Hey Teacher EP

The cult Neko Nation track "Hey Teacher" has finally gotten an EP release thanks to Ramen Records! For those unfamiliar with Hey Teacher by FTFX, it's the most requested track in Neko Nation history. An oddball request posted up for Neko Nation Adelaide a few years ago that eventually gained a cult status and created the infamous "Will this be played?" meme known to regularly pop up on the Neko Nation Adelaide pages. Noc.V, Shingo DJ and many other talented producers worked together to make a remix CD, which is free to download but the record is looking to accept donations to help cover some of the costs such as the artwork and owing the producers a drink or two. Donations over $5 receive a free packet of Mi Goreng. We would like to thank Ramen Records for the delicious Mi Goreng sent to us. <3 You can get the album from Ramen Records.

New Website, AVCon, Vocaloid

New Website!

We created a new website and is looking absolutely amazing, we are absolutely in love with switching to the new Wordpress website which looks sexy but also efficient in terms of navigation, loading times and mobile compatibility.  The original website was originally created in 2011 when it was supposed to be a small experimental Perth event, we kept adding and trying to expand on it but it was slow, clunky and Flash just doesn't cut it any more websites.

Check it out at www.nekonation.com

AVCon

Neko Nation once again returns to AVCon on the 13th of July, one of the highlights of our year, AVCon is by far our favourite con in Australia, the best organised and one of the most fun cons to get your cosplay and game on and Adelaide's crowd is well known for being incredibly passionate and into it, this is the city who has an anime con that is rated as a top 20 tourist attractions!  Neko Nation AVCon is a free all ages show, with free sushi served by catgirls, absolutely awesome DJ's playing tunes from 6pm-midnight and the biggest crowd that you'll ever see at a show and the only dance party at an anime convention (Amaranth doesn't really have anything on us, seriously, XD)

Vocaloid Night Sydney



Neko Nation has been asked to come down to help out with SMASH presents Vocaloid Night 2013!  Vocaloid legends Hachioji P and livetune are making their way down from Japan for an absolutely unmissable night where Japanese Vocaloid superstars are making an appearance for a set at SMASH.  It's a rare experience to get any Japanese musicians coming down to Australia, let alone famous ones of this calibur for a spectacular night that we can't wait to be a part off!



May-June 2013

We head into May and June, which ends up being our first proper tour of 2013, 4 shows within 6 weeks, oh it was certainly one interesting journey and adventure!

Brisbane - May 2013

This is the first show on the tour and did we start off with a mega bang here!  After the first sold out show of the year in Brisbane, which was also definitely problematic and a half due to hot weather and other niggling problem.  Neko Brisbane came back big time, new venue, staging, management, DJ's, catgirls, décor, a new live act and in general everything we completely revolutionised Neko Nation once again!
LELE was the brand new addition, the amazing J-Pop singer put on a stunning debut show at Neko Nation Brisbane to the delight of an awesomely charged crowd, a new stunning stage complete with glowing Sakura trees, a new crazy "Stargate" projector and the new venue was an absolute hit.  Neko Nation Brisbane has always had one fun and crazy crowd and it was definitely the best start to the tour!

Adelaide - May 2013
For a long time we've had people always suggest to do a Pokémon theme show and while in 2013 we decided to get ready of "themed shows" we thought we'd actually make this one happen in Adelaide.  A brand new venue in Producer's Bar which was packed out and was the fastest selling out Neko Nation event in history!

A long 8 month gap between shows, meant that people were really excited about this one, the new venue offered for a unique new dancefloor, awesome new outside area and one of the most unforgettable nights in a long time.  The cosplay at this event was by far some of the best we've ever seen at an event and Adelaide definitely showed Australia how it's done there!

Perth - June 2013

Neko returned to Perth for another absolutely amazing event at Gilkisons, probably one of our favourite venues on tour, a mega dance floor that was lit up by the new Sakura tree made for a brand new stunning looking dancefloor thanks to teaming up with FORCE, to also be on the safe side, there was a new ventilation system installed even in Winter we still wanted to keep things cool!

It was an absolutely amazing night, the return to Perth was a very emotional, after two year, Neko HQ moved back to it's hometown of Perth and while Adelaide was fun, the hometown welcoming and party was absolutely insane and emotionally charged with another extremely mega night which absolutely raised the roof!

Sydney - June 2013

Last stop, Sydney!  Sydney is considered the most interesting Neko Nation of them all, they have the most energetic, vibrant and varied crowd.  Sydney is known for it's unique rave twist on the Neko Nation concept, while it still stays true to it's roots, Neko Sydney does stand out as a late night epic spectacular.

Our new team has been working tirelessly to put in all sorts of awesome new lighting and displays to make Sydney loads of fun and our team in Sydney is definitely one of the most interesting to work with.  The night is long and a tiring one for us but it's the most intense party and one we had loads of fun with!

Upcoming Plans and Shows - Feb-May 2013

It's not long to go till our next Sydney show and you may have noticed the announcements have slowed down a bit over here.  There's two reasons for this, first of all I'm back at uni which is going to make Neko Nation a lot more harder on my end (we're still doing shows though!) and lots of new plans coming up on our end.  Here's what's happening with our upcoming shows.


Adelaide
With our last show on September, it's been long overdue for another Adelaide show.  With Higher Ground closing it's doors last year, it was a sad year for venues in Adelaide as many other great venues closed down as well too.  All hope isn't lost but it's a difficult and painstaking process (not just for us but all Adelaide event promoters) that certainly is taking it's time but we've got a few solutions and hoping to get a show happening in the next few months with an announcement to come in March if all goes to plan.

Sydney
Sydney is currently going through exciting times right now, our last venue completely packing out Midian Theatre, while providing a unique and amazing atmosphere, we've had no choice but to expand into a much larger new venue that can cope with the increased interest in the show.  We've got exciting things planned, such a brand new decor setup, sound, lighting and a proper dance floor.  We're a bit sad to say goodbye to Midian which provided many awesome nights but if all goes to plan, we're going to have exciting new experiences and fun at this new venue.  ^^

Brisbane
With the first sold out show in history, Brisbane once again shone amazingly well for an epic night in Janaury, which saw a massive expansion on our 2012 shows including improved lighting, sound, staging and epic amounts of sushi.  First thing on our list was pretty much to either expand with our current venue, with that option unavailable we are currently on the lookout for much larger and bigger venues to fit Neko Nation Brisbane in.  We've got something pretty awesome on the cards and we're also looking at this as a chance to experiment with lots of awesome ideas once this comes into fruition in the upcoming months.  Aiming for an April-May date at this stage.

Perth
Our Perth shows have been absolutely epic nights, with the original debut event starting out in a tiny bar it's turned into an epic show at one of the Perth's most amazing ballrooms, well equipped with Byte Nyte on gaming, Maid Latte helping our catgirls with sushi, it's made for an epic night.  We experimented with our new partnership with FORCE and Solid State whose wealth of experience came in with setting up our new sound, lighting and visual which you may have noticed with lasers and TV's and strobes.  The next show is coming up around May when it's much cooler and we're talking to Solid State about some potential new experiemental leading ideas they want to bring to the show.

Melbourne
We're looking at coming back sometime this year, due to the smaller size and interest it's likely we're only going to be doing one show this year and it's likely to be done on a much more smaller scale.  We'll be announcing news sometime in the upcoming months, so definitely please come down and support the show since, if there's a lot more interest this will obviously change!

???
Oh and we've got a special surprise at the near the end of the year, it's a work in progress but it's going huge though, more details to be announced later in the year.

Neko Nation 2012

Neko Nation would love to thank everyone for an absolutely epic 2012.  This year we finally toured all of Australia and we managed to pull of two shows in every city!  We broke our banks by dramatically investing in increased budgets into our shows, (our last Perth one cost 8x as much as the first show to put on!) but it was all worth in the end to see record crowds come out to our shows.

We held massive events all over Australia, including our very first official convention after party and all ages event taking place inside the Adelaide Convention Centre in AVCon.  This was an amazing special event as we never dreamed of such a huge event and we're very thankful for AVCon to help us create something this truly amazing.

We had a huge amount of support from all of our sponsors, especially Madman, Siren Visual, Beserk and Anime-X our main national sponsors, plus many other local sponsors.  We've had amazing catgirls with some amazing creative outfits and we even had the boys show them a thing or two with our shows too!  We saw amazing DJ's including massive talents from the hardcore, J-Core and hard dance scene such as Ravine, S3RL, Noc.V, Essi, Requiem and Triex join our events.

We expanded into new events this year by getting involved with Neko Domination, Hyper Dragon, Adelaide Chinatown Harajuku no Yoko and Neko @ The Pad.  Our favourite by far was Adelaide Chinatown Harajuku no Yoko, a local community event dedicated to cosplayers and lolitas looking for a place to hang out with the goal to create an atmosphere similar to Harajuku featuring stalls, DJ's, photographers and prizes, it was a great night for all which has been officially recognised and supported by the South Australian government and featured on Channel 10 news and The Project.

With new venues, even bigger budgets and international guests planned, expect an even bigger year from us, as we're working on making 2013 even greater, with even more free sushi served by catgirls for all our attendees!

<3 from the Neko Nation team.

Conventions 2013

At the turn of the millennium we started seeing conventions dedicated towards anime, the likes of events such as Wai-Con and AVCon attracting a couple hundred of people at a few university buildings, events like this today have now expanded into massive convention centres and the likes of events such as Supanova and Oz Comic Con have hit the ten's of thousands.  In turn we have seen a great increase in the number of conventions around Australia, while we haven't listed all of them, we've listed a fair few ones that we think are worth paying attention and interest too.

Supanova

Probably one of the most famous cons in Australia right now, Supanova has been generally seen for sometime as the convention in Australia.  Supanova isn't just for anime fans but for gamers, comic book fans, sci-fi fans and heck anyone who likes all things geeky and pop culture related, heck even wrestling geeks get catered for.  This is a convention with truly something for everyone.

Supanova's rise to fame has been through it's wonderful array of special guests that come from all areas of geeky fandom.  Having hit Adelaide for the first time this year, it's currently the only convention that is hitting all the major capital cities of Australia and especially in the case of Brisbane is definitely a major highlight for any anime fan.

Supanova generally takes place in April in Melbourne and Gold Coast, June in Sydney and Perth and November in Adelaide and Brisbane.

Oz Comic Con

There was a massive amount of hype and controversy about Oz Comic Con as it finally launched in 2012.  Massive controversy surrounded around the usage of the name, with the event having nothing to do with the original Comic Con, while never claiming to be affiliated with the massive San Diego event, they didn't do much to distance themselves.

With that aside, it's launch featured none other than Stan Lee, not via a video screen like at many other conventions in the past but actually in the flesh, a mighty drawcard for a legend in his 80's who rarely does cons anymore these days.  Despite all the criticisms it was too much for many fans to resist and both Adelaide and Melbourne were packed, while extremely popular, the event suffered many criticisms from lack of organisation and teething problems (http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/07/what-happened-at-oz-comic-con/) , the event is back in 2013 in Perth and Adelaide with William Shatner, the first event is always the hardest and here's hoping that they can learn from their mistakes to put on some amazing shows in 2013.

AVCon
There's a numerous amount of anime conventions around Australia, Wai-Con (Perth), SMASH (Sydney), Manifest (Melbourne), AI-Con (Hobart), Animania (Sydney and Brisbane), however rather than going through every single one, we're going to focus on our favourite anime convention of the year, AVCon in Adelaide.

AVCon is a huge deal, for those in Adelaide, you'll see massive AVCon banners strewn across the city, it's officially recognised as one of the top 20 events in Adelaide by their government and the numbers are pretty much ahead of all the other cons (or on par with Melbourne) and keep in mind this is the smallest major capital city of Australia!

In 2012, AVCon effectively used the entirety of the Adelaide Convention Centre, for what was a massive convention featuring all your usual cosplay, stalls, panels, fashion parades, artists alley, maid cafe and the gaming is really something else, with literally over a hundred consoles and TV's on freeplay for all the play plus a massive stage to play Rock Band on like a real rock band complete with awesome sound and lighting!  There is awesome night entertainment featuring screenings, mature age screenings and gaming, quiz nights and our favourite a free all ages Neko Nation event and a bar for those over 18!  AVCon takes place in July in Adelaide.

PAX
Around 8 months out from the con, PAX launched pre-sale tickets, the 3 day tickets were sold out within a week.  This is what many are claiming to be the con of the year by far.  PAX is the Penny Arcade Expo, a massive gaming expo from the people behind the famous Penny Arcade comic.  While we have seen the recent EB Expo which has been a great success and well loved by many goers in Gold Coast and Sydney, PAX promises a huge array of gaming in consoles, PC, tournaments, exhibitors and live music performances.

While tickets are definitely pricier than other cons, this is a convention that is expected to deliver with many people going expected to travel from interstate for one of the most exciting weekends of 2013.

Necomimi Review

Time to revive our blogger and we'll start off with something that I've been meaning to get around for a while and that's our review of Necomimi.  While most people have already made up their minds about the product, whether it's ZOMG, brainwave controlled cat ears! Or in the case of others, complaining about how expensive the price is, you've probably made up your mind.  For the rest still sitting on the fence or curious to know a bit more, here's our first hand experience.

We got our hands on the next gen European model, after spending 30-45 minutes or so calibrating brain patterns it was then good to go.  For us, obviously we're going to be biased and love the whole thought of brainwave controlled cat ears, it definitely does work quite well from our experience.  It's not super sensitive as many people who try to test a reaction of comments to get short term effects but this is something that does work over a short time span of minutes, it is picking up brainwaves, not facial responses or movements.  At the end of the day, it does exactly what it says it does and my god you need to see it in person to realise how much fun it is, not just for the person wearing it but for the other people around the wearer!

If you have intentions of wearing them quite a bit (and if you're paying that much for them, why wouldn't you!) it's reccommended you get some rechargables, battery life is around 8-10 hours, so definitely will get you through an entire night of Neko Nation or a convention but it may sputter our and become a bit weaker, slower and noisier near the end of it's time.  With that said, it's not exactly like you're going to be wearing it to sleep so the battery life is more than fine and it does use AAA batteries.

We bought the latest European model, this was the next gen batch that works best for Australia due to our radio wave frequencies, Japanese models worked just as well since the frequencies worked well for a variety of regions.  It's worth noting that the American models do work weaker on our shores with how radio waves work in America compared to Australia in terms of the frequencies.  The next gen European model was launched most recently at a major con in Europe and had a slight upgrade to make them more quieter and a bit more sensitive to picking up brainwaves.

Perfection?  Well for those who have been excited at the idea there are two downsides, the most obvious one is the price, with headsets costing between $100-195, depending if you get a cheap import or buy locally.  So obviously it's better and cheaper to import?  Well there's a bit of a gamble, unfortunately the headsets have been a bit hit or miss with a sizeable number of headsets malfunctioning pretty quickly which myself and a fair few others I know have experienced, buying overseas will not get you a warranty under Australian law nor will you get an optimised version for Australia.  The malfunctioning has been blamed on poor quality control, with increased pressure to bring out more units due to the insane demand, so I wouldn't be holding out for a price drop soon.

Overall, yes, if you need to have these in your life, by all means, you need to have Necomimi.  However with the price and some of the defects going around, this one is for the hardcore fans at the moment.  If you want to see these in person, come to one of our events, I generally have them on while DJing!  XD