Friday | Saturday | Costume Contest | Sat/Sun | Hetalia

After the masquerade, Sarah and I headed back to the room to chill for a bit. She slept off her illness while I logged on to the interweb and reconnected with the real world for a bit. It wasn't so exciting out there.

It was time to dance.

Saturday-2/Sunday
2 Days Later

As always, they were drumming up the fun. Nowhere but No Brand can you get excited to rocking out to the American Pokémon opening.

Erika presents "Rave Slut Len" cosplay. Yet another reminder- Len is a male Vocaloid character.

Another reminder- this is a robot. If you see him, run away. Because robots are made of metal and metal is strong.

(Geekbot's totally cool though. He's good people.)

I ducked in and out between the 202 crew, other random peoples and the outdoors. Our search for adventure led us up to the Daisho room party, where they had a little dance of their own. Made my little portable speaker set that I use for room parties seem wholly inadequate (although it is portable!). There were far too many people dancing in there to stick around, so I pre-regged, gave them money and exited.

Apparently, Richard and I were having a small room party as well. I hadn't given it much thought, as it wasn't an official Geek.Kon event (or Kitsune Kon for that matter; he's staffing for them now) and I didn't bring much other than a bag of chips and my little portable speaker set (now with inferiority complex!). Still, it was an excuse to open the door and start playing music, even as I was back to checking the internet. Really, we were just killing time until the big pinata party.

Ah, the piñata party! And Jasmine has created her most horrific monstrosity yet- Kuroneko!

The first attempt on Kuroneko's life was a headbutt. It didn't work so well.

Canada attacked it with Kumajiro-san and won the award for Most Useless Weapon.

Sarah whacked it with Hungary's frying pan and it was only starting to show damage. Clearly, heavy artillery was necessary and Switzerland and Denmark were nowhere in sight. Estonia did not attack it; his only weapon is a laptop and mine would crumple and die against Kuroneko. Remember, it's named Blaine for a reason!

Finally, some girl just curb-stomped the sucker with crazy thick boots.

The candy was still inside the piñata, and yet the riot began. By the time I got my hands in there, it was mostly ripped packages of Sweet Tarts and not digestible in their current states.

Back upstairs, the room party picked up a little as folks dropped in and out. A few Kitsune Kon staffers dropped by to chat about con stuff. One nice thing about Kitsune Kon is that they're very new at convention planning, so they aren't predisposed about how to run things. They come up with their own ideas, yet are very eager to receive input and advice. I'm really looking forward to that one next year.

Wausau buddy Mandy stopped by with Apples to Apples, eliminating all prior agenda items. I won Sensual. Good times.

We stopped the party around 3:00 to get some sleep. Sarah was sick and I had stuff to do Sunday morning. Like panels.

Having been on the panelist's side of things with "The Ultimate Writing Workshop By Two Unpaid Authors," one of the things I least look forward to when scheduling Geek.Kon's panels is giving somebody a Sunday morning slot. Mike made the panel schedule for No Brand and did the noble thing, giving Sunday morning slots to two of his own panels. Unfortunately, I wanted to go to both of them.

The first was a tribute to old school RPGs for the Super Nintendo and PS1, including titles like Breath of Fire and Suikoden. While there were a lot of titles mentioned that I'm interested in checking out and Chrono Trigger got due coverage, I had to leave before they got to EarthBound. While I did a sufficient job packing my stuff ahead of time, Sarah still needed to put her things in the car.

We did so quickly, and in time to catch his second panel- all about what it takes to staff a convention.

Naturally, almost everybody in attendance staffed at least one convention. Collectively, about six or seven conventions were in the audience so it became a more formalized con summit like we had at Daisho. It also fed nicely into the forum meetup, which I totally would have stuck around for if I didn't need to check out of the hotel.

Once the formalities were taken care of, we swept around the con again. I picked up the latest volume of School Rumble, finally remembering that I still read manga.

Kim here had two versions of Switzerland (military and Swiss Miss), a Vocaloid and now pulls out Rin for Sunday.

Evan had a 3:00 volunteer shift, so we had a ways to go before we could leave. And we were hungry. Despite only having an hour before his shift, we tempted fate and made the walk to the Acoustic Cafe for some soup and sandwiches. There, Evan showed us the prize he won at the hotel's restaurant the day before.

He received this as change- a dollar bill signed by assorted guests from Anime Milwaukee. There's Little Kuriboh, Wendy Powell, Todd Haberkorn, Chris Sabat, and one mystery autograph that logically should be Vic Mignogna but totally isn't. We spent most of lunch playing amateur graphologists to figure out who the hell that is.

We got back in time for Evan's shift, with enough time to spare to hang out with Kenny, Sarah B. and a few other folks that happened to be Geek.Kon staffers. We weren't having a staff meeting that day, but noticed that since Kenny and Sarah were our treasurer and secretary, we technically had a quorum.

After notwinning their Notaraffle (in fact, it's the first time I've attended No Brand's raffle since 2003 when a Milly Thompson cosplayer won practically everything), we stuck around for Closing Ceremonies.

Aside from having Trae, Cheesy, Katie and Yushi bringing up Mike's snoring, it was fun watching them try to hold their big announcement until the end: they were moving back to the Plaza for 2011. I've known about it for a month, but it still seems strange. Although they had a marginal dip in attendance this year, they've clearly outgrown the Ramada. The Plaza isn't much bigger, but has more hotel rooms and space that wasn't utilized in 2005. It also has a hot tub next to their swimming pool.

 Perhaps No Brand was another round of the usual, but it's hard to complain when the usual is this much fun. As always, the con seems to be something greater than what's on the schedule, when so many are friends with each other and excited about seeing one another. While Daisho thrives on excitement and ACen is always intent on being a show-stopping spectacular, No Brand is comfort food. They seem to be content with that- a nice change of pace with so many cons focused on bigger and better.

Speaking of which, I have a show-stopping spectacular to be at in two weeks.

It's not the end of the recap though. Not if you want to see all the Hetalia pictures from over the weekend.