PMX 2010 - Tsunami Scoreboard Introduction

Note: This review is in several smaller chunks to save everybody from reading a gigantic wall of text. This first post in an intro to how the Tsunami Scoreboard works, and part one will be posted afterward, and so on and so forth.

Time to bust out the board-shorts, boogie boards and beach towels, anime fans--the first official Tsunami Scoreboard is here, and we're about to get righteous!

Intro

The Tsunami Scoreboard is a concept I came up with two years ago but mostly kept on paper. I've never been able to post it to a blog before today, so I'll admit my update was later than planned due to some attempts to tweak the system to better suit Webzine journalism. I need to re-learn everything about Microsoft Excel to give you better charts of the Anime Los Angeles Tsunami Scoreboard, so hopefully you guys can get better coverage from me next time around. I'm still just getting my feet wet, haha. No pun intended (maybe).

In any case, the Tsunami Scoreboard works like so:

I choose to cover some of the bigger events that your average convention attendee would look forward to, like Masquerade for example. Hall cosplay is touched on as briefly as possible in order to discourage the ever-present need to rage at various things, and the quality of merchandise in the Dealer's Room and Artist's Alley get a blurb or two. I also go into everyone's favorite three words: "Location, location, location!" which pretty much means I gab about how the hotel looked, how long security lasted without having a miniature World War Three erupt over small issues, convention staff, and other smaller effects that really do influence the general convention experience.

All of these elements are then divided up into three numbers from which I draw an average score, and this gives us the scaled-to-anime version of a seismographic measurement of the convention if it were a tsunami, also called "Swell Points." Like surfer culture, the better the swell, the higher chances of catching a good wave.

Also, for anyone curious, the reason for the surfer theme is mostly because I grew up spending a lot of time at the beach for vacation when I was a little tyke. Now that I do cons for vacation in my early-twenties, I figured this was a fun way to reconnect with my inner beach brat.

So was Pacific Media Expo the long-awaited end of summer surge, or did it turn out to be nothing more than a really big drip? Stay tuned to find out!