Otakon 2013 – It was Cooler!

 

So Otakon happened this past weekend. It was a blast. That’s my opening.

Fine, I’ll write more. If you're in a hurry and don't want to read my thought-provoking post, you can skip to the image gallery. (2 PAGES!)

So another good year at Otakon, plenty of shoots, lots of food eaten. I finally got around to finish editing the photos and writing the article.

The weekend started on a lovely Thursday morning in Toronto, Alex, Sierra and I departed Toronto (albeit a little late) and headed down south. Things went south we got to the border, massive line-up. I don’t recall having a long line like this for any of the other US cons I’ve been to. I guess Thursday noon is just prime time to go to the states?

After a glorious 9 hours of driving we finally arrived in Baltimore, checked-in to our hotel, our three other roommates joined us later on. The three of us went to get our badges but just didn’t make it in time… First year we didn’t manage to get our badges on Thursday night, it was quite the emotional state I was in. Confusion!

The one thing I gripe about when going to the US is wifi, it’s always hit and miss, data roaming is disabled to avoid the million-dollar phone bills, but wifi always seems to be a challenge… Our hotel room wifi was like $10 for a single day, it also cost at the BCC, the only spots I could get wifi was at Starbucks (who’s prices seem rather insanely high for someone who spends a mere $1.60 on a Tim Horton’s medium double-double coffee), and Caribou Coffee, which was much closer and cheaper. Bottom-line, there needs to be more accessible wifi for out-of-towners!

I started my Friday with a photoshoot at 11, everything was going well until someone had a little accident and that’s when things went south… Luckily a cosplayer who had first-aid training and a med kit with her helped a lot with the situation, thanks again! Things eventually turned out all right, nothing serious.

The weather this year at Otakon seemed to be more mild, mercury staying more on the south side of the thermometer. Not saying much because it was still hot as heck out for most of the weekend! There was a nice shower Friday afternoon to spice things up, and several cloudy periods over the weekend were awesome, photographers rejoice!

There wasn’t anything too memorable this year, just a lot of photographing, moving around, chatting with people. Elysiam had his big ole’ softbox going, Beat-down Boogie had his stabilizer on the go, MLZ was doing his flybys. Always so lovely reconnecting with people after weeks/months at a time.

If you’re here to view some photos, here’s your cue. (Unless you’re aware that I link every lead article photo to the gallery ; ) ) Great variety of costumes once again, didn’t get a shot of everything I wanted because it’s just impossible to photograph every single cosplayer but I saw some ingenious costumes such as the “T-Bag man”, nose-bleeding Roshi, cute kid Gohan, metal gear solid group, Duke Nukem and so many other. Make sure you check the gallery. (2 PAGES!)

There was plenty of more that happened but its just too much to write down, dinners with people, gaming with people (Mario Kart Wii, I only lost because I had the GC controller, I'm much better with the classic controller!), and many other random crazy stuff!

So that’s my summary of the con for this year. I hear it’ll be moving to DC in 2017 and I can understand the need to expand as the BCC is getting a little crowded at this point, can’t imagine how packed it’ll be in 2016! I'll miss BCC! I do have mixed-emotions because I’m more familiar with DC being Katsucon’s home, but a bigger con building would be great, we just need to make sure the Ice Cold Water guy knows about this so he can head down South and join us!

Mike