After last year's three part AICon summary, this post is going to feel a little light. Between manning our stall and judging the art competition, we didn't get to see much of the convention this year. Between us, Mim and myself only managed to catch part of the opening and closing ceremonies.

Compared to the Derwent Entertainment Centre, this year's venue was pretty cramped and I think suffered some flow problems (I was an advocate for returning to UTas, though with this year's attendance being over 500 people more than last year's according to a figure I was given by one of the organisers, I'll admit it may not have been big enough). Many of the people we talked to on the first day weren't aware that there were additional traders down where we were, and some traders we spoke to on the second day who were in another building said that they'd had the same experience. That said, the organisers told us that attendees managed to find all the events in the assorted locations, which is the main thing.

Running a two lof bees stall was an exciting thing for us. The number of people who stopped by to tell us how cute our stuff was astounded us both ( wish we had some kind of counter that could go *ding* every time somebody said "cute"). In particular, we found that people were excited by Tentacle Love, Neko and Choose Happy Fruit, with Dignified Bat, Hello Cthulhu, Cute Kebab and Girl In the Woods also getting a bit of attention.

The really big crowd-pleaser though, was a lemon that Mim had drawn a smiley face on a few weeks ago. In fact, so many people on the first day asked if they could take our lemon home that we went shopping that evening and bought a bag of oranges and some lemons to draw happy faces on. I've never seen so many people squeal with delight at a pile of healthy food before! Towards the end of the convention, Mim put them in a box with "Homeless fruit 50c" written on it, and they disappeared within minutes.

Due to popular demand, we're going to be working on t-shirts with individual fruit on them.

Towards the end of day two, we left our stall in the capable hands of a pair of Mim's friends (thanks so much, guys!) for an hour or so whilst we headed off to help judge the convention's art competition. The art competition is divided into five categories, Best Themed, Best (made on the) Weekend, Best Digital, Best Pre-made Traditional, and Best New Blood. All entries are also submitted into a sixth "Overall" category. There were a lot of great entries, and it was particularly difficult to choose Best Pre-made Traditional and Best New Blood (which is restricted to younger artists). I have photos of the winning entries on my Flickr account, but I don't have the artists' names or the titles for the pieces. When the results are posted on the AICon site, I'll update this post with a link to them.

The closing ceremony ended with the AICon mascots escaping the impending apocalypse through a tardis (no idea where or how a Dr Who crossover comes into it) and arriving in the 1800s, setting the theme for next year's convention as "vintage".