The last two weeks have had many ups and downs. Some of the biggest disappointments of the last eight months have had their edge blunted somewhat by some fantastic events. I will only voice one frustration and be done with it. I really wish Gallery3 had permanent image hotlinking built in. Since it does not, I will be taking the "Externals" plugin and modifying it to suit my nefarious purposes.
Apart from that, I focus on the positive events of the week, including the photoshoots, celebration with a newly inducted engineer and my fantastic time at Emiko's Mini Convention. Emiko's Mini Convention is a anime, sci-fi, fantasy and gaming convention happening in the heart of Waterloo and easily accessable from Kitchener, Cambridge, Guelph, St. Jacobs and the surrounding areas of Ontario.
I attended two days of the three day event, and I can say that it was completely amazing. I have already uploaded an interview with the primary Administrator Ron Hoppe to Youtube, so please watch that in lieu of the photos for the time being. As per my usual timeframe, I anticipated having the photos online this weekend, but I instead opted to reorganized important paperwork into three main categories. Important, immediately important, and shredder food. I anticipate that the photos should be uploaded in the next 48 hours.
After some time to digest the events that have been happening, I'm going to go ahead and write about my experiences at the convention. First of all, I will start by promising to not compare it to the conventions I have attended in Toronto, Anime North, or any of those events. To do so would be to demean both, and I will not perform such a disservice to either.
This convention was hosted at a University, and was less distance for me to travel. It also was more focused on individual interactions and there was less of the hustle and bustle I experienced in Toronto. Things seemed more personal, and there was a generous amount of anime, manga, video games, tabletop gaming and general all-around fun. There were numerous video game tournaments that I participated in and I did quite well in Soul Calibur 2 and Super Smash Brothers Melee despite the years since playing it last. I did measurably worse in the Street Fighter 4 event, since I have not kept up with the series since Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the SNES.
I had a great deal of fun in a Settlers of Catan game and I wish I had entered into the large-scale version of Settlers of Catan. The robber game piece is about belt-height and the hextiles are large enough for a player to stand on and survey their domain. There were also Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 games that went on. As I know less about the series I did not participate and cannot comment on it. There were fewer vendors than I expected, but for me this was a good thing. I came with little money and did not want to part with it. At previous conventions I've arrived with what I thought would be more than enough and unhappily gazed into an empty wallet halfway through the day.
If I was to describe the whole occasion I would call it "Fun without Guilt", and there are policies in place to make sure the event is exactly that. When I spoke with the people behind the events, they all said that fun was primary goal. These are people who want you to have a good time and will bend over backwards to make it happen. I'm going to show up to their 2012 event which will be hosted at the Delta. You should too, to see how a different approach can completely change the entire experience.
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