San Deigo Con 2000 Log Welcome to my personal log of the events that I had which lead to the San Deigo Comic Convention 2000. 7/17/2000 Monday It was going to be the usual night of staying awake until 4:30am in the morning. However this time, I will stay awake and sleep on the train. I knew that I did do that but I figured it would be a far more useful way to do it. I got a ride from my mom since I figured Vic would be feeling dead about that time of the night. I got the station without too much of a hitch. The station was dead. I wandered around the place to confirm where to go and where to stand. It took me till 10 minutes before departure before I found out that it did not stop with the other buses. It stopped at some stupid ass corner of the building. Needless this was going to be an omen of things to come. The driver was an old coot. He had a really weird sense of humour. Kinda reminds me of Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager, doing the "diffuse a tense situation with humour". He made jokes of the pending border crossing, like "You can bring your marijawa or your cocaine, but they get ya if you bring over fruit or vegatables." or "Better hide those Cuban cigars." or "Ok everyone, this will go more smoothly if you put on an honest face." Ha ha ha, kill me now... Customs went by ok. My guy asked me where I was going. I said down to San Deigo for the Comic Convention. I wanted to get Pat Stewart's Autograph. He started mumbling something about Star Trek. I guess he thought I was a trekkie loser. But I commented that I wanted him to sign, "Make It So" on an X-men comic. I guess that would make me a comic loser. Then the guy clicked in about Patrick also doing Professor Xavier in the X-men Movie. The guy said that was cool and he waved me through. The next part was the x-ray machine. This was new and wasn't there last time. I suppose with all the terrorists bringing weapons recently, they installed an airport style machine. No biggie, there was nothing to hide. Of course, I realized after I went through that I had film in there. Oh well, that means those rolls might be bobo. I will have buy a new roll just in case it doen't. We loaded back into the bus, with two people short. Apparently 2 teens were going down across the border and they must have not had a return ticket or had a bad excuse or something but they were DENIED! I got to Seattle pretty quick. The sooner the better, my legs were getting cramed. We arrived ok and I got shuffled aboard. I was initally doubled up on someone else's seat but that was ok. The conductor just gave me another seat with lots of leg room. That was good however, the seat had no table. Not that was a real big deal since this seat had no AC power for the laptop anyway. It was only me for the shortest while. I got someone in my seat when I reached Portland. He was headed for Los Angeles. It was kinda of a drag since now I don't have all that extra space but that was ok. It just meant that I altered what I was doing during the day. So, I headed over to the lounge primarily on a search mission to make sure that it had all the various this that I would have needed to plug this thing in. I managed to find the one in the bar/announcer section of the top lounge, I knew about that one but surprisingly, I found another by the snack bar. That had much better prospects since that one had a table too. Shortly before the city of Salem, the electrical power all of the sudden went dead. Now that was interesting. It was major enough to knock out key lights, and of course the outlet power. They figurre it was some wires or some sort of short. We stopped and proceeded past Salem. Apparently, the city is too small and there were no tech types around. So thus we head out to Albany. So far so good, until I noticed that the air con is one of the powered systems that is dead. Uh-oh. The temperature of the cars rose and the air got stuffy. Epecially in the lounge since there are no curtains you can draw over the windows. I went back to my seat but that wasn't a whole lot better. I thought for a sec, and then I remembered something. I got up and went to the bathroom. I remembered that on the lower level where the bathrooms are, there are doors which have windows. Yup, sure enough the conductor was already there with the window open and the fresh air rushing in. mmmmmm. That fresh air was great. Obviously, we think alike. We arrived soon enough to Albany where people were alllowed off the train. I left the train with a bag of chips and a bottle of ice tea. I sat outside to chomp on it a bit. They got the problem fixed pretty quick, however as I was to find out, they might not be as swift as I as left to believe. hmmmmm. I went back inside and back to my seat and promptly passed out. They were doing dinner call but I ignored it and slept. I woke up again close to the end of the run so I figured the lounge would be vacant. It wasn't. They were almost at the end of the Stewart Little Movie. Stupid... All the seats upstairs were taken but downstairs was lots of room but most importantly the switch was free. Aha! I sat there doing my database stuff on music file, something I have been putting off for so so long. Great thing about vacations, with you away from your work, you can do all the things you have been putting off. Also played a couple of hands of Shanghai and totally failed to complete it. There were a bunch of teens on one table playing yahtzee, mostly John and Bobo victims. On another table, there were a bunch of kids who tried a game of Pokemon the card game. That didn't last long. Another stupid Wizard of the Coast card game where the more money you spend on the cards, the more likely you will win. After that horribly lopsided game, they started pulling out their coloured Game Boys and coloured cartridges. And wouldn't you know it, nobody had a link cable. I let the kids play on my laptop for a while. The power keep getting cut out so their card game and their gameboys are not viewable. Ha ha! Lucky for backlit computer screens! Well night became early morning, 3:00am early! I decided I may as well grab a little sleep. I went up to the upper part of the lounge but all the good 3 seat chairs were all occupied. Oh well. I decided to use the floor. I got about three hours of sleep before everyone started to wake up. 7/18 Tuesday I begin the day on the floor of the lounge. It is 6:00am in the morning, The sun is just starting to peek out. Damn it is nice, a must see especially over clear skies in the middle of nowhere with no city lights. Ok, what is on the agenda this morning? We have Emeryville at 8:40am. Well we pulled out of Martenez an hour late so I expect to arrive at Emmeryville at around 10:00am. I powered up the lap top and used it fixed up my music sheets. I got pretty far on it. I heard the call for Emmeryville. I almost didn't get off in time. But I started by just running out and putting a bag of stuff and ran back into the train to go get my other pieces of luggage. Sigh, that is the fun of travelling alone. I went through the station and through a set of doors which said "To the Buses". There were transit buses waiting and hotel tour buses all sitting around. No signs to indicate where they were going. All very very confusing. I looked at everything and nothing looked like the bus I needed. Then I noticed an AMTRAK labelled bus pull up and unload passengers. This Jamamican looking like guy came out and started loading people. He had a quiet voice so he had to repeat himself several times. But sure enough, he was going to the Pier. Then I thought, is Peir 39 = Fisherman's Wharf? Well, I had to wait and then I approached him and made sure. Everything was cool. I got on and started out. The guy's brain was whacked. He kept on forgetting which stops he was making and in what order he was making them. He also tried to be funny by saying "We will be at cruising speed of 80 miles/hour at a maximum altitude of 200 feet." Yea what ever.... Ha ha, Funny man, we'll shoot him first. I arrived at the Pier 39 which is the last of the Piers and it is the Fisherman's Wharf. I was about 11:00am and I found a pay phone to give Tim a call on his cell. He said he was at a meeting so he can't get away from work but he can do a lunch. That is cool with me. So in one hour, he will come an pick me up and grab my luggage. He will go back to work and do his stuff while he will leave me at Japan Centre to wander around. That sounds like a plan! The wharf was busy, Really busy! Lots of tourists and lots of groups of tourists. But I had an hour to kill so I wandered around. It was a nice setting. Very Robson or Granville like. Lot of those tourist like shops and food shops. There was a Namco arcade which uses tokens. If I stayed longer, I could have used up those stupid Johnny Zee tokens I was hold on to. They had a few pizza by the slice places. I saw a place you could buy fresh fruit and stuff and you can dip them into carmel and chocolate yourself to make a candy apple or chocolate covered strawberries. There was an NFL store, which sold lots of that crap. There is a small Disney store pimping the mouse. Lots of street vendor kinda stands selling bagels, chestnuts, hotdogs, and ice cream stuff. There lots of speciality shops like the magnet shop (lots of fridge magnets), there was a put your face on the aniki shop, there was plenty of photo finishing and photo supply shops, many restaurants doing sea food menus (although, I didn't notice any nationality specific cuisines.) There was no major fast food chains or even a Starbucks on the pier but there was some sort of theatre here. They were playing nothing I recognized. There was a cool flying shop which sold kites and all these mechanical wind up stuff. There was a flag shop and some sort of maps and magazine shop. There was of course a foreign currency exchange place. The pier itself was all wooden floored and tiled. There were wheel chair ramps everywhere which is perfect since I was dragging my luggage around. I stood around waiting for Tim in the passenger pick up/drop off area. When it got a little later, I was getting concerned so I got ready to give Tim a phone call. Then I realized that the pay phones take 35 cents not 25. I didn't have enough change. What a drag. So I had to go up to the hot dog stand close by and buy something that will give me some change. I got a $2.25 hotdog. Expensive as hell for a plain old hot dog. I was about to walk back to the phone booth when I spotted Tim's white car. Oh well, that was a fruitless expenditure. So we sped off to Japan Centre. We went upstairs to grab a bit of Japanese food. We ended up getting a bento box of Chicken Teriyaki. Nothing big but still did cost $6.50 (what a gyp) but what do you expect for Japanese lunch. Over lunch, we talked and I updated him to what was happening up here with the gang. He went over his plan of attack. He had to go back to the office to do some work. He said to call him back on the cell around 4:00pm to see how far he has made it. Then we will take it from there. That was cool with me so he left me at Japan Centre and I left my luggage in the back of his car. So I began to wander the mall. There was a great place called Japan Video. They had a real good collection of the comerical stuff for rental. Very complete even better than mine for some of the older titles. They also had a collection of the new Japanese stuff too, not quite as new as Combina but pretty close. But most importantly, they had a great selection of Japanese Smut, both live and animated and both domestic and Japanese versions! THIS is a place to rent the smut!! I continued my trip to the Mikado music world. They are like an MAL but all their cds were Japanese. I didn't see any SM stuff anywhere. They had walls of J Pop, Anime stuff, Game Stuff and all Japanese versions. They had a thinned out LD section but I looked through it and the smut. I did find many things which looked good. I noted the Pink Noise: Call Me Tonight and the Overfiend part 5, I will come back later to grab these. I continued to look around. There is a Japanese computer and software shop. There is also an antique shop called Genji Antiques. Of course, I stepped into the Kinyakinona bookstore to take a look to see what was up. There selection was not all that impressive. I think even Iwase Bookstore in Richmond had the beat on them for number of anime books. The price wasn't great but it was on par for what it was suppose to be for US-Japanese exchange. So it was ok the buy some of the books I saw but not to go crazy since the regular stocked stuff is no big savings. I checked the other bookstore around the block but they were closed. I also check the other video rental store, and that had some smut I didn't recognize. Also makes me wonder how much is there in the Overfiend and Blackboard Jungle series. Hmmm. Something for me to check out on Yahoo Japan. I picked up 2 Card Captor books and one Serial Experiments Lain book from Kinyakinoka. I was about to sift through the Five Star Stories stuff but I think I will do that at the con. Ok, I looked at the time, it was still 45 minutes before my check in time. So I walked up to a 38 Muni bus stop. I wanted to see what it will take me to get to Chinatown. It was a $1.00 to take the bus which was really really reasonable. After looking at the transit map, I realized that this route along Geary is a lot like the Broadway Corridor. There were routes for 38, 38A, 38B, and 38X. I suppose they were all types of express bus routes. But I decided it was a nice day and it wasn't all that far when I counted the number of blocks. So off I walked. I was going along basically following other groups of people and staying on streets with lots of traffic and streets that have big name stores on them. This brings me to a big road called Van Ness Ave. This lead both to Fisherman's Wharf and Chinatown. So down here I noticed a music store, so I walked in. I looked through their discount music bin and found some cheap $2.99 CDs. This is good, I can use these for a cheap declaration for any music CDs I buy. Then across the street there was a Good Guys store. I seen the ads so I stepped in. God, the store reaked the word, FUTURE SHOP. A whole bunch of loser salesmen ready to pounce on the customer as soon as he steps in. They start following you around if you say "Just Looking". So, I left the store to make the phone call. All I had was quarters, so I put in 50 cents to make the call, that is when I realized that pay phones don't give back change. Anyways, Tim was still at work and he was running a little late. He was going to be until 5:30pm. Ok, understandable. We agreed for another call back at 5:30pm to confirm where I was for pick up. If I am lucky, I will be finished Chinatown. So I continued down the street. There was a Chevron, so I stopped in for something to drink. I tried this Sprite wanna be thing called Splash. It was actually closer to a Mountain Dew but more lemony. I kept on following the signs which had directions for Chinatown and Fishmans' Wharf. I followed the street till I saw the Chinatown turn off. It went down a road which didn't have to much in the way of people traffic. Actually if nothing else it looked kinda residential to me. So I decided then to continue walking towards the Wharf until maybe I found a better road to use to get to Chinatown. Oh well, by then, I had already reached the wharf's end. It was nice. A lot like our Kit's beach. You got people jogging along the beach path and along the wall. You have lots of John victims running around, a couple of them nude. Too bad for you Dr. J. There were a couple of Vince types running around with no pants on. And too bad for you Bobo. I walked along the path and just to feel the sea air come in. Very refreshing and cool after such a long walk in the city heat. I arrived back to the front of the pier and behold I came back to where I started from. It was about that time so I called Tim. He was just leaving work, so I told him to meet me at the same place he picked me up the first time. Tim came back. It was dinner time, so I suggested we grab something to eat. I asked him what he would suggest. We tossed around ideas like Mel's Diner, Outback and Angus. We decided to go for steak, red meat! So he suggested a place called the Outback. Sure why not. It was an Australian flare version of Earls resturant. They were very much like a Keg/Earls in atmosphere with touches of Lone Star in there too. I choose the Aussie special 12oz steak with green salad with 1000 islands and the baked potato. We will have a Aussie fries as well which were fries, covered in melted cheeze with bacon bits. I guess sort of a substitue for nachos. Tim decided to go Prime rib 12oz, Ceasar Salad, and lots of mushrooms. They also served a kinda bread that was all brown. It had the look of Angels food cake but is was not sweet and was bread. I was stuffed but is was really good. We headed back to Tim's place. Nice and functional but built cheap. Kinda like a Vancouver Special. He lives in a townhouse community. His unit like the entire neighbourhood looks exactly the same. It is a 2 bedroom, washroom, kitchen, living room. It has a extra loft room on the top of the stair case which is like George's place in Seattle. No privacy, that is for sure. And there is a 2 car garage down stairs. The place has a metal protective gate which is cool. The place looks and feels new, but upon closer inspection, the workmanship of the house is rushed so the construction (or should I say the finishing) is shoddy. Things like dry wall not put on right, edges not painted or installed right, 2 of the light switch plates didn't cover the hole they made in the dry wall. Things like that, I have a eye for. I guess I am like that after buying a house. I spent the evening doing the big sort out. After almost a year of sending Ebay and Yahoo auction materials to Tim in the US, it sure has accumulated. Funny I thought I had more stuff at Tim's but I will solve that and worry about that stuff when I get back home and review my logs. I think the only thing missing is 1 of the 9 gig hard drives and the Rinoa Heartly figure. Now for Tim's stuff. Well, I knew that there was a lot. I sort of gauged what he had but I didn't bring the right stuff for his comics. What I needed was a long comic box and some silver comic bags. Oh well, I am going to a comic con, I should little problem finding them. Well, Tim has some impressive stuff. Some stuff I have, some stuff I have bidded on but never won, and some old stuff that is hard hard to find. I wrote it all down with how much Tim wants for it all. I will go through it later. I will also grab the stuff I want before Bobo gets it all wet. Hehehehe. It took me till midnight to get that all straightened out. Tim went to sleep and left me in front of the computer. I logged on with his ICQ and chatted a bit. Vic was not paying attention, Bobo and Elsie were there, and Hitman was there. I also went online to find out what the local free numbers of Excite was and used them to log in with my laptop to grab my mail from both yahoo accounts. Not that it mattered to much, since I couldn't repost the replies until I got back home. Next morning was an early one even though I never did sleep. I called the cab at 5:00am in the morning. Compensating 30 minutes for the cab and a departure at 6:10am. My bus is actually 6:40am but this will make sure traffic will not be a problem. I made the call and lugged all the crap downstairs. God damn some of them where heavy as hell. I guessing 70+ pounds. I got to the Fisherman's wharf without any delays. The fare was $35 so I gave him $40. This early in the morning the Wharf was dead. Lots of joggers though. And the wind was strong, wet and a bit chilly. I sat patiently, as trucks came and unloaded including a coke truck. The Amtrak bus came on time. Kinda threw me when then sent a hotel shuttle bus rather than an a normal tour type bus but that was cool too. I was then taken to the Emeryville station. I lugged everything into the terminal and sat down in an isolated corner of the place. Now here is where the bad thing happened, I must have drifted in and out of sleep and totally forgot how read a clock with hands on it, but I misread the time on the clock and missed my 7:35am train to Bakersfield. I was freaking out at the counter when I hear this, but I thought, why don't I just take the LA train coming at 11:40am? The lady then said I didn't have to do that. My ticket I got was an Explore America package which are a series of open ended tickets which allows you to freely travel the USA. Thus, I can easly opt to add more time to all my stays on the tickets to the expiry date. Good thing to know. So, my next train to Bakersfield was 10:10am and this time, I wasn't going to miss it. I sat outside this time. It was hell to board this train with all this new luggage but I got it all in there and all into the luggage racks. I don't have to worry about people trying to steal it because it will problably rip their arms out of their sockets trying to grab and run with it. Definely a few 10s of pounds over the regulation 50 lbs. I sat in a spot alone in this ride. This train was more of a commuter type train. This had more a table design to it with more space. On this leg of the trip I was pretty tired so I slept most of it with ease. We arrived in Bakersfield in the late afternoon close to 4:30pm. We were then hearded on to buses bound for LAX. There were like 3 of them all lined up and ready for LA. Of course I ended up chosing the one that was most busy. Oh well. I moved my stuff next to the bus and boarded it. Pity the driver who had to load them. I sat by a guy reading the globe paper. This bus was really roomy, it was great. So we got on the freeway and traffic was ok. I again, got a bit more sleep. We got to LAX at 6:30pm. Now the part I feared. LAX bus terminal is huge. It is laid out like an airport with a terminal, a waiting area, long tunnels to where you load passengers and long hallways to the individual tracks. I am going to dread moving this heavy stuff from the bus to the train. Well, I did successfully manage to balance and wheel the stuff into the terminal and boy was I glad to spot the luggage cart dispenser. Sure it cost me 4 quarters but it will be more than worth it. I just chucked them on the cart and off I went. As I got to the loading area, they were just doing calls for San Deigo on track 10. Great... track 10 is like the last track and the farthest away. But that was ok since I had my trusty cart. I got there and started to load up. Good timing, they were doing up last calls. I managed to hold them up and I was the last to load as I had 4 pieces of luggage to load in. Heh Heh.. oops. Ok, another commuter type train, with some chairs facing each other and some with tables. The neat thing about this was that even the coach seats had electric sockets availiable to them. I plugged myself in and I played and did some more music CD stuff. Had a fruity group of business men at the front drinking a bottle of wine. The four of them finished a bottle. One of them was standing up at the various stops yelling out conductor information. "The next stop is : Launga Beach, The next stop is:" and etc... Noisy bunch of lushes. I arrived in SD about 10:00pm, I was like the last one off the train. I tried real hard to load everything again but my bags kept shifting and falling apart. The golf cart shuttle came and offered me a drive out to the front of the building to where the cabs are. We loaded up a taxi and went off. I told the guy, a short ride to the Embassy Suites. Yea. I know like it is only like 3 blocks away but with all this luggage, I would appreaciate the cab! He drove me here and charged me $2. I have him $4. I don't even think he turned on his meter. A freebie for him. I got a hotel lobby cart, got checked in and loaded everything in the room. Nobody was there. So I decided, I better take a brisk walk out to Ralph's (24hr version of a Safeway). I grabbed some a dozen buns $2.39 (too expensive), thing of bolonga $1.89, 2L bottle of sprite $0.99 and 2L bottle of Mountain dew $0.99 and a dozen hot dogs $3.69 us (too expensive). After I left Ralph's, I realized I could have walked to the convention centre then Ralph's rather than the route I took via Horton Plaza. Which incidently is now being called Westin Plaza since now the ex-Omni, ex-Doubletree, ex-Best Western, ex-Horton Grand is now a Westin Hotel... I guess it really isn't that big of spot anymore. When I got back to the hotel the other guys returned. All of them were grabbing something to eat. We chatted a bit, and I unpacked my smut. Boy was that a mess!!! Dave took the Hidabed, rick and david took the other beds and I got the cushions. I could have used a pillow but I will survive I am sure. 7/19 Thursday 4:00am real early! I gues my system has not adjusted to the train sleeping yet. I suppose that is to be expected. I wonder if the if I ever will with this con but that is for tomoorrow. Anyway, I decided to go downstaris and go for the early breakfast. I don't know what I will find since it was still about 2.5 hours away. I basically wanted to use a phone jack. I could log in and chat whith the guys back at home on chat pos ir soemthing but I thpought I might be able to find one on the mezzine level of the hotel. But as it hurns out there was onloy som jcks near the business deks. Of course, I should have thought of that. Oh well. I guess I can use that time to catch up with my log entries now. I was typing for a bit on the mezzain then I wend town stairs when they got the drinks ready. So I packed up and when down stais and made with the food. I suppose it was pretty good for being about 2 hours early. I grabbbed soment had those things for a whilee) watermelon, some corn pops (wow I haven eaten those things for years). and of course fruit loops. when the food come later I was eating the normal sutff of the line like apple juice and coffee with crossiants. THe only main problem I had at this time was thast there was no electrical outlets in the eating area. That means once the screwy battery on this laptop dies, it will be dead. So I ran it as light as I could, tried to use things that didn't require too much hard drive usage. I lasted till 5:30am. Still a hour before breakfast but they still dien have any meat outl ahhh shit. I gues I can live with that. I grabbed some yogurt, crosiisants and some more cerial and wandered back upstairs I stumbledn into the room in almost complet darkness to find a plug in and plug the laptop back in for recharging. I remembered I was recharging the alkalines so I looked for the LED on the charger. I manged to plug it in and then I went back to sleep. I woke up again around 8:00am. The other guys had woken and were ready to go down for breakfast. So got up and went down as well. THat was coo. I now stocked up on the meat intake for the day. about 8 asages with a mass of bacon. those were good. I also had some hashbrowns but no scrambled eggs for e today and of course some more AJ and coffee to make it an averagely balanced breakfast. I noticed Dave was loading up on donuts and wrapping them in napkins and stuffing them in his comic box. He says He will storem thme up for later when he is on the con floor. If it comes down comics or the food, he will chuck the food. Yea, I figured that from dave. Of course, I will scam some bananas some more croissants and more ceral for later. My plan today was to hit the con around 12:00noon, After all on first day there are way way too many people lined up so no point hurring up and waiting. Ok, I arrived at noon. Again the registration was upstairs under the sails. No line up at all, just walked in and did the registration and paid for it. Boom boom boom and I was off to the room. I noticed that the autograph section was outside under the sails too so, obviously the con floor must be full. THe new section to the convention centre looks kinda like the old section but it was still not done. Still all scfolding and some concrete work. So another year.... Ok, so the game plan is to go into the con floor. Go to one end and rush through all the booths. Topological look at what a booth has to offer. Look at any anime books, Japanese CDs, or LDs. no point looking for SM knock offs because nobody down here can beat Vancouver prices on SM cds period. I was also paying attention to any mangas notably smut ones and also seeing if there are any dojinshis. I had pencil boards and posters in the back of my mind but that wasn't a big item on my agenda. All I can say is that I am glad to have gone to iwase to look what I have sitting there. The main items I need were free promo stuff and the comic box and comic bags for Tim's stuff. I didn't find too much in smut books or manga. The only booths who had that was black dog had books but he didn't bring his cred card stuff. The guy named storm (now with blonde hair) was selling his ever expensive books as usual. However, he did have a box of Dojins again expensive. But the mother load was amazonhentai.com. They had boxes and boxes of the good stuff. The animevillage.com (Bandai) guys gave me a mess load of promo bags which was great since it had flyers which will be good for smut manga and dojins. I ran into an old old aquaitance, Don Yee. He is now promoting Mari Iijima. He tells me, he has done one of the things he has always wanted to do. Ever fanboy of Macross has thought of meeting the singer for Minmei, but now he has not only done that, he is promoting her in North America. Doesn't get much better I suppose. I also bumped into Kevin Karnovan. Mr. Costume himself was dressed in a Galaxy Quest costume and he had the nebulizer prop too. He complained that Lyle or Med or Michael didn't come down. You bums. He also complained why I never call him, because I am a cheap skate to pay for the long distance. I ran across the board and noticed that Erin Gray and Richard Hatch were in the autograph section. But not for me, that would cut into my running time. In retrospect, I should have at least seen what she looks like after all these years. I certainly remember she filled that Buck Rogers suit pretty good. Oh well mayb next year. I managed to find a few books today: a langrissa 5 book, that pessy cowboy bebop characters book that Iwase couldn';t get in for me, a Yuna figures book, and a Parasite Eve book. I went to another booth to get the Lamumne 40 Fire book. Another booth had the Brain powered artbook. I did managed to find 2 dojinshis from my favorite artist Takaya. I managed to find "Symphony" which is an evangelion Dojin that i missed last year. The second was a book done by breast mans assistant. I also found a nice Plastic Little poster. I had to search for a bit but I did find a place to buy comic supplies. I grabbed a regular size, silver size with the boards, and a pack of the life magazine size along with a long comic box. That about did all the things I needed to get. My comic box was filled with crap, so I better head back to the hotel to dump all this stuff off. Of course, I was using shuttle, no way I am walking back with this load of crap that is for sure. When I returned, I thought about doing more of the con, but it was already 5:00pm. So with that, I headed down for happy hour. Along with the free breakfast, it has a free reception from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Free drinks from the bar, chips, nuts, popcorn are all free. The pop machine is opened up for the kids and they also get a bottle of grenadine, so they can make their own drinks. Anyway, I decided to wing it. I started with a rum and coke. When I sat down, Anna Exter came over and sat down too. We talked about various events. She tells me how she was lusting after the guy who did the manga for Trigun but no anymore. Today, he introduced to Anna his WIFE... Oh talk about a bum job... Poor Anna. But she will get over it, I am sure. I offered her a beer or a drink but she was not the drinking type. I got a beer and she had a sip. I also got another rum and coke and she tried that too. I think she handled that one better but she didnt get much passed a sip. I also had a bloody mary but the guy put too much v8 in so, i had to weaken it with a bit of 7up. When happy hour ended and the bar was closed, I headed back upstairs. I was about to start bagging the comics but I was so buzzed I wasn't getting very far. I passed out on the couch shortly after and didn't reawaken until 11:00pm. Oh well, I got a bit of a start on Tim's things. I was using some of the flyers for the smut. I was also ripping apart the Pioneer catalog. Dave wanted to go to sleep early so he could wake up early for an earlier attempt at the breakfast. Dave took the couch bed and I took the cushions and slept on the floor. I was cool with that since I will problably need to get out in the middle of the night anyway. Day 2 Ok, on this day, again early in the morning. Today I have the master plan. I want to go through the con floor carefully. This is where I will document the booths so I don't have to hit them tomorrow unless I really need to. Today I woke up around 7:00pm. Breakfast had already started so I headed down to load up on the meat again. After breakfast, I went to the con with Dave since he said he can get a 50% discount from Eros and 50% discount from Radio Comix. Alright! Time to do a catch up! I loaded up on complete sets of Coed Extreme, Slut Girl, Sexphiles, Bondage Faires Extreme, Secret Plot Extreme and some miscelanous others just to fill up any holes that I had. I probably bought doubles but this was not the time to count and figure that out. I went to the Radio comix table. They didn't have much I needed but I still grabbed a few Milks and a few comics for the covers. So here I start my convention experience. I will list the tables by isle number and then document them by notable things in each one. I won't really comment on the booths which are selling the typical comics. Ie. tables with boxes of comics or graphic novels or selling comic prints and that kinda thing since they are all over the place and this is the place for that. Use the map of the con floor as reference. Isle 2500 There is a GX Planet booth using a really big 20+ inch flat screen. They were doing a how to draw using this painting program. There is a press your image on a magnet booth, just like the place on the wharf. The Toypedia booth was doing a hell of a lot of collector cards and gaming cards but no anime ones. Animagic was selling lots of figures, bootleg wall scrolls, bootleg posters, and SM CDs. Switch House booth brought a PSX2. Dynamic City brought in 2 computers linked together to play Diablo 2. Amazing George's had a huge booth of comic boxes of comic boxes. The guy had 33 eight foot tables covered in comic boxes of comics to flip through. Super Collector has lots of domestic videos (which were pointless with the Sun Coast Video here and at Horton Plaza), DVDs, and SM CDs. They had a display of Japanese swords and bokans too. The next booth to them was a ancronism booth. Everything from chain mail, plate mail, helmets, armour, shields, daggers, crossbows, short swords, long swords, two handed swords. Oh boy, you want a weapon this is a great place here. Isle 2400 There was lots of hero and action figures in this isle. There is was s J-Hobby like store but they sold way too much Ultraman stuff. The www.adventures.com guys had a model for sexy girl in the booth in costume. She wasn't wearing much... The TNC booth was a big waste of space. They used a big section to set up an interview like booth. At the end of the isle is the Morning Glory person who Kevin introduced me to them yesterday as ET. Isle 2300 In this section there are more card dealers and guys selling GI Joe dudes and Transformers mechs. There is our first bootleg tape dealer. The years con is over loaded with these guys. They got photocopies of the covers with the bootleg tapes in boxes. Really really tacky. They sell them for $20 a tape, 3 for $45 or something like that. This particular table was selling Ultraman and was even brave enough to sell episodes of the Supranos from HBO. There was a place called Ripcord Software doing some sort of demo on a Mech Warrior like game. There is another mess load of SM CDs and T-shirts. There is another mess load of Star Wars and Magic card guys. Isle 2200 This isle has lots of the old old crap. Gold, silver age of comics here. In the middle there was the book place I grabbed the Yuna book. They had a small section of Japanese books, some domestic graphic novels. There is a booth selling lots of celebrity photos and movie posters. Nibichi booth was selling a big number of anime cels. Lots of Pokemon crap, bootleg posters, figures and action figurines. Some old books, some cards from hell, and figures from hell. There is another bootleg video stand with Sailor Moon SS, Beast Wars Neo, Dragonball Z, Marmalade Boy, Lexx, a tape of Shurato, Macross 7 and Kid's Toy. What a bunch of losers. Hot wheel car enthausist was at the end of the row. Isle 2100 Jewelery seller was starter of this row. There were more figurines. Coolvideo.com was here selling more bootlegged videos of Gi Joe, Jason of Star Command, Gatachman, Beast Wars, Galaxy Ranger, Mask, Flash Gordon and Marmalade Boy. There is another booth of weapons, and this one had single and double edge sword. There is booths selling paintings and artwork, smutty pictures too. There was a light sabre booth. This was a cool one with a segmented light up a polycarbonate plastic core. It is chip controlled and you can even wack things with it. There was a shop that sold a load of posters, he had many of the Gillian Anderson ones up. There was a booth selling off old old toys like the Fat Albert food tray and the Scoobie Doo lunch box. Isle 2000 In this ise ther is a comics onCd rom booth. I suppose it was a enevitable idea but this is the first time they are actauly puting those ideas on the cd. There was table full of miscellaneous stuff but of noteworth was a plastic resin kit of Asuka for $100 and the X-Men monopoly game. There is another booth more SM CDs. I had noticed they had to lower their price from $14 down to $12. Still can't touch the price we have here in Vancouver, but it is in to know there is still a market for that kinda stuff from hnerel. There was another way over priced booth. The books were over 2x the US to yen exchange. They had some figures but again way over priced. They had a Rinoa Heartly which I bought and saw somewhere else at the con for $49, this guy had for $69. Yea what ever losers. Ok, there is another bootleg video booth here. They were selling Flame of Recca, Dear Brother, Beserk, Macross 7, Wiez Krueiz, Nurse Angel Ririka, Himechan's Ribbon, some Gundam X and some Gundam Zeta, Sabre Marionette J to X, one tape of Shurato, and Vampire Princess Miyu. These losers were Unique Visions from Battlefield. There was Starbase1.com guys are the fanboys stop for Star Trek and Star Wars stuff. Hell, the booth had a pretty close looking Anikin Skywalker and two other Jedis were standing in the booth. Kinda funny, by the time I got to the end of the row, I saw 2 more female Jedis. I got down the end of this row where the Laser Perception guys were suppose to be but they were not here so what the hell? Isle 1900 At the Limelight booth, there was one of the artists, he was dresses exactly like the Captain. He hasn't heard of our Captain, so I filled him in. Some more old hard cover books, old posters, photographs, and art prints. There is a booth with a mess load of manga. In this case I really mean a MESS. He had like 8 boxes of mangas all strewn all over the place. There was no order by type or even publisher. I saw some Catseye, City Hunter, Justy, Galaxy Express, and Orange Road. There was a booth that was selling those stupid collapsable scooters at $60 US. There was game store that sells PSX, DC, N64, and Saturn stuff. Boring titles though. At the end of the row is AmazonHentai.com. THIS was the motherload of smut The front of the table was selling the Sailor and the 7 balls tape which I got from Tim anyway. But behind the counter was 9 boxes of mixed up Dojinshis and 1 box of the manga size stuff. Whoa, I didn't have the time to go through all that, So I picked up about $200 worth of the stuff and called it there. But I am sure if I had the day, and at least $1000 I might have enough time to pick out the stuff I need. Isle 1800 There was a stupid Ty booth an all that crap. Cybergames.com had a Tomb Raider Girl in costume. She looked ok, but no breasts though... There was a booth that had some pencil boards for $3.00. However, I didn't have cash and they didn't take Visa. Which later was too bad because when I came back to pick them out tomorrow, they jacked the price up to $5.00. Forget it. Steven's AnimePavillion was here selling SM CDs and some books. There was a booth here that sells original fan artwork and paintings. Most of the pics seem to be Ranma and Ah My Goddess but a lot of them were very very good. There was Black Dog here selling anime cards, some smut books but he didn't take credit cards so too bad. 1700 This is isle has a lot of action figures both new and classic stuff. Xmen figures seems pretty popular. There is a booth called Coolthing.com which has about 30 or so airsoft guns. I see .357 Magnum, baretta, glock, and desert eagle. There was another booth that sold magnets from hell. There was a booth that sold a real nice Ghost In The Shell figure. There is a booth that was selling celeberity photographs and movie posters. But the feature for me in this isle was the Kinonyona booth. For Japanese anime, they had the best exchange for books and boards. I bought the English Five Star Story books since you can't buy them anywhere else. I also picked up one of each of all the Rurouni Kenshin, Weib Kruez, and Card Captor Sakura boards because they happen to be the same size as dojinshis. He he he. I flipped through the various books they had here, and it was better than the San Francisco branch but nothing too unusual that I didn't already have. 1600 The isle starts off on both side with a huge Bud Plant display. They specialize in Graphic Novels and books. Also in this isle, we have more bootleg people. Replicus was selling old Godzilla, Laputa, Captain Scarlett, Voltes V, and transformers. Another booth called Showcase Trading, also sold lots of bootlegs but they were of Japanese big monster movies like Godzilla, Mothra and King Kong. He also sold many figures and masks and memoribilia. Banzai Anime was in this isle. They didn't have much to offer since the tapes they sold you could get cheaper else where, the SM CDs were cheaper in Vancouver, and the VCDs they had you can get cheaper in Chinatown. However, they did sell a couple of real posters. I ran across a small outfit that sold a mixed pile of the usual Taiwan knockoff anime stuff. But they actually sold Dreamcast bootdisks for $20 US. No games though.. There was another booth here that sells airsoft guns. They even had the Terminator 2 gun. At the end of the isle there was 6M sales, which was one of the only places that sold comic supplies. DF Productions which sold bootleg tapes. And there was Tai Seng Videos which is bringing over the Chinese stuff but after looking at the prices, it is way way cheaper from Chinatown. 1500 The booth Heroes Club is here with all there G-Kits, Yamato and stuff. I bought a Ryvius board. They had a Ryvius poster but it half of it had the guy in it. They also had some Dojinshi of Card Captor and Escaflowne but they didn't take credit cards so too bad... There is a place called the Nippan Book Company that sells Japanese books translated into Chinese. ie. the Hong Kong or Taiwan knock offs. There was a booth that had a $49 Ikari figure from Battle Atheletes. I hesitated to buy it since I knew J Hobby had one. But in retrospect, I should have bought it because it was cheaper. Anime Link was mostly a cell booth but they had a few dojins and some real posters. This is where I grabbed the Breastman posters for Chun Li and Plastic Little. There was a booth with furs and felts from supposed, werewolves. The Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferigino was here shanking hands and signing autographs. There was a small book booth called Bonnies Videos which also sold bootlegs of Avenger, Professional, and Timeslip. At the end of the isle is a huge Amazon.com promo booth. 1400 Central Park Media was here with comics and tapes. They had a few sales on. Their old tapes were like $10 each including Patlabor 6,7,8,9. They also sold their LDs for Slayers and Greenwood for $8. Heavy Metal magazine had a huge line up around them almost all the time, must be some famous artists. The I's guy had a booth in this isle. Media Blasters had their table here with all their smut videos. I was about the buy another copy of Voogie's Angel but I didn't want to be 4th time unlucky and buy a subtitled version and get get a dubbed one. AGAIN. 1300 On The Edge Video was selling bootlegs of KISS, Dragonball and Sailor Moon, and Wrestling. The Antartic Press table is sure pushing that Gold Digger movie they are working on. It was here where I bumped into Derek Liu. I was rather surprised to see him here but he was entertaining friends. I will talk to him more when he comes back up to Canada. There was the ADV/Suncoast Video table. They knocked all their prices down so you didn't need the coupon. I picked up my smut that was here like Gloria and Lesson of Darkness. I also inquired about my City Hunter and Nadia subscriptions and they told me they where a bit backlogged. Yea, right. So I held off buying the volumes there.