WOOOOT! We just got done with Day 2 of NYAF. We would like to send out a big apology to Adam Hennessy who will be running Anime Parliament. His panel is probably one of the funniest and most enjoyable panels we have ever seen in our life, but it takes place at four o’clock on Sunday, and to be honest, I am just getting over being sick, Casey, the trooper that she is, was pretty damn ill (hence why you saw the flu mask on her) and still did her performances anyway, and overall most of us are just too damn tired to get into the city a third time to see the panel. HOWEVER, you can expect us to be there at AUSA, that is for damn sure.

Anyway, let’s have a small recap. Yesterday I told you guys about how we ended up accidentally running Why Anime and Hip Hop Hearts Anime. Well today, lucky enough, we did not have to run any other panels. Of course we already had three scheduled, so it wasn’t like we had any less work. The day started, as most days do, with Fan Fiction, in specific it is a panel we did called Fan Fiction: Mary Sue to Shapespeare. We filled that room quite comfortably, and the audience was more than awesome. Everyone had a serious interest in in the material and they really kept the whole thing flowing. Unfortunately, one of the volunteers there cut us off early by screaming “you’re done” from the back of the panel room. Even though I addressed the audience who said they wanted to see us fill the rest of the time, and even though the rest of the staff agreed with this notion, she still forced us off the stage.

The next few minutes were spent talking to assorted volunteers in an attempt to get to the bottom of this. Luckily, staff at NYAF totally kicks ass! The volunteers went to get someone right away and soon I was talking with Kim Mueller, the nicest programming coordinator at any anime convention I think I have ever met. They assured us this was a big misunderstanding and that what she did was totally inappropriate, especially after we saved 2 panels yesterday. We have been doing NYAF ever since its conception and all of us wanted to keep coming, so it was nice to know that the upper levels of staff gave as much of a damn as we did. I’m sure fans went home disappointed that the Fanfiction panel was cut short, but I assure you it won’t happen again.

We were approached by lots of different people for interviews and soundbites, which was totally awesome. We have been in the professional panel game for a while now, but it always jazzes us when people take notice and ask us to appear on film or in an interview. Most of the time was spent talking with Will Robertson from AnimeLoveU. We talked about a lot of different stuff, including our philosophies, our past convention experiences, the message we try to get across in our panels, and lots more. In fact I feel a little bad because he asked four questions and we talked for about an hour, which really says something about how much we like the sound of our own voice. However, he told us we simply answered all of the questions he was going to ask before he got a chance to answer them. He was a cool guy, you should check out his site, AnimeLoveU.com.

A good portion of time was then spent trying to get the skinny on industry panels. You see, I was also tweeting for 30ninjas.com, my day job, and probably the coolest people in the action world (shameless self promotion). However, since I was spending so much time PERFORMING panels, I had much less time to actually go to them. I have more than enough to do an info round up within the next few days, but it kind of sucked that I couldn’t be there first hand more. Still though, the Bayonetta playable demo was awesome, and there are a lot of upcoming anime releases that I think you will all like, but you’ll have to read my article on 30ninjas for that.

After I successfully made the wrong decision in not having lunch or drinking any water before the next panel, I hurried over with Brian “Sonic Whammy” Sapinski to the panel room again to put on Anime Press Your Luck. For those of you who don’t know, this is in fact a full game show production of the classic Press Your Luck, except it’s Anime themed. Long story short, it is awesome. Before the panel he had his friend rob trying to talk people up and get them excited, and wrangle in a bunch of Whammy cosplayers. He did an OK job but he was noticeably falling flat with the crowd. I decided to step up and give them a hand with my corny announcer voice and it went over pretty well … that is until Koshi realized that he hadn’t practiced with the program AT ALL! I’m totally taking Brian’s side on this one, Koshi had no frackin clue what he was doing up there and half the time was spent with Brian telling him what to do, or covering up for their unfortunate programming errors. In fact at one point someone’s score was NON! That’s not even a number!

Still tough they MORE than packed house. Every seat was taken, there was a decently big crowd waiting to come in, and overall everyone stayed till the end. They worked through their errors quickly and they really kept the crowd enthralled. Also they hit their middle mark when it came to questions. Some questions were easy, some were hard, and some were just right and we had a multitude of different spin totals that really kept the game interesting. Anime Press Your Luck just keeps getting better and I can’t wait for it to continue at other cons as the years go on.

APYL ran a little long, and for a while I was wondering why staff was panicking so much about going over time. Then I checked outside the panel to see a huge unruly mob waiting to come in to our biggest panel of the night Spoiler: The Panel Part 3. I don’t even mean a long line, I mean a mob, a CROWD of people pushing and shoving and practically injuring each other to get into our panel. Hell one guy was screaming something about his ribs, and although this sounds kind of horrible, the idea that a guy could have gotten injured simply due to enormous fan turnout makes me a little giddy. Still I hope he is OK though.

We start up spoiler with … minor technical difficulties. The sound isn’t all that good and the staff couldn’t figure out how to turn up the gain. No problemo though, we still hit a decent stride going in, and people were laughing hysterically. A couple of us flubbed some bits and we got… weird varieties of laughs, but hey, people laughed at a comedy panel, and overall that is what we are going for. My parents showed up to support me, and hey what can I say, that brought a smile to my face. I was actually quite nervous considering they were coming in to a panel where we made jokes about stepping on my genitalia and furries, but they seemed genuinely amused. When I came home later that night, they told me they thought I was awesome even if they didn’t understand me. Now that, that was pretty cool.

Spoiler went down great and we only had enough time for a little bonus material but whatev. We got most of it on tape, and everyone had a good time. Now more than ever I am aware that Spoiler really can’t be confined to an hour. Even with a good start we ended up hitting the hour mark halfway through the panel and we needed more time just to finish up. Perhaps we are always fated to go over, but hell if the fans want to see more of us we will give them what they want. I also want to give a gigantic thank you to all of NYAF staff, specifically Kim Mueller and Pete Tatara (hah remember when we met back when I was interviewing for that position Pete? Well look at me now ^_^). They are two of the coolest people I have ever had the pleasure to work with. They gave us a long time slot, were great with making sure our technical needs were met, were flexible with us running long, and overall are just nice people. Thanks for being eleven flavors of awesome guys, you rock.

There is still way more we want to say about NYAF. We will eventually talk about the other panels we saw, the dealers room, the WCG, the tabletop area, and lots of other stuff that I assure you we have opinions on. All of our members have amusing anecdotes and rants about the convention, and you will hear them all in due time. However, for now I need to shower, and sleep off my massive bout of con fatigue. I hope you liked us this year NYAF and we will see you next year with spoiler 4, and plenty of other panels to bring the insanity and spread the chaos.

P.S. Go go curry is our normal place to eat after NYAF, but today we went to a random Mexican restaurant, and it was awesome! I totally want to go there again but I can’t even remember its name.