Entry tags:
Senshi-Con, Denali, and general internetage
I am temporarily sneaking onto my grandma's internet (hiding out in the bedroom XD). I drove down this weekend to have a table at Senshi-Con, Anchorage's anime con (more on that in a minute). I am staying for the next few days to help Grandma move into her new senior-facility apartment and to provide various forms of assistance for my mom in facilitating the process.
Last night I couldn't sleep for awhile and I ended up writing a long report on Senshi-Con, which I did not have Internet to post, so that follows under the cut, and then some late-fall pictures from the Fairbanks-to-Anchorage drive last Thursday.
Okay, so, Senshi-Con. First of all, I've never been there. I've actually never been to an anime con at all. My big convention-tabling days were back in the early 2000s, and it was all comics conventions, mostly small press ones with a few big ones like Wizard World Chicago thrown in. I had absolutely no idea how my books would sell at an anime show. Turned out they sold pretty well! I think I could've done better if I'd marketed myself better and had more swag for sale -- this wasn't a comics-buying crowd, really, so much as a crowd that was looking for prints, key chains, and other cool gift-type things to take home with them. But I still sold enough to make back all my costs, and talked up my webcomic a bunch, so that was good!
And also, homigosh, Senshi-Con is BIG. I guess I was expecting a small local con, because Alaska, you know? I sort of forgot that Anchorage is, you know. A city. And while it wasn't, say, Wizard World Chicago levels of big, it was certainly on a par with something like SPX for size and number of attendees.
And they were ALL DRESSED UP. Since I've never been to an anime con before, I'm not sure if this is an anime con thing generally, or just a Senshi-Con thing. But I have never been to a con with so many cosplayers by volume. Probably 90% of the attendees were in costume, AT LEAST. In the first few hours of the first day, particularly, the number of people walking by my table who were NOT dressed up was maybe a dozen, out of hundreds or possibly thousands. (After that I think some people got tired of it, especially the ones with more elaborate costumes, and started walking around in street clothes.)
But, wow. It was such AMAZING sensory overload.
The crowd in general was also WAY more female, and more diverse, than I'm used to seeing at comics cons. It was something like 60% female, probably at least a third Asian plus a lot of other ethnicities too, a number of people who were evidently queer, and just generally not the overwhelmingly white and majority male crowd that was the norm at the comics cons I had tables at in the early 2000s.
In addition to cosplayers by the ton, there were also a lot of people who were just generally taking advantage of the occasion to dress up. There were a lot of Lolitas and Renfaire people, for example. A group of six or seven, I assume Japanese, young women came by my table in those super-expensive silk kimonos, with their hair and makeup done gorgeously -- they were pretty clearly out for the evening and not cosplaying something. The Anchorage Japanese consulate, of all people, had a booth where they were taking pictures of people in authentically designed Samurai armor. (I walked by it several times on my con walkabouts and/or bathroom dashes from my table before noticing who was running it, as per their sign. I gathered from snatches of overheard conversation that, in Japan anyway, Samurai armor and the wearing thereof is legally restricted by the government, so government representatives needed to be involved for this? Something like that.)
And the cosplays were really something. Most of them were amazingly elaborate. I saw very few that weren't absolutely going all out with theirs (and let me mention again that nearly everyone was dressed up -- it wasn't just that the 10% of the crowd in costume had really done a great job on their cosplays: it was EVERYBODY). The majority were anime and video game characters, and fandoms that tend to overlap with those, like Stephen Universe and Homestuck (SO MUCH of both of those, omg; also SO MANY UNICORNS and/or My Little Ponies). But there were also a smattering of just about every fandom under the sun. Most of the Korras and other Water Tribe characters I saw were being done by Native Alaskan cosplayers (and there was also a really adorable Korra and Asami who were clearly a couple, and whose costumes were amazing -- I wanted to take a picture for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
frith_in_thorns, but I sucked at taking pictures generally). There was a group of stunningly detailed Mad Max cosplayers. I was a little surprised, overall, that I didn't see more Mad Max cosplays, and particularly more Furiosas -- theirs was the only one I saw at the whole con. But they were really, really good costumes. There were the usual smattering of gender-bender costumes (nearly all the Buckys I saw were female, and a really AMAZING female Vegeta I wished, again, I'd gotten a picture of), including several guys cosplaying female characters, which again is something I don't recall seeing at comics cons. And then there were the costumes that were just total hilarious oddballs, like the family who came dressed as interlocking Tetris pieces, or the guy who was dressed up as Bert the chimney sweep from the Mary Poppins movie who went around the con singing snatches of the character's song (in a thick Cockney accent, of course) and doing bits of the dance number from the movie.
It was also really nifty to me how many of the cosplayers and Lolitas were moms with their kids along, often in costume too. There was a whole family who came as the cast of Firefly, including a Jayne who was a little girl of about five, with a Jayne hat and a big plastic gun, who was having an absolute blast mugging and looking fierce for all the people stopping them to take pictures. While, for the most part, the kids weren't dressed up as elaborately as the grownups, especially the young kids, there were a few family groups where it was clearly the kids who were the ones who were into it, and some of the child cosplays (I mean kids in the middle school to young teen age bracket, not LITTLE kids) were as detailed and gorgeous as the adult ones.
I wish I had pictures, but while I did TRY, none of them really captured the spectacle of the thing, and the handful of pictures I took of individual cosplayers were taken with my phone, and came out blurry or dark or otherwise not that great.
So you get Denali pictures instead.
Prior to Senshi-Con (I'm cleverly going in reverse chronological order here) I did the 6-hour drive from Fairbanks to Wasilla. Wasilla is an hour north of Anchorage, and that's where my family lives, so I stopped over in Wasilla before spending the weekend in Anchorage and then driving back out to Wasilla again.
I really love the Fairbanks-to-Anchorage drive, and I drive it several times a year, but THIS -- late fall -- is not a time of year that I've driven it much. (And the weather is now reminding me WHY freeze-up is a terrible time of year to go anywhere. It snowed 6 inches in Fairbanks the day after I left, has been raining buckets in Wasilla/Anchorage the whole time I've been here, which is supposed to turn to snow on Tuesday. And then another storm system is supposed to move in this weekend. Driving back is going to be awful no matter when I leave. >_>)
But ANYWAY, I've driven the highway a lot in late spring, summer, early fall, and winter, but have not seen it much at this time of year, after most of the leaves have fallen and the mountains gained a cap of snow, but before the landscape is thoroughly snow-blanketed. So here, have some pictures.
Tamarack trees. Tamarack, aka larch, is a kind of deciduous conifer that looks like a normal spruce/pine tree until it turns yellow in the fall and loses all its needles, at which point it just looks dead.
Denali from wayyyyy on the north side (around Nenana).
Frozen waterfall along the road in Denali National Park.
Although the waterfall had started to freeze, there was still water flowing. Closeup of a rainbow at the bottom.
Across the road from the waterfall, since I was stopped anyway, I walked down to the Nenana River to take some pictures of the lovely blue-green, glacier-fed water.
A couple pictures of the mountains in the park itself. The highway skirts the eastern edge of the park, and (ironically) Mt. Denali is not visible from the road inside the park -- it's concealed by mountains along the road. This was also not a particularly scenic time of year because everything was brown; two weeks earlier, it would have been flaming reds and yellows (like this or like this, for example).
South of the park, there are several lookouts alongside the road where you can get nice mountain views looking north, so here is one of them.
Last night I couldn't sleep for awhile and I ended up writing a long report on Senshi-Con, which I did not have Internet to post, so that follows under the cut, and then some late-fall pictures from the Fairbanks-to-Anchorage drive last Thursday.
Okay, so, Senshi-Con. First of all, I've never been there. I've actually never been to an anime con at all. My big convention-tabling days were back in the early 2000s, and it was all comics conventions, mostly small press ones with a few big ones like Wizard World Chicago thrown in. I had absolutely no idea how my books would sell at an anime show. Turned out they sold pretty well! I think I could've done better if I'd marketed myself better and had more swag for sale -- this wasn't a comics-buying crowd, really, so much as a crowd that was looking for prints, key chains, and other cool gift-type things to take home with them. But I still sold enough to make back all my costs, and talked up my webcomic a bunch, so that was good!
And also, homigosh, Senshi-Con is BIG. I guess I was expecting a small local con, because Alaska, you know? I sort of forgot that Anchorage is, you know. A city. And while it wasn't, say, Wizard World Chicago levels of big, it was certainly on a par with something like SPX for size and number of attendees.
And they were ALL DRESSED UP. Since I've never been to an anime con before, I'm not sure if this is an anime con thing generally, or just a Senshi-Con thing. But I have never been to a con with so many cosplayers by volume. Probably 90% of the attendees were in costume, AT LEAST. In the first few hours of the first day, particularly, the number of people walking by my table who were NOT dressed up was maybe a dozen, out of hundreds or possibly thousands. (After that I think some people got tired of it, especially the ones with more elaborate costumes, and started walking around in street clothes.)
But, wow. It was such AMAZING sensory overload.
The crowd in general was also WAY more female, and more diverse, than I'm used to seeing at comics cons. It was something like 60% female, probably at least a third Asian plus a lot of other ethnicities too, a number of people who were evidently queer, and just generally not the overwhelmingly white and majority male crowd that was the norm at the comics cons I had tables at in the early 2000s.
In addition to cosplayers by the ton, there were also a lot of people who were just generally taking advantage of the occasion to dress up. There were a lot of Lolitas and Renfaire people, for example. A group of six or seven, I assume Japanese, young women came by my table in those super-expensive silk kimonos, with their hair and makeup done gorgeously -- they were pretty clearly out for the evening and not cosplaying something. The Anchorage Japanese consulate, of all people, had a booth where they were taking pictures of people in authentically designed Samurai armor. (I walked by it several times on my con walkabouts and/or bathroom dashes from my table before noticing who was running it, as per their sign. I gathered from snatches of overheard conversation that, in Japan anyway, Samurai armor and the wearing thereof is legally restricted by the government, so government representatives needed to be involved for this? Something like that.)
And the cosplays were really something. Most of them were amazingly elaborate. I saw very few that weren't absolutely going all out with theirs (and let me mention again that nearly everyone was dressed up -- it wasn't just that the 10% of the crowd in costume had really done a great job on their cosplays: it was EVERYBODY). The majority were anime and video game characters, and fandoms that tend to overlap with those, like Stephen Universe and Homestuck (SO MUCH of both of those, omg; also SO MANY UNICORNS and/or My Little Ponies). But there were also a smattering of just about every fandom under the sun. Most of the Korras and other Water Tribe characters I saw were being done by Native Alaskan cosplayers (and there was also a really adorable Korra and Asami who were clearly a couple, and whose costumes were amazing -- I wanted to take a picture for
frith_in_thorns, but I sucked at taking pictures generally). There was a group of stunningly detailed Mad Max cosplayers. I was a little surprised, overall, that I didn't see more Mad Max cosplays, and particularly more Furiosas -- theirs was the only one I saw at the whole con. But they were really, really good costumes. There were the usual smattering of gender-bender costumes (nearly all the Buckys I saw were female, and a really AMAZING female Vegeta I wished, again, I'd gotten a picture of), including several guys cosplaying female characters, which again is something I don't recall seeing at comics cons. And then there were the costumes that were just total hilarious oddballs, like the family who came dressed as interlocking Tetris pieces, or the guy who was dressed up as Bert the chimney sweep from the Mary Poppins movie who went around the con singing snatches of the character's song (in a thick Cockney accent, of course) and doing bits of the dance number from the movie.It was also really nifty to me how many of the cosplayers and Lolitas were moms with their kids along, often in costume too. There was a whole family who came as the cast of Firefly, including a Jayne who was a little girl of about five, with a Jayne hat and a big plastic gun, who was having an absolute blast mugging and looking fierce for all the people stopping them to take pictures. While, for the most part, the kids weren't dressed up as elaborately as the grownups, especially the young kids, there were a few family groups where it was clearly the kids who were the ones who were into it, and some of the child cosplays (I mean kids in the middle school to young teen age bracket, not LITTLE kids) were as detailed and gorgeous as the adult ones.
I wish I had pictures, but while I did TRY, none of them really captured the spectacle of the thing, and the handful of pictures I took of individual cosplayers were taken with my phone, and came out blurry or dark or otherwise not that great.
So you get Denali pictures instead.
Prior to Senshi-Con (I'm cleverly going in reverse chronological order here) I did the 6-hour drive from Fairbanks to Wasilla. Wasilla is an hour north of Anchorage, and that's where my family lives, so I stopped over in Wasilla before spending the weekend in Anchorage and then driving back out to Wasilla again.
I really love the Fairbanks-to-Anchorage drive, and I drive it several times a year, but THIS -- late fall -- is not a time of year that I've driven it much. (And the weather is now reminding me WHY freeze-up is a terrible time of year to go anywhere. It snowed 6 inches in Fairbanks the day after I left, has been raining buckets in Wasilla/Anchorage the whole time I've been here, which is supposed to turn to snow on Tuesday. And then another storm system is supposed to move in this weekend. Driving back is going to be awful no matter when I leave. >_>)
But ANYWAY, I've driven the highway a lot in late spring, summer, early fall, and winter, but have not seen it much at this time of year, after most of the leaves have fallen and the mountains gained a cap of snow, but before the landscape is thoroughly snow-blanketed. So here, have some pictures.
Tamarack trees. Tamarack, aka larch, is a kind of deciduous conifer that looks like a normal spruce/pine tree until it turns yellow in the fall and loses all its needles, at which point it just looks dead.
Denali from wayyyyy on the north side (around Nenana).
Frozen waterfall along the road in Denali National Park.
Although the waterfall had started to freeze, there was still water flowing. Closeup of a rainbow at the bottom.
Across the road from the waterfall, since I was stopped anyway, I walked down to the Nenana River to take some pictures of the lovely blue-green, glacier-fed water.
A couple pictures of the mountains in the park itself. The highway skirts the eastern edge of the park, and (ironically) Mt. Denali is not visible from the road inside the park -- it's concealed by mountains along the road. This was also not a particularly scenic time of year because everything was brown; two weeks earlier, it would have been flaming reds and yellows (like this or like this, for example).
South of the park, there are several lookouts alongside the road where you can get nice mountain views looking north, so here is one of them.
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Whenever we visit Pfeffa's sister, Denali is invisible behind clouds.
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-29 04:18 am (UTC)(link)no subject
Denali has a habit of doing that. I think it's shy around strangers.
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Yea, I could have told you that about Anime cons. Dress up and cosplay and do little skits like no-one's business! I've been to a few, and that's been the theme - as well as the masses of artist tables with things like buttons, small prints, pillows, keychains, pouches, lanyards, etc, etc, etc. I went to a few because of the smaller artists and that there are a lot of them. My big problem last time was I knew NONE of the anime that was popular and it was like WOAH on the amount of stuff that I had no clue on.
So I'm glad you went and had fun! and that it was big! :)
Comic con has artists tables... but they are by and large by big professional artists, a little stuck up, with just prints and hanger's on. So it's not really fun to go through them.
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Even a decade ago, when I was regularly selling my comics at cons, Comicon was too expensive to be worth doing for me. I imagine it's only gotten worse now, and I gather it's really more of a pop culture con, and not really someplace that people go to buy comics and art from artists like they do at smaller cons.
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Though those pics from the road - WOW. What a gorgeous place you live in! (Too bad about the crappy weather coming stay safe!)
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I'm told one of the best parts of anime cons is the cosplayers and the chance to cosplay. I think it's the joy of the masquerade, and certainly the pictures I've seen from various anime cons demonstrate gorgeous, often well-made and hand-made outfits with significant attention to detail.