S. Worthen | Weblog

If standing in line for a long time can earn good karma, then my hour in line this afternoon was time well-spent. Anime North hadn't begun, although registration was well underway when I joined a nascent line in the hopes of getting tickets to some of the more hard-to-get-into events of the weekend. After all, why waste time in line during the con when I could do it before the con began? After an hour of chatting with Original Character cosplayers working from BLEACH, our whole enormous long line was dismissed. "Go away. Line up in another two hours, not now." Reluctantly, we abandoned our posts.

A few hours later, I wandered back, expecting to either be at the back of another long line, or else for the evening's ticket supply to be used up. But I was in luck! I snagged the second-to-last masquerade ticket/sticker of the evening, and had no line at all for tomorrow afternoon's j-rock concert. Whether or not standing in line was wasted effort on my part is debatable - but I got both tickets.

Oh My Goddess (Movie?) - I caught five minutes of this. Belldandy's face looked different than usual. Was this done by a different designer?
Fullmetal Alchemist - Episodes 11 and 12. "The Other Elric Brothers" - I've heard a great deal about this series but haven't seen it before. While these two episodes convey the premise well, they didn't really show me why the show has such a following.
Kamichu - Whimsical! Charming! A young girl wakes up one day and knows she's become a god. Her friends take her seriously. But she doesn't know what she is a god of, and the boy she has a crush on doesn't ever remember who she is.
Samurai Seven - When the opening sequence discusses recruiting samurai to guard a village under threat, I thought the show would be more about the village. While it is, the first few episodes look like much of the series will revolve around the city and the challenge of finding the samurai and convincing them to work for rice alone. I wouldn't mind seeing more. Also, I note that this series is as close to medieval content as I came in my day.
Fantastic Children - I saw the last ten minutes of an episode. Children escaping something. A bright pink woman. Countryside. People in black cloaks. I have no idea.
Planetes - Typical anime scifi office drama. Underfunded space garbage collection. Everyone yells at each other all the time.

This year's Anime Music Video (AMV) contest was populated by lots of Azumanga Daioh, Final Fantasy (presumably the most recent, they were all from the same one), and Weird Al music. The Fullmetal Alchemist piece set to "A Boy named Sue" was very funny. So was the "Cotton-eyed Joe" one. (No series I knew.) The Kiki/Totoro video set to "On top of the world" was lovely and lyrical. I correctly guessed - without ever having heard it before! - that "There's life outside your apartment" was from Avenue Q; funny video too. The "Viva Forever" video for Tsubasa Chronicles, was very moving. The best overall video award didn't go to an AMV set to music though - it went to an Evangelion video set to the Resident Evil: Apocalypse preview soundtrack.