DaiCon

I was in an apartment somewhere in Malaysia, sitting on the floor of an under-furbished room with two vicious felines plotting the death of my sleeping bag. The stench of cat feces permeated the air, but fortunately my nose was blocked.

You have read the event coverages of DaiCon, the anime convention held in Cyberjaya, Malaysia last weekend. Now you can read the exhilarating story of how I spent my weekends at DaiCon and saw Minori Chihara live, based on the true story of the past three days of my life.

July 10, Friday – 1330 Hours

It is D-Day. Our destination is the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, a world-renowned airport recently rated best in the world (in the 15-25 million passengers category). Bring it on. But not too hard.

I am meeting up with TJ Han at Changi Airport’s relatively-new budget terminal. In the dark and seedy underbellies of Terminal 2, I board a shuttle bus with ridiculously low ceiling. As it approaches the budget terminal, I take a moment’s pause to marvel at how closely this humble airport terminal, built to serve the budgetary needs of cheap-ass American backpackers and third-world virgin flyers, resembles my factually-baseless mental image of what airports in Cuba look like. It is awesome beyond my wildest imagination.

July 10, Friday – 1445 Hours

The “boarding gate” or, as I like to call it, the “featureless corridor that leads to a door which opens up to the tarmac”, has a grand total of 5 plastic seats, the kind you find in the waiting lounge of rundown public health facilities. Our plane, a Tiger Airways Airbus A320-200, stands motionlessly on the tarmac like a stuffed dead bird (thank the secular cosmic forces of the universe it wasn’t an A310). The machine that reads our boarding pass is, on closer inspection, basically a cheap computer on wheels with a USB (or god forbid, serial) barcode scanner.

And that is the exact moment when I fall in love with the budget terminal.

July 10, Friday – 1520 Hours

Watching How I Met Your Mother on my venerable iPod touch. Barney is upset that his friends call him Swarley when in fact he should be upset with his mother for naming him after a gay dinosaur.

A homely-looking (budget) flight attendant takes orders for overpriced beverages served in styrofoam cups made of pure environmental rape. The exorbitant price tag of three bucks for a cup of coke is really Tiger Airway’s self-sacrificing initiative to save the world.

Aww, Robin and Ted would make such a great couple. I take a moment to reflect upon the cruel realities of life before dozing off for a bit.

July 10, Friday – 1700 Hours

We are stuck in this long immigration queue in this building that looks like a poorly-refurbished warehouse. Every other queue is moving faster than ours, an unexplainable phenomenon waiting for its Nobel prize-winning theorem. New faces mysteriously appear in front of us in the queue from time to time. Apparently the queue is moving so slowly that the people in front of us got married and gave birth to two daughters and a son during the time it took for us to turn the last corner.

July 10, Friday – 1730 Hours

It took us a while to realize that this horrible place we are in is actually KLIA’s equivalent of our budget terminal. That was a close shave. My impression of Malaysia rebounds significantly from the abyss of negative infinity.

July 10, Friday – 2100 Hours

After many various other trials and tribulations involving a long bus ride around the entire rural outskirts of the airport runways and a ride on the KLIA Transit rail service, we found ourselves in Putrajaya, a planned city in the middle of nowhere that perfectly juxtaposes its modern amenities with the vast areas of trees and hills that surround them, reminiscent of China’s many new industrial parks and universities. It’s like finding a Hilton Hotel in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Or one of those Soviet-era mega-projects that never go anywhere.

Finally, we reach Kurogane’s house, where we are to spend the next two nights. I find myself sitting on my sleeping bag in an unfurnished living room inhabited by two cats. Aww. How cute. I love cats.

July 11, Saturday – 0030 Hours

One of the cats has just killed a moth on my sleeping bag and is slowly mutilating its dead carcass into dozens of pieces. Not so cute. I am sleepy.

Chewing on a juicy moth. Yum

July 11, Saturday – 0400 Hours

I am still not asleep. The cats take turn to pretend rape each other, a violent and noisy process which involves them jumping onto my sleeping bag from time to time. Aww… How… cute… I… love… cats… Sleep… Murder… those… fu…

DaiCon

Now, instead of going into the boring details of what did or did not happen at DaiCon, I shall just give my general opinions of the whole event and whatever else results from the random firing of my neurons because the entire experience kind of merged into one continuous march of the living dead who lacks sleep. So let’s do this PowerPoint style, doubleplusquick.

Commendable efforts.
Before I get down to business, let me first start off by saying that the event was better than I expected, mainly because I didn’t expect much. It was quite incredible for an event organized by a school anime club. Now on to the unpleasantries.

The location of the event was terrible.
I hold the urban elitist belief that such events should always be held in the city centre so that you can pad the crowd numbers with curious onlookers and lost tourists who make the event area more lively.

TJ Han had to climb a mountain just to get his media pass

There was not much to do.
The event items clearly catered to existing fans of anime, and yet at the same time did not provide much in-depth content for the truly dedicated. The lack of real industry support is glaring, with the only professional presence being maintained by Hotlink Youth Club, a local mobile service whose name sounds a lot like a dating chatline, and Dell, a faceless multinational PC manufacturer who seeks to ruthlessly crush its oppositions like many East-Asian ruling political parties.

Mass-produced PVC figurines were pretty much the only things I took pictures of

Too much focus on Minori’s concert.
I’m probably not expressing a very popular opinion here, but I believe that the vast sum of money spent on Minori’s concert could have been used for a lot of other things. Half of the event hall was taken up by the concert area and the other half felt more like a sideshow than anything. Of course, given Malaysia’s weaker anime industry presence, it may very well have been the case that even throwing more money at the problem wouldn’t have solved anything, but still… Does a seiyuu concert opened only to ticket holders (and fake bloggers with media passes) really serve the purpose of promoting anime? Hmmm.

It’s Minori

Minori sang well.
Unfortunately, she has bad songs. This is a sad reality for many J-Pop singers with great voices. Just look at May’n before her stint under Yoko Kanno…That’s what she said! (Although I kind of liked “Crazy Crazy Crazy“) Also, the sound system was bad. The lack of proper acoustic design in the event hall did not help either.

Moving stage lights were made of Satan’s hellfire.
They burnt a permanent pentagram onto my retinal. The disclaimer at the bottom of DaiCon’s large banner made so much sense after the concert.

“EMINA will not be responsible for any epileptic seizures caused by the extremely exciting nature of our events.”

The MC tried too hard.
I felt embarrassed on her behalf. How noble of me.

TJ Han finds Minori’s hairdresser attractive.
Unfortunately, someone else hit on her first. Smooth.

Event-organizing involves a lot of politics.
It’s a stepping stone to becoming the next Obama, really. What do you think he did as a community organizer in Chicago? He ran an anime convention, duh.

Indirect kiss is only cool in anime.
In real-life, it’s just a way to spread H1N1. It’s also kind of creepy, but whatever floats your boat. Still, it was probably not the best idea in the world to make a blog post about your first indirect kiss with a somewhat well-known mid-tier voice actress. Hell hath no fury like a seiyuu otaku scorned. They can do terrible things to you, like leave angry comments on your blog or sign your email up for porn mailing lists. The horror. *click*

The Rest of It

That’s about all my thoughts on the subject matter of DaiCon actually. I have plenty more on Malaysia and its transportation system, but you know the kind of blogger I am — I just hate digressing from the topic at hand… Oh, did I tell you how I only found out last night that one of the cats that had been terrorizing me in my state of semi-comatose was actually a male? Yeah.

Oh yeah, we actually met up with Owen S and Faye during DaiCon. I didn’t know them before that since I am not an anime otaku and I don’t run an anime blog; I am just a lost soul walking though this surreal world that exists beneath the surface of what most agree to be reality.

Also had supper with Silencer, who happens to be the president of the university’s anime club. This is what we ate: