Naka Kon 2011 Recap

Another year of Naka Kon is complete. 2011 marks my 6th year in attendance, and my 3rd year on staff. And my how we've grown. The first year I attended, the con was at 650 attendees. This year we were somewhere over 4,500.

This year started off for me heading to Kansas City on Thursday morning and setting up the gaming room. We'd changed some things around from past years and I think it greatly improved the way things worked. Additionally, we finally supported some Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon TCG tournaments as well as running some sponsored D&D campaigns. Everything went exceptionally well except for a few staffing issues.

Aside from my official duty, I also was the MC for our costume competition which is always fun. I also ran a panel on how not to give a crappy panel, as well as a fan panel on my favorite anime, Gurren Lagann.

But perhaps my favorite part of Naka Kon every year is that it's where I always debut the new version of my Anime Mythbusters talk. I barely got it done this year. One of the topics wasn't working out as well as I wanted to and I only got it sorted a day and a half before I needed to leave.

This year I added three new topics. The first was the physics of Pokeballs as featured in Pokemon. The second was the amount of UV exposure from a pokemon that is supposed to have a body temperature twice as hot as the surface of the Sun. Lastly, I explored the possibility of having habitable worlds around red giant stars (which will be translated into a UT post in the next few days).

Every time I've given this talk, I've had standing room only crowds. So this year, I was given a larger room and still had people cramming in against the walls and sitting in aisles. It was a huge success and the feedback has been wonderful. There's a few changes I'm going to make before I tour it to some other conventions I'm expecting to attend again this year as well.

Fortunately, one of the people that's been to the panel the previous two years volunteered to tape it for me and very quickly got the video exported, broken up, and sent to me so I could get it on my YouTube account. The first segment is below:



Overall the con went fantastically. I'm still sore and needing another weekend already just to keep up on sleep.