Day 2: Saturday
I think I should write small details about the events as they go on during the convention, not at 11 at night on Sunday after the convention is over and memories of what I did are slowly fading thanks to age, alcohol, and other shit.

After prepping up, I dragged myself to the convention’s game room.  As a walk there I encounter a few friends who were rather pissed at me (okay, not really pissed but apparently upset).  I had invited them to a room party I was hosting Friday late night/super early Saturday morning.  Nobody whom I invited show up, so I was like “fuck it, I’m going to bed.”

Or so I thought.
Homegirl told me that her and her friends did indeed did show up to my room around 3ish. However, I was knocked the fuck out.  On the realest shit; I thought I was dreaming so I didn’t bother to check on what was going on.

(I’m upset they didn’t wake my black ass up ha ha ha)

Anyway, we decided to walk around the dealer room to window shop because we’re poor adults.  Yay!   Homeboy decides to live stream us for Facebook, give the world a glimpse at what we do at these things.

‘Dammit.  Why don’t I do this live streaming thing for cons?” I asked myself.  Maybe I’m not confident in my voice and speaking.  I’m better at writing my thoughts down and expressing through written word.  Honestly I need to start live streaming my convention adventures.

That’ll be a great idea.  Yes that will.

After a lap around the dealer room, I decided to dip out on my friends and head to the game room.  Holy shit has Naka’s game room went downhill in quality and selection.  There were maybe less than 15 set-ups in this small ass room.  Wow. Great.

In the past, Naka’s game room was like at least three rooms long and had a diverse selection of video games to.  The game room I saw on Saturday was a shell of its’ former self.

The place was lackluster. Naka-Kon, what happened to ya game room?

Normally at a con’s game room, I hit up any Street Fighter set up. SF2-5, EX, SFvX, anything Street Fighter.  I love that series.   To my shock, Street Fighter was nowhere to be seen in the game room.  That’s a red flag.  I do not trust any game room that doesn’t have Street Fighter.

In the absence of Street Fighter 5 I chose to play Blaze Blu: Central Fiction, a game I have little knowledge of . But I love me some animu weeaboo fighting games so BBCF had to do, even if I’m completely free in that game.

While waiting for my turn, I wrote  notes of each player and the characters they  were using.  Best study and analysis what character does so I won’t be completely free, right?
Sadly, even with my notes,  I was still getting’ bodied by folks who were light-years ahead of me.  Oh well. That how that shit goes when you barely play a game.

Following my oh-so-great performance in BB:CF (0-5), I left and went back to my hotel in preparation for later plans with friends and room partying.   My room crew was dicking around talking wrestling shit and showing off their toy belts such as the WWE World Tag Team, U.S.  Title, and the World Heavyweight (winged eagle version) Title belts.

I want a title belt to have to myself.  Perhaps I should invest in a replica WWF Intercontinental belt.  I should aim to become the Intercontinental Champion of conventions!)

My goofy ass friend lost his autograph ticket dicking around with the belts.  He thought it had slip into another friend’s bag that his championship belt was in.  Tore the room up for this thing until my boy gave up and went to seek if he could get a new ticket.  Found that damn thing in the snow lol.  Dumbass nigga drop it outside lol but hey it happens to the best of us.  I’m not perfect myself.
After that,  I took a power nap.  Gotta be well rested for the parties and pics of cool cosplays…Even though I only did one of those things.  Take a wild guest!

Alright! Made a guess?  If you  that  I only took a power nap and didn’t take pics of cosplayers because of my shyness and some social fears, you’re correct!
For some reason, I lack pictures of cosplayers from my first con of the year.  This could be link to the fact the first con takes me a while for me to warm up.  My confidence to ask for pictures of cosplay isn’t up to what I want compared to say cons later in the year when I have an average of 25-100 pictures a convention.  On the other hand, I think I might suck at reading faces of people and assume they don’t want to have their pic taken or interact with anyone, so I don’t ask for their pics.

This doesn’t help at all when I find people cosplaying from obscure series or characters.

Example: I wanted to take a pic of a Celice (Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War) cosplayer at the con because holy fucking shit!  I have never seen anyone cosplay from the older Fire Emblem games.  Genealogy of the Holy War doesn’t get enough love in the Western FE fanbase.  Seeing a fellow FE4 fan cosplaying Celice made me incredibly happy inside. Sadly, my courage wasn’t on the same level and my fears prevented me to ask for that picture.

Godammit Benjamin.  Godammit. Why are you like this?

Fasting forward into the night (because again, my dumbass should have taken notes), party planning time!  I felt like a grown ass man.  Hosting my own room parties rather than going to them.  Becoming the source for a party for fellow drunken socially awkward anime fans!

One thing I am learning about hosting a room party: You will not start out huge.  Even if you’re promoting yourself and your party, you may not get much folks to come through. Hell, you may only host 3-10 people at the time.

That is okay.

I bet you that the biggest party’s hosts and hostsess who have 20-30 people in their room at one time in their hotel suite started out small, with only maybe 3-5 people.  They had to work their ass off networking and building a rep, but they managed to become popular as fuck through hard work and knowing people and having hosting skills.

I’m saying this because my homeboys and I were trying to promote our room party to folks, trying to get them to come to no anvil and success.  We don’t have a rep at Naka nor the powerful social network.

Not yet at least but I’m confident we will in due time.  Things take time.  You try to rush this shit and you’ll become discourage and unsuccessful.

A little back story to make this clear:

We were invited to a room party that was lacking liquor.  My Friends and I decided that it would be best to grab our booze as a donation to the party.  People were happy at the idea, including the hostess.  Sadly as we were getting our shit her party was shut down and everyone went their own way.

Homeboy and his crew were seeking people to link up with us and continued the party but no luck.  I had to tell them “Hey, let’s take this lost and go back to our room.  There’s no shame if things are not going the way you want ‘em to.”

Besides, it’s the first con of the year.  There will be more chances to throw room parties and network with other hosts.

Success is a slow but rewarding process. Don’t rush it.  Don’t become discouraged.

Day 3: The Final Day

Ahh Day 3.  The most boring, least eventful day of most conventions.  Everyone is hung over, tired, and worrying about if they caught somebody from the random dude or chick they fucked the night before.  Wrap it up folks.

May I say that we need to end Daylight Savings?  Like what’s the point of that crap?  That shit did not do me any favors for the party hosting and sleep.  Bad enough I only get 5-7 hours of sleep at these things compared to my 7-9 hours of sleep on my normal days.  But daylight savings fuck and everyone else up hardcore.

Time to clean up and destroy any evidence of partying, which the hotel probably knew we party but didn’t care cuz we clean up after ourselves and kept our noise down to a respectful level.

Seriously, if you are respectful about your partying and don’t be loud, hotels won’t bother you.  Anyway, after we checked out I decided to give the game room one more chance given I promise my friend I would beat his ass in some fighters.

Let us go back to earlier.  Remember when I said I couldn’t find Street Fighter 5 at the game room?  Well, next to Naka’s console game room is the free-to-play arcade room.  I am going to guess that you guys know where this is going.

Street Fighter 5 was in the arcade room, complete with a custom cabinet from Tokyo Attack. Finally!  A way to give in to my Street Fighter 5 addiction and abuse Karin’s magnificent poking and spacing game!

Only one problem: Arcade uses sticks.  I play on a pad. I suck using sticks. Boy this was going to be fun.

I must say, despite not playing SFV in about two weeks and being handicapped on a stick, I did pretty well for myself   I managed to pull off a few of Karin’s bread-and-butter combos with the stick.  Then again, I did drop an awful lot of combos with her and did some increadbliy noobish mistakes like fuckin’ jumpin’ into R. Mika’s Yamamoto summon rather than blocking it.

Take the bad with the good.

Finally, after 3 hours of Street Fighter 5 and networking with new players, it was time for my friends and I to hit the road back to St. Louis and plan for our next convention trips.  Naka-Kon was incredibilly lackluster this year.  Many of the panels did not appealed to me or my niches and I did play myself by not going to the one panel I found interesting but I was also drunk and dind’t want to make a fool out of myself.

I am planning to come back next year and hopefully have more success compare to last year.