GeekNights Wednesday - Anime Boston and Zenkaikon 2015

MrPeriod

It's the end of con season until ConnectiCon, so we talk about our great experiences at Anime Boston 2015 and Zenkaikon 2015! In the news Pones started up again, and we talk about some of the shows that looked OK from our Judge Anime By Its Cover Summer 2015 panel. We also want to hear your speculation on why fursuits are becoming more and more prominent at anime cons. Anime Boston in particular impressed us with an uptick in interest in academic panels over other content, and we plan to return for 2016!

• 62-Year-Old Tries Out MMA
• The Tigerfibel

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Cremlian

Hey, We did double the size of our board game area :-p

Also Zenkaikon is a Sci-fi/Anime Con Damn it :-p It always has been.

pence

Apreche said:

Thanks, Philadelphia.

I saw a guy wearing a "Broad Street Bullies" t-shirt yesterday. The dream lives on.

Dragonmaster Lou

I've been trying to get more academic-style panels on the schedule for years and always gave them "bonus points" when trying to pick panels at schedule time. Nice to see the applicants are taking advantage of that and my replacement is continuing with the policy.

Hitman Hart

I remember the song from the stinger, it was on this best of Slayers CD I got from ADV back in the day. The one thing I noticed about the programming at Anime Boston was that there was a lot of Team 5 Star DBZ Abridged style things from panel descriptions. That seemed a bit odd.

open_sketchbook

Hearing Scott talk history is still painful.

Basically, Less Evil Hitler doesn't invade Europe, because Evil Hitler's motivation for invading Europe was "Conquer and ethnically purge the East of the lesser people in order to loot it for resources and then resettle it down the line." The German war machine was no shit basically built on stealing and slave labour. Less Evil Hitler conquers Poland and France, blows up his economy doing so, and promptly apologizes and hands it back.

This approach of straight-up strip-mining the places they conquered was so vital to the Nazis war effort that, when a combination of Allied bombing in East Germany and Soviet approach on Poland put an end to it, the German economy crashed completely and only barely limped on to the end of the war.

As Rym mentioned, the technical and tactical superiority of the German army was limited. Coordination, small unit tactics, innovations in armour and small arms? It's difficult to dispute a lot of those, even if it was to a lesser extent than popular imagining. To the tip of the spear, the German army was a terrifying foe. But the reason those things were true, basically the super nerdboner the fascists had for that stuff, is also the reasons why the German army sucked. It reflected super amateur thinking about how armies army, and it's the reason why everyone remembers and fears the Tiger... but they only built 1,500 of them.

Terrible command structure, atrocious logistical systems, bad industrial priorities, backwards medical support, all their shit broke down constantly, they were retooling their production lines non-stop, they rushed barely-working prototypes to the front even before they got desperate, and their obsession with form over function saw their troops cold and miserable more oft than not. They were exactly the army you'd get if they were put together by people who wanted a big scary army but didn't actually understand how armies worked, and they only got as far as they did because they pillaged Eastern Europe for supplies.

There's no WW2 alternate history where any kind of Nazi-esque Germany pulls off taking on Europe and wins. The best they can ever hope for is that the US is pathologically isolationist, offers no support to Russia or Britian, so the Eastern Front just stalls out in '42 with the German army spent, the Russians without any ability to project force, and the Commonwealth soloing the Second Front a year late. This prolly buys German like, what, a year or two more? Tops?

Luke Burrage

Germany was fucked the moment it invaded Russia. That's it. It would also have been fucked if it had tried to invade the UK, because the effort it would spend doing that would have diverted so much away from elsewhere that Russia would have taken advantage almost immediately. The war lasted 1939 to 1945, but Germany was on the back foot for over half that time.

Banta

Luke Burrage said:

Germany was fucked the moment it invaded Russia. That's it.

True, but if they hadn't invaded then Russia would have attacked them at some point. The peace between Hitler and Stalin was tenuous at best; both men knew their countries would eventually butt heads, it was just a question of when and who would strike first.

open_sketchbook

Luke Burrage said:

Germany was fucked the moment it invaded Russia. That's it. It would also have been fucked if it had tried to invade the UK, because the effort it would spend doing that would have diverted so much away from elsewhere that Russia would have taken advantage almost immediately. The war lasted 1939 to 1945, but Germany was on the back foot for over half that time.

Germany was also fucked if it didn't invade Russia, because by 1941 it was economically dependent on cheap (ie: stolen/produced by forced labour) raw materials for industry, and politically dependent on continued war and victory to paper over the considerable problems the government had just, like, doing the government thing. They were fucked in every direction. Less Evil Hitler cannot save them.

And obviously Operation Unmentionable Sea Mammal was a total non-starter in any case.

Basically, don't pick a fight with all of Europe. It's bad no matter how you slice it.

Viethra

It would be good to preface this with the fact that these thoughts are based primarily on second hand experience as my first furry convention isn't until June.

A big part of fursuits making more appearances at non-furry cons is that other fandoms are being less abusive and more friendly toward them. It could also have to do with FiM and FNAF being a crossover between suiters and cosplay. Then there's the fact that there are simply more fursuiters than ever before. The fandom continues to grow and more and more people are finally buying or making costumes. I think people want to cosplay their expensive creations and gamercons/animecons are yet another opportunity.

I can tell you that it isn't because of aging grognards or that-guys though. As far as I can tell the fandom is a cross section of teens, college kids, and bachelors. No one really complains about older people being a problem. Young people usually complain about each other really. I'd say the biggest issue is when websites have favoritism (FA for example) as the conventions are surprisingly well managed considering how young and amateur some of them are.

Fursuiters are proud of what they do, and they want to share their work. I suppose they're feeling more comfortable with diversifying their venues these days.