So this last weekend was Anime Nebraskon, an anime convention here in Omaha with a little under 3000 attendees this year. I've had the good fortune to be with the con for a good 5 years now and its probably one of the better things I've done with my life. It is completely non-profit, completely volunteer run organization. We pride ourselves on our customer service, the first and foremost thing we are there for is to give the attendees of all ages the best possible time we can and to help people make connections with each other, not just in the local nerd community but across the country, in fact we have had a few attendees from as far away as Australia. My specific duties are fairly music oriented, in that using my own personal Japanese music collection and some provided by two others on staff, I run two events, one is a "Name that tune" panel in which myself and one of the other previously mentioned staff members select songs for teams of attendees to try and guess what series they are from. It can be surprisingly hard to be on either side of the table during this too, as I have tried the game at other cons. Anime genres and their target demographics can vary greatly both in gender and age group. Add to that the fact that the music selection we use totals close to 1500 songs and that you don't want to make it too easy by playing something you know everyone will know in two seconds. The end result is sometimes going through the first 30 seconds or so of maybe 10 songs where everyone has blank looks on their faces, and then the next 3 songs are named almost immediately. The other event is much bigger though, in duration, organization requirements and attendee interest, and that would be Karaoke. I'm very proud of the Karaoke event that we put on at Nebraskon, and it would be significantly more difficult if the other person who has ran it with me the last two years hadn't have expressed interest. With 3 days available to her she cataloged all of the music available to us, removed songs from the gaming section without lyrics and composed a long list of every song we had so that we no longer had to have the attendee ask us if we had it. She was a godsend and it made everything run so much more smooth. We have it set so there is nothing behind us in the schedule and we run from 8pm until there is nobody else left who wants to sing. Typically it ends around 2am each night (Friday/Saturday) but in 2010 our Saturday event ran until 4 am, including the extra hour for daylight savings time. Between that and being able to play any song we have or that the attendees can get to us and remove the vocals or leave them in, and provide lyrics on a big flat screen tv if needed, we probably have one of the better Karaoke events at an anime con in the country. Each year at least 2 or 3 people come up to us and compliment us on it and how much better it is than other conventions they have been to which often only last an hour or two, are very restrictive on what you can and cannot sing and may limit you to a single song the entire time.
Now, while I take great pride in both of those events, I take even more pride in the events I put on with my group of friends known locally as [RHO] or Robot House Industries. The founders and most of the others all met as students at UNO, mostly through the anime club we formed through the university, though some of us met through other means. There is a core of about 10 of us or so, but the corps overall is probably closer to 30, and 4 of us have been part of staff for awhile now, one of which is the head of the tech committee. Anyway, I digress, we have two panels that we run that are simultaneously nearly identical and completely different, and we wouldn't have it any other way, and this year we had the last minute pleasure of subbing in on a different panel because the panelist was otherwise disposed, and it oddly served as a good midpoint between the two. The three titles are: "Ethical issues in anime", "Biggest Anime Prick Contest" (The substituting one) and "Your Anime Sucks and This is Why". Now at first glance our two panels are vastly different. Ethical issues is a very intellectual theme, polite, educational and dedicated to exploring themes in anime and japanese culture overall in an open minded manner. Your Anime Sucks (YAS) on the other hand, is full of cursing, purposefully mean spirited and completely devoted to ruining your favorite series for you in an attempt to entertain everyone else in the room. I'll get to the third later since we never planned it in the first place and had it thrust upon us. Now, if you dig a bit deeper into our two panels, it is quite obvious why we are able to do both with such ease. Both are semi-roundtable discussions, primarily lead by us but also encouraging audience input at the same time. Both require a wide range of series to have been seen by the panelists to properly address the series proposed to us. Within that, both also require an ability to analyze what you have seen from many different poitns of view. With Ethics, you have to be able to detach yourself from your own point of view and look at it from the point of view of the various characters. For instance, Lelouch in Code Geass is probably one of the better character examples we've ever addressed. So much of what he does can be seen as incredibly wrong from many points of view, but at the same time, he is doing it all to make the world a better place for his sister, even at the cost of his own life. Similarly, with YAS, when someone in the audience suggests an anime for us to tear into, most often the panelists doing so are one of that series biggest fans and because they can detach themselves to analyze something objectively like in Ethics, similarly they can take that analysis, throw in colorful language and some jokingly mean spirit and you have fun for all. We love doing this panel and it easily fills the 2nd largest room we have at the con, reaching around 100 attendees and standing room only.
I was going to describe how I got conscripted to sub into the other panel, but it's 2:30 and I'm really tired, maybe some other time.
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