It was interesting to find a report or a postmortem or one person’s view about AX 2022 and what they thought of it. They laid out a laundry list of issues that needed to be addressed before the next one, but it seemed to acknowledge that a lot of the problems appeared to be endemic to the nature of expos and may not be solvable, like the long lines. (more…)

Part and parcel of shindigs like this is waiting in line. I mean, unless you can find a venue here that doesn’t clear out the room for the next event, you may find yourself sitting in the broiling sun (we ARE in July, we ARE in Los Angeles) and those stupid tents or awnings or projecting roofs are of zero help. And even if you get in line for an evening event, that concrete is unfriendly to back and legs and whatnot. (more…)

In years past, I avoided the Entertainment Hall, as I felt it was just a place to go to play customizable card games. I could not think of anything more wasteful than to purchase a four-day pass and then, come into this location and play Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon non-stop. Why buy such an expensive pass? I know you can find a card room of sorts closer to where you live (up in my neck of the woods, it’s Black Diamond Games), where you can do all of this, and perhaps WarHammer 9000 or whatever it’s called (“It’s over 9000!”) and not shell out that caliber of money you would to be at an Expo. But I was drawn in for other reasons. (more…)

This was something that I had not seen before at AX, or maybe I did, but I paid it no heed. It’s just this was a very popular stand that I needed to find out more about, as there was always a line in front of it, even worse than trying to see the “Trash Taste” boys. (more…)

Now, unless you got a hotel room at the J W Marriott or the Ritz-Carlton (so close to the venue, you could spit on the people down below. Note: Please don’t do that, OK?), you’re going to have to avail yourself of the shuttle buses. Now, this, in and of itself, is not all that bad. They come at regular-ish intervals, so you need not wait too long, especially in front of your hotel, early in the morning. A lot of the street people will stare at you, because you look like Sailor Moon (still a very popular cosplay option) or Sephiroth and his ten-mile sword. It’s just that you ARE dealing with humanity and things can go south faster than you realize, both outside and inside. (more…)

Now, with AX being at the Staples Center crypto.com Arena, it is somewhat easy to get to. There is a subway line that runs close to it (provided you are near a stop. The Biltmore is.) and the shuttle buses are, for the most part, reliable and safe (but more on that later). Driving your car to the venue gets pricey, at $20 a day. But one mode of transportation that was as ubiquitous about the area as discarded Starbucks cups were eScooters. (more…)

In years past, one of the harder panels to get into were all those 18+, FAKKU, hentai fun shows. Even if they put them in ever larger and larger venues, there never seemed to be enough seats for all the perverted people who wanted to show up and ogle and stare and hoot and holler and stomp and enojoy the ‘adult’ activities so presented. And since the Fire Marshal did not allow standing for these things, it got tough, When I got the preliminary schedule for AX, there was one panel that I really, really felt that I had to get into. (more…)

There is a scene from the movie “A Fish Called Wanda”, where Kevin Kline cracks open a safe, hoping to find a ton of pelf within, but is greeted instead with silent emptiness. Screwing his face up with disgust, he loudly proclaims, “OK… OK… DISAPPOINTED! Son of a bitch.” I know how he feels, when I got the letter from Anime Expo, letting me know that there will be NO AX for 2021. *sigh* OK… OK… DISAPPOINTED! Son of a bitch. (more…)

Now, you need to understand that I am Old School. Hell, I’m Ancient School. I’m so old, Plato taught me at the Academy himself! I come from a time that when we got a FIFTH TV station in our area, we lost our collective minds. If you missed an episode of your favorite show, you had to wait half a year for the summer reruns to catch it. And if your show was cancelled, that really was the end of it. Home taping? Maybe with an AUDIO cassette recorder, perhaps a Super 8 camera pointed at the tube. (more…)

I recently gave a review regarding “Princess Lover”, a rather standard romantic comedy anime. It was a fan-service heavy eroge game, which became a fan-service heavy manga, which became a fan-service heavy anime. OK, the above picture never happened in the anime, but it skated pretty close to it.

They later came out with two OVAs. The first one was a six-episode offering. If you didn’t have the time to invest 300 minutes to watch the entire series, you could cough up 16 minutes to get an overall sense of the show, but not get a good feel for it. Look, if you don’t have the time to watch anime in its entirety, then go watch something else, like “Schoolhouse Rock” or “Foul-Up, Bleeps and Blunders”. Anime does require your attention.

It was the second OVA that bothered me. Now, I have seen a lot of things in anime that bother me, but this one really sticks in my craw, as it doesn’t make any real sense. The second OVA is a two-episode excursion into hentai. (more…)