I was at ACEN over the weekend in Rosemont, IL. I had a blast, but I’m
not going to mention the panels I went to (one for the href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U3O4cMuexE#" rel="met">Redub
of Suzumiya Haruhi, another where some href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranglehold_%28video_game%29">Stranglehold
people played around with Chow
Yun-Fat’s faces on a computer), the anime I watched (Death Note rocks!
I am justice!), the music I heard (the href="http://www.spoonybards.com/v2.2/" rel="met">Spoony
Bards played “Unyielding” from style="font-style: italic;">Halo!), or the
cosplay I saw (Bioshock people, you rock!).

Instead, I’m going to tell you a story of the creepiest person that I
met while in Rosemont, who was not actually a con-goer.

Because of my procrastination, I wasn’t able to get into one of the
overflow hotels, and I stayed at the href="http://www.wyndham.com/hotels/ORDAP/main.wnt">Wyndham
O’hare (it’s okay, but I wouldn’t recommend it). So, I got a
cab to the convention center Sunday morning. (I stayed at the Residence
Inn in ’07, and loved it, although it’s a good distance away as well).

Now, the previous year I tried to get a cab by calling Rosemont Taxi,
and they were a no-show, which is also a complaint I’ve seen on reviews
for them online (why go to the trouble of having taxis and a phone
number if you’re not going to drive people to places?) So, I decided to
take my chances on Horizon, which is the other big taxi company that
you see all around Rosemont.

So, I called, and one of their vans showed up at the hotel fairly
quickly.

As we pulled in the convention center itself, the cabbie said “Lots of
hot girls around.”

Well, that’s true enough. No problem there…

“You get lucky with any of them yet?”

CREEPY!

Many anime start with light, easy to digest humor and move on to deeper issues. Trigun is an example of this. Welcome to the NHK seems to be doing almost the exact opposite, as of the 6th episode. The first three or four episodes are creepy, disturbing, and downright insane.

The main character, Sato Tatsuhiro, spends his days in an apartment. He has a hallucination where his appliances reveal to him that there is a global conspiracy to create Hikikomori (shut-ins) like himself. Things become very strange as Sato attempts to convince a young girl, who seems to be stalking him, that he’s actually normal.

Overall, I’m looking forward to seeing more of NHK. The way the (very insane) characters interact with each other is unbelievable. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at the dream Sato offers for psychoanalysis.