Tag: Conventions

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Conventions Special Features

Anime Detour 2023 – Convention Reactions and Personal Updates

*Tries to pretend that she wasn’t absent for months*

Hi all, how has everything been? It’s been a little while. Long time readers will probably be familiar with these periods where I just drop off the face of the Earth for long periods of time. It’s not you, it’s me. Specifically, I’ve realized it’s an ADHD/hyperfocus thing. For quite a while last year, my particular hyperfocus was fiber arts (knitting, crochet, etc.) and so having thrown my whole self into that, it left me with not as much time to document my anime-viewing adventures. I’m choosing to try to make peace with that aspect of myself rather than worry too much about it – since I don’t make my living off of my writing, taking long breaks doesn’t necessarily cause many negative effects, aside from the fact that I lose touch with the many online-only WordPress blogging friends I’ve been fortunate to make (though I do still pop in and read your writing when I can, I promise).

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Conventions Special Features

Convention Report – Anime Central 2022

Hi, all. I’m back from my break feeling refreshed and re-invigorated (at least as much as is possible considering my generally poor sleep habits and what-not). This past weekend I had the chance to head to Chicago, Illinois for Anime Central, one of the first anime conventions I ever attended and definitely one that’s worth popping back into every few years if you have a tolerance for big conventions.

The past couple of years the convention has been on a hiatus due to the pandemic, but like many other similar in-person events that had smaller online components in the interim, this year marked a (possibly financially obligatory) return to a more typical setting and format. Like my local convention, Anime Detour, Anime Central was forced to cancel its in-person aspect two years in a row simply due to the timing of when the event is scheduled (mid-late May), so I was curious to see how things were going to shake out – especially since ACen is something like 5 or 6 times as large as Anime Detour (in a normal year).

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Conventions Personal

Shiny New Anime – Anime Detour 2022

Hi everyone! I hope you had a great Anime Detour this year. Below are panel materials for this year’s “Shiny New Anime” panel. There’s a presentation, a hand out, and also a folder of clips for those who can’t play the videos in the presentation and would like to see them.

Shiny New Anime PowerPoint Presentation
Shiny New Anime Hand Out
Shiny New Anime Clips

This panel (and my others) are a lot of work, so if you’d like to use some of these materials, please credit me (Jessi Silver).

Have a great day, and see you next year!

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Conventions Personal

Anime for Grown-Ups – Anime Detour 2022

Hi all, below are my panel materials for “Anime for Grown-Ups.” They include a PowerPoint Presentation with notes and links, and a hand out.

Anime for Grown-Ups PowerPoint Presentation
Anime for Grown-Ups Hand out

This one contains some clips, and if you don’t have PowerPoint I’m not sure if the web version will open them, so I’ve put the clips in a folder here.

There are a lot of links and notes in this one, so I hope you’ll give it a look (since it’s mostly included for informational purposes and not as things to talk about in depth during the panel).

If you use the material for other purposes, please credit me (Jessi Silver).

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Conventions Personal

Manga for Grown-Ups – Anime Detour 2022

Hi all. I hope those of you who attended “Manga for Grown-Ups” enjoyed the panel. Below are the panel materials (presentation with links and notes) as well as the hand out if you would like it.

Manga for Grown-Ups Presentation
Manga for Grown-Ups Hand Out

If you happen to use these materials in any way, please credit me (Jessi Silver).

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Conventions Personal

Anime Detour 2022 – Panel and Event Schedule

Hi everyone! Long-time-no-see. I’ve briefly come out of pre-con hiding to share my Anime Detour schedule, in case any readers are attending and would like to say “hi” to either myself or my spouse, J.C.

As usual, I’ll be posting panel materials after each panel is completed, so those who would like to see my notes or use the hyperlinks embedded in the presentations are welcome to do so. The panels “The Odd World of Odd Taxi,” “Madoka and Homura: The Trap of Selflessness,” “Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective,” and “Anime About Anime” are essentially unchanged from the form they took at Anime Fusion 2021, so if you’re interested in those (which are mostly just discussion topics), you can check out the previous posts about them.

You can view the Anime Detour schedule in its entirety here.

Edit: I’ve added room numbers to the entries 🙂

Friday, March 18th, 2022

  • 3:30-4:30pm, Greenway A/B – “Manga for Grown-Ups” – Manga aimed at older or more experienced fans, with a special focus this year on various online (legal) manga-viewing platforms.
  • 5:00-6:00pm, Greenway A/B – “The Odd World of ODDTAXI” – Fan panel focused on last year’s noir sleeper hit.
  • 8:00-9:30pm, Nicollet Ballroom – “AMV Contest” – The AMV show of all this year’s entries.
  • 11:00pm-12:00am, Greenway I/J – “Anime by Numbers Trivia” – J.C.’s game where the object is to get closer to the numerical answers than the other team.

Saturday, March 19th, 2022

  • 10:00-11:00am, Boundary Waters D – “AMV Showcase” – Exhibition showcase of other AMV entries to the contest.
  • 1:00-2:00pm, Greenway A/B – “Anime for Grown-Ups” – Anime aimed at older or more experienced fans, with a special focus this year on older anime (which fits with the convention theme).
  • 4:00-5:00pm, Greenway A/B – “Madoka and Homura: The Trap of Selflessness” – An analysis of the character motivations in the Madoka franchise, focused on the Madoka-Homura relationship.
  • 8:30-9:30pm, Greenway A/B – “Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective” – A discussion looking back at the animated franchise as a whole.
  • 10:00-11:00pm, Greenway F/G/H – “Don’t Judge an Anime by its Cover” – A game where silly OPs and EDs are drawn and the player must describe the plot of the anime (wrongly) based only on information in the OP.

Sunday, March 20th, 2022

  • 8:30-9:30am, Boundary Waters D – “AMV Awards” – The awards ceremony for the AMV contest winners
  • 1:00-2:30pm, Greenway F/G/H – “Shiny New Anime” – Our look at new anime from the past year that we enjoyed, with a focus on shows that aren’t as well-known.
  • 3:00-4:00pm, Greenway F/G/H – “Anime About Anime” – A look at anime series focused on anime production and what we can learn about it from those sources.

We’re really looking forward to be back in person at our “home” convention, and hope we’ll see some of you there!

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Conventions Special Features

Madoka and Homura: The Trap of Selflessness

And here it is, our final panel from Anime Fusion 2021. This one was primarily J.C.’s work, so the format is slightly different. It’s also a re-versioning of a panel we presented several years ago directly after the release of Rebellion, so we’ve had some years to stew on that (spoiler: both of us liked it) and now with a new movie on the way it’s opened the door to further speculation.

I hope that these posts have been helpful and interesting to people reading. I also hope that they help to partly explain my delayed episode 1 impressions for the past week and some days; we work really hard to put this stuff together and it ends up taking priority over other things. I’ll definitely be back with more reviews and such now that our (very weird) convention season is effectively over for the year.

PowerPoint Presentation

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Conventions Special Features

The Odd World of “ODDTAXI” – Anime Fusion 2021

I’m back again with more panel materials! This time from our Sunday discussion of the wonderful ODDTAXI anime series. Like our Evangelion discussion, this is mostly a presentation to contain our discussion notes and to distract people from directly looking at our faces the entire time(lol), but it may serve some use to folks who are interested in the series. I’m writing this a day ahead of time so I’m not sure how many people are actually going to show up to this panel (I suspect probably the couple of people we know and that’s it, haha) but I hope it’s of use to some people.

I will note that there is a slide devoted to discussion of major end-of-series spoilers, but we don’t mention them directly, so if you’re worried about any final reveals this shouldn’t take that away from you.

For reference, you can check out my episode reviews of ODDTAXI at the link below:

ODDTAXI episode reviews

PowerPoint Presentation

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Conventions Special Features

Anime About Anime 2.0 – Anime Fusion 2021

Good evening (or morning, depending on your time zone). Continuing with the onslaught of panel materials is our presentation from “Anime About Anime 2.0,” which talks about the anime production process as it can be gleaned from watching anime that takes place within that industry. We presented this panel a few years ago but included a few updates and switched things around a bit.

I’d like to note that neither of us is an expert on this topic; we’re both just interested enthusiasts. There are links in the source pages to places where you can learn more in-depth information about anime, its production, and the state of the industry and the staff members. But much like trying to get a sense for the Japanese language through watching anime, if you don’t make it your primary or only source, it can still be helpful for getting a feel for things.

Have you seen any of the series we reference in the panel materials? Let me know!

PowerPoint Presentation

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Conventions Special Features

Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective

Hello again, friends. Below is the PowerPoint presentation from our Saturday 2:00-3:00 panel “Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Retrospective.” This is mostly just for some visuals to go along with the discussion, so unfortunately there isn’t a ton that’s useful about this outside of the panel itself, but you’re welcome to take it and read our notes (you can tell who wrote which notes because mine tend to be very brief and J.C.’s are much more coherent, heh).

What’s your experience with Evangelion? Have you watched all the movies yet? Are you excited about GKids’s release of the TV series on Blu-ray? Feel free to discuss in the comments 🙂

PowerPoint Slides