Got to there around 1 am and met up with coraa, jmpava, catbird's SO, and neonelephant and his friend so we could all pick up our Masquerade and AMV contest tickets together. After that we went and wandered around the exhibit hall and fan artist alley. I saw a lot of cool t-shirts which i may purchase later, and a lot of cool toys and models which i probably won't get. Of course there were also lots of awesome costumes, of which i took a fair number of pics. (69 according to the counter on my phone, but a lot of those are repeats.)

After a couple hours of that we went to one of the video rooms and watched the first two episodes of Ouran High School Host Club. I was pretty sure i was going to be interested in it before just from the bits i'd heard/seen about it, but i'm definitely interested in trying it out now.

We walked over to CPK for dinner after that. We split up for a bit to drop bags off at various places since we weren't supposed to have them in the Nokia theatre for the AMV contest (a process which seems entirely unnecessary in retrospect given the number of people we saw going in with bags.)

There were some really good AMVs this year. There were also a lot of decent but not especially memorable ones. The Drama section had a lot more variety that normal (including one that i thought ought to have been in Action instead of Drama) but none that seemed especially memorable, at least on first watching. Likewise the Action category was all good but not overwhelming (and included one that i thought ought to have been Comedy rather than Action =) The Comedy section was great, as is often the case. The AMTV Pro section didn't have anything as outstanding as Skittles this year, but it did have several that i'm interested in tracking down.

So currently there's about five or six AMVs that i'm anxious to get ahold of, but trying to keep track of 28 AMVs all at once is rather hard, so if i go to the re-show/award announcement show then perhaps some of the others will jump out at me the second time around.

Of course it's not a good year for the AMV contest if i don't get at least one new song totally stuck in my head. This year those songs were the "Pizza Hut Song" (Definite falls into the "cheesy and bouncy" category, and the AMV was using a somewhat different variation than this one) and Owl City's "Fireflies." Of course "new" is a relative term for me. A brief internet search seems to indicate that "Fireflies" has been cruising the web for at least six months, and "Pizza Hut Song" has been around for at least four years :)

After the contest everyone was feeling pretty tired, so everyone headed off to their various sleeping locations. I got home just a little after 1am and crashed around 2. And now it is time to head off for AX again :)