I feel as if seeing JAM Project live is the culmination of my anime fandom. The victory lap of one of my central hobbies. What more do I need to do, if I have reached the peak? Little Wing acoustic version was absolutely incredible. If I ever see another anime-related concert in my life, I’ll be comparing every song to the pure delightfulness of Little Wing. After Little Wing, my favorite performances of the concert were SKILL, No Border English version for hilarity of the lyrics, and Rinbu Revolution. Losing my voice singing to JAM’s efforts was the time of my life. I was still feeling the effects on Monday.

More than how ecstatic the fans were at finally being able to ask their demigods such eternally pressing questions, I was surprised at how truly genuine JAM Project seemed at their panels. They answered everything from their musical influences (Masami Okui’s reason to become a singer was Kageyama!) to embarrassments in Baltimore (Fukuyama lost his shoes!) to answering a New York fanboy’s plea to join JAM (Kageyama answered that they’re always taking members in amusing fashion).

Maybe I should start from the beginning. I came into Baltimore at around 4PM on Thursday. The light rail took about an hour to get to the Inner Harbor area with the wait and stops, sadly. Given how anxious I was to meet my internet friends, I should have taken a taxi. Once I was there, I proceeded to the Sheraton, where I was staying. After freshening up and dropping off my luggage, I met astrange and kransom, two very fine folks. We decided to go for dinner at Tir Na Nog, a very decent Irish pub, where ricequeen showed up.

Shortly after figuring out what we wanted to do, I dropped by the Megatokyo Forums dinner to hang out, which was attended by omo and many others. I ended up getting somewhat drunk after the dinner, which was shown by my (more than) slightly incoherent ramblings with omo and other people at the bar. I do recall that laughing at wrestling on ESPN Classic was quite entertaining!

Friday morning was uneventful until Mike Toole’s “Dubs That Time Forgot” panel, which I attended with SDS, astrange, and kransom. Laughing at Daddy Longlegs in English was hilarious enough. After walking around the convention center, I lined up for the Lantis/JAM Project panel. I met some quite spirited JAM fans before the panel, including a Korean that brought out his DS to play Super Robot Wars W. I ended up sitting in the front row, right next to Daryl Surat and friends. Who wouldn’t appreciate Daryl’s drive to ask guests about Crystal Triangle? Right after the panel, I met the legendary Momotato, which was like falling into a time warp.

I decided to check out the dealer’s room with wildarmsheero and roast-beefy-weefs, my de-facto con buddies, and picked up Acceleration of Suguri from Hen Da Ne (staffed by kmisuzu) and Wandaba Style box set. As late as I cruised the dealer’s room, all Hen Da Ne had left of mention (besides AoS), was eXceed 3rd, which while awesome in its own way, isn’t worthy of purchase to me. I did see Embodiment of Scarlet Devil for $40 at another booth, which I cracked up at. I ended up meeting mightygerm, WTSnacks, moot, Saber (lol banned), and other Something Awful goons on my trek through that vendor’s hall.

It was getting close to 5:30PM, so after lunch, I went to setup for my Touhou panel with TheStupidOne, IoriE, the ever-mysterious Mandoric, and Suzuran. The panel wasn’t without hitches. For various reasons, we hadn’t prepared and we had some technical difficulties. While I still had a good time and people were laughing, I was disappointed in our efforts. We spent too much time on fan materials and not enough explaining more about what Touhou is. I am certainly giving a Touhou panel another try next year, but not without actual planning and a different format. I’m not going to go much into the other problems we had, such as the incorrect time in the convention schedule.

Despite Touhou panel hitches, I rushed out to the one-time Temple of Gloriousness, the First Mariner arena, for the JAM Project concert. I wish I would have brought my DS to pass the time for JAM to show up. Not that it wasn’t worth that wait!

As tired as I was by that time, I was instantly re-energized by JAM Project’s rock ballads. I almost wish the concert could have gone on for another hour or two to experience more of their solo songs, especially Kageyama and Makkun. I’m not kidding, even if Angel Voice, Rinbu Revolution, and Yuushaou Tanjou were incredible enough. If only we could have had a real band and the Otakon sound staff didn’t suck, but that’s near nitpicking.

If it were my choice, I would have slept on the floor of the concert hall to relive the memories over and over again, but I had to leave. I met omo, moyism, and others to have dinner at a bar across from the BCC. The food and service was nothing to nipah about, though I had a blast chatting with moyism. Later on, super rats joined us and the quiet Ten briefly showed up.

On Saturday, I woke up early again for Mandoric’s “Anime is Serious Business” panel, where I sat next to super rats. Mandoric sure knows his stuff and it answered some questions I had about the issues of the anime industry, including why keyframes are spotty in too many series these days. I met up with wildarmsheero to make another dealer’s room run, where I didn’t buy anything as I implied in a previous post, but we did pick up tickets for the JAM Project signing at the Bandai booth.

I dropped by the Megatokyo Forums Saturday meetup, where I met TheBigN and digitalboy for the first time. With omo, wildarmsheero, TBN, and others in tow, we walked over to the JAM Project Q&A panel. Much fanboy/girling by everyone there. The greatest bit was when they did their battlecries of victory, Masami’s being the most surprising of them all. You really have to see all of them in real life to get how amazing they are.

At 4:30PM was when I skipped down to the Bandai booth to have my 2008 concert tour album signed by the JAM crew, where they all shaked my hand. Makkun held my hand for a few seconds!!! That was possibly the most memorable moment of the entire weekend. Shortly after the signing, I met the larger-than-life Sub, who remarked that Fukuyama couldn’t autograph his Fire Bomber poster per Bandai rules, so the rocking man ended up hugging him. Nice.

The rest of Saturday was uneventful (besides doing too funny commentary to the terrible Bartender with wildarmsheero and roast-beefy in their hotel room) until the so-called Bandai surprise panel, which had a ridiculously long overflow line. Thankfully, it ended being a literal blogger meetup, where I saw Os, Baka-Raptor, and lolikit, among almost all the other previously mentioned bloggers in that line.

I left that awful line to one of the highlights of the weekend, omo’s epic karaoke session. We started off with omo, TheBigN, and myself singing SKILL. After the bizarre band night, complete with enough Carmelldansen for anyone, astrange sang “Meros no You ni -Lonely Way-”, SDS sang Disarm Dreamer, digitalboy did an impressive solo rendition of Soul Taker, wildarmsheero made us laugh with Catch You Catch Me, and I murdered Platinum (literally). omo karaoked SKILL a second time with two other friends. We were accompanied by others, including Ten and moyism. I ended up meeting the veteran Anna, Ten’s con partner. Everyone had a jolly good time.

Sunday was much more relaxing. I met up with in the karaoke cafe with wildarmsheero and omo once again. omo sang What ‘Bout My Star?, wildarmsheero sang 1000% Sparking and we witnessed the single best performance in that room ever, the previously mentioned Nico Nico Douga kumikyoku. It has to be linked again for sheer awesomeness. This has inspired me to gather as many people as possible for my own kumikyoku next year. We also saw a fitting Mazinger Z by a sufficiently older guy, though it sadly wasn’t the English version.

After rocking morning karaoke, we hit up the dealer’s room one last time, then sat down and discussed the convention. kmisuzu showed up and we were talking about those crazy internets. At 3PM, we went to Mike Toole and Daryl Surat’s “The Very Worst of Osamu Tezuka” panel. I never knew that there was an incredibly low-budget Phoenix movie until now. Or a live-action Blackjack movie with detachable limbs…

I said goodbye to wildarmsheero and killed some time until I treked over to the light rail. I ended up meeting Mike Toole there and we discussed our convention experiences, JAM Project, Momoi Haruko, the broken anime industry, people we know on the vast internets, and more. I felt like I was talking to a scholarly professor with how much he threw at me. Thanks, Mike!

The many people I spent the weekend with and JAM Project made this a very special Otakon, despite the lack of decent programming (I’ll have to echo the slight concerns of wildarmsheero there). I will never forget this musical, social spiral of epic proportions. Now we need Ai Nonaka and/or Marina Inoue next year. Or another fun/cute seiyuu like 2007.

An obligatory thanks to omo, wildarmsheero, SDS, and roast-beefy-weefs for tolerating my incessant chatter for the longest of everyone.