The highlights for me were:

• Songs from Chrono Trigger!
• Oboe solo in Legend of Zelda medley.
• Music from Halo 1 and 3, with live guitar and full orchestra and choir. Just excellent sound. It made me want to play through Halo 1 again. And get the soundtrack.
• Music from World of Warcraft! It was amazing to hear the background music that I usually take for granted done with such precision and volume. Syncing it with visuals from the in-game trailers was also a nice touch.
• Excellent performance of One Winged Angel from Final Fantasy VII, with cosplay pics being shown on the display, as an encore.
• The Video Game Pianist renditions of Final Fantasy and Mario tunes.
• Music from various Castlevania and Mega Man games, some of which I recognized from my The Advantage CDs.
• A live performance of Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion on expert mode in Guitar Hero by a talented audience member, with guitar and orchestra accompaniment. And some sort of odd-looking tube for the first 20 seconds or so of the song.
• Seeing Out Run footage while the orchestra played some of its music, as I was walking in. Man that takes me back.

There were a few things that could have made the show even more amazing than it already was.

• I couldn't place one of the songs in the Chrono Trigger medley that most time was spent on. Perhaps it was a Chrono Cross piece? I would have liked to have heard even more themes from Chrono Trigger, and more time spent on that segment overall.
• For Castlevania: Stage 3 (I think that's what it was), instead of them saying "go, go, go", I was expecting to hear some really sweet high notes being hit on the guitar. Most likely, this is due to me being familiar with the live performance version of the song by The Advantage from archive.org.

Stacked parking was an interesting experience. Lots of people waiting in their dark cars, and then simultaneously leaving. It was more painless than it looked. One car nearby was rocking out some video game tunes with some sort of synchronous blinking lights on their car while everyone was waiting to get started.

I took the metro rail line from Universal City Station to Central Station on 7th Street, and then to Pico Blvd. From there it was a short walk to the conference. As I got off at Pico at 9am, I noticed quite a few cosplayers, and walked with them to the conference site. Taking the metro line brought to mind the Genshiken manga and anime series, and how the characters would always take the rail line to Comiket.

The cosplayers were amazing, as expected. Some highlights were a group of Sonic characters, a guy giving Mario a "tough-guy" image, many many cute Asian-American girls (most with male escorts), a guy with an exclamation point over his head, a girl dressed as Midna from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a few characters from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney yelling "Objection!", several girls with Tetris block costumes, Chouji from Naruto, Sakura from Naruto, a Transformer character, and some girls with parasols.

The line for picking up badges was very short, thanks to pre-registering online. I just had to print the email confirmation at home, bring it in, and scan the bar code. Definitely an improvement over the system at ACEN.

To start off, I went to the viewing rooms and took in some anime. I had been wanting to see The Third for a while, so I made sure to catch a few episodes. I liked the opening song. The anime had some humorous moments, which were appreciated by the crowd. The plot wasn't quite for me, though: a 14-year old tomboy beating up on mecha using PSP, with a bishounen love interest. After that, I watched a late-season episode of Wolf's Rain. I still don't quite understand the plot of that series. The episode had some sort of epic showdown involving a paradise.

I had some sort of a Thai salad for lunch on-site. The dining area was a bit crowded, and I ended up sitting across from a Korean-American manga-ka (manga author) named Jinsoo Terry. She was there to exhibit her new series Palbot: Come to America. She told me where her booth was, but alas, I was looking in the wrong place for it, and ended up missing it. Nonetheless, it was nice just to meet her.

I wore my "Eye"-R-C Chart T-shirt to the con, and that proved an excellent choice. I received at least 4 compliments on it, and two of those were not even while at the conference site. I had bought that shirt last year at ACEN 2007, so I made another T-shirt purchase this year. This one had a front which reads "Robert A. Heinlein for President: More Life Than Any Other Candidate ... and Better Ideas."

After lunch, I went to the exhibit hall and checked out every single vendor (including the artist alley), which took at least an hour. I ended up buying a Trigun poster, the aforementioned Heinlein shirt, and an artist drawing of several heroines from the Naruto anime series — I must admit a fondness for Hinata from that series :^) . I also noticed a towel with Kyoko Otonashi from Maison Ikkoku for sale, as well as some body pillows with the character Haruhi from The Melancholy of Suzimiya Haruhi. Tempting, but I have my limits.

I noticed that they claimed to have a "manga cafe" near the viewing rooms, so I thought I would see what that was like. Basically, it was just a room with several tables, a couple vending machines with drinks, and a lot of manga available for reading on shelves. We were required to leave our badges and belongings at the front desk, presumably to discourage theft. I spent a good hour and a half there, making it through volume one of the Nausicaä manga, and about half of the first volume of To Terra.

By 3:30pm, I was a bit tired, and no interesting anime series were being shown in the viewing rooms, so I decided to call it a day. This was the first time I had done a solo trip to an anime convention, and it proved to be an enjoyable time.

Luckily, I didn't miss them, and enjoyed about an hour and 10 minutes worth of material. There was a good mix of old and new. Isaac Brock was fucking fantastic to see in person. Some kids next to me lit up a cigarette when Modest Mouse played the song Fire It Up, which prompted a security guard to take them aside for a talking to. Paper Thin Walls was a personal favorite, due to the walls on my apartment conducting a bit too much sound. The instrumental work in Doin' the Cockroach was particularly snappy. I was able to see one of the band members break out a trumpet with a mute on some of the songs. They did a really good job of bringing the concert songs at least up to par with how they sounded on the albums, which was quite a feat.

R.E.M. was about how I expected them to be. In a word: mediocre. I left about halfway through their set because I didn't hear any of their older stuff.

I enjoyed the setting for the concert. In the backdrop were some hills with a tiny bit of vegetation on them, and a bit of the famous Hollywood sign. Not so enjoyable was the gaudy eyesore of an electrically-lit cross off to the right in the background. With the hills, it was a contrast of majesty and masochism.

There were only a couple of songs from the Modest Mouse set that I didn't recognize, probably because they were from the latest album. I'll have to pick it up now.

1. Block until movers arrive with computer and other items
2. Install Internet service (for getting directions and evaluating furniture options ahead of time)
3. Block until arrival of car from a different mover
4. Obtain driver's license and temporary permit for car from the DMV, which involved a very long metro trip
5. Clean driver's side window and front window to make it safe to drive more than a block
6. Take car to car wash place to make it safer to drive for longer distances
7. Make trip to furniture place
8. Receive couch and bed from delivery people
9. Install couch
10. Reboot the system (sleep)
11. Install bed

I decided to use the metro instead of renting a car, based on some decent experiences in West Lafayette with their transportation system. That has been a somewhat dismal choice, mostly due to needing to learn several lessons about life in a big city. Such as: don't sit on a bench for more than a half hour if an angry panhandler is known to be in the area. And also: the LA Dash tends to zigzag across different roads, rather than staying on its current road, leaving me an uphill walk of perhaps a mile and a half to get back on track. I got my car a few days ago, and I have never been more happy to have one.

It's interesting to go to a place like Starbucks at different times of the day and note how the atmosphere changes. I had never seen anything like that until I came here.

I went to IKEA yesterday to get a couch and a bed, as I did not bring any furniture here with me. The couch looked easy to set up, so I did that yesterday. Even though the couch was a tad narrow, it beat sleeping on the floor. My goal for the end of the weekend is to set up the bed and buy a microwave.