In spite of the technolgical setback, Raider3 persevered and plunged into the 2002 Anime Con Season with a vengeance. First stop, Anime Central, for Year 5 in Con Ops, surviving the Mega-Tokyo Panel Line From Hell (relax, we'll line up on j00 ^_^;), and the pre-masquerade stampede, and the Sunday brunch (^_^;), as well as managing to not see semi-nude towel-clad Rei Ayanami (who later changed into her school outfit, got complaints for her towel costume, then had the cojones to complain to Con Ops about it. ^_^;) waltz through hotel. It's a good thing, because the weekend after found R3 back in California for Fanime-Con, with co-worker/cosplay folks Miaka no Baka and Aoshi for another exciting anime weekend closer to home!

After a brief interlude of a month and a half with no anime-cons going on, the fun wasn't over by a long shot. Encouraged by Megumi, Raider3 made it a new part of his Otaku Ambassador mission to support local anime fandom (well, semi-local), by traveling to the Pittsburg-Antioch megazone in Contra Costa County to support the inaugural Recca-Con event, which was a pretty good showing for a first-year event, in fact, comparable to Fanime Con around 1996 and 1997. It was after this that Miaka and Aoshi discussed with Raider3 about the possibility of starting up an anime con locally. Discussion and plans continue as of this writing.

The 2002 Con Season finished up with some one-day events at Great America (Para-Con, across the street from Fanime-Con), the Metreon Festival of Anime II (A.k.a. Shameless Viz-plug Con) in San Francisco, at the Sony Metreon, and a pre-Halloween Cosplay event at Japan Video in SF Japantown on Sun., Oct. 30 (where we got to see the Angels hand the Giants' asses to them for a hat, closing out the World Series.. ;_;) Also within that end-of season blitz was a great thing, and the event that unofficially made the second every Raider3 Anime Con Triple Crown: Ani-Magic 2002 - Raider3 experienced the Autumn Dream for the first time, making for a nice closing to the 2002 con season.

Finally, there was one last event, which wasn't exactly an anime con, but a lot of anime folks, primarily in the cosplay community, were in attendance, and Miaka and Aoshi got Raider3 to join in one final time in 2002. The result was a near-48 hour cycle, punctuated by brief sleep breaks, and a trip to the mini-mall situated next door to the hotel. Japan Expo 2002 yielded fun for Raider3, and a seat at the table with other notable folks in the cosplay circle to celebrate Lionel (Kyousuke/Linus Lam) Lum's birthday in true fan style! And thus, closed out 2002, as operations at Raider3 central shifted into low gear for while.

Anime acquisitions continued, as well as Raging Otaku Society, while plans were in the making for 2003, in terms of con plans and acquision of funding. It was during the end of November/beginning of December where two key events accelerated Raider3 into the “modern” era on the technological front: The accumulation of enough capital, along with the stress of nearly 9 months of sharing his mom's computer taking its toll on both Raider3 and Raider3's co-creator, resulted in the acquisition of the first ever Raider3 computer not-built in-house: A brand-new Dell Dimension 4550 2.4 ghz Pentium-4 256mb, with enough bells and whistles to keep things going for the next three years! Windows XP also was deployed for the first time, something that Raider3 thought never would happen. (So far, it's somewhat better than Win9x... only one major crash, and that was just caused by extreme screwing around... It was, however a major success, as Raider3 has never met an operating system he couldn't run into the ground eventually.) Fortunately, the computer survived, and now serves the key role as the Production R3/Raider3 Central development machine/portal to the online world.

Discovery and less-than-satisfactory experiences with the v.92 data/voice/fax modem led Raider3 to finally carry out a threat to go broadband, resulting in connection to SBC Yahoo DSL in mid-December... The “Long Winter of Discontent” on the computer front came to end at last. All existing operations were transferred over to the new box, and preparations were made to close out all previous dialup connections, so chances are if you're looking for Raider3 on Invision and Earthlink/Netcom, he won't be there for long. (On to page 6!)

[-- page 1 : page 2 : page 3 : page 4 : page 5 : page 6 --]