it is abhorrent. I felt terrible for the young and nervous performers. I hope this con gets its act together for next year, because it is currently a complete disgrace.
Personal Thoughts: Sketch and I loaded up the pieces of the TARDIS into the minivan Thursday evening so that we would be all set to leave for AAC the next morning. Unfortunately it rained overnight, and when we got up on Friday we saw the tarp covering the TARDIS base on the roof of the van had filled with water and had birds swimming around in it. Guess we found the pool! After bailing out the blue box, we drove up to Nashua and unloaded it into main events with help from Katy. The three of us managed to assemble the entire thing in about 30 minutes - a new record! That project complete, we moved into our hotel room and I got into my Inara costume from Firefly before heading to the Artist’s Alley with Sketch to pick up our table badges and set up shop. That afternoon I met up with Christa and showed her around the hotel. I helped her scout out photoshoot locations and she was nice enough to take some great shots of my Inara costume. I also helped move around furniture in the conference room while she did an Iron Man photoshoot with Bry-Chan and Katy, and while in there assisted one of the guests to a chair so he could check his e-mail. He did not seem particularly well, which was worrisome.
By then we were bored and hungry, so we stole Sketch from his table and headed out to find lunch; Katy manned the table while we were out and Sketch came back to several sales and commission orders. Woo-hoo! There wasn’t much else to do for the rest of the day, so I sat around the art table until the Alley closed at 7pm, and we went back to the room to change, invite some people over and have some drinks. By the time Steve’s party panel rolled around, we were completely tanked. We hit up that and his Hentai dubbing 3000 panel afterwards, but by 1AM the buzz had worn off and we were tired so we just went to bed.
I woke up Saturday and changed into my Rosette costume while Sketch got into Mal; I walked around the con but there was nothing to do, so I went back to the room and took a nap until noontime. After that there still wasn’t much to do, so I went to the art table and chatted up customers while Sketch worked on their commission. I watched the table while Sketch grabbed us lunch and then judged the art show, until around 4 PM when we had to change into our Doctor Who outfits for the masquerade. On my way I ran into Christa taking photos of Katy as the Tenth Doctor and Steve as Rose Tyler which was absolutely hilarious.
Everyone came up to our room to practice the skit they had asked us to do, but when we went down to main events there was a huge drama where certain staff members wanted to block us from doing it, which was incredibly irritating considering we’d been invited to the con in the first place to do specifically this; PatD had driven all the way up here specifically for this event even though he hasn’t attended the convention for years because of issues such as this one. Finally somebody said something to somebody else and the whole thing was back on; I rolled my eyes and joined the crew for an awesome photoshoot with the TARDIS while the staff set up for the show and organized participant seating.
Eventually the doors were opened and the show got on the road; saying the masquerade was a complete disaster would be an understatement. The majority of the skits had the wrong or messed up audio and had to be redone, the list given to the emcee was so completely out of order that Katy had to ask each performer for their information before they went on so she would have something to announce, two performers hurt themselves pretty badly when one was carrying the other offstage and the stairs slid out from under them since no one had bothered to secure them, none of the staff came to attend to the injured and we had to help them ourselves using my small amount of medical knowledge gained from dance injuries, and the masquerade coordinator, in a display of complete unprofessionalism, interrupted the show more than once to apologize for her own incompetence. It was too bad, considering some of the performances themselves were pretty good and deserved better than that from the coordinators. I especially liked the Majora’s Mask skit and the girls who did the exhibition Bleach dance last year came back with a Moulin Rouge parody that had the audience on their feet. As for our own skit, it’s a good thing they did not cancel it as they needed the filler between the show and the AMVs; it was a silly little thing that didn’t make a whole lot of sense and mostly involved the Doctor Who cast dancing around like nutcases, but the crowd loved it and that was all it was supposed to do. Our part finished, we took the opportunity to escape and go out for a late dinner of pancakes at IHOP. Good times.
We got up early and I changed into my Miku outfit for the day; I hung out at the art table with Sketch for a bit then helped Steve and Lindsay advertize their trivia panel before skipping out to find breakfast. It was a C-HALLANGE. When we got back I put my regular clothes on and helped break down the TARDIS with several AMV makers I’d competed against for years and whose work I enjoyed but whom I had never actually met before: Bashar of the Ages and Lantis. Similarly, they joked, “We always wondered who ‘Shiva’ was!” After packing up the car we hit Steve and Lindsay’s trivia panel at 4 before heading home.
