Category: Conventions

Hi folks. As some of you may have heard, we’ve been in the middle of a pandemic for a while (I know, it was a surprise to me – not). I help staff a volunteer-run anime convention called Anime Detour that takes place in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota during non-Covid times. We got kind of the short end of the stick in this whole situation, as the pandemic began to reveal itself around mid-March last year about two weeks before the in-person was scheduled to be held. When it was clear the convention was going to be canceled, we didn’t really have the time needed to put together an alternate event in the time frame that we were given. Now that we’re a year into this mess, most of us who participate in conventions have gotten to have at least some experience with online events, and it’s with that knowledge gained that Anime Detour has elected to run an online event this year.

This has been known for a few weeks now, but since the schedule for the event is now available I thought I’d pass the information along to my readers since my partner and I are participating in a few of the scheduled events. You can check out the full schedule and other details here, but below are the specific panels that we’re participating in. Times are Central Daylight Time, US:

Friday, April 2^nd, 7:30 PM – Anime By Numbers
This is an anime trivia game where each answer is a number. Typically this is a team challenge, but of course it works a little differently online. We’ll have participation from a couple of guest panelists who will choose a couple of answers, and it’s up to the online audience to guess whether the actual answer is lower than both guests’ answers, in-between them, or over both. Hopefully this will be a fun time and give the audience a way to interact in a manner they would not normally be able to.

Saturday, April 3^rd, 1:30 PM – Shiny New Anime
J.C. and I do this panel at many conventions throughout the year (typically), where we look at the anime we really enjoyed over the past year. We’re both dialing things back a little and expanding them this year – we’ve decided not to spend time talking about any sequels beyond short mentions, while also expanding the timeframe a little to encompass some series from late 2019/early 2020 that we didn’t get a chance to talk about with all the convention cancellations and stuff. We’ll still have fun clips to share (assuming the streaming situation works – I’m testing that out with tech later today), and gushing words to say about our favorite anime.

Saturday, April 3^rd, 7:30 PM – The Precipice of Fanservice: How Much is Too Much?
A discussion about everyone’s favorite subject in anime – fanservice. J.C. and I will be joining Dave, our head of programming, to talk about the various manifestations of fanservice in anime and when/how those depictions might add to or detract from the viewing experience. I think this will be a pretty interesting discussion (I obviously have a lot to say on the matter, and so do my co-panelists!).

This is free and open to anyone who can access Twitch and YouTube, so even if you’d never be able to (or want to) attend a convention in the Upper Midwest United States in person, you can attend this! If you find yourself lacking in entertainment options this Friday and Saturday, we’d love to have you stop by.

Hey folks. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think we can all agree on the strangeness of the past several months. I’ve given myself a lot of grace lately regarding my depression, accepting that unless I’m really, truly upset about something, it primarily manifests as lack of motivation. I’ve had a really frustrating underlying desire to watch a lot of anime that’s been buried beneath an inability to actually click on any streaming services or grab any discs off the shelf. If that sounds maddening to you, well, welcome to the fun that is mental illness – it’s the endless push-and-pull between what you want to do and your inability to do anything about it.

One thing that usually motivates me is the responsibility I have toward multiple anime conventions throughout the year. Having the looming date of an event on the horizon is usually what prompts me to finish up anime that I’ve been watching and to organize my thoughts into something coherent. 2020 has become the year without deadlines; a mass of unmarked time with no big events to serve as signposts in the fog.