the gravitational pull of Kyle Hebert

I arrived home Saturday fresh from the disappointing Black Hills Space Tractor Model Show. I wished there was some super fantastic robot convention stuff going on around here but I'm screwed. Maybe thats the problem, though. I'm convention lazy. I really only attend conventions if they happen to be going on in whatever city I'm visiting at the time. That's how I went to AnimeExpo '02 and Otakon '03. I don't even like anime cons, I just happened to be in the neighborhood on my way to something else and I saw signs for those shows so I figured what the hell, it's "Conventionally Convenient".

"Conventional Convenience" is what I call this aligning of circumstances by which I unexpectedly find myself at various geeky gatherings all over the place. Unfortunately my current geographic situation has me placed in a conventionally inconvenient location a couple hundred miles from where any show is going on. If I wanted to find myself crashing the nearest anime convention I'd really have to do planning. Organizing my time and money just to be at large gathering of nerdy preteens who like japanimations seems like a dumb thing to plan for, but if I don't do something then I'm stuck with space tractors.

Ideally if I go to a show I'd like to know there's other fans of toy robots around my age there to avoid and run away from. However, anime conventions are typically attended by roving swarms of horny teenage kids that really have very little in common aside from that they watch Cartoon Network a lot. Half the time I can't tell if I'm at a convention or an elaborate sting operation set up by To Catch a Predator. So what I have to do is forget about making friends and pick a convention that has a guest that I would like to see, and I don't mean Stone Phillips.

The only guy I'd be interested in seeing that's showing up at a show anywhere near here is anime voice actor/podcaster Kyle Hebert. He has a podcast called The Big Bald Broadcast that I listen to. If there was ever a reason for me to go to a con, meeting him would be good as any. There's really no guarantee that we'd meet, I don't watch any of the animes he's in, he doesn't do robot voices and we really have nothing in common other than that we own Playstations, but for some reason just getting to see the guy and maybe get a picture would be cool. I guess I could ask him his Playstation ID so that when Home starts up we could maybe invite each other to our virtual apartments. But how to propose that to him without seeming a) gay b) desperate) and c) a voice actor stalker eludes me. Who am I kidding? Kyle Hebert is such a social networking whore that he'll probably drive ice cream trucks through neighborhoods everywhere so he can shout out invitations to his real apartment.

Luckily for me, this guy is such a hardcore self promoter that finding a place Kyle Hebert is appearing is just a matter of throwing a rock and seeing where it lands. He'll go anywhere, even South Dakota. There is one anime convention happening in October here where he'll be a guest. You know you're at a South Dakota convention when the motto on the convention website is "We like to think we don't completely suck". The problem is that in the next few weeks I'll be going on a vacation to Hollywood, Florida and I'll miss that South Dakota con. After Florida I'll spend a couple days in Houston, Texas where Kyle Hebert will also be at another convention, but I leave to come back home a couple days before that one. So I miss out on Kyle Hebert this year unless he decides to go on an ice cream truck tour of South Dakota in November. Heck, knowing him he just might.