Ohayocon 2010: RabbitSnore’s Account
About a week ago, on January 29, I rushed back from class to my apartment in New York City. Wasting no time, I grabbed the bags I packed the night before and hopped on the closest bus, riding it to the house of Thereisnospoon303 (TINS), where he and my brother Black_Puffin were waiting. In a few minutes, we drove off to La Guardia Airport, and shortly thereafter, we were on a flight to Columbus, Ohio. After several months of planning, we were finally en route to Ohayocon, the first anime convention we had ever attended – but this was so ordinary anime convention: We were traveling across several states, spending hundreds of dollars, and taking the risk of being caught by security with all those drugs hidden in my rectum, for the purpose of meeting six other members of the Forum.
TINS and I have administrated YouChew for approximately two years. If you were to have told me, as we began the transfer of administrative power from Conrad Slater to us, in two years, that as a direct result of maintaining the forum, I would find myself in Columbus, Ohio to meet people I had up till then only known online, I would have looked at you incredulously and asked you if your brain was running on Lussumo Vanilla, that software that kept crashing every time I tried to install it on the new server. But it seems I am frequently surprised these days. Our finding our way to Ohayocon was an unexpected result of being the administrator of YouChew, but it was certainly a welcome surprise.
The night we arrived, the three of us took a cab to the convention center, and for the first time face-to-face, we met Dillrod90, who was primarily and most directly responsible for the planning and organization of this gathering, and RedLuigi, a user with whom I’d frankly not had much contact at all. The following day, we met with Ruthie, Deepercutt, NoTAMATZ, and TheSfarioBros. All of us hit it off with relative ease. It was, as Dillrod so aptly put it, “like meeting old friends for the first time.”
Later, I asked RedLuigi what he had thought the convention and meeting others from the forum would be like:
“I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I had no idea what any of the members would be like in real life. ‘Are they all gonna be massive douche bags? Are they gonna be huge nerds with no life? Are the more popular members going to disapprove of me, etc?’ Things like that. And I’m very glad to say that [everyone was] very nice and very…
As for the con itself, …it was pretty much what I expected. Full grown men playing dress-up and being kawaii.”
Thanks largely to the preparatory efforts of Dillrod and thanks to our mutual ability to get along, the meeting was a striking, if surprising, success. Indeed, some of us had less than optimistic expectations for the potential gathering of forum members. “I thought the meet up would be a horrible failure,” TheSfarioBros told me. “Ohayocon is held in a very large building, making it difficult to coordinate groups of people. I expected people to be lost, confused, and frustrated most of the time. I also feared that, if we even found each other in the first place, that people would divide themselves up into groups and go do their own thing without really talking to or getting to know any of the members that were present. All of these pessimistic preconceptions were dashed when everyone eventually got together and we ended up having a great time.”
NoTAMATZ echoes this incredulity as he told me, “I guess I was slightly worried that we would all be too socially awkward to carry on a good conversation but I was wrong. I admit that in the first hour or so, it was a little awkward for myself but after a while, I had no problem with being relaxed. You bros were good like that.”
It surprised me as well that we were so readily able to connect with each other and laugh at most of the same things, but I suppose it stands to reason given our shared humor on the forum. All the same, it was a pleasant discovery that it did not take long for us to relax around us, and any awkwardness dissolved quickly, allowing us to get to know each other better. “[Deepercutt] sucks at frisbee but is awesome for getting me that retro Amy plushie,” said Ruthie when I asked her what she thought of those she met at the con. “I’d also like to add that TINS is quite the handsome man.”
We all spent a good amount of time attending events around the convention, enjoying each other’s company and conversation, and engaging in general merriment. We reveled in the antics of TINS infiltrating a Sailor Moon cosplay photoshoot, dressed as TF2’s BLU Spy, disguised as Ami Mizuno. As Ruthie remarked, the episode “was just sheer brilliance.” Best of all, there is copious photographic evidence to prove it.
Just as planned, we gathered at Buca di Beppo near the convention center on Saturday night for a group dinner. The forum’s group was in full attendance there, as we ate damn good Italian food, made wisecracks about the restaurant’s décor, laughed hard, and shared some of the most memorable experiences of the trip. As per request, our waitress brought out a cake, decorated to order with the words, “NO YOU FABRIC,” written across it in what I can only describe as the most putridly radioactive green I have ever seen in my adult life.
To cap off the evening, we retreated to Dillrod’s hotel room, where we unsuccessfully attempted to hook up a DVD player to the television in the room. After some consternation over the failure to play Attack of the Clones, we decided to search through the in-room movies available for order, hoping to find a film sufficiently horrendous to watch and riff. Finally, we settled on X-Men Origins: Wolverine, through which a great deal of jokes were born regarding Hugh Jackman and his sweaty body. Taking cracks at the film was one of my fondest memories of the trip; we were all relaxed and able to enjoy ourselves as a group of friends. RedLuigi perhaps said it the most succinctly: “…[D]espite some of the differences we all may have, we can all still join together and tear the holy fuck out of a bad movie.”
By the following evening, we had all gone our separate directions, back home, bidding each other farewell and, “See you on the forum.” “Honestly the hardest part of that entire meetup was leaving,” said TheSfarioBros, “as corny as that may sound.” And I must agree with him. After spending a great weekend with great people, going back to New York was the sorriest part of the trip. As TINS, Puffin, and I took up our bags from the convention center and we began making our way to the airport, the radio came alive in the taxi, playing Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time. “It has to be a sad song that plays as we’re leaving,” remarked TINS, “doesn’t it?” Indeed, TINS. It must be a sad song from the mid ‘80s. It must. That’s just the way these things work.
Let the success of nine people from an online forum meeting at a convention full of teenaged girls and grown men dressing in sailor fukus be an evidence that the there is no space between people that cannot be bridged with the proper application of airfare and Italian restaurant reservations. The sentimentalist in me feels that this trip was something special; something that brought the YouChew community closer together; something tangible that demonstrates that we are not dissociated, disembodied, and inscrutable creatures at a distance, but real, knowable people –- as Dillrod called us, old friends who have, most of us, never met.
Article by RabbitSnore.
the beat is extremely catchy, everything syncs up, it’s very rhythmic, and as I listen to it while I make this review, I notice that it has a very nice bass line.
Around the middle of September this year, I began watching the Sailor Moon anime. I began watching the show because a thread about it had grown on the 
At the time I am writing this, I have watched 120 episodes, which amounts to 48 continuous hours of time spent watching a Japanese cartoon about magical schoolgirls in the ‘90s. If in August you were to tell me that in three months I would have spent that much time watching a cartoon which as a child engendered embarrassment for me to even stand in the same room as a television playing it, I would have said you were crazy and should have a CAT scan performed to investigate the possibility that a brain tumor was perhaps pressing on the part of your brain which keeps you from being fucking stupid. But that would have been the socially awkward child in me speaking, the child who my therapist keeps telling me is sad, alone, and afraid to form interpersonal connections.
But perhaps it’s not so strange that I ended up liking Sailor Moon enough to watch over 120 episodes of it, put 
There’s a charm about Sailor Moon I quietly detected as a child, even from the shitty English dub I was originally exposed to, and after watching the subtitled Japanese version, I can better understand what it is that gave it the staying power of over 
# 1: Do not mistake your preferences for an objective measure of quality. Remember that what you like is not necessarily reflective of the media’s objective quality. In fact, I would argue that media does not have objective, quantifiable goodness or badness; there are merely opinions and responses. If some media appeals to one person or group and not to you, it can be difficult to understand what the hell they see in it…. I have this trouble with fans of the Twilight series all the time…. But if you accept the fact that people can feel differently about different things, you come to realize that nothing is good or bad in any real sense. This is not to say, however, that you should not allow yourself to get riled up about media. If you didn’t, things would get quite boring, now wouldn’t they?
At the end of the day, you should be able lay in bed and to feel good about the way that Mark Hamill played The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, and you should be able to say to yourself, “My god, I hate 
My point is that you should strike a balance between accepting the flaws of your favorite things and loving them madly; these things are not incompatible. Don’t take things too seriously, and you will do just fine. Love what you love, and don’t get too hung up on trying to defend it from all criticism. It is my suspicion that, at worst, not practicing the suggestions I’ve outlined here can lead to elitism and xenophobia, sometimes to the extent of the old “War on AIDS” debacle. At best, however, you can have a damn good time not taking things too seriously, lying back and enjoying the way Tuxedo Kamen always shows up just in the nick of time.
