EDITORIAL: HOUSECLEANING

It was Friday, around 5:30pm. After two solid days of work at Anime Expo and little sleep, I was feeling pretty tired. But like all the other staffers, I still had a lot to do. And in addition, I had the EX panel to contend with at 6:15. I certainly don't mean to imply that I wasn't looking forward to it, more accurately, I wasn't looking forward to everything that could potentially go wrong (The more technical equipment one involves, the greater the potential for a mishap). And since we were trying to project some of the pages onto large-screen televisions for our audience this year, I was afraid I'd be hit by the exploding shrapnel.
However, we arrived at about 6 and set up the equipment. We were only able to hook up the computer to one of the televisions until the tech staff came to the rescue. And, amazingly at 6:17, after tracking down the last panelist, the panel began.
I won't bore you with all the gory details, but suffice it to say that a lot of our readers turned out to ask us questions and to put faces to some of the names they see every six weeks. (And now you know why we don't include pictures of ourselves, folks!) The panel was punctuated with a lot of laughter, and a lot of good questions from the audience, concerning such things as copyright permission, content selection, and exactly how it is we do all this. Scott Frazier also entertained the audience with telling us exactly how he writes his articles.
After the panel, one young woman came up to me and very quietly thanked me for all the work that we had done over the last year. She even asked us to autograph her EX CDROM after she bought it. Then she hit me with the big question:

"Why do you do this?"

It's obvious we don't do it for the money or the power, since there is none. We can't say that we're doing this to make the world a better place (well, we could, but that would be a pretty weak argument).
So why do we do it? We do it because we want to. And because nothing makes us feel better than to have people say, "Thank you. I really like what you're doing," whether it's over e-mail or in person at a convention. And yes, it's a simple thing, but it keeps us all going when we're knee-deep in deadlines and problems and the like.
And to the young woman who never did get her EX CDROM autographed: I'm afraid you didn't tell me your name. Send me e-mail and I will arrange to get you one.

Ex animo,

Charles McCarter
Publisher/Editor in Chief

Charles McCarter

Keith Rhee

Chris Kohler

Chad Kime

Peter Cahill
Roderick Lee
Charles McCarter
Ben Nunez

Peter Cahill
Eugene Cheng
Ken Cho
Eri Izawa
Mark Johnson
Roderick Lee
Eric "Scanner" Luce
Egan Loo
Charles McCarter
Maria Muñoz
Taku Otsuka
Keith Rhee

Patrick Conley
Chris Kohler
Tom Larsen
Eugene Moon
Keith Rhee

Jennifer Au
David Van Cleef
Scott Frazier
Darold Higa
David Ho
Dickinson Lo
Richard Kim

Eric "Scanner" Luce

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