Mikomicon 2006 was an anime convention held at California State University Northridge(CSUN) from October 13th to the 15th. I was only able to go on the 14th, but it was a lot of fun ^_^ Not as big as AX of course, but still worth going to.
When I first got to the con and got my badge, I had tentative plans to enter a Super Smash Bros. tournament that was going to be held. Smash Bros. is one of my favorite games, and though I consider myself pretty good at it, I doubt I could beat some of the "experts" that I figured would enter. But I still wanted to play with other people just for fun. I also bought my DS to show off my Pokemon Pearl game, LOL, but no one really noticed =P Anyway, there were quite a few people there(at least 100 in the fairly small room) and people were still signing up even after the time the tournament was supposed to start. Then I found out that first prize was a free Nintendo Wii system! Second was a PSP I think, and third was a $50 gift certificate to some gaming place. No wonder so many people wanted to enter! But after a while, I started having mixed feelings about going through with it. There was another event I wanted to go to at 12, and competitors weren't even assigned until after 11:15. Since I was late on the list, I didn't even get my name called when the first round matches had already started, so it probably would've been at least another hour or so before I finally sat down with someone to play against. It was seriously taking too long, plus I knew my chances of winning were pretty slim with all the die-hard video gamers in there, so I eventually decided to withdraw. Now if it had been a Pokemon battle tournament, that would be a totally different story XD
Anyway, after that I went to a Japanese Culture panel where one of the Japanese and humanities teachers from CSUN talked about Japan and its influence on the rest of the world, starting with paintings from many hundreds of years ago, to clothing and imports, to the events of World War 2, and finally to anime. It was all pretty interesting stuff. After that, I went to the dealers' room a few times, where all the anime shops and companies were selling all kinds of anime products at cheap prices(I only bought a few things though.) I also went to a non-anime related panel about the comic-style flash video series, "Broken Saints." Again, very interesting =) You can watch the original series online here.
Then finally, I went to a voice actor panel with Spike Spencer, who does a lot of anime voices, but probably most famous for his role as Shinji in Evangelion. He was a very funny guy(quite the opposite of Shinji actually ^^) He's currently working on writing a book about voice acting, and about the crazy things that can happen at anime cons. I might have to check it out one day =)
Well, that's about it for my day at Mikomicon. Here are the photos I took...sorry, there's only a few. There really weren't too many cosplayers =P
The Super Smash Bros. tournament begins!
Naruto cosplayers, Tsunade and Temari
The dealers' room; aspiring artists, AMVs, and tons of anime stuff for sale
A Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya pencil board I bought ^^
