NiGHTS into Dreams .Com

Meet location: Anime Detour – Minnesota USA
Date: April 23-25th 2010
NiDcom regulars who attended: Infractus, Zero-Shift, Level 99, Andersam, Sierra

Level 99: Oh, I'll write up my full report over the coming week, but first…
 

I left Thursday right after my home inspection, which went pretty well! A few things need to be fixed but it didn't damper my mood for the trip. Got to BWI nice and early, hung out, got on my two flights and was greeted by two strange hobos at the baggage claim…OH WAIT, NO, IT WAS ZERO-SHIFT AND INFRACTUS! After giving hugs and handshakes and all that, we got in the car and proceeded to get repeatedly almost-lost by a GPS with bipolar disorder. The car ride was just a taste of things to come: we couldn't stop laughing most of the time.

We arrived at Senor Wongs and met up with Brushfire and OA there. All said their hello's and we got a table not far from the karaoke table. I had forgotten that I shouldn't be drinking anything alcoholic since I hadn't eaten anything after I got on my first flight. Drinking after 7-ish hours of travel without eating would be bad. So, of course, I ordered sake and a huge mixed drink before eating anything. IM A SMART. Delicious drinks/sodas and sweet potato fries which were seasoned to perfection and breaded just right helped break the ice between everyone as we perused the list of karaoke songs. OA went up and did two after I had finished my drinks. There was a woman there who was really really really REALLY really drunk. She danced kinda funny too. Zero-Shift and Infractus ended up leaving before we did cause Zero needed to get his wig ready for the following day. After they left, as we were leaving, the crazy lady ended up (as random and disturbing as it sounds) asking us for "CRAAAAAAACK". Scared of this woman and worried for our safety, we proceeded to leave with most haste (we assumed she didn't mean butt-crack). Got to OA's quite late and went immediately to bed.
 

I forgot to mention that Flik ended up showing up Friday morning as we were making breakfast. He's done some stuff on OCR, and on thasauce, but mostly he does compo's. Very funny and crazy dude. He brought his ridiculously awesome camera to get pictures, so most of the stuff I'll post picture-wise is from him.

Getting back to where I was, there were a few pictures taken of random cosplays as we waited in the long line for walk up passes. Took us about two hours to get them and, by the end, they were counting to make sure they had enough room for all those in line (we should have taken this as a sign of things to come). While waiting in line, Brushfire broke out the AHnold impersonations, which resulted in one of the best ideas we had over the weekend. We also talked with some random folks about OCR and they ended up coming to our panel the next day. Lots of people came the next day because of us just talking about it in-passing, I guess.

So we got the passes, wandered around a little bit more, and took some pictures. We walked past all the rooms showing different Anime, and stopped in the modestly sized game room. The game room was "family friendly" territory, which apparently meant no cursing, however there were a number of fighting games there so in the end, we payed no heed to that rule. But I DID try. For a while.

Next we went to a panel on The Rise and Fall of Retail Anime. It was a pretty good one. Brushfire did a lot of talking (he always does a lot of talking, that's one of the reasons I keep him around ). It was nice to just relax for a while. I'm not terribly into Anime, which is why there was so much that I didn't know or get, but that didn't stop me from enjoying any of it. I'm much more used to MAGFest, where I'm constantly running around doing at least one thing at any given second, so this was a pleasant change to the norm. After the panel, I checked out the room for the OCR stuff the next day. HUGE room, and I was definitely worried we wouldn't fill a quarter of it. We wandered a bit more and then decided to pack it up for the day and head back to OA's. We had already made plans before the con to hang out with some other peoples from the OCR-niverse. BBQ and adult beverages were in store for us. I got to see a few people I hadn't seen for a while, plus I got to finally meet Moonlapse (whom I collaborated with, along with OA, on the Waves of Stone track).

Now is where things started to get very unpredictably fun. Anyone familiar with ANY kind of fanfic is also familiar with just how horrendously BAD fanfic can be. The one that has been tossed around a lot lately on OCAD and in chat is the classic abomination My Immortal. It started as a random topic on OCAD, which evolved into proposing the idea for dramatic readings being recorded, and finally hit a peak last Friday evening. We decided to record each of us taking turns reading chapters round robin style. However, if you had to stop reading for any reason (it started just with cringing, but eventually became if you stopped for any reason, like laughing), you had to take a drink. If entire room all stopped together, everyone had to take a drink. We made it round the rotation twice (8 people, 16 chapters read) before we couldn't bring ourselves to read or consume any more. After that is kind of a blur but there was Rock Band playing and then everyone went to bed or left around 2 AM. I have a feeling we will be playing that fanfic game more often now.

We woke up the next day and, considering what happened just a few hours before then, slowly got ourselves prepped and ready for the day. This was going to be our long day, where we showed up around lunch and stayed through the dance. Things didn't go quite as planned in the end…

*To be continued*

Infractus:
 

One of my personal favourites

Also, there is this

Will's Dad spies Helen

If I were you I'd run.