When I see the way you paint your lips and I smell your perfume...

Photos posted recently:
WisCon 32 (May-2008)
Mother's Day at the Faire (11-May-2008)
Culture Day - Gamble House (01-Jun-2008)
LASFS/Aftermeetings part 322: Coral Cafe (06-Jun-2008)
Dad's Birthday Lunch (10-Jun-2008)
Allie & Glenn's Wedding (14-Jun-2008) et seq. (morning photos not previously uploaded)
Cosplay Picnic at Santa Monica Beach (15-Nov-2008)
Anime Los Angeles 5 meetings part 31: Exec, General Meeting (16-Nov-2008) et seq.
Indianapolis Trip (Nov-2008)
LosCon 35 (Nov-2008)
Picture of helen_keeble is from wiscon.

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What happened, did I fall off a cliff? Not exactly. I think I owe y'all a recap of my fall and winter since my last installment. Let's pick up the story with Part 1 of my four-part PMX report. The post I made on animelosangeles doesn't count here, and for the most part I'm repeating everything I said there anyway. (Other installments: part 2, part 3, part 4.)

Pacific Media Expo was the first full weekend of November.

( My Friday morning started out with a detour to pick up Selina. We had about ten people representing Anime Los Angeles over the course of the weekend... )

library_lynn (left) was able to come out for part of the weekend! Hooray! My lovely wife doesn't make it to that many of the conventions on the circuit, because she works about three Saturdays a month. So on the whole, it was a weekend with some of my favorite people.

The fine folks at PMX had given us a choice spot, on the side of Artists' Alley closest to the elevators (right). With our shiny new red tablecloth, we had an eyecatching location. The Downstairs Team spent the weekend there, giving away postcards, Shinbunshi (our newsletter), and temporary tattoos with le_moose's "Chibi Winking Ala" on them, granola bars, gummy worms, and bottles of water; and sold some silly ribbons to raise money for all the ribbons we give away for free at animelosangeles. Also they had some ribbons to give away freely as they wandered the convention, to add to the buzz. I'm thinking next year we'll have an ask-for-it-nicely ribbon -- if you say "May I please have an xyzzy ribbon" you'll get that one.

( It's been pointed out that sometimes I'm ambiguously snarky, or even passive-aggressive, in my LJ posts. So let me state this plainly: I like Pacific Media Expo... )

If anyone's likely to invite Sam Bak Za, they can do it and not have it conflict with their charter.

( Does PMX have problems? )

They're a small convention with big-convention connections. Oh, I'm green with envy on that front -- one of my set pieces has to do with "big conventions can do things little cons can't, and little conventions can do things big cons can't" and they're straddling both areas. (Do I need to add a caveat that "...and PMX can do everything?") Just as one example, they're bringing in Asian fashion designers you won't see at Animé Los Angeles or at Anime Expo. And they seem to be giving AX a run for their money as far as bringing in musical acts.

They're doing okay. I hear they had about 1400-plus people, and that they were up a little from last year. There's a great community of people that appreciate PMX for its unique aspects, especially regarding art and fashion. They're trying interactive events such as a Cowboy Bebop event, which reminds me a little of what Rum Party has been doing at other SoCal conventions. And tatsugawa is encouraging people to participate, to bring in more ideas. Anyone want to report on how PMX is using Facebook and Myspace?

To be continued...

...when I see the brand new color that you've dyed your hair too...

Continuing with Part 2 of my four-part Pacific Media Expo report. pmx was in November, so I'm only eleven weeks behind realtime. (Other installments: part 1, part 3, part 4.)

( I'd booked us three rooms so that we'd all have a place to sleep... )

Having the room on the "Hollywood Garden" (right) made a world of difference compared to last time. Also, there's the simple fact that a lot more people knew about Animé Los Angeles 5 than knew about Animé Los Angeles 4 (because about 500 more people had been to the convention), but it's hard to downplay the importance of location, location, location. In 2007, we'd been on the pool deck, and a few people stumbled across our room, and we had a space downstairs in Artists' Alley with a small scrawled sign telling people about the PB&J upstairs. This year, a lot more people knew about us, a lot more people found us, and with more people on the team representing the convention there were a lot more opportunities to talk up the convention.

( We ran a Peanut Butter & Jelly Room in the room at the Hilton... )

People really appreciated our free food. Some of them were eating the frozen macaroni and cheese before it was up to room temperature, to say nothing of it being "warm" or "hot" yet -- we need to start the mac & cheese sooner, and we need to keep it somewhere else until we want to serve it. Checking in Thursday night will help with this. It also might make sense to have two crockpots going, perhaps starting them an hour or two apart, rather than putting two catering-size packages of mac & cheese into one crockpot.

We kept the room open until midnight (not counting a dinner break in there) which is probably longer than it needed to be open. On Friday evening I really didn't want to close up until that night's batch of mac & cheese was all gone. On Saturday night, when people drifted off to the dance and the other evening events, they didn't come back later. Next year we'll probably close at 10:00 pm. We certainly could use more time to clean up Saturday night at the end of it all.

To be continued...

...I know you know it's more than physical...

Continuing with Part 3 of my four-part Pacific Media Expo report. pmx was in November, so I'm only eleven weeks behind realtime. (Other installments: part 1, part 2, part 4.)

( We've been using the publicity tour to train my minions, with mixed success... )

My best minions are likely to "graduate" to other positions from one year to the next, which is great. I'll talk more about that when I catch up to this year's convention.

( We've been trying to recruit people to join the Anime Los Angeles staff... )

The publicity tour, aka the convention circuit: it's certainly not a short circuit. I estimate that I spent 10% of my nights in 2008 sleeping in hotel rooms, and that's likely to go up slightly for 2009. I've spent a lot of my time on the road giving the same speeches. (And I've identified two new ones I need to add, which could be abbreviated water and ops. More about those later.)

In the "Is Anime LA worth the consideration?" thread that turns up on Cosplay.com every year, I summarized most of my usual subjects when I said: I'd be happy to talk at length about how things are run. Some keywords for that dissertation: non-profit, volunteers, pass-on system, rollovers, memberships vs. tickets, student discount, military, groups, parent-in-tow, postcard art contests, mascot, fairy godfather, minion, ribbons, open meetings, divisions and departments, framework for creativity, choose to have fun, we are all "us," McGuire's conversational theory of conventions, community, Standlee's potluck theory of fandom, forum participation, outreach, noisy/quiet floors... A number of you who've been by my side all the while know these by heart. With any luck, the memes are trickling out into the wider world, too. If I'm not careful, somebody's going to make a Chaz Bingo card for these topics someday.

( Julia (right) interviewed me wearing her ''Sailor Venus'' costume... )

The Traveling Valentine article on PMX has a splash picture taken in our PB&J room. I'm flattered that they considered the crowd in our room to be iconic enough to represent the convention as a whole. Traveling Valentine is getting better at their reporting -- I've watched Vic's journalism improve over the years, from being mostly a personal diary full of in-jokes to more thoughtful and methodical coverage. And their tagline was: Ain't no party like an Anime Los Angeles party so I guess that means we should keep partying on, dudes.

To be continued...