Otakon 2011

Christ it’s weird and incredibly wonderful /sob seeing everything at… normal size again on an actual web browser and not a tiny smartphone screen. MORE ON THAT LATER.

Anyway, this post-Otakon report certainly took long enough.
Man, just typing this out was enough to remind me of the amount of stress that I accumulated before and during that con, but I have to say for all the times I felt like I was ready to pull my hair out, it was worth all the work. A few things didn’t go quite as planned, like having no time AT ALL to go to any convention panels and events. Being able to meet so many talented artists like Ves and Moementm, plus seeing and talking to some of the people who followed me on dA/tumblr more than made up for it though ♥

I’ll make this part mercifully short and sweet: HI THERE THE REST OF THIS ENTRY IS UNGODLY LONG and even then I’m sure there are parts I still forgot to include ohhhh wellllll





The flight to Baltimore was actually pretty uneventful even though I was fully expecting to be stopped by security because… okay seriously, my suitcase, IDEK.
When I actually got to Baltimore I met up with my childhood friend/tablebro two_jun ♥ and sleeping_table who, along with her family, was nice enough to let us stay the whole week with her. Honestly, I still can’t thank her enough for putting up with us for that long aksldfjaslkd;fj. sleeping_table’s dad was extremely generous and even let me use his large format printer for making my prints which saved me the trouble of hunting down a local printing shop AAAAHHH WHY WAS EVERYONE SO NICE alksdjflakas

We barely had about three days before the start of Otakon to actually get all the final prepwork done. The first day everyone was already exhausted, so the whole day was spent with us sitting on our asses and just TALKING. It was exciting enough to meet sleeping_table in-person, I also had a blast catching up with two_jun , and afterward none of us still felt like doing anything productive so I popped in SMT: Nocturne since I’d wanted to introduce that to Jun ... and things kind of went downhill out of control from there.

This is essentially how the rest of the night went, along with any other time we weren’t killing ourselves over Otakon work:




The second day we went out shopping for anything we thought would be useful for display. Glossing over the details on how that went because so many things just didn’t work out at first ahahaha... 8T Then we got drunk off of even more Nocturne when we got back to Liz’s /PREDICTABLE. I don’t even know how we could have been so relaxed about everything at first IT WAS NOCTURNE since pre-reg and artist alley setup was the next day. So when the next day actually came and we stepped into the Artist Alley to get everything set up we started puking double rainbows and shitting bricks because holllyyyy fffffffffffffffffffffff



These pictures don’t even do justice to the sheer size of this place.
It then hit us that we had no idea on how the hell to even start setting our table up. Just looking at other setups and how good they were was overwhelming enough. Thankfully the whole AA just had the nicest fucking people. I’m still a;ksdljflaskdjf over all the sweet people who took the time to break away from their own table setups to help us with our own AAAAHHHHH WHY WAS EVERYONE SO NICE



Yeah, so what if our table looked incredibly ghetto; IT WAS OUR FIRST TIME SHUT UP /face in hands
We also checked out the dealer’s hall setup since it was literally right next door.



This was the only photo I took of the outside of the convention center. I figured I’d have more chances later to take some more during the day except LMAO JUST KIDDING I’dhavenofreetime
HERE WE GO WITH THE ACTUAL CON STUFF



I actually had to run through the registration line again so I could get an additional Artist Alley ribbon for Liz so she could help out as an assistant when she had the time. I thanked everything that the artist’s line was mercifully short in comparison to the monster that was forming right across from us.

Another thing that amused me while getting my IDs checked and approved everywhere was the number of people who were really… fascinated by the fact that I was an Oregonian. To be fair, Oregon is kind of the middle of nowhere as far as the west coast goes, but some of the questions people asked just made me lose my shit so bad:

“SO DO YOU GUYS ACTUALLY LIVE IN LOG CABINS?”

REALLY GUYS HOPEFULLY THIS QUESTION WASN’T SERIOUS?

Okay, back to stories about table management.




Besides our premade merch, Jun and I also thought of opening up sketch commissions, so we drew up some sample sketches the night before. YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE WHAT WAS ON OUR MINDS DURING THE WHOLE NIGHT.

Also, Jun thanks for letting me keep your handsome version of the demifiend bby ♥




Since the Alley didn’t open up till the afternoon on the first day, we filled up time by sketching out even more stuff. In the end, we had enough to add a “bargain sketches” section to the back of our display folder where everything we drew was only $1.00

When the Alley was actually opened, business was… a little slower than what we expected. We didn’t expect stellar results to begin with since we were still new, but traffic at our section in general was just BAD. On hindsight, our table placement was pretty terrible. People also got distracted a lot by the porn that was selling at the table right next to us LMAOOOO




Another thing Jun and I weren’t expecting at all was that the sketch requests turned out to be our most popular attraction. It’s a wonder we didn’t die from our workload. I think we were averaging around ten sketch requests each per day. That didn’t sound like a lot at the time, but when most of those were full body requests along with multiple characters , surviving on one meal for the whole day, going back to Liz’s only when it was nearly midnight, and still drawing till some disgusting hour in the morning… Yeah. It caught up with us :T

ALSKDjfalsdfj the first night was probably our worst acid trip as far as being delirious went. I didn’t even realize I fell asleep in the middle of texting Liz on our taxi ride back. Apparently I pressed the ‘Send’ button at some point so my text came out something along the lines of “Hey, we’re on our way basdf;lkj.” CUE LIZ FREAKING OUT ON TUMBLR. I really should feel bad about making her worry so much that she had to resort to that, but I still laugh at this every time /TERRIBLE

Also, JUN YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE ME ALONE AT TABLES ANYMORE. I GET THE WEIRDEST SKETCH REQUESTS WHEN YOU’RE GONE


And of course there were quite a few good cosplayers wandering around. I wish most of the pictures I took weren’t so blurry 8(




Of course there were a few things I got from Otakon myself:



JUN, YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS SPOIL ME TOO MUCH
WHY WON’T YOU LET ME CHUCK MONEY AT YOU GUYS

Finally after Otakon was over, we decided to celebrate our first successful Alleying by going back to Liz’s and having a T&B marathon… and playing more Nocturne /KICKED
That nearly sums everything up.

Sort of

I mean, the con’s been over for awhile now, but there are just no words to describe how much I still miss everyone jaskldhfkadf
Why do you guys all live on the opposite side of the country ;-;