EirtaKon is coming up in a few days and, as usual, it’s a mad dash to make sure everything’s prepared.

This is as true for the attendee as it is for the staff member, and so here is your quick guide to EirtaKon 2007.

Time and Place

EirtaKon 2007 is being held in the same place as it was in 2005, the Hub in Dublin City University (map).

The Hub is the student centre of DCU, and contains two bars, a main hall, and several seminar rooms, where the screenings will be held. Here’s a simple map of The Hub itself:

The date for the convention is Friday the 9th of February to Sunday the 11th of February.
Starting times:

• Friday - 7PM, Old New Bar, The Hub
• Saturday - 10AM, The Hub
• Sunday - 11AM, The Hub

Getting There

Once you’re in Dublin City Centre, it’s an easy task to get to DCU. If you’re bussing it, you should take the 19A from Westmoreland Street, or O’Connell Street. You can also take the 13, the 13A, the 11 and the 11B
; the timetables for which are all available from dublinbus.ie.

If you’re driving along the M50 northbound, DCU is the third exit after the Westlink toll bridge (€1.90 charge for the toll bridge).

From anywhere else consult this map.

What’s Happening?

There will be a traders room running all during the convention, with a “Barter Table”; ie, a place for you to sell or trade your own anime/manga/toys etc with other congoers. The committee warn that the onus will be on attendees to look after their merchandise, as they cannot provide secure storage for them.

On Friday the pub quiz will be running in the Old Bar from 7PM ’til late (No minors, sorry guys!), there will also be anime showings upstairs.

On Saturday:

• Anime all day
• console games all day
• Lolita Fashion show 4pm
• Cosplay walk out, 6pm
• Anime and games til close

On Sunday:

• Anime all day
• Console gaming all day
• Giant robot melée
• Closing ceremony

Food & Drink

There will be ample food and drink available from the local Spar shop, across the road from DCU, a 7 minute walk from The Hub.
The Restaurant and bars are not open over the weekend (for those familiar with the layout of DCU), but there is a local bar Matt Weldon’s (The Slipper), which should sate the thirst of attendees during the day.

Aprés Con

Nothing official set, but I imagine there’ll be an after-con venture into town when it wraps up in the evenings; you can count on eirtakus to have a party Or at least a few drinks!

Help : (

If there’s still something that you need to know, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.

There is a thread in the forums dealing with accomodation if you’re late on the bandwagon and looking for places to stay.

The first Eirtakumeet of 2007 saw a few new members embarking on (what I know can be) the somewhat intimidating venture of meeting people from the Internet. How will I recognize people? Will they recognize me? Is this all an elaborate hoax designed to make me appear somewhat foolish?
Well, perhaps the last one is not so likely, but we did stand around for a while at The Spire unable to determine who Raito Yagami was in the crowd! True to his namesake, we didn’t know it was him until he introduced himself. Myself, DrPepper, cade, MarkMI6, Daitokuji, I_forget, AskwinK and Raito made the traditional run to the Oriental Emporium to stock up on asian junkfood like Pocky and a bunch of random other samples that invariably taste atrocious. While there nadir joined us, then ZeroQI, who was utterly exausted from carrying his gargantuan, anime filled, 4TB hard disk array.
	“pleasant to the palate give first choose treasure.”
We spent longer than usual in the shop, browsing around and laughing our asses off at the hilarious engrish on the various packaging. Myself and daitokuji were momentarily exicted upon our apparent discovery of fireworks in the form of sparklers deeper in the store; we were disappointed when it was pointed out that “joss sticks” are, in fact, incense. A brief smelling of which confirmed the unfortunate fact. With Pocky, strawberry-koala-things, and an array of foods that would later turn out to be utterly inedible, we made our way towards our democratically elected eatery: Ukiyo.
Ukiyo were thoroughly accomodating hosts; they even pushed their two large tables together for us, wherupon I_forget decorated the table with an assortment of girly manga magazines and DVDs, shortly after which she began dispensing. Enthusiastically I was handed a copy of Shojou Beat, which I took and opened warily; looking around to ensure my manhood was not in question. Forunately, I was sitting next to nadir, who I dragged with some confusion into flipping through the magazine - a visual assault of flowers, smiles and gentlemen of extreme height - to satisfy our young newbie. Eventually I purloined a copy of Neo from cade, which contained the much more comforting visage of boobs and blood courtesy of the Ghost in the Shell manga.
Having sated our palate (and purchased some sake), we made our way towards DrPepper’s courtesy of Dublin Bus, daitokuji doing a good job scaring various passengers with his documention by photography (will update the article with these when we have them!). We quickly arrived at DrP’s and everyone began to set up their equipment. ZeroQI, as ever, the centre of interest setting up his hard disk array. Experience from many previous meetups has taught us that there is no such thing as too many power adapters, and we were well set; several laptops, external drives, routers, switches, and - of course - the HD projector and surround system.
We started off watching Riding Bean, which was well received all around. Throughout the evening we watched a variety of other first episodes, mostly the best of the recent seasons; Black Lagoon, etc, as well as AMV Hell Championship Edition, and several AMVs. Coming up to midnight myself and Hybridchild paid a visit to the local chinese (just before closing) for some hot food, and some discussion of the upcoming EirtaKon for which I’ll be presenting the Friday night pub quiz et al. At this stage we had picked up a few extra people, and jtang had come and left (thoroughly unenthused at the prospect of watching the Evangelion parody Redeath).
Later, as people began to doze off (and ZeroQI had left and returned several times), daitokuji exposed us all to the hilarious Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series. If you haven’t seen this yet, you should see it Thoroughly redeems Yu-Gi-Oh. The filesharing, sake-drinking, pocky-scoffing, and anime watching continued well into the wee hours of the morning, but my memory of the events in those hours is somewhat hazy as I was busy drifing and out of sleep. All in all, a thoroughly successful meet, and one I hope some of the newer members enjoyed as a sample of the eclectic nature of eirtaku.