Anime North 2023 HYPE Thread (May 26-28)

Re: Anime North 2023 HYPE Thread (May 26-28)

Probably one of the best Anime North meetups I've ever been to.

The whole spontaneous FFR Booth setup coming to life over the first day, and the attention that the single table got while at the convention was insane. We had crowds at the table big enough that we had to ask people to move over to allow others to continue using the hallway that we were in, it was congested where most other tables only had maybe 1 or 2 people at them at a time.

I really hope I can attend again next year and see you all again <3

Re: Anime North 2023 HYPE Thread (May 26-28)

After 5 years of not seeing you guys, this was a big visit for me. The major difference in this one was that we literally set up a booth with FFR that had an external monitor facing the hallway for people to see as they were walking by. Thursday night, Velocity helped configure the steam deck with FFR and the small portable keyboard. It could handle something like 160 BPM 16th jacks and 320 BPM 16th relatively consistently, but speeds above that it couldn't handle well.

The Sheraton

There was no rhythm gaming room, but the hallway had Pump It Up, Stepmania (with Simply Love and unmodded L-Tek pads), and the FFR booth. It would be amazing if we can get a booth like that again for next year.

A person with a pirate costume made a four-key setup that had a circuit board with large blue keys. This attracted a surprising number of people who were walking by. Thanks MarioNintendo for recording Reality! It's a great way to de-boost yourself at least 3 divisions down, and the anchor section in AIM Anthem became impossible.

Can I also mention that kommisar recorded MarioNintendo going hard at the FFR booth? It's amazing.

Dinner

It's a shame that Tuckers closed, but we still had that group photo taken at the Tuckers location for old time's sake.

We had the Lone Star Texas Grill, sushi, and Jack Astor's. I got reminded how amazing Tim Horton's is, especially those honey cruller donuts. It's a shame the line went outside the door during the convention though, so I ended up having to skip out on a donut dessert a few times.

PIU Tournament

I'm proud of smartdude1212 for winning the PIU tournament on Saturday. I made a thread over in Brag Board about it.

Hotels

The hotel nights were incredible. ShadowGod in particular made me lose it so many times, and Velocity's deadpan sarcasm in person is definitely an experience in of itself.

Next time bananagram is brought, let's deliberately try to make Gaelic words for the memes. Also gotta love the Joking Hazard night.

Some lessons learned

Don't fly Air Canada. Had to take two expensive Lyfts (Uber was around the same price) due to switching airports in the layovers. $90 and $146 base price, spent over $250 to go across airports. I didn't know I had to switch airports until the day of. Never again.

Also, the guy who brought the L-Tek unmodded pads is arrogant and a hypocrite. Really bad combination. When I first played on them, the offset was way off and when he had to reset it, it was something like 14 ms off. Ok sure, that's fine. I play a 10 and get like, a 68% because of how bad the registering was. For comparison: It was worse than DDR gold cab pads, and that's saying a lot. When he was like "let me see what's going on" he picked a 7 with slow 8ths, got greats and perfects instead of fantastics, and then was like "it's fine, they're unmodded and you can't bracket on them" -- then why were ITL and other technical packs on the machine? He also made some rude offhand comment about "pick something actually hard" when smartdude1212 and his opponent (Kevin?) got a dual SSS. Going to remind myself that I just shouldn't bother going onto the 4 panel setup since it's clearly terrible, ESPECIALLY when that guy was like "all of a sudden 8s are hard" -- that's a huge red flag, jesus fucking christ.

Re: Anime North 2023 HYPE Thread (May 26-28)

I live for the moments where I can make my friends laugh and smile in ways that you did, mate. I am legit shocked that we didn't get a noise complaint considering we had three people with the loudest laughs in one room at some points (You, myself, and T-Force)

Re: Anime North 2023 HYPE Thread (May 26-28)

It's also been 5 years for me since I've last gone to AN and there were a ton of amazing moments and wholesome surprises this meetup. Sparing details, this was a much-needed vacation after I had a rough month in April. As usual, I'm not much of a talker in big group settings but believe me I was happy to just be in the moment and absorb all the memes and stuff

I've missed the chance to give goodbye hugs to some of you and I sincerely apologize. Honestly, deep down I've missed you all tremendously after a hiatus of AN meetups as well as being semi-inactive on the forums. I'm also content to go home with actual stuff! A nice Pompompurin gift from Chris and Jess and a couple of Junji Ito books that I've been dying to read for a while.

Hoping to keep in touch with you all via Discord/social media <3

Re: Anime North 2023 HYPE Thread (May 26-28)