Anime Iowa: 2001


MOCHI > The Scrapbook > Convention Memories > Anime Iowa > 2001

Friday morning, we all got some bad news: Spiky Mochi had been told that he might have to drive back to work over the weekend. Everyone asked, "Aren't you on vacation?". Apparently, the people where he worked figured that he was on vacation on Friday and that the weekend was fair game. At any rate, Spiky had been handed a Blackberry and told to wait for a message letting him know whether or not he had to come back to work.

Spiky went back to doing some last-minute costuming work while Sugar Bomb and Daifuku went up the street to the local Panera to buy some breakfast goodies and drag them back to the MOCHI lair. Toasted Mochi bopped down to finish the video room setup.

All of the video rooms at AI ran from a common "nerve center". Speaker cable and video projectors went back to a central table which held all the electronics (like DVD players and VCRs). Each set of electronics were hooked up to their own monitor. This meant that one operator could manage all three rooms. [It saves wear and tear on the volunteers. - Toasted] There were tape machines put aside for fast-forwarding or rewinding video cassettes to the right place.

Even Toasted Mochi had to admit: it was kind of scary-looking!

Much of the setup design came from Marty Milder. He took a break from running the video rooms this year, but was very gracious in helping out. It turned out to be a kind of "marriage made in heaven": Marty is very video-oriented while Toasted is very audio oriented. In fact, Toasted Mochi was a little dissappointed that he couldn't set up full Dolby 5-channel sound, but it would have made the setup very difficult for the volunteer operators.

Daifuku: [picks up a small black box in a leather case] What's this?
Toasted: A decibel meter.
Daifuku: A what?
Toasted: A decibel meter. You use it to balance the speakers.
Daifuku's eyes widen.
Ideally, you want the sound levels from all the speakers to be the same. Now, you can do it by ear. But the human ear is really bad about knowing if two sounds are the same volume when one is really bass.
Daifuku: [laughing] Geek! Geek!

Later that afternoon, Spiky Mochi got the bad news: he was being recalled into the real world. Hopefully, if everything went well, he might be back in time for the masquerade on Saturday.

Meanwhile, things got hopping down at the registration line. One thing in particular caught our attention: the ritual display of a pinata that would later meet its doom. This year's "victim" was JigglyPuff. Instead of auctioning off the opportunity to give it a couple of good whacks to a single person, the convention decided to do a raffle. Each ticket cost $1 . When it came time for the, er, bash, three winners were drawn and given a swing.

Let's just say that the pink ball of pudding got what it deserved ....

The con was in full swing by dinner time. The Guest of Honor banquet held almost a hundred people. This year's head table held Robert DeJesus, his wife, Charles Piehl (con chair), Steve Bennett, Kevin Lillard (who would be doing more than his usual round of photography for this convention), and JigglyPuff. If you've never been to the banquet, we all encourage you to give it a try -- especially if it's your first time at an anime con. Not only will you make sure that you get a good, solid meal at least once over the weekend, it's a great way to meet some of your fellow con-goers. For the rest of the weekend, there will be at least eleven other friendly faces that you've seen before.

[Day One]