Friday, December 8, 2006

Cool Note
- MTV will be sending a representative to AnimeFF for a small documentary. Am very excited about seeing the gallery live.

- theOtaku's presence at AnimeFF would be screwed without Gail, she an amazing organizer.

- Hehe some people wonder why PS3's are first and second place while Wii's are 3-8. Duh, you can sell your PS3 and buy 2 Wii's plus games (or an Xbox + games) :-).

- Since announcing the contest, our unique visitors are up (makes sense, lots of buzz) but our total page views are down drastically, which does hurt. People read the announcement and then they stop browsing for whatever reason. But you know, I have to jump on all opportunities to shower artists with recognition/opportunities/and bling.

- I hope to spoil artists to the best of my abilities. I've always loved making long-winded announcements/speeches, but as SomeGuy said this contest will force me to raise the bar for subsequent announcements. "The new Art Of Otaku is awesome, but where are the thousands of dollars in prizes?" hehe

- For those wondering, the parent company of the convention owns a video game business of sorts, so they had no problem providing the consoles.

- It's sad we couldn't accomodate international visitors. This was something I brought up very early on--as you remember I'm very international-friendly. Our last few contests were international in scope and I even shipped theOtaku t-shirts overseas when doing so resulted in a financial loss. Art Of Otaku CD's also ship internationally with no added charge, I often have to pay $10-15 per order to do this.

The short is, shipping consoles overseas is a HUGE pain, not even considering that consoles are region-encoded, so they wouldn't even work in most countries.

Three months ago I shipped Massin a pair of shoes. He's based in Canada--it was a nightmare. It took over a month for the shoes just to get through customs and for a week we were told they were probably lost. There was no tracking in place either because of some peculiar union laws. And those were shoes, imagine shipping a PS3. If someone doesn't get their prize it turns into a liability for the convention.

- Here's a fun video by Utada Hikaru:



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