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Oh what a weekend. Where to start. I suppose a food place to begin is to apologize for the lack of any “live video”. For starters, once there I had completely oped against the laptop/ustream live streaming idea because it was inconvenient. Then I couldn’t for the life of me get my phone to send any email. It must be running in some weird roaming mode that’s incompatible with my so ervice. I’m sure they will (already have by the time I post this) all spill out some where on the road on the trip home.

Why already have?

I get to the hotel and I can’t for the life of me get the internet to connect. This sucks because A) I NEED to log on remotely and take care of a short maintenance task at work. And two, I can’t make blog posts. My only means of blogging anything has been Twitter through my Blackjack. . I’ve gained at least 3 followers from it though.

On the subject of the hotel. I recommend against the Travelodge in Sharonsville. The internet access doesn’t work. I made my reservation for Friday two weeks prior to this event. I call the place up at like 9 PM Friday and make sure they are going to hold my reservation if I arrive late. The guy on the phone looks up my name and says they will have my room. When I finally arrive at 1:30 AM, a very rude foreign guy who hardly speaks English tells me my reservation had canceled automatically at 6PM and now I’ve got to pay 10 dollars more per night for an upgraded room. I realize it’s only ten dollars and I didn’t bother to argue at that time of night but the fact is I had CALLED AND MADE SURE at a time that was ALREADY PAST THE EXPIRATION of my reservation.

So enough bitching about the hotel, on to the trip itself.

Friday, After mowing the lawn and dropping my kids off at school, I head out on the road for the 5 hour drive to Cincinnati, which I can never spell correctly no matter how many times I correct it. Somewhere along the road I realize “There is a time change, I’m going to get there are two thirty not one thirty and the zoo still closes at five. After some debate I decide to go ahead and hit the zoo anyway. I can’t get into the con and I need something to kill two and a half hours. I’m glad I did because it’s a very nice zoo.

I should just mention I love photographing at zoos. I’ve started a small hobby of trying to see how many different zoos I can go to (4 Large ones so far and 1 small one). The Cincinnati Zoo doubles as Botanical Gardens which means there are gorgeous flowers everywhere. Also the animals were more active than I’ve seen at many zoos, especially the apes and monkeys (I’m sure the nice weather helped). I took a ton of photos which can be found in this Flickr Set (Eventually). I’ll add more once I develop my film. I broke out my old Minolta and man, I had forgotten how nice to looks when you look through that glass.

Anyway, around 4:50 as I’m finishing up photographing the penguins, I get a call from Naladahc. He and his group and going out for dinner and they wanted to see where I was at. I told them I’d meet them at the hotel.

A half hour or so late, I’m meeting up with 75% of the “Non professional Transfandom Blogging Community”. I’ve never met someone I only know vie the internet before. It’s very interesting actually. I’ve read stuff they have written, I’ve seen photos of them, it actually is almost like meeting up with someone you know in real life. For the most part, no one really felt like a stranger and the whole environment was pretty comfortable. It makes me wonder what it would be like to meet up with Rob or Shannon, a couple of people I’ve known via the Final Fantasy fandom for nearly twelve years now. I have known those two longer than I’ve known any non family person in my entire life.

Anyway, dinner was very entertaining and it’s fun to watch how other bloggers operate. This first group consisted of Naladahc, Giga, Mr. Terrific, Teresa, and a friend of Naladahc and GigaMutt, JKNotRowling. We went to an restaurant which was located across the street from the hotel. After the food we headed back to the hotel for some very very uneventful “room trading”. Which lasted about ten minutes before we all landed in the bar downstairs for a few hours of crazy yacking and general mayhem. It was a lot of fun.

I left around 12:30 ~ 1AMish and had the previously mentioned trouble at my hotel. The next morning, I managed to completely sleep through my alarm clock by twenty minutes, something I NEVER do, which was kind of odd. After cleaning up I headed out to find gas and a Wal-Mart to buy some breakfast. This turned out to be a totally awesome idea when I found a lone Transformers Animated Bulkhead and a pair of the Optimus vs Megatron two pack. I picked up the two packs for my fellow bloggers and bought the Bulkhead for myself.

I should probably explain for anyone not familiar with the situation. The new Transformers Animated toys aren’t slated for a mass release until June 23^rd which is ridiculously stupid since the cartoon has been airing since like last December. Hasbro decided to do a “test market” campaign which happened to occur in the same town as Botcon, where 90% of the real hard core Transfans are going to be. Basically, they saturated the market, then everyone came in and bought up everything either for themselves or to resell to dealers or on ebay.

I never expected to find any of these toys arriving 2 days late after everyone knew these had been in the area for at least a month. I’ll continue with the story of Animated toys in a bit.

Saturday was the actual event. After arriving back at the hotel to find everyone gone, I realized I had no idea where the con actually was (It was apparently not in the hotel itself). Turns out it was across the street at the Duke Energy Center. After waiting in a reasonably short line for maybe ten minutes, I had dropped down my ten dollars and was in the dealer’s room.

This room was actually very much like the one I’d seen at Anime Central back in 2002. It’s like going to a flea market or craft show only everyone is selling toy robots. As expected, most of it was priced more than I was willing to pay. After meeting back up with the group, which also now included Despotes and the guys from the About Heroes podcast,I did quickly find my first purchase, a tenth anniversary Beast Wars Megatron. I’d never seen one on the shelves and it was only fife dollars over MSRP, I went ahead and made it my first buy. Next, I found one of the items I’d been planning to buy, Encore Skylynx for only 60 dollars, 40 dollars less than I’ve ever seen it listed for online. I also later would pick up a World’s Smallest Thrust and two Revoltechs, Rodimus Prime and the Patlabor Ingram.

We took a break at one point to head down to the panels. After sitting through half of thevery boring Club Panel, we were allowed to stay over and thus got decent seats for the Hasbro Design Panel. Oh man, worth the trip alone. I was twittering the whole time and most of my thoughts can be found there. I’m going to do a whole separate post on the subject though.

After the panel we headed back to the dealer room for a bit. The line for autographs was dwindling so like a complete dork I decided to go ahead and get Tara Strong to sign my copy of Final Fantasy X-2. She was obviously very bored during the whole event and I swear she was text messaging on her cell phone while some guy was yakking with her. Like a boob, I had dumped my Beast Wars Megatron in my car when we had taken a break for lunch without thinking about David Kaye being at the con signing things. Oh well, I’m not really a huge autograph person anyway.

Around 5PM, the con was closed for General Admission. Depotes, Giga, Omar, SpiderBen, JKNotRowling and I all decided to do a toy run for Animated toys. Sadly, we found nothing at Wal-Mart, TRU and Target nearby. Not really surprising through. We headed back to the hotel and dropped Giga and JKNotRowling off. The rest of us decided that since we weren’t going to the Botcon dinner, we’d continue the hunt. Despotes has a brilliant idea to head south across the river into Kentucky.

Apparently Transformer fans are afraid fo water and won’t cross bridges. Actually maybe they avoid bridges due to a fear of Trolls (LOL Internet humor is TEH FUNNIES). At the first Wal-Mart we found Prowl, Bulkhead, and Lockdown and a Prime. I picked up Prowl and Lockdown. I then proceeded to break the hand off of my Lockdown in the car because, I’m a genius.

Next we hit a Target with no sign of ever carrying anything. Third was a Toys R Us overrun with Bulkheads. I tried to post a photo from my phone but as previously mentioned, email wasn’t working.

After the TRU we hit a K-Mart which had almost everything in mass including two Voyager Megatrons. Megatron is probably the best figure in robot mode. I’m not doing reviews here though, I’ll leave that for later.

After one more uneventful Wal-Mart, we headed out for some Hooters for dinner. Good stuff.

Back at the hotel room, we mostly just sort of hung around talking. Some people went down to the bar. Crazy Steve, and a couple of other scratchbuilders were there talking about resin casting, molding and kitbashing. Interesting stuff. If I had more time it might be something I could really get into actually.

Once everyone had landed at the bar again around midnight I opted to go ahead and head back to my hotel. I really wanted to continue hanging around with everyone but I was also getting pretty tired.

On Sunday, I decided not to return to the con. I’d bought all I really cared to in the dealer room and the only panel I wanted to attend was the second design panel. I had a reasonably long drive ahead of me and I could get back at a reasonable hour this way.

Comments on the Hasbro panel as well as reviews of the five animated toys to follow later.

I’ve packed my clothes and any Camera equipment (though mostly cameras are for the possible Zoo trip).  I’ve set up everything I might want in advance.  I think I’m set.

I’ll most likely go with Youtube vs Ustream (original plan) due to the previously commented “weight issue”.  I can upload video to Youtube via my phone anytime and with the memory card+adapter I can even use high quality, off my camera, video and not crummy Cell video.  More likely I’ll do both though and upload any camera videos at the end of the day.

Youtube channel can be found here.

I I get ambitious, Ustream channel is here.

Youtube is getting a bit overdone these days so I may use Vimeo instead.  I’ll probably put out a constant stream of Tweets anyway.

As for plans for the trip.  I guess I’m mostly winging it.  I’ve decided to take my copy of Final Fantasy X-2 and tote it around in my nerdbag in case I get the chance to get it autographed by Tara Strong (Rikku).

I’d like to visit some of the panels possibly but I am pretty sure that package members get first serviced in that area so I am not counting on actually getting in.  Otherwise I’ll probably just hang out with whomever I can find to hang out with.

I leave in the morning.

Botcon is next weekend.  For some reason I still don’t know if I’m overly excited for it.  At least the base trip isn’t costing me much (About $200 for hotel+Gas+Admission+Food).

I’m still debating on if I want to find someone to pick me up Botcon 2005’s set at the member price or Black Rodimus.  Hell I don’t even know mow much a black Rodimus will be or if they will even be selling it individually.

I figure I’ll end up with 3-400 in spending cash for the convention, I don’t need to blow half of it on some convention toys I’m not sure I even want.  Especially since I’ve been considering picking up Encore Skylinx, which is another hundred.

I’ve seen people making lists of “what to look for”.  I’m not even sure of what I want these days.  I guess my only real goal is to buy at least one “World’s Smallest Transformer” and at least one Revoltech (Transformers or not).

While I’m not sure how excited I am over this movie yet, I sure do like me some Scarlett. Snake Eyes is pretty slick as well.

On the other hand, I kind of hate the “modernized X-men” revamp. A part of me wishes all fo the characters were decked out in their corny classic costumes. I can completely forgive Transformers’ total lack of G1 but I feel ripped off that everyone in this film is wearing black and gray jumpsuits.

For More visit WWTDD.com…

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. I find this hilarious on so many levels though a lot of that is because I consider Mortal Kombat and DC to be subpar next to Street Fighter and Marvel. I love how the website goes to an Apache web server test page.

Seriously though, I’m reminded of a hilarious phoshop I made a few years ago when Marvel announced it would make it’s next “VS” game with EA instead of Capcom.

[Photoshop Image not available as I can't remotely connect to my home Pc to find it at the moment]

That’s still not as great as Batman and Subzero facing off.

Thanks to Alex Lucard…

I’ve only ever been to one “fan convention”. In college I went with a friend of mine to Chicago to “Anime Central 2003″. The irony was that, at the time, I was falling out of my care for Anime. Still, the experience was pretty fun even if it cost me $200 for a hotel room with 4 other people where I got to sleep on the floor and STILL pay $40 a day to park.

This year I’ll be attending my second convention of this sort with Botcon. I’ve been “into” transformers pretty heavily since around 1996 with Beast Wars yet I’ve never had the care or money to attend Botcon. I’m just not really a “fan person” person.

Still, I’m looking forward to hopefully hooking up with people I know from various places and websites.

For what it’s worth, I’m also working on a clever scheme to shoot live footage via wifi on the floor using ustream.tv.  I’ll be testing out the camera next week to see if it’s a viable option and how long the battery on the laptop lasts with Wifi going and the camera streaming.

I’ll be paying the general admission price for the actual con.  I figure that leaves more money for anything I may find in the dealer room, though by the time I get there all the good deals will probably be gone.