Yesterday Jon, Josh, Nick and I visited the Doubletree Hotel & Conference Center as a possible location for con next year. It's a beautiful venue! I seriously hope we can afford it and get the dates we want. It's got this big outdoor pavilion that's climate controlled that would perfect for all of our major events. There's a covered path that leads to the pavilion and I think will be a gem when it comes to line control. There's a big ballroom that will serve well for the Dealer's Room/Artist' Alley. There's a few smaller conjoining rooms that'll work for Gaming Rooms. A huge board room with built-in projector and screen will be a brilliant Anime Room, as well as a nice place to serve as a Spillover Room for the people who can't get into the Masquerade. We'll project the contents of the Masquerade into the Spillover Room, that way no one misses out. The downstairs has an amazing couple of conference rooms that will be great panel rooms. There's a brilliant room with a beautiful round table, connected to another room with a few chairs and a bathroom, and it IS Con Ops. Unfortunately, the hallways are fairly narrow, so we have to use a semi-spacious room for Registration. We found a fantastic room though, and it can be locked up, so no one has to watch over the computers overnight. Overall, I dearly hope we can get this venue, because it's more or less exactly what we need.

I started watching Meine Liebe, which I'd been told by Tinne was great, full of pretty boys. I Wikipedia'd the show to find a plot description. There was none 0.0 There were no character descriptions either. The only thing I did find was the voice actor list, which is one of the most impressive for any one show. Seki Tomokazu, Seki Toshihiko, Koyasu Takehito, Sakurai Takehiro, Hoshi Souichiro, and Ishida Akira. Holy cow~! If they could have gotten Miki Shin'ichiro and Midorikawa Hikaru (and yeah, Ito Kentaro as well), they'd have all of my favorites. Well, Jouji Nakata would be nice too :3 Yeah, I'm obsessed. Anyhow, so how an amazing cast that has BOTH Seki's in it could possibly suck is beyond me, but Meine Liebe succeeded in just that. They must have spent all of their budget on the seiyuu and not that much on the animation, but it mediocre quality. But what bugged me the most was the character's faces. I've never seen such expressionless faces in a recent show. One of the best parts about anime is how much emotion the artists can express through a character's eyes, eyebrows, and mouths. Meine Liebe might have just starred a both of robots xP

So, after three episodes I quit Meine Liebe. I just couldn't watch it with it's horrifically bad dialog and non-existent plot. So I picked up another show instead. Whilst searching for Zombie-Loan icons, I found an icon-maker who had a few Z-L ones, but she was actually a major fan of something called Ghost Hunt. Her icons sparked some interest in the show. Z-L left me wanting for some more paranormal stuff, and Ghost Hunt looked liked it was a little darker than Z-L. The last time I watched something dark, it was Higurashi Naku Koro Ni, which I found to be pretty messed up. Perhaps it was that the main male character looks like Seishirou in Tsubasa (not so much X tho), that I was instantly drawn to the show without knowing what it was about. So, not bothering to Wikipedia the plot, I dove in, hungry for something quality.

Jackpot.

Ghost Hunt is what a lot of ghost-hunting shows on the History Channel are like, but with, you know, results. It's about a high school girl (Mai) who gets roped into becoming an assistant to the narcissistic young head of a paranormal research company (nicknamed Naru-chan). Naru's cases are often helped out by several other experts in the paranormal field; a self-styled Shinto priestess, a bass-playing Buddhist monk, an Australian Catholic Priest, and a young TV medium. These mismatched characters work together to discover what's behind a haunting and try to expel the spirit or poltergeist or whatever the troublesome creature is.

What I like about Ghost Hunt is how it manages to be spooky and funny at the same time. The characters tend to be comedic around each other, but the action of the show is pretty spooky in my opinion. Especially when the cast is watching something on one of Naru's many cameras. Then it's really something out of Ghost Hunters. I have to admit, I was hooked within one episode. I'm only seven episodes into the show, but I know already that I'll be wanting a second season.

So that's all well and good. The icon girl also got me interested in another anime, which I'll get into when I finally get around to seeing it :3