Anime Weekend Atlanta: quick intro, sketchy schedule, blogging all weekend
How to Spot Matt (Caecus mattias v. cerevisiae) in the WildCaecus mattias, more commonly known as the Eastern Common Pub Crawler, is a shy, retiring beast that prefers to avoid direct sunlight, only emerging to forage in the twilight hours or after dark. Rarely spotted in the open, the best places to look for C. mattias is under rocks, amidst leaf litter on the floor of deciduous forests, and in confortable pubs and sports bars that have draught Guinness and free wi-fi
I’ll be attending Anime Weekend Atlanta, geeking out for the second time in less than a month. My wallet is still bruised and broken from Dragon*Con, but AWA has the distinct advantage of being my local con; extremely local as I can be back home in 15 minutes — and that’s 15 min. only if the traffic is bad and I catch nothing but red lights.
Hot meals at home and my own beer fridge (at the end of the day: don’t drink and drive, kids) do a lot to keep down expenses and preserve sanity. Still — 15 minutes is 15 minutes and I’m planning to be ‘on-site’ as much as possible.
If you’re looking for me (outside of panels and the like) then your best bet is to go to the RocketBomber Press Office (Jock’s and Jill’s) and look for the guy at the bar typing on a laptop while nursing a 20oz. Guinness. My favorite place to grab breakfast (coffee) before the con is the cafe at the local Barnes & Noble, a leisurely 20 min walk from the venue and about 5 minutes by car. Both Jocks and B&N have wifi; Jocks is free.
I’m looking at the following panels & presentations, but I’ll warn you that I’m taking a casual attitude for the most part, may change my mind at any time, and might decide to just spend 5 or 6 hours at Jocks at some point if the crowds get too onerous (est. 11,000 people will be at the event)
Friday:
2pm Manga as High Art
3pm Get Peter Fernandez to sign my Speed Racer DVDs
~3pm attend a Steampunk cosplay panel if there is time after
4pm Gundam Primer
5pm either Funimation or Veterans of Anime Fandom. Leaning toward the history lesson instead of a corporate power point presentation.
6pm Bandai Panel
7pm —blogging, refueling
8pm Snapshot of the Industry
9pm —home, blogging, charts
I’ll be working on the charts all weekend, in fact, as I find the time. (I have to — it takes a surprising amount of time just to enter all the data.) The offshoot of that is that if you were one of my 6 regular readers, and if you were at AWA, and if you cared (an awful lot of conditionals) then you have an excellent chance of watching me do this thing Live. (send me an email and I can even schedule a time for you)
Saturday:
8am * something special, I hope. I can’t tell (precisely) from the listing in the program but from what *is* listed I have a suspicion that something very cool is showing in the main viewing room.
10am Otaku USA
11am How to Tell a Story in Comics
12pm Anime Podcast Roundtable
1pm —blogging, refueling
2pm Writing about Anime
3pm 20 Years of Dark Horse Manga
4pm Publishing Comics: Print and Web
Saturday evening is wide open, not sure what I’ll do yet.
Sunday:
11am Tim’s Anime Treasure Chest
12pm video room: Toward the Terra
1pm Is Anime Over? panel
2pm How to Read Manga
…and on Sunday afternoon I should have the weekly chart up on RocketBomber. Write-ups for individual panels will be forthcoming as I find the time.
If you’re at AWA (and if you are, why are you wasting time here?) give me a shout in the comments and we’ll meet up. I’d love to meet my readers. …assuming people read this thing and all my web traffic isn’t from search engine spiders. ;P
