Cosplayers, cosplayers, and more cosplayers – My Saturday at NYAF

Yay for people paid to dress up. These Bandai Entertainment cosplayers gave out items while posing for pictures every minute!

-chan already posted what his view of Saturday was so I don’t need to say much. We got on the ferry, walked to the Jacob Javits Center, received our badges and went in. The first thing you see in the dealer’s room is the Bandai Entertainment booth. There were quite a lot of people crowded there so we decided to pass it and walk around. Our first panel was the Anime Bloggers panel. I was so pumped because I was able to see Hinano!

An Anime Bloggers’ Who’s Who and Other Things – My Saturday at NYAF

It was surprising to see how big the Bandai Ent. booth was this year compared to last year. I guess you can spend it up when Funimation and Media Blasters are the only remaining competition. Ah yes… the nuances of free-market capitalism…

It has been normal procedure for the past few years to attend as many anime cons in the NJ area. Today, both sis and I were at NYAF for essentially our home con (since AnimeNext has really sucked it up in Secaucus). Once again we try our best to make the Saturday at least since going the entire weekend (and crossing the Hudson that many times) takes alot of energy for this 40hr-work-week anime fan. Here’s my report on NYAF 2008 Saturday:

Moe Computing Research Center (MCRC) – Harem Resource Management

As I dig up my research (and wiki page links) for this post…

This past week, my project released its complete design of the system to the government. Along with the system design review, the software group also briefed their software design. After listening to software’s boring presentations, I thought to myself: “There needs to be a better way to teach some of this dry stuff.” Remembering that I once wrote about tsundere state machines, I thought of the various ways I can teach computer science/engineering theory with anime again. Here’s the topic pairing I came up with for today: harems and operating systems.

Please hold your applause till the end – A few thoughts on anime rankings and fandom

Sis’ cotillion was alot like the above… just add more filipinos, add line dancing and subtract the attacking ghosts with a sword in a ball gown and heels…

During the week before my sis’ cotillion, sis and her cotillion court did at least one dress rehearsal in the ballroom before the actual party. I was in attendance that day helping set the place up and driving people around. The coreographer decided he wanted to run through everything one last time from beginning to end (they did 4 different dances one after the other with small pauses in between). As they went through their last run, I decided to clap in the dance change pauses and after any complicated parts (particularly any lifts) just to simulate the actual event a few days later. Two things happened which surprised me. One, the audience watching the practice (mostly parents and/or relatives of the dancers) ended up following my lead by clapping. If I didn’t clap, the practice audience would have never clapped since they have seen the them practice for the (N+1) time. This made final practice somewhat realistic and helped the dancers focus a bit more. Second, all the times I decided to clap during the practice were exactly the same points when the actual audience clapped in the day of the party.

So this leads to the classic question: How does this relate to anime? Well, I looked at a few anime ranking lists recently (particularly ANN’s Baysian ranking and MyAnimeList.net Top Anime ranking) and I noticed a few of the top rated anime are not very popular shows (ef, Aria and a few others come to mind…) especially in the North American anime market. With some of these shows, the popularity in North America is sorta understandable (unlicensed shows or shows with a limited release will be less likely to rank highly). What I find interesting is how some of the ridiculously popular anime (Naruto and Bleach come to mind) are no where close to being on the top of the list. After thinking about this some more, I came up with a few thoughts on the popularity of anime with some “real-life” examples. Here are some thoughts…

“Manga kids” – They keep covering the shelves

Well, this is a perfectly empty walkway toward manga books. That does not happen every day.

School started for me again, Aniki is back in college, and Nii-chan is out at work. I haven’t been checking this blog over the summer due to my birthday. I’m quite amazed that the Kyonko post created by Nii-chan is still the first link set on Google when you ask for Kyonko. Anyway, I’ve explained enough of what’s been going on with this blog. I’ll finally start what I was going to talk about.