Panel OF DOOM Report: JACON 2007

I've procrastinated on this for long enough. The JACON Panel OF DOOM kicked off at 10:30 PM in the Main Events room on Friday. It's actually the exact same place as the Sheraton, only they got bought out and the name changed. As I mentioned in the original announcement, the new hotel staff wasn't too keen on this whole "anime con" thing, and so doing things like taping up flyers was out of the question. On top of that, I was scheduled opposite the Yaoi PJ Party and right after the flagship event of Friday night, the Wasabi Animusical. A big event like that expends a lot of energy from the crowd, and so I was kind of hesitant about how my turnout would be, especially considering the popularity of the yaoi stuff at JACON (and every other con). On top of all that, it was opening night for Spider-Man 3. So how'd things go?

To my surprise, it was better than last year! I'm not going to say that I filled up the room or anything, but there were more people than last time:
While it's true that I asked for the smaller room, having the extra space came in handy. I ran the panel off of a HP Pavilion 2210, which I purchased specifically for use at anime con panels. As lame as that may sound, without it I'd have no Internet connection to be writing this report up! Equipped with a DVD drive and support for DualView video output, I could output the videos to the projector screen while keeping the playlist, controls, and such visible only to me on my monitor. This allowed me to move things around, cue things up, and switch over to other clips as needed.

Once I started, I pretty much just kept going without much regard for the time. The tech staff--who gave me setup time to prepare in advance and ensured everything was running according to plan, so kudos to them--came in and asked me to wrap things up at 1:00 AM, which is when I realized it was 1:00 AM and I had officially missed out on going to all the important afterparties, thus missing out the best time to secure silly podcast promos from the guests and such. D'oh! Still, this was the highlight of the night:


To see a full listing of what got shown, as well as an explanation regarding WTF is going on in that video, click here. I recorded the audio for most of the entire show, but it started a few minutes late and then the battery on my recorder died with about 15 minutes to spare. Did anyone other than Danno care enough to listen to the one I did for last year's panel? If not, I'll probably just send the file to him directly. Next Panel OF DOOM probably won't be until Anime Weekend Atlanta in four months. That time I won't have the benefit of having a full week where I don't have to go to work, so I'd better work that one further in advance.

animehell