ACEN 2025

[dorchadas]

Twenty years of ACEN! Not all of them, of course--I didn't go from 2009-2011 because I was living in Japan, I didn't go in 2013 because I had a bit of a sour experience in 2012 and that was the point where schoolpsychnerd was deep in the throes of grad school and we had very little money, I didn't go in 2020-2021 because thanks to the Plague Years it didn't happen, and I didn't go in 2022-2023 because 2022 required full masks at all times (which I have no moral objection to, it just didn't sound very fun) and because sashagee was too sick to go and I didn't want to go by myself. But last year I went, and now here we are again.

It's been a while since I stayed at a hotel other than the Hyatt. This year, however, my luck finally ran out--when the hotel lottery happened I failed to get a room at the Hyatt, and then I failed to get rooms at the other hotels I tried. Fortunately, Anime Chicago as a community prepares for this. Several people grabbed extra rooms in the knowledge that there would definitely be people who missed out, and I was able to get one at the Embassy Suites. I've never stayed here before--I've stayed at the Doubletree, and at the Hilton, but this was a first...and honestly I'd go back. The rooms are huge and, more importantly for a couple with a four-year-old, they're suites. There's a front room with a couch, an armchair, a table with more chairs, and a little bar area, then a door between the two connecting rooms, so we don't need to turn all the lights out and immediately go to bed when it's time for Laila to go to sleep. I would say "You can't buy that kind of peace for money" but we obviously did.

And now, the daily accounting.


Thursday
I did not take any part of Thursday off--a bad decision on my part--though I did get up early and go to work early to leave early. After I closed the laptop and logged off, we finished what little packing we had left, mostly odds and ends and making sure that all of Laila's friends (her stuffed animals) were there. Then we went out into the heat.

So the thing about Chicago weather is that it see-saws like crazy in spring. Less than a week ago we needed heavy coats when we went outside and today it was 30°C. It'll be the same tomorrow and then in two days it'll be 14° instead. We walked to the bus stop in the heat, missed the bus by literally two seconds, and when we got on the next bus it just crawled, taking over an hour to make the trip down Foster Avenue that usually takes forty minutes. We had the same problem on the train, which was literally going slower than the traffic on the highway, but after two hours--forty-five minutes longer than it should have taken--we finally arrived at the hotel, checked in, and went to our room on the top floor. Laila immediately ran over and jumped on the bed, but we had other plans. There was an Anime Chicago meetup down at the restaurant on the first floor--it had historically been held at the bar in the Hyatt, but last year they demanded a $2000 up-front free and spacedragon basically said "Fuck you forever"--and our original plan was that I would go for part of it, sashagee would go for part of it, and whoever wasn't there would watch Laila. She pointed out that what would Laila eat, though, and that led to all of us going down and sitting at a nearby table and then getting called over to join the full group. We sat next to mhhilker and his girlfriend, and a person I hadn't previously met who was staffing the con, and chatted about rent, con logistics (getting the guests from the airport to the hotel), and other things while we ate margherita pizza. When it was done most people went to the bar, but it was definitely after Laila's bedtime, so we went back to our room and I got her Yoto to play sleep sounds after a lot of fiddling with the WiFi.

I sat in the front room and read some let's plays while sashagee went down to the cool kids' gathering on the third floor, and when she came back it was almost midnight, so we just took a shower and went straight to bed. Laila would be waking us up in the morning.



Friday
I was woken up by Laila taking a flying leap onto me in bed. I had slept in the outer room in the couch bed, since sashagee was worried about all of us sleeping in the same bed, but that meant that I was unprepared for the Laila assault. After I managed to fully wake up, I took a shower while sashagee and Laila got dressed, and when I was down we all went downstairs for breakfast.

The other benefit of staying in the Embassy Suites, besides the ones I’ve already mentioned, is that you get complementary breakfast each day. Was it good? I mean, no, not really. The eggs were tasteless and a little runny, sashagee told me the coffee was incredibly burnt, and the tea was…well, hotel bag tea. The potatoes were actually pretty good, though, and right as I was giving up hope about the empty fruit and yogurt, someone came by and refilled it with a giant bowl of pineapple. That was definitely Laila’s favorite part.

We saw staina.x, graceelizabeth, and robin.hammer8 in line, but the table we were sitting at was too small, so after we were done eating we walked over to say hi before going back up to the hotel room briefly to prepare for the worst part of ACEN—the security lines.

I had forgotten the lines from last year (the first year they were implemented), and that year they were nightmarish. Nearly everyone got a full check, there were gigantic lines in the skyways that would have been a huge hazard in case of a fire or injury or anything, it was clearly not well planned at all. This year, it didn’t move at all until 9 a.m., but once it started moving we were through in only a couple minutes even though we had started down the block from the entrance. The line for Starbucks was another thirty minutes, but by the time we were done with all of that the dealer's room was finally open, so we followed the line and got inside.

Directly inside was the Bandai Namco gacha section, so I held onto Laila while sashagee picked out a couple gacha prizes--one from Cardcaptor Sakura, one from Hello Kitty, and a bonus one from Kirby for me. I spotted a King DeDeDe among the gacha machines as well and he graciously stepped away so I could get a picture:

We wandered around a bit, buying a Kuromi plush for Laila when she spotted it form twenty meters away and would not be dissuaded or pick any other plushie in the pile, and eventually just as we were ready to leave since Laila was getting a bit overwhelmed, she spotted the princess and demanded we take a picture:

Just like last year.

Also just like last year, we went to the children's programming room, and just like last year Laila was the only child in there. The person running the panel remembered us, she said because of my hair, so we chatted a bit while sashagee and Laila built a rainbow road out of interlocking panels and ran up and down the road. After an hour of Laila playing and shyly walking up to some of the adults and talking about her shoes or her painted nails, we had to get Laila back to the room to eat before the grandparents would arrive, so we left and took the skyway back to the hotel. On the path just outside, we met jeremy.podczerwinski, who was waiting for erendira.morales, and chatted for a bit (he sadly was not in his "Frieren being eaten by a mimic" cosplay yet so we didn't get to see it), before taking the elevator up to our room and eating a lunch we had brought from home of cheese, celery, beef summer sausage, red peppers, hummus, pineapple, and blueberries. With the little bit of remaining time left, sashagee and Laila watched Bluey until we got the news that Papa and Nana were here, and we handed off Laila over to them. She was a little sad to leave, but cheered up when I told her how much fun she was going to have at Papa and Nana's house. Half an hour later we got a text--she had fallen fast asleep in the car.

We walked over to the convention center again and went through the line, which took no time at all (a massive difference from last year), to get to our first panel of the year: “Ja-PUN-ese” (subtitled 言葉で遊びましょう (kotoba de asobimashō, “let’s play with words”). After a brief intro about the basics of Japanese (fewer phonemes than English so there are a lot of homophones, many words can only be distinguished by context or the kanji they’re written with, most kanji have multiple pronunciations), the first example was Journey to the West, in Japanese 西遊記 (saiyūki), and the manga (very loosely) based on it, 最遊記 (saiyūki, "Journey to the Max)"—and hilariously my phone autocompleted that second kanji writing rather than the real one. There’s a demonslaying weapon called a Demon-killing Gun(魔死んガン, pronounced mashingan). There were a couple more examples, like how Luigi/Waluigi is a different format than Mario/Wario because 悪い (warui) means "bad."

After a brief mention of Japanese-native vs Chinese-derived pronunciations and a discussion of Japanese numbers (including the classic "four = death" superstition), the presenter mentioned that Tokyo Skytree is 634 meters tall, which can be pronounced "Musashi," the name of the old province in which it is located. A marathon is 42.19 km, which can be pronounced "Shi Ni I Ku," which can be written 死に行く, "I go to die." Five yen coins are traditionally offered at shrines because goen means "five yen" but when written 御縁 it means "connections" or "fate." Kitkats are lucky because the word sounds like きっと勝つ, (kitto katsu, "I'll definitely win!")

The next section was about dad jokes (オヤジギャグ, oyaji gyagu), with classic examples like 布団が吹っ飛んだ (futon ha futtonda, "the futon blew away") or うんこまったぞ (either un, komatta zo, "yeah, it’s troubling," or unko matta zo, "I had to wait to poop!"). She ended with advertising, including a mention of famous ad character Segata Sanshirō, both a name and also similar to セガサターンしろ, (sega satān shiro, "Play Sega Saturn!"). When the presentation ended, we left immediately when the person in the front row who had kept chipping in with his comments immediately asked a question.

After stopping for another Starbucks drink for sashagee, we went to the Artist’s Alley, since we had avoided it while with Laila so she wouldn’t grab things in its tight confines. sashagee bought a tote bag. We wandered for a bit, with a brief detour when I saw an amazing Lynel cosplay:

sashagee bought two hats from Makohouse, a baseball cap and a fuzzy bucket hat, both with a crescent moon on them. We wandered around a bit longer and eventually made our way into the dealer’s room proper, where after some fruitless searching for a very particular Sakura Miku figurine, we bought a red bean bun from a shop called Icy Treats and Bread, and a Kirby-shaped cookie from Maggie’s Sweets. We did more looking for Sakura Miku, and I stopped to take a photo of a man in T-51b power armor:

There were a lot of Fallout cosplayers, actually--I assume the show has renewed interest in the setting. After ducking into the bathrooms it was time for the crab panel! 🦀

After a set of clips including Sailor Moon crabwalking and Doraemon turning into a crab, we got a brief history of the panel, which basically came down to "last minute panic over a topic."

"People have asked me 'Why crabs in anime?' and when you walked in here, maybe you thought the same thing. Well, when you leave, you’ll think the same thing."

The panel was mostly clips from anime and カニげ (kanige, "crab games"), including Fight Crab and Tokimeki Memorial High School. It was interspersed with crab-related trivial questions and challenges like "Name five crab-related Pokémon in fifteen seconds." We learned that February 13th is Crab Rangoon Day! They even played a clip from Wakakozake, which made sashagee really happy. Not much to write about here--like the egg panel from last year, it was mostly clips. You had to be there.

After the panel was over I asked about dinner plans but everyone was already either at dinner or not hungry, so fueled by sashagee's desire for katsu after going to the pun panel, we skipped the Horrible Heian Histories panel and went back to the room and ordered chicken katsu from a nearby restaurant. After waiting in the lobby for a bit to make sure we got it on time, I took the food and started walking back to the room when a…dust storm warning appeared in my phone?? Apparently we really are speedrunning the 20th century and now it’s time for the Dust Bowl. Fortunately we had no plans to go outside, so we sat in our room and ate chicken katsu while the wind and dust blew crazily outside. At 7 p.m., we got a message that the first room of the room crawl was finally ready, so we went down a few floors.

There were five rooms in the crawl, themed as follows:

1. The Mushi Banquet: spacedragon and gmarchan's room, themed after Mushishi. Soft lighting, with little plastic vines strewn up everywhere and soothing piano music playing. The drink was chamomile tea with a shot of sake in the center, and the more you drank, the more the sake spilled into the tea. The plastic cups were designed specifically for bomb-style drinks so the entire thing was one piece already.
2. The Limey Pirates: robin.hammer8, gracielizabeth, and staina.x's room. We walked in to the strains of Lazy Town's "You Are a Pirate" to find the ladies dressed in nautical attire...and the room done up with limes and virus warnings, because this was also about internet piracy. The drink was sprite and yuzu vodka in a punch bowl.
3. Hydration Station: mm55134 and his girlfriend's room, done as a relaxing tropical destination. I say hydration station and while they did have plenty of bottles of water, they also had a lot of mai tais and rum punch drinks already made, as well as butter mochi cakes and chocolate chip cookies made by his girlfriend. Every last bit of cookie or cake got eaten.
4. Cyberia: jeremy.podczerwinski and erendira.morales's room. The room was based on a scene from Serial Experiments Lain, a show I've been meaning to watch for fifteen years and still haven't gotten around to watching, and jeremy.podczerwinski had adopted a very incongruous persona that we called "DJpod." erendira.morales, of course, was Lain. Near the end of the time there, the feed was "hacked." sashagee says they always have the best rooms--last year was Cardcaptor Sakura themed--and I'm very sympathetic to that argument. The drink was vodka and lime with a cherry.
5. The Struggling Artist: confuciusdragon's room. It was themed like an art studio where all of the other artists had suddenly quit, so there was a keyboard set up in the corner and sketches on all the walls. The drinks were tiny bottles of pre-mixed drinks, but because they were tiny they were almost 50 proof.

We had some lovely conversations--including some about our various health conditions, the true indication that we are now in our 40s--how sashagee is more worthy to be here because she watches like 100x more anime than I do, Laila, and surprisingly phallic bananas. People went to the rave afterwards, but the parties had gone on long enough that sashagee was very tired, so we just went back to the room and tried to get a good, full night's sleep.

Lain hacking the feed:

Saturday
We woke up at 8:30 a.m. and lazily got ready, without the pressure of a four-year-old to move us along. Breakfast was fortunately open later on the weekends, so at 9:15 a.m. we went down to breakfast, safe in the knowledge that basically nothing at the con opened before 10 a.m. anyway. We got lucky and nearly everyone else was done at breakfast at the same time, so we stayed there for an hour chatting until it was time to go back for sashagee to change into her cosplay:

Uzaki Hana from 宇崎ちゃんは遊びたい！ (uzaki-chan wa asobitai!, "Uzaki-chan wants to hang out!").

We went to the Artist’s Alley first and once again sashagee found a bunch of stuff she wanted. We got a set of zodiac Kirby pins (for the two of us and Laila) that she intends to turn into fridge magnets. We briefly ran into MomoManLove and said hi before heading over to the S2Heart to look for more designs. They did have them, but only in 3XL, so sashagee and the owner just chatted for a bit about their lives and the owner told her to sign up for updates so that she'd know the instant a restock on that shirt happened. We looked around a bit more, found a place for sashagee to buy body glitter, and then kept wandering while she continued to look both for her Sakura Miku and for a particular figure from My Dress-Up Darling (we would later learn that this latter search was doomed because the figure she was looking for is a pre-order that won't ship until next year. Oops!

No figurines in hand, we started walking toward the exhibitor section and I made us stop at the Japanese Cultural Center booth to watch a tea ceremony demonstration. A woman in kimono talked through what was going on while a man sat at a low table--as the woman said, tea ceremony is usually done on the floor but the table makes it easier to demonstrate it for an audience--and measured out the water to warm the implements, made some tea, and gave it to another man to drink. Then she took questions and said that people were welcome to take pictures. I declined, saying I used to live in Japan, but I did take a photo of the setup because I liked the message written on the scroll in the back:

日々是好日 (nichinichi kore kōnichi, usually translated as "every day is a good day" with the connotation that every day has the potential to be good)

We very briefly randomly ran into mabown in passing while sashagee looked at the tattoo parlor that head been set up, and also ran into another Anime Chicago member that we had seen at the pizza dinner at SLYCE, and then we grabbed our 18+ wristbands to prove our grown-up status (necessary for a later panel we planned to go to), before sashagee said that she needed to do some cosplay repairs, so we went back to the room to snack and for her to source some tape.

Tape source and snacks acquired, we went back down looking for people in the dealer's room but kept missing them. We did find d3adend, dressed as...let's say the "protagonist" of Disco Elysium:

...and dan.blazek.9, dressed as a character I didn't recognize from One Piece but, on looking them up (though the genius strategem of searching for "huge guy one piece"), was one of the Pacifista artificial soldiers. Since it was just us and sashagee really wanted boba, and since MomoManLove had told us that there was a boba stand at the convention in recent years, we wandered around until we found one, on the other side of the wall from the rest of the food stalls. They were out of almost all the mochi donuts--I had watched a matcha one and sashagee had wanted an ube one--but they did have a blueberry cheesecake one, so we got that. They were also out of boba coffee--they had one coffee but it had no boba in it--so we both got strawberry bobas. We sat down, ate our donut, sashagee had just opened up her boba and started to drink it, when I checked the time and realized that if we weren't careful we were going to be late, so we said our goodbyes and then we had to leave for the Records of Anime: Collected Related Vinyl.

After a brief intro, the presenter asked “Why are you collecting records?” Several people shouted out that the sound was better, and the presenter acknowledged that and then mentioned that a lot of people collect specifically for the artwork. They don’t even listen to the music, but some records have exclusive artwork that only appear on specific editions of that record. After mentioning some labels (Tigerlab, Microids, Blackscreen Records, All The Anime, Milan Records, Very Okay Vinyl, Materia Collective) and international shippers (old classics like CDJapan and PlayAsia), she mentioned a big problem with collecting is small press runs--a lot of runs were only a couple thousands copies, and while sometimes you’ll get another print run it’s not always true. She also mentioned that while color variants are great to look at and fun to hang on the wall, the south quality is actually worse because the weight of the color and art throws off the balance. There was a big section just going over various examples of different recent vinyl releases, most of which I hadn’t heard of and none of which I’d seen. At one point, though, sashagee leaned over to me and said she wanted one of the examples bass on the art, and it turned out to be a vinyl of Angel’s Egg, an extremely weird OVA from the 80s! She also mentioned the upcoming release of the My Happy Marriage vinyl, a series that sashagee is really into, and in the “upcoming releases” bit near the end, she said that Violet Evergarden is getting an upcoming compilation with the full OST and the movie. And that was the end, not counting questions. To remember for later: the presenter was ILoveAnimeVinyl.

We left and went for the game room, but spacedragon was right—it was pretty sad this year. There was a much smaller amount of machines and big empty areas where there had once been arcade cabinets or consoles. We only stayed briefly, but I did get a picture of a great Zero:

After we left, I texted around trying to find people. We also met dan.blazek.9 again, also trying to find people, but never did meet up with everyone—not helped by being stopped every few dozen meters by someone asking to take photos. Eventually we left to go eat dinner only to almost immediately run into mabown and alainamwhite smoking just outside the doors! We chatted about the old days, about how one by one the people we used to go to cons with have dropped away, and about how the ladies have given us a new perspective with their enthusiasm and wonder--as an example, sashagee watches like a hundred times as much anime as I do nowadays. We were on our way back to eat dinner, so we didn’t stay long, but it was nice to see them after the briefly rendezvous earlier—mabown said that he had thought we looked busy, so I was trying not to bother us.

Outside the hotel we were waiting for sashagee’s “walking taco” that she had bought to be finished when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see robin.hammer8. She asked if I had gotten her Discord ping--I had not--and then said that she had found a set of Kirby bowl and cup for sale in the far corner of the dealer’s room. We chatted for a bit and I got a picture of her Deedlit cosplay:

And then we went up to the room to eat—I scarfed down the remnants of sashagee's chicken katsu from yesterday—and then rushed back to the dealer's hall and found booth 1028, Dark Moon Cards and Games. They still had the cup and bowl, modeled off the famous "Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Hokusai, and when I bought them I was told that I had gotten the last ones. Score!

After that, we went back to the room to get a breather before the rest of the night’s events. The traditional spacedragon party is on Saturday night, and that was the first thing we went to after changing out of the clothes we'd spent hours wandering around it. It was chill, and we spent almost the entire time we were there talking to werepez, and by talking I mean listening, because it was her and sashagee talking about Love and Deepspace, a game I don't play and know very little about other than that it's an otome game that also has battle sequences and every single guy has some kind of tragic and extremely complicated backstory--one is an Atlantean prince, one keeps jumping to timelines where the main character dies and he can't save her so he jumps again, etc. That was most of the night, but we were only there for an hour before we had to leave to go to the Everyone In Your Party Has Died--Let's Play Oregon Trail! panel. I had noticed it was in the same room as the vinyl panel and thought "that's why too small for the Oregon Trail panel" and unfortunately I was right. We got there, got into the giant line, and around thirty people in front of us, us, and who knows how many people behind us all weren't allowed in because the room was full to capacity. So, with some time to kill, I texted lightninglychee to see if she was around and she said she was in the Hyatt lobby, so to the skyway we went.

I did find a nice Barney on the way to the Hyatt:

We found lightninglychee there with alicetheallstar and her husband, and after not too long mabown and alainamwhite, brettybb, and stephen_poon all joined us as well, so we spent the next hour catching up and chatting about the con until alicetheallstar, stephen_poon, and lightninglychee decided to go to the bar. Unfortunately, they did it by joining a friend at the front of the line, and sashagee thought we would be too conspicuous if we did the same thing (not to mention the moral qualms). So we parted with a "see you around!" that would sadly prove to be inaccurate.

We checked up and found that the party in spacedragon's room had moved next door, so we went there and stayed for two hours while people waited for it to get late enough to make the rave easy to enter, and around 12:15 a.m. the time was deemed to be nigh! ...it really wasn't, though, because by the time we actually got over there, there was still a line that wrapped around two corners of the hotel to get in, though it at least moved extremely quickly (because, it turned out, to use the bathroom you had to leave and then get back in line). When we got in, Yuc'e (pronounced "Yūshe") was playing, and singing--or at least, lip-syncing to songs she had previously sung. The music was good, but it wasn't all that danceable in my (and sashagee's, and several other people's) opinion, so we danced as best we could until her set was done. The next DJ immediately got spacedragon insanely hyped because it was Ryu☆, one of Bemani's DJs who helped make DDR what it is. His entire set was extremely danceable...to me. sashagee and I had the following conversation:

sashagee: "Is this children's music?"
Me: "Have you ever heard of 'happy hardcore'?"
spacedragon: *busts in like the Kool-Aid Man to lore-drop about Ryu☆*

There was at least one literal DDR song played, and also a dance remix of Cruel Angel's Thesis (if you want get a group of weebs jumping...)--this remix isn't it, but it sounds similar. Here are Second Heaven and Sakura Luminance if you want examples of his actual music.

Bonus Happy hardcore Tetris theme remix.

The absolute funniest thing that happened, though, was graceelizabeth cockblocking confuciusdragon. Cosplaying Himmel the Hero, confuciusdragon was dancing in the middle of a ring of people when a woman jumped in. They danced, circling each other, alternating showing off their moves. He looked at her. She gave him the Look. She let her hair down and they kept dancing. And then graceelizabeth busted into the circle like a freight train, dancing, and the woman backed off. She looked at confuciusdragon, she looked at graceelizabeth, then she shook her head, smiled slightly to herself, and left.

Sadly, we also left shortly thereafter because sashagee was getting extremely tired, but we did run into robin.hammer8 on the way home and told her the same story, so hopefully it makes it back to the involved parties. We went back to the room, took showers to wash off the rave, and went immediately to bed.



Sunday
We woke up at 9 a.m. and I got into the shower while sashagee lay in bed. When I got out, she was dressed and putting on her makeup, and we went down to breakfast and sat with everyone. The energy level was low--unsurprisingly, we were mostly up until 2 a.m. or later--but I had a panel to go to, so I scarfed down my food, said goodbye to everyone, I rushed over to the convention center for the 10 a.m. panel on Japonisme.

The panel opened with a brief description of a Japonisme--"to designate a new field of study of artistic, historic, ethnographic borrowings from the arts of Japan"--and a screenshot of the Peacock Room, which was described as "the 19th century equivalent of a full-room anime collection," before moving into different art styles used by Japonisme artists (a lot of Impressionism, a lot of art nouveau). The presenter showed an image of The Courtesan (after Eisen), correctly (at least for me) noting that you wouldn't think it was a Van Gogh art piece because it's very different from his usual style, and then...went to a history lesson! The Black Ships steamed into Tokyo Bay and forced Japan to open its borders to trade for foreign nations at the exact time when art in Europe was looking around for new inspirations. Impressionism was one result of this hunger for the new, and Japonisme was another.

The presenter couldn't pronounce anything that's not in English, though, whether in French or in Japanese--she pronounced shogunate as "sho-GAN-te" and "ukiyo-e" as "yuki-oi."

As soon as the borders opened, Europe started importing all kinds of ordinary objects from Japan--cups, ceramics, prints, books, etc--which was extremely popular because it was new and different. Ukiyo-e art was also very popular, because it was something they had literally never seen before. Ukiyo-e artists cottoned on to that very quickly, and started making art specifically designed for sale to these exotic Occidentals. One example was Hokusai's manga, a series of sketches and drawings bound into multiple volumes that was very popular. In pottery, aritaware (named after the town of Arita, also often called Hizenyaki (肥前焼) became very popular and especially among foreign customers, so a ton of it was made for export. It was usually blue and white, with other color mixed in.

Then came the meat of the presentation, where we actually did art criticism! The presenter showed The Fitting by Mary Cassatt and Geisha as Lovers from Seirô Niwaka Geisha Ni No Kawari by Kitagawa Utamaro, and asked the audience to mention the similarities. A similar comparison followed with Van Gogh's Almond Blossom and Ogata Kōrin's Red and White Plum Blossoms (plus several other pairings, I'm not going to list all of them).

After the comparisons, the next section was about 洋画 ( yōga, literally "western pictures"), where Japanese artists were also inspired by all this Western contact and started making Western-style art, like Under the Trees by Kuroda Seiki or The Village of Kotaba by Asai Chu. This was pretty brief, before we ended with a list of resources for further research (primarily academic books on Japonisme) and then a Q&A. Sadly, no illuminating questions were asked, it was mostly about specific Japanese art forms that didn't make the jump to Western culture like kintsugi, though the question about the most surprising thing was interesting--the presenter said yōga, since she had expected (without any background in the subject) that there wouldn't be that much cross-pollination, but was totally wrong.

i left, almost running into a photoshoot but managing to side-step at the last second, and texted sashagee that I was out. She said that she and jolyne-chang were on their way to the artist's alley, so I waited in the lobby for a bit until they showed up. We walked up and down, looking for anything remaining that we hadn't bought, and talked about how there seemed to be fewer older series represented this year in the dealer's room even though there were more cosplays of older series (I saw multiple Homestuck trolls). We, by which I mean sashagee, needed coffee, so we went back to Maggie's Sweets so she could get more of their horchata cold brew and jolyne-chang fangirled over an actual Dragonball ricekrispy treat before buying it. I stepped away to get a picture of Hythlodaeus:

And we went over to the gacha area so sashagee could get one more token and spend two tokens at a machine--in classic gacha fashion, of course, nothing costs the minimum possible price to make sure that you end up with fewer tokens than are needed to get anything and have to buy more. She got a cutesy riceball, which she's planning to put in the fridge as a good luck charm. Then, checking the time, we realized we needed to leave immediately, so we went back to the hotel, said our goodbyes, and packed. I asked if sashagee wanted to stash our luggage at the hotel and go to anything else, but she was tired, so we called a Lyft, piled everything in, and went home at noon.


And now we're home. We're tired. We're sore. sashagee took a five-hour nap just after lunch. But, she's already decided that Uzaki Hana is going to be the cosplay she sticks with--she's going to work on it a bit, get screen-accurate brown boots, get a tighter shirt (she has lost weight since I got the original for her), and maybe get a wig. She expected to wear it a bit and have some fun and was very surprised when multiple people came up to ask her for her picture.

She did say she was a bit suspicious, though. Uzaki-chan is a romantic comedy, but the shirt specifically says "Super huge!" (sugoi dekai), so whenever someone asked for her picture she was like "Hmm..."

The only downside were all the things we couldn't get to. We didn't get to see the Conbini panel and couldn't get into the Oregon Trail panel. We didn't go to the dance on Friday, which it sounds like might have had more music to sashagee's taste. We didn't get to go back to see lightninglychee and stephen_poon again. We didn't try any of the board games at all. We didn't get to see the AMV contest, which as I've repeatedly mentioned, used to be a central event that I always went to. There's always soon much to do and not enough time to do it.

Laila is going to come back with infinite energy and run both of us over. But we had a lovely time with all our friends. Looking forward to ACEN next year!