Manifest 07: Day 1

Today was the opening day of Manifest for 2007. There's usually not much to do on the Friday apart from picking up tickets and watching some anime screenings and this year was no exception. What the first day is really good for is whetting your appetite for the next two days!

The day officially starts at 2pm for the general public – I'm sure the organisers and host of volunteers started a lot earlier than that. The afternoon start turned out to be really good for me as I was coming out of an extremely hectic few days in which I had very little sleep, so a good long sleep was needed for me to fully enjoy the weekend festivities.

I arrived at Melbourne University at 2pm. I was on the opposite side of the campus from the Manifest registry, which was in the economics and commerce building this year (it was held in Wilson Hall last year), so I got to the registration area about 10 minutes later. I could tell I had arrived by the cosplayers.

A note about some of the cosplayers: whoever was playing Kakashi and Sakura from Naruto, you guys rocked! Especially Kakashi for dipping a girl and kissing her. Still with the mask on, of course. I also saw some people reprising roles from last year, such as Archer from Fate/Stay Night and a bunch of shinigami from Bleach. I actually saw someone playing Pheonix Wright from the Ace Attorney games, complete with "Objection!" speech … err, sign. While I was queued up the girls in front of me saw him and yelled "objection!" as loud as they could.

Overall though most of the day was pretty boring. What did I do? Here's a hint:

Yep, from 2:10pm until 4:40pm I was standing in a very long, very slow moving queue. I now have that queueing shit down.

After that there wasn't much to do. I'd missed the Lovely Complex screening (which is fine since I've already seen up to the current episode), I took a look at some of the fan traders that had set up and I went to see the screening of Byousoku 5 Centimeter (5 Centimetres Per Second) which was a superbly animated and sad/bitter-sweet story that I recommend watching if you're into that kind of thing. So my accomplishments for the day were:

• I watched a cool new anime that I hadn't seen before.
• I bought my first doujinshi … although it wasn't manga-style so it was really a fan comic.
• I got my passes for a weekend of awesomeness!

Now I'm just psyched about the rest of the festival! More reports to come!