Daisho Con 2019

[dorchadas]

An anime convention at a waterpark? At a waterpark resort? Really?

Yes, really. And it was great.

Thursday

After waking up later than usual feeling more rested than usual, I left the house just after ten so I could catch the buses to gracielizabeth and gracielizabeth's husband's place. Unfortunately, the bus on the tracker didn't actually exist, so I ended up waiting for twenty-five minutes while someone who worked at Wrightwood 659 as a security guard said I looked familiar and then talked to me the entire time about the museum, traveling, the trip I was going to take, condos going up in Uptown...and honestly talking to her wasn't so bad. I said goodbye when I switched buses, the Lawrence bus came in only a few minutes, and I arrived only a few minute late. JHarris was already there, so we gathered up our things, loaded up the car, and set out.

They called it "The Black Car" for demographic reasons. I was, as gracielizabeth said, the token Jew.

We stopped in at Binny's for drinks, then at a road oasis for lunch. I was really excited when I saw there was a shawarma stand, so I ordered some falafel:

Unfortunately, the road oasis nature prevailed, and it was tasteless and barely palatable.

We waited for a while at the oasis since we got news that spacedragon and gmarchan had gotten a late start and wouldn't be at the villa for a while, and after forty-five minutes or so we got back on the road and listened to podcasts on the way (including Throwing Sheyd at my suggestion!). We arrived just before sundown and heard that robin.humer and cassie.carbaugh.1 were going into a place called "Tom Foolery" to go bowling, so we entered the horrifying doors covered in "hehehehe hohohohahahahahaha" and wandered through the arcade games and rides until we found them. gracielizabeth bought a game card and we turned around to see...this:

JHarris beat the first board, but lost at the second just before we would have gotten the last pill. We walked past the crane games, where some kind of crane game sage was standing with an armful of sloth-on-fruit plushies, and gracielizabeth challenged me to a game of air hockey. I won, 3-5, with two of the points scored against myself--pretty good for not having played in twenty years! We looked around a few more games, but the real last choice we wanted, Wizard Duel, required 12 credits and we only had 8, so we gave up. On the way out, spacedragon said she was in line to check in, and the rest of us drove over to the villas and settled down to wait the thirty or so minutes until they arrived, and then we all crammed into the villa.

After dropping off the luggage, most people quickly took a trip to grocery store, leaving only a few who avoided the shopping trip. staina.x, sean.fassbinder.1, erendira.morales, and Tatsuhiro_Sato and I made our home in the basement for a bit, but I ducked into the bathroom and when I came out, they had all left. I went upstairs and talked to D3adend about how I had brought Shabbat candles, and when he said he wanted to walk over and pick up a new keycard and get his badge, I joined him.

We did not get our badges, because registration didn't start until 10 p.m. And we did not get a new keycard, because no one else's name was on the reservation. But we had a nice chat and I got to see the layout of the convention center before we head over there in earnest. When we returned, the Thursday dinner team was making food in the main atrium area:

Not sure how I feel about this decor...

...and people were playing pool downstairs, so I went down to sit by the fire. I was only there a moment when the shoppers returned and needed help carrying in groceries, so we all convened on the main level.

While the dinner team continued, I talked a bit with JHarris about the homes we had just bought, and then I played a bit of Smash Brothers until dinner was ready. I ate a taco, got up, washed my hands and washed out my mouth, recited the blessing after meals, went back, and ate another taco because I wanted a cheese taco and a meat taco--this is technically permitted, though it’s not exactly encouraged --and after I was done, I went downstairs to sit at the bar and join the conversation:

Tatsuhiro_Sato: "So, what’s it like being a JRPG villain?"

I sat and talked for a while, steaming Illenium to staina.x's speaker, and enjoying sean.fassbinder.1's bartender skills:

I ended with a brandy alexander and then, as everyone else finished playing Mario Kart, we all went upstairs. We were only there briefly, playing anime songs and reminiscing about Where There's A Whip There's a Way, when gmarchan told us to call it a night, so we did. I went to bed and found that my bedmate alan.villanueva.12 had decided that the couch was a lot more comfortable than the bed, so I got the whole bed to myself. And after reading a bit online, I went to sleep.

Friday

Most people were already up when I got up, but that meant that breakfast was almost done! The breakfast crew cooked bacon and eggs, biscuits, pancakes, and provided donut holes, so we sat around kind of in a daze eating our food:

gmarchan: "Why am I getting more tired as I eat?"

I took a shower and went out to the main room, but when I checked the schedule I found that no part of the con even opened until 3 p.m. Wr had originally planned to go the con first and then the waterpark, but the schedule changed our whole plan around so people started changing into their swimsuits. I did too, left nearly everything behind, and went to the waterpark.

I didn't bring my phone so I don't have any pictures, but it was a lot of fun! D3adend and I went up on a slide right away, and when that was done we joined everyone in the hot tub:

Me: "I’m wearing an actual color! You all should feel privileged!"

...and once we were sufficiently warm we got on tubes and went down the lazy river, all holding on to each other's tubes and linked together in a giant raft. We ended up in the bar pool, with most people buying $30 monster drinks almost as big as my forearm that I really wish I had my phone to take a picture of. When nearly everyone was done, we left to go wait for the shuttle, but D3adend and I got tired of waiting and wandered off to get our badges. After we picked ours up, we met erendira.morales in the hallway. She said she didn't want to wait for Tatsuhiro_Sato to get through the line and buy his badge, so the three of us went back to the main lobby and hopped on the next shuttle back to the villa.

I took a shower while alan.villanueva.12 made pizza rolls, and we all gathered in the main room to eat.

Tatsuhiro_Sato: "dorchadas, I forgot to point out when you were wearing the blue trunks, 'Look, it's a real-life shiny!' "

We ate snacks until some people decided to go over to the con and look around before dinner, so they got dressed up:

"Coffee"ing, Shidō Erina from High School DxD, and the Triforce

There were more people in cosplay and I wanted a picture of everyone, but the shuttle arrived right as everyone was ready and they had to run out the door.

Tonight I was on the dinner team, so after I lit the Shabbat candles, spacedragon and Teniya.Earmer and I assembled in the kitchen to prep our meal. We were making Japanese curry and yakisoba, so we spent about forty minutes chopping vegetables, and spacedragon spent an equal time chopping chicken, before all the prep work was done. Then we got to cooking, though with some difficulties--the villa electric stove did not want to heat enough to boil either my noodles or spacedragon rice. Eventually she managed to wrangle her burner into shape, and when her rice was done I took over her burner and that finally got the water into some semblance of boiling. Thirty minutes late--forty minutes after I started trying to boil water--dinner was served:

People ate almost everything, which I was extremely happy about! I made two big pans of yakisoba and less than half of one was left when it was done. All the curry was gone, all the chicken was gone...people were hungry!

And then a lot of people fell asleep.

I had missed both the Friday things I wanted to attend, a panel about Japanese wildlife at 5 p.m. and the AMV contest at 7 p.m., so I went downstairs to get a couple drinks. While D3adend played Pokémon Sword on the big tv downstairs, I sat at the bar and ordered several drinks and got into it with my fellow weebs:

Tatsuhiro_Sato: "We used to think it was more fun to argue without pulling out our phones-"
Me: "Ok boomer."

We talked and drank until the early hours:

Including discussion about my hair, because of course.

Eventually people started drifting off to sleep, and while I was still awake, the distance between our villa and the convention center was a bit intimidating. Since there was no rave on Friday night, I decided to stay close to home. I talked a bit with spacedragon and staina.x, drank water, and then went to bed.

Saturday

When I woke up at 8:30 a.m. the villa was totally silent other than the sound of people breathing, so I went back to sleep. When I woke up again at 10 a.m., I heard everyone talking and laughing out in the main room, so I got out of bed and ate a delicious breakfast of French toast and eggs and grapes and then got ready to go to the con. And then waited about an hour for everyone else to get ready too. The perils of being in a house with twenty other people.

I did discuss the difference between アホ毛 and アヘ顔 with D3adend, though!

The shuttle came at 12:15 p.m., we piled in, it picked up a few more groups, and dropped us off at the convention center, where we headed straight for the game room. I immediately checked to see if they had Taiko no Tatsujin--they did--and the other person in line and I joined up to play through Cruel Angel's Thesis and Guren no Yumiya. He was much better than I was, and I later saw him with a 300-combo on DDR, but I did okay for myself. When I was done, I walked a few steps away and found some of the others, and gracielizabeth asked me what I had been playing. When I told her, she wanted to play too, so we got back in line and then did...the exact same songs.

When we were done, I walked around to see where everyone had gone and found a horrible goose:

I saw spacedragon, recognizable from her Misato cosplay, playing Beat Saber over in the VR area, but mostly people had dispersed. Or so I thought--after only a few minutes, I found everyone again just as they were deciding to go check out the dealers’ room, so that’s what we did next. It was much smaller than ACEN (obviously), so we went though the whole room in about twenty minutes. I saw a few Kirby plushes but not anything I really wanted, and spacedragon lost her beer can with NERV coozy but staina.x found it. That was about the level of excitement we had.

We were sitting around after the dealers’ room trying to decide what to do and people eventually decided to go get food. We walked all through the convention center, past all the rooms and people in cosplay, and went to the overpriced waterpark food vendor and everyone else bought food:

spacedragon: "I wish you could get sleep by eating."

I declined, except to take JHarris's fries when he was done with them.

I saw a bikini Daenerys and swimsuit Jon Snow cosplay heading into the waterpark just before everyone else left to go in.

But I didn't! There was actually a panel I wanted to attend about Japanese mythological creatures, so I walked back through the halls, past a Dogemurai poster:

ワウ

...and into a line, but it started moving pretty quickly.

The panel was put on by a group called The Nerd Club that I'd never heard of, but they had t-shirts and everything--in their intro, they said it was a college thing that they expanded outward to allow other people to join. They had a banner with a crane, a carp, a cicada, and a tanuki on it (and one presenter asked us not to shout out how the tanuki has magic), and then started by talking about 妖怪 yōkai categorized based on their true form, who they're different from a normal expression of that form, and what they appear as, by some scholar they did not mention. They mentioned the varieties of ghosts and how they had done an entire panel on ghosts:

"They're not exciting ghost stories if you already know that there's a ghost at the end."

霊魂 reikon are just ghosts, and 幽霊 yūrei are vengeful. There was a list, of which my favorite was the 雪女 yuki onna, the snow woman who freezes travelers solid.

Most of the early part of the panel was lists, actually. They did a list of 鬼 oni, though they had a separate slide for "ogres," which is how oni is almost always translated into English? I’m not sure what kind of distinction they were trying to draw...

There was a cute drawing of a kappa, and they explained that kappa are murderous water monsters who love human flesh but can be defeated by politeness, and that if a kappa's water bowl is empty, if you refill it, they'll owe you their life. When they were talking about 付喪神 tsukumogami, one of the ones they immediately mentioned was a 目目連 mokumokuren, the spirit of shōji screens with holes in it, so our old house in Japan was totally filled with mokumokuren until we figured out how to repair them.

The whole panel was a bunch of lists, so I can't talk about everything they said. I liked how they linked the Koroks from Legend of Zelda to 木霊 kodama tree spirits, and how often they brought up Ōkami, where many of the enemies are straight from mythology. I learned about the 雨女 ameonna, "rain woman," a woman who rainstorms follow and which is used in modern Japanese as a slang term for someone who has terrible luck; and the 火車 kasha, fiery cat-spirits that steal the bodies of the dead; and the 管狐 kudagitsune, fox-spirits who can hide in a smoking pipe and curse people but who eat a ton and breed like crazy; and the 脛擦 sunekosuri, dog-like spirits who find travelers in the mountains and...rub against their legs to make it hard to walk. Scary!

I was a bit annoyed at the panelists' dynamic--it was a couple where the woman did almost all of the presenting and the man pronounced the Japanese and interrupted her with jokes--but the information wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it would be. Thanks to slight disorganization and the man's interruptions they ran out of time, and had to speed through the end. They didn't even get to kitsune until just before the panel finished and then they threw us all out because they were out of time. Sigh.

I left and checked, but apparently everyone was still in the pool and away from their phones because there had been no updates, so I left to wander around. I did a quick circuit of the dealers' room myself to make sure there was really nothing I wanted, and on finding there was not, I left. Outside I spotted skull kid and the happy mask salesman:

大変な目に遭いましたね

spacedragon texted that she, gmarchan, JHarris, and alan.villanueva.12 we're heading to the game room, so I left to go look for them.

I found gmarchan playing Sound Voltex and once I checked in, played a solo game of Taiko no Tatsujin and failed a medley based on the music from Kirby's Return to Dream Land and I was going to pay a danmaku game, but there weren't any! So I waited until people were leaving, we did one last circuit around the dealers' room, and then I walked back to the villa while everyone else took the shuttle. And beat me there.

I found a screaming naked madman Link cosplay, with pot lid shield and branch, but didn't take a picture for the same reason I didn't take a picture of bikini Daenerys.

While the dinner team cooked, I watched pezroan play Destiny 2--I really like the moss-covered stone ruin robot aesthetic of the Vex--and checked Twitter until dinner was ready:

Garlic bread, bagged salad, jambalaya, and vegetarian sausage. The vegetables tasted unbelievable.

After dinner, several people left to go do an escape room while gracielizabeth invited a few of the women upstairs to try on a bunch of clothes she had brought. I went downstairs, where Smash was happening, and played a couple games before moving over to where Tatsuhiro_Sato was tending bar, sat down, and got some sake:

staina.x: "What's happening here?"
spacedragon: "Talking about fighting the patriarchy among a bunch of dudes."
D3adend: "Let me tell you how to fight the patriarchy."

Then staina.x drew everyone else away to play Circle of Death:

Tatsuhiro_Sato: "Want me to keep the sake coming?"
Me: "It’s a salaryman kind of night. Sitting alone at the bar, drinking sake..."

I talked about living in Japan for a while with Tatsuhiro_Sato and erendira.morales until the escape room crew came back! They had failed to escape by fifteen seconds, but only because the escape room staff had given them an incorrect equation so their inability to solve it wasn’t their fault. I taught them about 駆け付け三杯 (kaketsukesanbai, “Three cups of sake that latecomers to a party are made to drink to catch up to everyone else”), the escape room crew all drank shots of sake, and the clock ticked past 9:45 p.m.

spacedragon had disappeared upstairs to make turkey meatballs and pizza pockets, so the party gradually moved up there until all the food was eaten (with a lot of jokes about balls). I got pulled into playing Mario Kart 8 with robin.humer, cassie.carbaugh.1 and gracielizabeth's husband and did pretty well for myself until we called it quits, and I went back up to watch more pezroan playing Destiny 2 while sean.fassbinder.1 shook the whole house with the bass from his car's sound system. gmarchan led some people a few doors down to the party of some other friends he knew while robin.humer and I talked about kaomoji and the ^_^ bottom on the Japanese keyboard and Destiny 2 continued on the screen. Eventually, we all went downstairs when gmarchan returned--the party wasn’t worth it at all, he said--and the evening ended with gmarchan, pezroan, and I drinking Nikka from the barrel and Yamazaki 12-year whiskey together until I called it a night at 2:30 a.m.

Sunday

JHarris's alarm went off at 9 a.m., so we woke up and then stumbled through getting ready and cleaning the room. Mostly in silence other than a lot of asking "Whose [x] is this?" or "Does anyone want this?" though at one point the soft strains of "We Like to Party" started coming from someone's phone:

alan.villanueva.12: "This party needs more Vengaboys."

After one last selfie:

...we piled into our cars at 10:45 a.m., drive past groups of subdued, hungover anime enthusiasts loading up their cars, and someone playing an acoustic cover of Good Things Fall Apart, and headed off to breakfast.

Waitress: "I’m gonna need twenty waters!"

We ordered food, it came:

gmarchan: "Did she say a quesadilla with no cheese?"
Me: "Yeah."
gmarchan: "But how can it be a quesadilla if..."

We ate, and the Black Car finished before everyone else so we got out on the road. We were all so exhausted that there was barely any converation--I even fell asleep in the car!--and we all woke up when we arrived in the city, JHarris hopped on the L and I walked home from the drop-off point, and Daisho Con was over.


I'm weirdly energized now, though I feel like I need to walk roughly a hundred miles because I'm full of alcohol and candy. I was worried about how much I would use either the con or the waterpark facilities, and I feel like I got my money's worth on both of them. I spent Friday at the waterpark, Saturday at the con, and a bunch of time at the villa. I didn't go to the rave, but you know, that's okay.

Looking forward to next year!

(Translator's note: I assume that the name Daisho comes from the 大小 daishō, the matched katana and wakizashi worn by samurai)