You will be absolutely amazed at how many accessories are included!

• Loran Pilot
• 2 Beam Sabers
• Shield
• Blaster
• Cow (that’s right)
• Missiles for Chest
• Mace

Next up are the signed photos of legendary voice actors! Theres Animated Batman’s voice-actor, Kevin Conroy and the voices of Pinky and the Brain, Maurice Lamarche and Rob Paulsen.

Finally I have a signed print by Enfu (Ken Taya).

Enfu

Intro

I go to these events to be inspired, to build my hope in humanity and to see really AWESOME STUFF! Emerald City Comic Con (ECCC) was a great time to study the different markets of what’s popular (Steam Punk) and what’s phasing out (Zombie related anything), however Sakura Con wasn’t helpful in that regard. Most of the time I had no idea what people’s costumes (also called “Cosplay“) were, but they don’t really mind telling you if you ask. One of the major reasons I like going to cons is to ask people what they are passionate about. I go in with an open mind and ask people what I should be watching, reading etc. and they are incredibly gracious with their responses! It’s a great way to pass time in lines.

In case you have never been to a con there are 4 or so major reasons people go: 1. to socialize with others; 2. to dress up and “cosplay” (pretend to be that character); 3. Watch Anime; 4. Play Games (Role-Playing, Card Games, Mobile Games, Arcade Games, Console Games, Retro Games); 5. Sit in a variety panels to hear stars talk about a show you loved, share interest in other activities, or pick up new techniques in a plethora of hobbies; 6. SHOP the show floor where people travel from around the country to show off stuff from Japan or their home-made items; I spend my time doing a variety of all those things, although I didn’t dress up for this particular event. I truly enjoying seeing all the creativity that goes into the costumes. People make such elaborate works of art and push the threshold of what I think “clothing’ is. These events truly inspire me!

The number 1 reason I went to this con was because they were one of the hosting sites for the 2012 Gunpla World Cup. This is a worldwide competition where people from around the globe who enjoy building Gundams (i.e. plastic Robot model kits made by Bandai

) can show off their favorite works while hoping to win a variety of awards with “Best In Show” giving you the opportunity to face off with the winners from around your country to see who will go on to represent your country with the best of the globe. This LINK (and THIS ONE) will show you some of the winners from last year. You can learn more by checking out THIS blog post about me building 3 gundams for the competition.

Preparing for the Con

Completing the gundams was the first part of preparing and the second part includes going through the schedule of the con and writing down the panels I want to attend in my iCal which were sync’ed to my iPhone.

Day 1

I got in line at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Seattle around 8:30 pm. It wasn’t until 11:30 that I got throughout the line with a ticket. There were 2 rooms that were being used for the line. When I entered I was in the back of room 2. By the time I had a ticket the line had wrapped outside, and was wrapping around the hotel…I met one person who got in line a half hour after me. He was in line for 5 hours. Next year I will book my ticket online if I don’t wind up working for the con. After getting my pass I went straight to the show floor to drop off my Gundam kits at the Bluefin Corp booth for the Gunpla World Cup. The gundams are displayed all three days and judged on the second day. After that I continued to explore the many tables with things for sale. One thing on my shopping list was a scaled drum set for my Toys Alive photos.

After spending time on the shopping floor I went to the 6th floor to room 6C where I saw some voice actors do a demo on how they dub Japanese cartoons for American audiences. It was very interesting observing how they use cues, Pro-Tools and how they taught a few audience members to dub a section of a strange cooking-show.

Around 3:15pm I went to room 6E to see a “Foam Sword Contest”. I had no idea what it was going to be but I was definitely pleased. The seats in the room formed a square empty space in the middle of the room like you might have seen in Karate Kid where kids made a tournament and paired off to fight each other with foam swords. I don’t know the rules but I’m sure google has the answer. Make sure you check one of these out if you hear about it! I was fascinated by the different fighting styles.

While at ECCC I heard Will Wheaton talk about his new Youtube Show “Tabletop” where he reviewed different board games. That panel inspired me to check out board games because I have never enjoyed Monopoly or any of the other games I had played. While he was talking about games, the crowd went crazy when he mentioned Munchkin. That made it to my list of things to learn about. At Sakura Con there was a gaming room where people played the Pokemon card game, Magic and a plethora of other games including Munchkin. At 6pm I went to room 613 to see if I could find some strangers to teach me to play. Needless to say the game is amazing and I now own a copy

At 9:45pm I went to room 206 to hear some people discuss the various Gundam Anime Series’. It wasn’t all that entertaining to I went to Theater 4C 2 to watch a new Trigun movie. Probably around 11 I made my way home and was VERY excited to go to bed.

Day 2

The second day of the Con probably got started around 10am for me. At noon I went to see if I could play another round of Munchkin (which rocked!). At 1pm I attended a Panel about the JET program where you can get paid to teach English in Japan. From 3-4pm the Gundams were judged and at about 4:15pm the winners were announced. My Gundam Age-1 Normal won BEST 1/144 Scale and my Hakugin Ryuseiba SD (Horse Gundam) won best SD! I was NOT expecting to win two different categories! I also appreciated that they mis-labeled those as being made by my girlfriend. I received a Gundam Age-2 Normal Kit and a new SD Gundam Age Kit!!! I made sure Amanda got the Age SD kit.

6C was my destination at 4pm where Steve Blum who plays Starscream on the new Transformers cartoon was talking about his experience. After his panel I booked it to get Amanda a signature by Chris Sabat who voiced her favorite Dragonball Z Character, Vegeta.

At 6pm Chris Sabat had a panel in room 618 where he shared about his experiences voice directing DBZ “back in the day”. It was a fantastic time!

My night came to an end in Theater 4C-2 where I watched the first 2 episodes of Gundam Unicorn which were fabulous!!!

Day 3

My final day at Sakura Con started with a panel about voicing video games at 10:45am. After that I got to attend a very interesting panel about Super Sentai at 11:15 am in room 309. In case you don’t know, the American tv show, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was made in a pretty bizarre way. There had been a show in Japan called Super Sentai that had been on for almost 20 years at that time. Some people decided to take one of the shows fight sequences and cut it with American actors to make a show for the youth of America. That is what we know as Power Rangers. This panel answered A LOT of questions I had!

I spent the rest of the time taking pictures of people’s costumes, sharing conversations, shopping and picking up my Gundams before heading home. There was an estimated 30,000 people at the con.

Conclusion

Events like this are sometimes sad to leave. it’s so nice to be able to walk up to anyone and be able to strike up an interesting conversation about media, stories or another culture. Anime fans might not smell the best, but they are some of the friendliest and most welcoming people I have ever encountered. I love their culture. I had an absolute blast and I am looking forward to working with the staff on next year’s event. I was blown away to find out that the even exists as a non-profit business. This means that NOBODY on staff gets paid. ALL of the planning is done by volunteers!!!! MADNESS

(The last picture is all the stuff I collected and bought at the con…people pass a lot of stuff out).

Jack Elliot Nunn (Best in Show Winner) & Me

My thirst for alternative games was driving me to look for something new and I decided to check out the Resident Evil Deck Building Game. Now when I think about card games, I quickly remember my first experience playing a collectible card game (CCG). It was the original Star Wars CCG and I bought a starter deck. After learning the rules and playing against myself I went to a local game shop where I found a stranger to play. I was so excited to pull out a Tatooine land card and applying soldiers to it when the guy I was playing brought out the freaking Death Star and began DESTROYING my planets…needless to say, I stopped playing those games until Pokemon came out.

Either way, I learned that I did not possess the skills for building a deck and I didn’t like playing against people who spent $200+ on card games…enter the world of Deck Building Games! In one box you have all the cards you will ever need. All the players start off with the same basic hand and you slowly add cards to your deck to learn the process.

Resident Evil has been a strange franchise that has seen some pretty low lows…I was nervous about a card game. After all, how could Bandai get involved with a Card Game and it not suck? It’s Resident Evil! The movies have NOTHING to do with the games…and the current games don’t even seem like they are connected with the originals.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about the game, but it is AMAZING! Make sure you check it out! For about $25 you get everything you need to have fun with 1-4 players!

The downside? The box it comes in has a horrible plastic insert for keeping your cards organized. If you plan on putting your cards in sleeves then you are also out of luck…so I found this post and got inspired!

The staff at Card Kingdom (a MUST SEE gaming hub in Seattle) recommended KMC Sleeves. After making my purchase I got started at one of the nearby tables.

Step One: cut the tops from the 400 count card boxes.

Step Two: replace the plastic tray with the boxes.

Step Three: Make dividers using cardboard or in my case, old cereal boxes (I recommend the cardboard, it stands out better).

Step Four: Sleeve Cards

Step Five: Make Cardboard boxes to fill in the large gaps, but leave enough room to sort through the cards when the side is full.

That’s all it takes to make a stellar box that has been modded! Another perk of this mod is that the cardboard boxes make the outer box much sturdier!

Note: there is enough room for the rule book as long as your dividers aren’t too tall.

The Game

Even before I entered the competition I knew I wasn’t going to win best in show, but I wanted to try for some of the other categories like Best SD (stands for Super-Deformed which means tiny body, big feet and huge head), Best 1/144 or Best Out of Box. Best 1/100 seemed like a category where the super talented professionals would show of their craft. The entry form allowed 3 entries and after contacting the judges I was told that it would be ok to enter 3 that Amanda and I worked on. During this process I had bought the 1/144 scale Gundam Age-1 Normal and was wildly impressed with it’s pose-ability. I had also recently acquired a airbrush and was experimenting with shadowing my robots. It was probably 2 weeks before the Con that I decided to enter my Age Gundam.

My personal entries included: Gundam Age-1 Norma 1/144 Scale, Hakugin Ryuseiba SD (Horse Gundam) and Musha Gundam Bakunetsumaru (Looks like a warrior SD Gundam).

My Group Entry with Amanda included: 2 BearGGuys 1/144 Scale and 1 MG Turn A Gundam 1/100. The bears were custom painted to look like a Panda and a Polar bear and were riding in a shopping cart that was being pushed by the Turn A. My secret addition was hiding a tiny BMO figure from Adventure Time in the shopping cart.

Preparing for the Con

Unfortunately I waited too long to register online for the con so I had to plan on getting there SUPER early on the first day to buy my 3 day pass. The other part of preparing for the con was continuing to build and work on my Gundam Age Gundam and the Horse Gundam that I was making for Amanda. I literally worked on both of those until the night before the Con! It was crazy. One thing that really slowed down my completion of the AGE Gundam was that I shadowed in a crazy way. Typically what you will do is take your kit, prime it all one color, pre-shadow with black then paint with colors (either by hand or airbrush), clear coat, panel line then clear again. With this Kit i didn’t want to prime because if you bump your toy while posing etc. it very quickly shows the damage. I wanted to shadow the Gundam directly so that if I bumped it, the damage would look like actual battle damage.

First I assembled the pieces, then mixed 1 drop or so of Vallejo color that was close to the color I was shadowing (blue, red, or yellow) and added 1 drop of black to darken it. Then I would very lightly spray a thin line on the edges of all the pieces. Frequently I would make mistakes and would dip a brush in rubbing alcohol and would scrub the piece until it was clean. This wasn’t too difficult. Shadowing the white was nearly a nightmare. I used Tamiya Smoke with Tamiya Thinner or 70% Alcohol. Some websites recommended 10 drops of alcohol to 1 drop of Smoke but I found it to be far too weak. Let me introduce you to my problem. Smoke direct is too dark for the gundam and needs to be thinned with something transparent to help it go on lighter. So you add something to thin it to make it lighter. Too much thinner and you have no idea what is happening until after 20+ passes or you lose track of what you are doing and the whole thing looks gray (that happened a lot…), too little thinner and it’s too dark. Another problem is that if you air pressure from the compressor is too strong it will cause the paint to bead and spread the way a hair dryer will blow water drops on your counter. If your pressure is too light the pigment will not come out smooth. The more thinner the use, the lower your air pressure can be, the less thinner you use the higher your air pressure has to be (remember this can cause your paint to bead up and turn out terribly). Now take all those variables, add them together and you will find a very frustrated Jon who has tried all kinds of mixtures.

Some nights I found success using 5 drops of 70% Rubbing Alcohol and 2 drops of Smoke mixed in my airbrush at 10 PSI (constant pressure when holding down the trigger), other nights I preferred 5 drops of Tamiya Thinner and 2 drops of Smoke at 8 PSI. Towards the end of this project I was using 1 drop of Alcohol and 1 drop of Smoke at 9 PSI (could have been 8 PSI…). Normally when you are shading you can go back and forth between black and color to get the transition you want. My technique was not so forgiving. It was free hand and you either got it right, or your started completely over. It was very time consuming, but it will be much easier to touch up in the future then the other option. Over time I think this technique will be more durable then priming. I’ll be sure to post about it.

The Horse was a totally different technique. I primed the pieces, painted black in the edges, and then painted the pieces their proper color while keeping the edges that were shadowed softer. It was pretty straight forward and looked great! The reason I did this was because I was totally changing the colors from it’s original silver. The Age could be done it’s way because I didn’t change the colors at all.

Washing the Pieces

I made a lot of new friends and got to share many interesting conversations. Among the first of the people I met was a guy who was there to “DM” for a game. I asked what that meant and I was told DM is short for Dungeon Master. I was curious about his experience with Dungeons & Dragons since I was told repeatedly if I played the game I would be possessed by the devil or I would go to hell. I asked the DM if he remembered this from the 90′s and asked where the messages went since I no longer hear them. He informed me that they began with Chick Tracks a crazy christian group that made little comics about the end of the world and other such nonsense. I had a great time learning the history of the game and seeing how it has played a major role in a number of the writer’s and creator’s lives of media I greatly enjoy. Pen himself actually said that Adventure Time is most influenced by his experiences playing D&D as a kid! He said it’s like Dungeons and Dragons without dice.

Among the costumes and panels I learned about a new sub-culture called “Bronies”. These are 20-something males obsessed with My Little Pony. Grown men, into My Little Pony. I don’t know much about them but there are t-shirts targeted just for them at many booths. Shannon Watters, editor of the Adventure Time comic asked me, “Have you seen the cartoon?” I told her I had not and she told me that it is amazing. I assume the quality of story and cuteness of characters is the reason they have such passionate fans.

Outside of the front doors, there were tons of custom lego sculptures set up promoting Seattle’s Brick Con. It is a convention dedicated to Legos and other building toys!

I have to give a special shout out to Robot and Jasmine at the Kaboom booth for helping me and my new friends get in the line to meet Pen Ward. The original plan was to do a raffle to find 50 people to get his signature on Saturday and Sunday. This didn’t exactly work out perfectly because a lot of people did not show up to check at the booth. I was able to sweet talk them into letting me in the back of the line where I was able to get Pen to sign a few things for me. I’ll make a new post of those after I surprise Amanda with what I got for her

Another highlight from the convention was meeting some of the biggest voice actors of my childhood! Jess Harnell (Wacko), John Dimaggio (Bender, Jake the Dog), Billy West (Doug Funnie, Stimpy), Tara Strong (My Little Pony, Timmy Turner, Bubbles from PowerPuff Girls), Mo LaMarche (Brain,  Toucan Sam, Lexus), Rob Paulson (Yakko, Pinky, Throttle, Raphael from TMNT) and the legendary Kevin Conroy who played the Animated Batman. They were all extremely friendly and had great recommendations for pursuing voice acting.

I dream of a faith where we are not looking to make a career out of following God, one filled with incomes, bonuses and larger facilities. I dream of a faith where we are able to surrender what we own and recognize that they are gifts from the creator and recognize that no one was created unequal. We as men created those differences and as Christians we should war against the programs and belief systems that maintain these differences for we should be a people that are practicing for the age to come. Yes we are broken, but it doesn’t mean we can’t work towards the way things were meant to be. After all, there really is no other reason to waste your time in this existence. If we truly loved one another as we loved ourselves a ancient and mysterious truth of beauty would be revealed.

I dream of a faith where we share our excess with each other so we can share lives of equality, simplicity and celebration. This is the heart of tithing. Not building gigantic idols and continuing to separate ourselves from God so we can pay others to tell us what God is saying. Yeshua truly desired a people who would live in communication with the father. It is a damn shame that we have rejected this truth for a cheaper faith. The king has always desired to interact with his people and even the Israelites rejected this model because they were too scared.

I have learned to reject anyone that believes that they “know the way” to live this faith. We are all but fools on a journey like ants trying to figure out how a microwave works (thank you for the beautiful metaphor Charlie). We will never truly know anything, but we can work together and dream of a better tomorrow. Beware of people claiming to have the answer. Many will say community is the answer, many will say pentecostalism is the way, many will say that home churches are the way. These answers are all lies from people who are far too arrogant to recognize their own failures. The truth is that pieces of all of these are necessary. But that short list of three is not complete. In our culture we want to live lives of comfort while buying books from people who claim to have it all figured out. Truthfully we don’t have anything figured out. As I type this I want to remind you that I don’t know anything. I am a fool on a long, winding and divided road. But at each branch I want to sit silently listening for the eternal one to whisper the delicate truths that we so easily overlook.

We don’t need to live our lives looking for brilliant snippets that are under 140 characters that we can share with our friends. We can live for conversations and silence of wisdom that don’t belong in the digital medium.

May we be a people who war against zionism, may we be a people who rebel against the lies we have known since birth, may we pursue life as close to the kingdom as we can get before we truly meet the creator. May we dismantle the idols in our lives and be willing to publicly set them on fire as tears of repentance roll down our faces while others think we are fools. May we live into our destiny as a strange people in a strange land where we seek to love each other as we would love ourselves. May we hear the whisper of the Creator and his Son while we sit on our hands and knees in silence.

Our to-do list included:
• Stanley Park 
• The Eatery
• Movie Land Arcade

Probably one of the most iconic stops was at The Eatery. If you are open-minded about trying new foods, enjoy sushi and are somewhat interested in Japanese cartoons or paper mache monsters suspended along the ceiling then this is THE place for you! Our favorite part was the Mars Attacks Desert. It is a European Mars Bar (different then US) deep fried,  served next to vanilla ice cream, topped with chocolate syrup, whipped cream and a cherry. It was magnificent!!!

As a Heads Up the Movie Land arcade is a little weird. There are plenty of video games and pinball machines (most notably the new Transformers machine) but there are dirty peep show video booths in the back that take quarters.

I was amazed at how many Asian restaurants were in Vancouver. Possibly the second best memory was sitting on top of Vancouver’s space needle (Vancouver Look Out) and seeing the sunset together. Hopefully soon I will edit the videos from this trip.

Are you curious about the picture of the van? Yeah…we are too. No idea what it is but I couldn’t help but share a picture of the “Wham-Bambulance”. Vancouver is a strange place.

The video truly demonstrates why I exclusively track politics on Comedy Central. Thank you for keeping it real and authentic Jessica Williams.

My gift to Amanda is secret, but it involved flowers, chocolates and fragrances!