Last weekend my wife and I attended ArcadeCon in the Ballsbridge
Hotel (You know the one, Sean Dunne paid over €100m for it thinking that Irish
people would queue up to pay €1m apiece for apartments in Dublin’s most
charmless area. Yeah, I said it: Ballsbridge can burn in hell, There’s no
decent pubs and its full of bankers .)
Anyway, rant over. The hotel isn’t bad except for the insane
prices in the bar and the fact that it looks like it was constructed out of
bargain basement Lego bricks in the 1970’s. It was filled with a mixture of
convention attendees dressed as Anime characters and bemused American tourists.
The Convention took over most of the ground floor and some of the first floor.
The main attraction for me was the Stephen Mooney and Roger Yuan panels.
Stephen spoke to the rather small but enthusiastic audience
about his comic “Half Past Danger”. It’s great, by the way. You should go buy
it. I’ve decided that the trade paperback will be my default Christmas gift for
those who I feel need some culture in their life. I do that sort of thing a
lot, because I’m an unbelievable ass. Stephen claims to be useless about self-promotion
but I think he did a great job. If you get a chance to chat to him then you
should. Kim from the Irish Pubcast interviewed him and they made for an
entertaining team.
I hit the trade floor for a brief period between panels and
picked up some Anime films at very decent prices and chatted to a few of the
comics people hanging around. It isn’t really a comics event though, the crowd
swings very much towards anime even though the Con tries to cater to many
tastes including movies, games and comics and I imagine that people who don’t
have at least a passing interest in Manga and Anime may be left feeling a little
cold.
Roger Yuen’s panel was an absolute joy to attend, at least
for me and my interest in martial arts and action movies. Again, the turnout
for the panel was pretty sparse, maybe fifteen people out of the entire attendance
of over one thousand. That was disappointing for a guest who has done so much
work in Hollywood over the years. He was in “Skyfall” and trained Daniel Craig
to fight for the film. If you remember the film there’s a scene where Bond is
attacked by three guys in a Casino in Macau. One of those is Roger. He was also
the Fiendish Doctor Woo in “Black Dynamite”. I asked Roger a question about the techniques
he would use to train an actor who has no martial arts background and Roger
told us to move the chairs into a corner as he took us through a class of the
basic moves he uses to train actors to perform in fight scenes. Spoiler: he
starts with boxing techniques and moves on from there depending on what style
most suits the actor physically.
I enjoyed the con overall and it’s great to see another
successful entry into the nerd calendar in Ireland. I think my future attendances
will be based on what guests the organisers get for coming years, if they
manage to get people of the calibre of Mooney and Yuan again then I’ll
definitely be back.
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