Emptyeye

Last weekend was the second-annual Gobble-Con, a small convention that this year took place at the Stamford Plaza Hotel, eventually to be renamed the Stamford Crown Plaza. I arrived at noon and got my badge. Unfortunately, my hotel room wasn’t ready yet, so I left to go get some food. Something I didn’t realize: Summer Street, that the hotel is located on, is one-way. And I had pretty much no navigational aids with me whatsoever (Other than, I realize as I type this a week after the fact, possibly an atlas in the back of my car. Doh!).

After stopping at the “Wedge Inn” (A wedge, in Stamford, sounds like what I know as a “grinder”) for some chicken tenders and curly fries, I attempted to navigate my way back to the hotel. Essentially, I knew I had to take a left off of Summer Street, then another left until I was going back the way I came. Luckily for me, I found a street name that looked familiar–the other option when leaving the hotel’s parking lot. I pull in said lot right as the epic part of Yes’s “Close to the Edge” kicked in, which struck me as fitting.

Returning to the hotel, I decided to use my laptop for a bit before I went off to the Opening Ceremonies. This lasted all of about 10 minutes before the battery gave out. No joke. And my room still wasn’t ready yet (It was between 1:30 and 2:00 PM on Friday at this point). Back in the car the computer went, and off to opening Ceremonies I went. Generally speaking, I’m not big on Opening Ceremonies at conventions, ever since MAGFest 4, where I felt vaguely talked down to by the fact that the ceremonies consisted mostly of “MAGFest staff read most of the program to you, apparently under the impression that you’re too stupid to do this yourself”. But it’s not like I was doing anything else–I went on my own, a lot of my friends wouldn’t be arriving until Saturday, and my room wasn’t ready.

Fortunately, this opening ceremonies wasn’t as patronizing, due in part to the fact that, being a second-year convention on a shoestring budget (More on this a bit later), there was no program to speak of to read from. I learned about the convention’s special guests, Robert Axelrod (Best known, James Earl Jones-as-Darth Vader-style, as the voice of Lord Zedd in various early Power Rangers incarnations) and Tiffany Grant (Best known as the voice of Asuka in Neon Genesis Evangelion).

After finally checking into my room a little after 3PM (I couldn’t be too mad, as that’s when the official check-in time was), the rest of my Friday consisted mainly of going to halves of a couple panels, including the second half of the Cosplaying on a Budget panel, as well as the Gobble Tonight Show panel, a convention-related spoof of the late show (Think Letterman, etc) paradigm. This featured the alter-egos of two of the main characters of Gobble-Con, Cobra Commander and A Count Named Slickbrass. Or more accurately, Toga Commander and A Count Named Silkbrass. This was funny stuff, and the person who ran the panel wants to do it more “properly” at other conventions, which is something I’d like to see.

Other things I did on Friday included going to the dealers’ room/artist alley, where I bought a Mega Man X perler, and a How to Draw Manga book. I’m an interesting case in the convention fandom in that, while I really like the art style of manga/anime, I don’t actually watch or read a lot of it. My knowledge of Sailor Moon, for instance, is based pretty much entirely on the binging of The Abridged Series I did for the last month or so (Although it was weird to watch The Abridged Series and somehow recall random fragments of the “proper” episodes, since I hadn’t seen them in about 15 years, and even then only bits and pieces.).

Saturday came around, and I went down to purchase a couple more pieces of art from the dealer’s room. One was a piece of art showing a dark angel in the moonlight, and the other depicts Link shouting “HEY LISTEN!” at Navi…whom he’s taped to a lit bomb, which is something pretty much everyone who has played Ocarina of Time has wanted to do at some time.

Also Saturday, I went down to registration to find out that my panel’s time had been moved again, from 4:30 to 6:30PM. In theory, this was good, as a later start time would mean a bigger audience. In theory. In practice, I looked at the schedule…and saw I was now competing directly with the second half of the Cosplay Masquerade.

If you’ve never been to a pop-culture convention before, the Cosplay Masquerade is almost invariably one of the biggest events. In other words, pretty much everyone would be there.

I felt like shouting DOOOOOOOOOON!! William Shatner-style at this point.

The good news was that the panel had now been expanded by a half hour, to an hour and a half. With the hour I had been given, I was more or less going to put what I did in the panel up to popular vote (Option 1: lecture Power-Point style like I did at Gobble-Con 2010. Option 2: Attempt to talk about speedrunning in general while running live through Mega Man X); with the extra half-hour, I was fairly sure I could fit both parts in under the wire (Turning the MMX section into talking speedrunning strategies on the game specifically) if I did the lecture part quickly enough, knowing how long it look me to run through MMX (Generally 43-45 minutes). The first part was going to be the question mark, since I’ll admit I wasn’t nearly as prepared this year as I was last year.

Last year was my first time doing a panel for a convention, and this year would bring another first–my first time cosplaying. As I wrote on a Facebook update,
“I’m pretty sure there are very few places on Earth where a quest to procure batteries for a Rock Band 2 drum kit can end in agreeing to be Tuxedo Mask as part of a Sailor Moon cosplay group….ladies and gentlemen, my October 2011 Connecticon Member Appreciation Day.”
That’s the short story of how I got roped into it. Basically, I got asked, figured “I have most of the parts already, how hard can it really be?” and said “Okay, sure.”

As it turns out, the answer to “How hard can it be?” is “Actually, pretty hard”. There’s a lot of detail that goes into making a costume that you don’t tend to think about. The gold buttons on Tuxedo Mask’s suit were something that I had to add myself. Additionally, while I owned a cape, I didn’t own one with red lining, so I had to head to Joann Fabric, buy two sheets of fabric (One black, one red), and make the cape myself using fabric glue, allowing me to cheat the process of stitching them together. Further, I had to attach the cape to the suit by poking a couple holes in it and pushing the shoulder buttons through the holes. While this actually worked, I was convinced that it looked terrible–compared to how he looks in the anime, the cape was way too wide at the shoulders, or so I thought. It was probably also a bit short, but honestly, this was a relief after a year-plus of going to events wearing a cape that hit the ground with four inches to spare.

My friend Katie, who was one of the ringleaders of the whole thing (And, I’m pretty sure, the person who originally asked “Are you going to Gobble-Con?” and kicked the train into motion), and everyone else in the group was supposed to get there at about 12:30PM Saturday, which was actually the original, original time for my panel. As 12:30 became 1:00, which became 1:30, which became 2:00, I was becoming vaguely concerned that the whole thing was some elaborate practical joke played on me to get me to dress up as Tuxedo Mask for no particular reason…in which case, I would’ve had to applaud everyone for the sheer scope of it (This, if it had been a practical joke, would’ve involved multiple pictures posted to Facebook of the cohorts sewing stuff, plus my friend Cels actually bringing the bows for the Sailor Scout costumes to one of the Connecticon Member Appreciation Days.). But finally, at around 2:45, I looked down at the lobby from the third floor hallway and saw a huge group of Sailor Scouts. I headed down, minus the suit/cape (Because I was still convinced it looked awful.). After taking a few pictures, I went back to my room, basically waiting for Cels to come up and make the alterations to the cape that I thought were necessary. While I knew on a theoretical level what I thought was wrong, I was afraid to actually make the alterations myself, knowing that I didn’t have another chance or a plan B if I screwed up and cut off more than I meant to. Cels, on the other hand, basically does costume stuff for a living, so I expected her to look at it and cut off the excess perfectly in about three seconds.

At 4:30, I more or less got impatient and said “forget it” and went down with the cape and suit. And…Cels thought it looked fine, as did everyone else. Had I known that was going to be the outcome, I wouldn’t have hid in my room for an hour-plus before coming down with it. Either way, though, after about a half hour of picture-taking, I headed back to my room to get ready for my 6:30 panel. Packing up stuff and heading down to the panel room, my worst fear attendance-wise was realized: I was, at that point, the only person besides one volunteer in the room. One person eventually showed up. To spin this into a positive, it was a very intimate, low-pressure environment in which to do the panel. And I got through both parts of it with about five minutes to spare. The people who did watch it seemed to like it, and the volunteer did his best to try and get the few people not at the masquerade into the panel room, largely without success. The Mega Man X run went fine, as I finished in 44:01. There was a time when I would have killed for that time, but now I can pull off a sub-45 run pretty consistently, which is nice.

At some point early afternoon Saturday, I also went to most of the Best of Robert Axelrod panel, where he showed some of his favorite clips from various voice-acting he’s done, discussed behind-the-scenes stuff (The reason for three of the original Power Rangers leaving the show boiled down to “They wanted more money”.), talked about some techniques he used in achieving voices (Lord Zedd is a lot of diaphragm), and so on. Pretty good stuff, worth my time despite my honestly not being interested in the guests specifically beforehand.

Late on Saturday, after not-insignificant quantities of rum, I went down to the 18+ Cosplay Court Case, where (amongst other things) Sailor Saturn was accused of being a prostitute, and a Vocaloid was accused of ear rape. Also, I was a bailiff, which basically meant I stood around and looked cool up front. This was fun, and a little chaotic (For the Vocaloid case, the prosecution and defense had to switch, because neither one played their appointed role very well), probably helped by the fact that I was far from the only inebriated person there.

On Sunday morning, I got up, checked out of my room, and went down to the registration desk, where to my surprise, there was a “Pre-Reg for Gobble-Con 2012″ sign out. The reason this was a surprise is that, long story short, attendance for Gobble-Con 2011 was not what was expected, and large quantities were owed to the hotel to the point that the convention was actually extended with some impromptu panels, from 1PM to 6PM. Sunday highlights included a panel run by Robert Axelrod concerning doing voice-overs for commercials. I actually tried my hand at a Chili’s commercial circa 2000, and I guess I did okay. This, too, is fun stuff, and something I could see myself doing part-time, if I could figure out how to get into it. There are apparently some sites out there dedicated to this, but I’d be spending a lot more than I think I’d stand to make were I to join one of those sites.

Another Sunday highlight was seeing how much the convention meant to the attendees. Despite the pre-registration sign, there was no guarantee of a third Gobble-Con actually happening, the financial situation was so dire. Luckily, just before I left, there was confirmation that it’s taking place next year, and indeed, preliminary work on guests has already started. Also, I really could have used one of the extended panels on Saturday, as one of the things I learned about cosplay was essentially “Don’t halfass it, but it’s okay if you’re not 100% accurate to the character, and in fact, your own spin on it can actually improve the costume.” Still, it’s good to know for the future. I just consider the cape and mask my own personal spin on it now.

In short, it was a lot of fun, and the lack of size of the convention makes it easy to meet and talk with people. It’s a lot of fun, and you should check it out next time if you’re in the Connecticut area.

-EE

Links!

• My photos. Note that I commented in proper chronological order. For a “proper” narrative, start here and keep clicking “Previous” until you get back to the “first” picture. Otherwise, it’s going to be like watching Memento.
• Pre-register for 2012 here. Just click on the “order now” button (Make sure any script blockers are off). I already pre-registered, and you should too!
• Steam-Funk’s website. The aforementioned A Count Named Slickbrass, who basically got his start (So to speak) at Gobble 2010, runs the group.
• Royal Nerd’s site. They’re the people in the picture here.
• Eric LaCore Photography, who took a bunch of other pictures at the convention.

So I’m about a month away from Gobble-Con 2.0, where I’ll be giving the So You Want to be a Speedrunner panel again. This time, I have a bunch of new videos to show, and I asked for a second hour to do a live run of Mega Man X, even though the game play won’t take a full hour. With setup and the like, an hour sounds reasonable. My current best time through the game getting everything is 41 minutes and 46 seconds (Which is actually only about 20 seconds slower than my time not getting everything, even though the two should be about 4 minutes apart if I were a top-tier player at either of them).

I’ve been keeping up on the writing thing as well, although I’ve failed to get anything published as yet. That’s fine, because I’m still pretty new at the whole thing. As long as the ideas keep flowing, I’ll break through eventually.

-EE

(For more on the title, check this out. It’s in regards to this convention I attended.)

This past weekend, I attended the first-ever Gobble-Con in Milford, Connecticut at the Hilton Garden Inn. In contrast to Connecticon, or even to MAGFest, Gobble-Con is a small (about 300 attended), first-year convention created to fill the gap between cons in the Connecticut area, as not much really goes on in that department later in the year.

I arrived late on Friday morning to…not really a lot. As it turned out, registration took place to the left of where I had entered, and the actual picking up of the badge for pre-registrations was to the right, actually inside of a hotel room. The setup was a bit strange, but probably the best they could have done given that the actual registration desk was off in a corner, in a relatively high-traffic area for the convention, right by the dealer’s room and two panel rooms, as well as the screening room.

While I didn’t really have to be there until early Saturday morning for my panel, I figured I should check out the convention on Friday and see what it had to offer, as well as hand out business cards and try to drum up interest in said panel (It being at 9AM Saturday morning, combined with this being a convention geared toward [although not exclusively for] a 21+ crowd, meant I was going to need all the help I could get in that regard, 9AM Saturday being “Booze-induced sleepytime” as SDA member DBallin called it). At opening ceremonies, I meet a person named Oliver who was doing a Kingdom Hearts-related panel on Sunday morning, and who offered to record my panel for me, as he was interested in it anyway–an offer I quickly accepted, not really having any high-quality ways to do so myself.

I then checked out the Game Room, which was really more of a Pachinko freeplay room with a couple gaming systems off in the corners. I will say this: It was cool to actually see these machines firsthand and get to try them out. That said, I’ll admit that I don’t really see what the excitement is all about, although that’s probably a reflection of me moreso than the concept itself–I also don’t see what the big deal is about slot machines, preferring to use them to compose progressive rock albums rather than actually trying to win money on them.

If you’ve never played Pachinko before, or heard of it, it’s essentially slots meets pinball. You have a bunch of small metal balls that launch into the playing field via a knob; how far you leave the knob turned to the right affects the power the balls are launched with. Your goal is to get the balls into a slot in the middle, at which point a slot machine kicks in. If you get a lucky spin of the slots, your payout is…more balls. In this case, filling up a tray full of balls got you entered into a drawing to win money toward the purchase of a Pachinko machine; in Japan’s Pachinko parlors, I’ve read, the balls can be exchanged for various prizes.

There were two specific panels I had wanted to check out on Friday, glancing at the schedule. The first, Cosplay/Con Survival, basically turned into the Foamy the Squirrel (Warning: Link not really work-safe) panel, although the first video tied in with the message the panel was originally supposed to have (Namely, “Take a freaking shower every once in awhile”). The second was a panel on Sailor Moon (Yes, really), that got into some of the non-anime media the series has had over the years, such as a live-action series, a bunch of musicals, and some foreign-language commercials for it. It was pretty neat to actually see some of this stuff I had heard about, but never really sought out due to laziness amongst other things. They also showed some of the differences between the American and Japanese versions of the series.

I should note that I actually missed the beginning of this panel because, between the two panels (Which were scheduled one right after the other), I decided “Hey, getting a Long Island Iced Tea from the bar would be a good idea. Drinking the entirety of it in 20 minutes so I can make most of this Sailor Moon panel would be an even better idea!” This led to a text message to Silver stating that, in fact, this was not such a good idea, and that I wouldn’t be home for awhile due to my need to sober up. Don’t worry, I remember everything I did, and I didn’t do anything that I regret at all, although I can now cross off “Wind up in the hotel room of a female stranger while drunk” off of my Convention-To-Do list. No, nothing happened, and I remember exactly how I got there. We struck up a conversation, and I asked if I could tag along with her and her friends while I sobered up. She said yes, and then I followed them to their room, and just sat there talking to them while they got ready to go to the Totally-Not-A-Rave Informal Dance that night.

I briefly went to said dance, but then had to head home to try and get to bed kind of early for my 9AM panel. I succeeded well enough in this, and made it back on Saturday morning with plenty of time to spare. Once there, I had a couple surprises waiting for me. The first was that the room was still a frosty 62 degrees thanks to the Still-Not-A-Rave Informal Dance. The second was that the panel after me, dealing with the Sailor Moon musicals I had mentioned earlier, needed use of my laptop to both rehearse and actually use for their panel.

I could go on about those things or other factors out of my control, but truth be told, I think I did pretty okay with what I could control. My two main mistakes were not stopping on the comic long enough, which made me feel like a jerk, and forgetting about a black slide just before the excerpt from my glitchy TMNT run, which probably went unnoticed. Well, there was also the fact that the slideshow wasn’t quite full screen, but hey. The few people that were there seemed to like the panel, which was reinforced by talking to Don (The guy who runs the convention) later on. He basically told me that I already have a panel slot for next year (Presuming that A. There is a next year and B. I actually want the slot). So I guess I did all right.

I then watched the Sailor Moon Musical, or “Sera Myu”, panel, and not entirely because they were using my laptop either. In the middle of the panel, what is apparently a new convention tradition for me occurred (I got a similar on Saturday morning of Connecticon 2010): The helpdesk at work called. Apparently someone at a branch was trying to close a loan, but was getting a warning preventing them from doing so. Not really knowing whether the particulars behind the warning’s programming had changed recently, and not being in a position to be able to log into the system even if I had wanted to, all the advice I could offer amounted to “Try having them follow what the warning says”. I didn’t get a call back, so I’m hoping that did the trick. In any event, this was a fun panel too, and apparently they had it even harder than I did–besides the lack of a laptop, their web mistress and main tech person was in the hospital the day before, meaning at least one of them was literally seeing the slideshow they had lined up for the first time as they were doing it live. This is obviously not an ideal situation.

After that was a lot of wandering about the convention, going into the Game Room and the Dealer’s Room, and getting commissions of little Christmas ornaments and artwork that I may take pictures of and link to here.

In all, it was a fun time for a small convention, and I’ll in all likelihood go to it again next year.

Links!
The pictures I took
Legendary Senshi- the New England Sera Myu Society, who borrowed my laptop for their panel
So and Sew Plushies, who made the ornaments I mentioned above
Chi Studios, who did the art that is the first picture on my Gobble-Con album.

-EE

Super Mario Bros
-When Mario is moving downwards, his collision priority takes precedence over that of the enemy. Thus, Mario will stomp on an enemy and kill it, even if it looks like he should die.
-Andrew hesitates for a split second at the end of 8-3 to stop the clock at 242 instead of 243, and thus avoid the fireworks that would cost him real-time.

F-Zero X
-Several advanced techniques are used here.
-One is sliding, which is self-explanatory: sliding around a corner to increase your speed during and coming out of it. This can be combined with boosting on any lap after the first to increase speed further.
-Another is rail-sliding—starting a slide, then grazing a wall and holding contact as long as you can to increase speed on a straightaway.
-Finally, there’s double-tap diving. The double-tap is a basic method of attack, but doing a double-tap while inside of a dive (EG coming off of a jump) will increase your speed very quickly.

Double Dragon II: The Revenge
-There’s actually nothing super-advanced or obscure here, just the fact that the flying knee is really hard to do once (As mentioned, it’s a 4-frame window after landing from a jump), let alone to chain together consistently.
-Yes, dropping straight down to his death is the quickest way to advance.

Final Fantasy VI
-Oh boy. Pretty much everything here requires an explanation—for the complete breakdown, check out Essentia’s full comments. Here are the basics.
1.Setzer’s special move is the Slots. Two possible combinations are 7-7-7 (Called Joker Doom; kills all enemies regardless of immunity) and 7-7-Bar (Also called Joker Doom; under ordinary circumstances, kills your entire party).
2.While 7-7-Bar normally kills your party, this can be manipulated to instead kill the enemies. The entirety of the strategy in the sequence rests on this (As well as the fact that 7-7-Bar is allowed to occur in the battle, while 7-7-7 will never occur in this battle under any circumstances). This is done via muddling and un-muddling Setzer. More precisely, the muddling has to be done as 7-7-Bar is being input, and the un-mudding must occur between the input and Setzer’s actually “casting” the slots. This is the primary method of attack.
3.The killing off of Gogo and Setzer is so they can be brought back with low HP. This will allow Celes, who A. has the True Knight accessory equipped, and B. is basically invulnerable thanks to her equipment setup, to protect them from pretty much any attack while the Joker Doom trick is being set up. Vanishing Gogo before killing him is to override his equipment setup; his being Vanished allows magic to always hit him regardless of his equipment (Otherwise, like Celes, he’s essentially invincible).
4.Gogo mimes Joker Doom twice per tier because of the way Miming works. It essentially attempts to duplicate the previous attack exactly—in other words, it attempts to Joker Doom an already-dead set of enemies the first time. The second time, it works properly.

I ran through the presentation again today. We’re about two and a half weeks again from Gobble-Con, so I really have to get practicing that again. I’m probably going to dry-run it at the next Connecticon M.A.D, which will give me some experience with doing it in front of people. Silver also suggested that I record myself giving the presentation. This is actually a good idea, although I don’t know how I’m supposed to do it.

With just over a month to go until Gobble-Con, I ran through the audio portion of my panel today while I was making dinner. In a couple weeks, I hope to actually run everything through in front of an audience, such that it will be. I think I did okay, considering I was attempting to multi-task while I was going through said audio. Of course, actually getting the slideshow re-integrated with it will be another matter.

Knowing that I really need to practice the presentation for Gobble-Con, but being lazy at the same time, last night I struck a compromise and ran through the audio part of it, IE what I want to say. I’ll have to do some more of that in the coming weeks if I really want to get this down to the point that I’ll be confident at the convention itself. Hopefully I get there.

Admittedly not a lot of progress to report today. What I did do was put “Mention Q&A” in its proper place near the beginning of the notes I have for the presentation, which will help me, you know, remember to mention it. And that’s about it, really.

After not thinking about the panel for Gobble-Con for over 2 weeks, I ran through the material again earlier tonight. And that’s really about the only positive thing that can be said about it. I took longer than I had before, and it was just generally not very good–I still forgot to mention important stuff like the fact that there would be a Q&A and handouts and the like. Yeesh.

I think from here on out, I’m going to have to run through the panel weekly, to A. keep everything in my head, B. refine everything a bit more, and C. hopefully get my confidence to the point where I’m not making all sorts of nervous gestures.

-EE

I made another pass through the presentation today, this time using the notes that I stated I had created in a previous entry. This time went much quicker, 43 minutes, which is just about where I want to be. I think this was primarily due to cutting out material, stories, etc. rather than actually speaking quicker. Unfortunately, I still have nervous habits with my hands (Clasping them, passing the remote back and forth between them) that I’ll have to try and eliminate. On the other hand, the speech part of it is coming along pretty well. The other piece of good news is that there’s enough video footage that I really only have to memorize small parts at a time, at which point I can consult my notes while everyone else is watching the video, which will get me through to the next video, etc.