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I've managed to grab time on the computer at the New Koyo this morning to update. Let's see if I actually remember all we've done.
So: Worldcon. Rachel and I worked out how to get to Yokohama from the New Koyo, which involved three changes of trains and an hour and a half, but when you compare the price of the New Koyo per night to the price of the Worldcon hotels per night (i.e., we're paying for six nights about what it cost for one at the con hotels), it's completely worth it.
Rachel wore her Harajuku outfit and I did her hair, and she got stopped several times for pictures on Friday. Less so on Saturday, to her disappointment, because there were more costumes wandering around then, although not as much as there'd be normally be, I expect because of the cost of shipping costumes to Japan.
Rachel was on the Henson panel along with Halle Stanford, the president of children's programming at Henson and Julianne Buescher, one of the puppetteers. Henson's doing some really nifty things due to come out in the next year or two - especially with a new digital system that allows for motion capture of performers and real-time digital rendering of the characters they're portraying. What this means is that there are two performers for each character: one in a body suit that a camera can follow and pick up points on important joints, and one controlling the character's facial expressions and movements with their hands. The performers act out the scene, and the cameras pick it up and dump it into a computer, which constructs the animation as it happens. So you get real-time animation, which means performaers can redo scenes or improvise, and the animation picks up the energy of a live performance. There's post-processing time to add shadows or fur or whatever, but the primary animation is done realtime.
If you Google for "Henson Skrumps" you should be able to find some examples - they're working on a sitcom-style show using this system.
They also announced that "The Dark Crystal 2" is in production at the panel.
Rachel and I headed over to the Japanese-language programming track for one that was supposed to be in both English and Japanese, on (naturally) Yaoi vs. Slash. I left partway into it, since I wasn't able to follow much of the translation and I wasn't feeling good, and Rachel left not oo long after.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kate_nepveu stuck it out and has a report on it over at her LJ, if you're interested in a conversation between Japanese and English-language fans on the subject.
We went for lunch withkate_nepveu and the Henson people to an udon place in the Queen's Square mall next to the convention center. As we were standing in line ordering, a very fmailiar voice said to his dining companions "I'll take care of it," and a man pushed to the counter next to Rachel and talked with the cooks in Japanese. Turns out it was George Takei, which sent Rachel into fits of fangirlishness. :)
In the afternoon we went to the Naomi Novik interview, conducted by her Japanese editor through the absolute best interpreter we saw at the entire convention, bar none. I was far more interested in her performance than the interview itself. XD After the interview, while waiting for Naomi to get ready to go to dinner (oh yeah, did I mention that we went to dinner with Naomi Novik, her husband, Ellen Kushner, and a couple of their friends? I highly advise going to Worldcon with a writer who knows people. It greatly increases your name-dropping potential), we met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
bravecows, and a Japanese girl who was a great fan of Novik's books, both of whom we're going to geek out with today doing doujinshi shopping and dinner. :)
[Rachel, momentarily hijackingtelophase's LJ-- the Japanese fan's LJ is sho_sunaga. She is into yaoi, manga, SGA, Supernatural, Naomi Novik, and fic. Go forth and friend her!]
DInner took a while, since we started out late and most of the restaurants in the area were closed or couldn't deal with seven people with no reservations without a wait. We met Ellen Kushner on the way back to teh hotel, who took us to another nearby mall, and we ate at a steakhouse.
I also managed to do something to my left ankle during the walk, and it hurts. :P Mostly when I walk uphill, or down stairs, which is weird. and it feels more like my Achilles tendon, and not the ligament that I'd screwed up a number of years ago. Last night we bought a bottle of Sport Ice from the convenience store, and I iced it down, and this morning we're going by a pharmacy to see if we can get something that I can wrap it with.
That was Friday. Saturday we got to the convention at a more civilized hour (noon), and went to teh Bob Eggleton/Yoshitaka Amano panel for about twenty minutes, until the sheer incompetence of the translators - Rachel could translate some stuff better than they could - drove us both away. Which, considering what an Amano fangirl I am, was quite impressive. At least I was in his presence for twenty minutes.
We went for lunch to a conveyor-belt suhi place,w here, naturally, the first plate I grabbed contained sushi that had natto on it. Whereupon I found that apparently I don't actually hate it, because I refused to believe it was natto when Rachel told me, because it wasn't as nasty as natto was supposed to be. Huh. At any rate, they had some wonderful stripey salmon, some delicious stuff that I think was salmon eggs, and I liked the crab salad sushi a lot. But that wasn't the cool bit. The cool bit was in the checkout. As per usual at conveyor-belt sushi places, the plates are color-coded according to the price of the sushi on it, and the server count sup the plates at the end of the meal and tallies your bill from that. Here, the servers carried handheld scanners and waved them up and down the stack of plates. The scanner tallied the bill, and small printers they carried at their waists printed out the bill. Nifty, huh?
Oh yes - most restaurants we've gone to use small PDAs for orders, which seem to connect to a central computer so that any server who happens to be walking by can add to your order.
That afternoon we went to what was supposed to be the Ellen Kushner kaffeeklatsch, but which ahd been rescheduled (without telling her), and we ended up talking to Naomi Novik's husband, Charles Adair, who owns Subterranean Press, about printing and other things. And Rachel got a tattoo from Ellen Kushner. I'll let her tell you about that.
Down in the small fanzine alley, Rachel and I found a librarian who does manga, and who had been to India and wrote a manga about that. Unfortuantely, she wasn't there every time we tried to go talk to her, so we had to settle for writing notes to her and leaving them with her stuff. :)
This is another difference between Japanese and American conventions - people in the fanzine alley left their wares out and left money boxes with a note telling you to put your money in the box if you wanted to buy something. I wouldn't dare do that at a US con.
We ditched the Hugos, fearful of the translation, and met up withbravecows, and headed out to Yokohama Chinatown to tourist about and eat dinner. We had duck and pork for dinner, and consumed many cups of tea while sitting around geeking out about manga and doujinshi and anime.
Overall, a nice con even though we didn't attend much of it. It suffered from not enough integration between the Japanese and English tracks - all the interesting stuff seemed to be happening in Japanese with no translation, while the English track was the same old stuff that you get at every con. I'd have loved to attend some of the Japanese panels about media and other things, but it was not to be, giving the impression of two completely different cons that just happened to be taking place in the same hotel at the same time.
That's all I remember for now. Well, Rachel just poked me and said "Giant tortoise!" While we were walking about Chinatown we met a man taking his tortoise for a walk, and took pictures and petted it. :) His name is was Rupo or Lupo, and he wa 6 years old. His shell was ... about a foot in diameter? Maybe a bit more. Rachel will post pictures when she can.
So: Worldcon. Rachel and I worked out how to get to Yokohama from the New Koyo, which involved three changes of trains and an hour and a half, but when you compare the price of the New Koyo per night to the price of the Worldcon hotels per night (i.e., we're paying for six nights about what it cost for one at the con hotels), it's completely worth it.
Rachel wore her Harajuku outfit and I did her hair, and she got stopped several times for pictures on Friday. Less so on Saturday, to her disappointment, because there were more costumes wandering around then, although not as much as there'd be normally be, I expect because of the cost of shipping costumes to Japan.
Rachel was on the Henson panel along with Halle Stanford, the president of children's programming at Henson and Julianne Buescher, one of the puppetteers. Henson's doing some really nifty things due to come out in the next year or two - especially with a new digital system that allows for motion capture of performers and real-time digital rendering of the characters they're portraying. What this means is that there are two performers for each character: one in a body suit that a camera can follow and pick up points on important joints, and one controlling the character's facial expressions and movements with their hands. The performers act out the scene, and the cameras pick it up and dump it into a computer, which constructs the animation as it happens. So you get real-time animation, which means performaers can redo scenes or improvise, and the animation picks up the energy of a live performance. There's post-processing time to add shadows or fur or whatever, but the primary animation is done realtime.
If you Google for "Henson Skrumps" you should be able to find some examples - they're working on a sitcom-style show using this system.
They also announced that "The Dark Crystal 2" is in production at the panel.
Rachel and I headed over to the Japanese-language programming track for one that was supposed to be in both English and Japanese, on (naturally) Yaoi vs. Slash. I left partway into it, since I wasn't able to follow much of the translation and I wasn't feeling good, and Rachel left not oo long after.
kate_nepveu stuck it out and has a report on it over at her LJ, if you're interested in a conversation between Japanese and English-language fans on the subject.We went for lunch with
kate_nepveu and the Henson people to an udon place in the Queen's Square mall next to the convention center. As we were standing in line ordering, a very fmailiar voice said to his dining companions "I'll take care of it," and a man pushed to the counter next to Rachel and talked with the cooks in Japanese. Turns out it was George Takei, which sent Rachel into fits of fangirlishness. :)In the afternoon we went to the Naomi Novik interview, conducted by her Japanese editor through the absolute best interpreter we saw at the entire convention, bar none. I was far more interested in her performance than the interview itself. XD After the interview, while waiting for Naomi to get ready to go to dinner (oh yeah, did I mention that we went to dinner with Naomi Novik, her husband, Ellen Kushner, and a couple of their friends? I highly advise going to Worldcon with a writer who knows people. It greatly increases your name-dropping potential), we met
bravecows, and a Japanese girl who was a great fan of Novik's books, both of whom we're going to geek out with today doing doujinshi shopping and dinner. :)[Rachel, momentarily hijacking
telophase's LJ-- the Japanese fan's LJ is sho_sunaga. She is into yaoi, manga, SGA, Supernatural, Naomi Novik, and fic. Go forth and friend her!]DInner took a while, since we started out late and most of the restaurants in the area were closed or couldn't deal with seven people with no reservations without a wait. We met Ellen Kushner on the way back to teh hotel, who took us to another nearby mall, and we ate at a steakhouse.
I also managed to do something to my left ankle during the walk, and it hurts. :P Mostly when I walk uphill, or down stairs, which is weird. and it feels more like my Achilles tendon, and not the ligament that I'd screwed up a number of years ago. Last night we bought a bottle of Sport Ice from the convenience store, and I iced it down, and this morning we're going by a pharmacy to see if we can get something that I can wrap it with.
That was Friday. Saturday we got to the convention at a more civilized hour (noon), and went to teh Bob Eggleton/Yoshitaka Amano panel for about twenty minutes, until the sheer incompetence of the translators - Rachel could translate some stuff better than they could - drove us both away. Which, considering what an Amano fangirl I am, was quite impressive. At least I was in his presence for twenty minutes.
We went for lunch to a conveyor-belt suhi place,w here, naturally, the first plate I grabbed contained sushi that had natto on it. Whereupon I found that apparently I don't actually hate it, because I refused to believe it was natto when Rachel told me, because it wasn't as nasty as natto was supposed to be. Huh. At any rate, they had some wonderful stripey salmon, some delicious stuff that I think was salmon eggs, and I liked the crab salad sushi a lot. But that wasn't the cool bit. The cool bit was in the checkout. As per usual at conveyor-belt sushi places, the plates are color-coded according to the price of the sushi on it, and the server count sup the plates at the end of the meal and tallies your bill from that. Here, the servers carried handheld scanners and waved them up and down the stack of plates. The scanner tallied the bill, and small printers they carried at their waists printed out the bill. Nifty, huh?
Oh yes - most restaurants we've gone to use small PDAs for orders, which seem to connect to a central computer so that any server who happens to be walking by can add to your order.
That afternoon we went to what was supposed to be the Ellen Kushner kaffeeklatsch, but which ahd been rescheduled (without telling her), and we ended up talking to Naomi Novik's husband, Charles Adair, who owns Subterranean Press, about printing and other things. And Rachel got a tattoo from Ellen Kushner. I'll let her tell you about that.
Down in the small fanzine alley, Rachel and I found a librarian who does manga, and who had been to India and wrote a manga about that. Unfortuantely, she wasn't there every time we tried to go talk to her, so we had to settle for writing notes to her and leaving them with her stuff. :)
This is another difference between Japanese and American conventions - people in the fanzine alley left their wares out and left money boxes with a note telling you to put your money in the box if you wanted to buy something. I wouldn't dare do that at a US con.
We ditched the Hugos, fearful of the translation, and met up with
bravecows, and headed out to Yokohama Chinatown to tourist about and eat dinner. We had duck and pork for dinner, and consumed many cups of tea while sitting around geeking out about manga and doujinshi and anime.Overall, a nice con even though we didn't attend much of it. It suffered from not enough integration between the Japanese and English tracks - all the interesting stuff seemed to be happening in Japanese with no translation, while the English track was the same old stuff that you get at every con. I'd have loved to attend some of the Japanese panels about media and other things, but it was not to be, giving the impression of two completely different cons that just happened to be taking place in the same hotel at the same time.
That's all I remember for now. Well, Rachel just poked me and said "Giant tortoise!" While we were walking about Chinatown we met a man taking his tortoise for a walk, and took pictures and petted it. :) His name is was Rupo or Lupo, and he wa 6 years old. His shell was ... about a foot in diameter? Maybe a bit more. Rachel will post pictures when she can.
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people in the fanzine alley left their wares out and left money boxes with a note telling you to put your money in the box if you wanted to buy something.
Whoa, really? I'd think that would be a good way to get ripped off.
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But am glad, nonetheless, that you had a good time. It's too bad the con proper was disappointing in some ways.
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Ellen Kushner! OMG, I am green with fangirl envy!!!
I'm glad you are having such a geat time, but sorry (of course) about your ankle.
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