ACen 2008 Aftermath Part I

Anime Central 2008 is now over and so far I’m at a loss for words, probably due to total exhaustion. ACen 2008 was a lot better for me than 2007. This year all of our badges came in time and I was able to avoid any unnecessarily long waits in line, like the now infamous 8 to 9 hour waits many spent in the pre-reg lines. Compared to last year ACen seemed slightly more organized and I really got the feeling that they were trying to make up for last year’s shortcomings. And I feel that I was doing the same thing!

I made a lot of mistakes last year which I think I corrected this year. First, once I realized there was no way I’d get the Gene Starwind and Melfina costumes done in time, I dropped them. Last year I was feverishly finishing costumes on Thursday and Friday morning, which made me miss a lot of stuff. Doing that took a lot of weight off of my shoulders which was good because I was actually quite sick Thursday and Friday so I couldn’t push too hard if I was going to make the show at all. Another thing I did was better plan for the worst and adjusted my expectations. In particular, last year my lovely wife was totally freaked out by my crossplays and didn’t really want to be seen with me at all. That was unexpected, and hurt a lot. I didn’t think that her feelings were going to change a lot, so I didn’t plan anything that would require her presence. She stuck with the younger kids doing kid stuff while we used text messages to keep track of each other and our older daughter who’s old enough to do things on her own. This actually worked out much better than I could have imagined, and we did rendevous on a number of occasions and it was okay.

So all in all, I had a ridiculously good time which I’ll detail here a little later. Here’s one of my favorite cosplayer pictures. I think she makes a really cute Haruhi!^_^