Time machine destination set to 2019.. and engage!

Firstly, here’s a nice cosplay of Ainz from the Overlord anime. Imagine walking around town and meeting this guy late at night.

There were definitely a bunch of people dressed up in and around the convention, and a good amount of people in general, though not as much as the conventions that I’ve been to in Japan or New York. It was a very similar sort of convention though, if on a smaller scale, and I took this picture of a local idol dancer group performing out in one of the convention halls, even though it was a very dark picture due to the brightness in the background and my lousy iPhone camera at the time.

There was an autograph section with the guests who were in town to attend the conference, and they were selling CDs at the autograph table as well. I believe the autographs cost $10 or so per, I don’t believe they were free that year.

I did bring a CD for one of the guests, Choucho, to sign, and bought a CD from each of the other two guests that I was interested in, Sayaka Sasaki and Yoko Ishida, to have them sign on the spot as well.

The other CDs there were bought from other stalls at the event. The top right one was a CD from the Yuru Yuri anime that was on sale for $5, and the one in the bottom left was from the Tokyo Xanadu game, from which I featured a song last week. That last CD came with a pack of cards from an in-game minigame, as well as an art book, as well.

I also bought a blind keychain box from the Re:Creators anime and got a keychain from a character I liked, and I ended up wearing this keychain on my bag for a couple of years.

The last item I bought was some random comic book sized fan manga of K-On. Basically a doujinshi, or fan work, though I don’t think it was lewd like most Japanese doujinshi tend to be for some reason. Or else I wouldn’t have bought it.

I also took pictures of a store selling plushies and came away with a lot of “whale pictures” that were basically Kel‘s favourite Jinbe-san plushies, though I don’t know if I was fully cognizant of this at the time.

I didn’t buy anything from there though.

Two other notable things happened that I remember. The first was that someone that I didn’t recognize stopped me and gave me some tickets to the maid cafe event happening on the evening that I was there, as they did not have time to attend it. We basically went into the maid cafe, which was staffed by volunteers, 50 at a time or something, and got split up amongst tables where we sat and played some games with the maids serving our table, and then had omurice decorated with tomato sauce by the maids while watching other maids singing on stage.

We then had the chance to buy souvenirs, including having some photos taken with the maids: That was all very cool.

Lastly, there was an evening concert that I attended, with the three Japanese guests that had come over to Edmonton — Choucho, Sayaka Sasaki, and Yoko Ishida. They took turns singing solo songs, then duets, and then some songs with all three of them on stage at once, which was neat, although at that point of my anime career I didn’t recognize most of the songs, except for some songs from Girls und Panzer — DreamRiser by Choucho and Grand Symphony by Sayaka Sasaki. Those two songs are still songs I love a lot to this day, especially the latter. We sadly weren’t allowed to record this, and the stupid event never released any recordings of this either, though I think some audience members did record parts of it anyway and put it on Youtube. For my part, I had bought and was using a glowstick anyway so I only had one free hand, but I did take some pictures.

Finally, this is not my video or my upload, but here’s one that someone (apparently named Grant, looking at the shikishi board at the end of the video) put together for the collab concert back then.