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Things I did this weekend:
★ Visited my brother in Burlington to attend this year's Bakuretsu Con; we had attended once before in its inaugural year, 2001, when we were both in high school, but my brother hadn't been back since, and I hadn't been since...2007? 2008? Anyway, it was a fun ~blast from the past~ for both of us, and I tried to get my brother caught up on various nerd culture things since he's a bit out of the loop when it comes to anime/manga things.
★ Signed up for National Blog Posting Month, so expect...regular updates for a month?! Yes, it's true. (Unless I flake out, which is quite likely.)
On to something I always mean to do after cons but never actually get around to doing...
★ Cosplay: OKAY. SO. I have...a lot of issues surrounding my own cosplay. I enjoy doing it, but I'm super terrified of having my picture taken and being posted online. I try to work around this by cosplaying obscure characters from forgotten shows (like Maetel from Galaxy Express) or characters that don't actually require me to show my face or body (Arakune from Blazblue), but at Bakuretsu Con I decided to finally go as Rise Kujikawa from Persona 4, who is neither obscure nor...uh...amorphous. I'd been working on the cosplay for months--I bought the costume (Rise's winter school uniform) at AB, but the alterations ended up being harder than I'd anticipated...I actually had my mom help me with like, everything, haha. I also decided to use hair extensions instead of a wig, because my hair is about the right color and length for Rise's hairstlye; I figured I'd only need extensions to add volume to the pigtails. And I was right, but I didn't realize how difficult it would be to put my hair up into high pigtails in the first place. As in, I'm not able to do it on my own. WHOOPS. Luckily, my sister-in-law was able to help me out in that department.
ANYWAY, I finished the outfit, and I spent most of October trying to hype myself up into actually wearing it this weekend, and...I did! And it went well; there weren't many Persona cosplayers (I only saw a *very* in-character Teddie and a rather shy Yukiko) but a lot of people recognized Rise right away and that was pretty satisfying. I also made myself (well, really my brother) take a few pictures of me so I could get over my fear of having my cosplay posted publicly but. Um. I'm still not confident enough for that yet HAHA SORRY :S
My brother dressed up as a Headcrab zombie from Half-life, which got a lot of Half-life quotes yelled his way. :) I have pictures of that, too, but I need to make sure he's cool with them being posted here. He's not really into cosplay culture; he mostly wanted to dress up for Halloween and to 'fit in.' :P
★ Panels/Events: I only went to one panel this year, "How To Post & Create But Deal With Internet Hate"--my experience with con panels, particularly those at smaller conventions, is that they tend to be a bit unprofessional and aimless in presentation, but this panel was one of the best I've been to in years. A lot of good stuff on how to handle anonymous internet hate of varying types, how to motivate yourself to create after getting discouraged, and how to promote yourself without being weird or obnoxious about it. I was impressed at the amount of factual information the panel moderators were able to give people--one of the mods explained people's browsing habits, and how most people only skim a page for 10-15 seconds and if they don't find something that piques their interest in that time, they'll leave. The moderators also did something I've never seen at a panel before: they went around the room and asked every single person what they were currently working on--or what they wanted to work on--and one (or more) problems they were encountering that they wanted advice about. Part of that was due to the small size of the panel, but I've been to some real tiny panels before and I've never seen the moderators do something like that. It was incredibly thoughtful and I really appreciate how much attention the mods were able to give every attendee. :)
The other major event I went to was a 'Grabbag' video game tournament--basically the organizer picked random games to compete in and whoever won the most won the tournament. In practice, it ended up being a 'popular N 64 games' contest with some Smash Brothers melee on the side, but given that I and my brother wasted a lot of youth playing the N64 we were pretty cool with this turn of events. The first round started as a Star Fox 64 1v1 dog(fox?)fight, and I totally mean to brag when I say that I utterly crushed my opponent. Though to be fair, he probably didn't waste his prime years in high school playing SF64 versus mode like I did and is probably better off because of it. :P But! Still! I played SF64 well enough to draw a few gasps when I dodged or chased down my opponent, and at one point someone shouted "she's not human!" which I am going to assume is a compliment of a sort. Heheh.
Unfortunately I lost in the second round, which was Super Smash Brothers Melee. I'm pretty terrible at that game unless it's set to free-for-all and I can pick off other players while they ignore my shitty but super adorable Pichu. This was a 1v1 single stock match, so I had no chance. XD
My brother made it all the way to the final round, which was a 4v4 Smash Brothers 64 stock match...it was a very close game, and ultimately went to a Link player--a girl who'd basically slaughtered all of her competition prior to the last match, which was fun to watch.
★ Video/Board gaming: There wasn't much of note in the video game room...someone had brought the North American release of beatmania IIDX as well as the official controller. I've only played IIDX in arcades so it was kind of novel to play the only NA console release. Also, somebody had set up Perfect Cherry Blossom on Friday so I introduced my brother to Touhou. (I left out the part about the fanbase's monumental output of porn.)
For board games, we played Kittens in a Blender, which was fun enough with just the two of us but would probably be even more entertaining if we'd played it with a bigger group. We also tried Pandemic but after 15 minutes of setting up the board and trying to figure out the rules of the first turn, we realized it was too complicated for us. Especially when our mood was at 'hahahaha throwing these adorable cartoon kitties into an imaginary blender is fun.'
★ Dealer's Room/Artist's Alley: The dealer's room and AA were rather small, a given considering the size of the convention, but I still ended up buying a lot of stuff. I got a dumpling folder thing, which is a uni-tasker (literally, all this thing can do is fold dumplings) but dumplings are the one thing where I can go 'if it weren't such a pain to fold a batch, I'd make them a lot more' so I feel justified in buying one. Also got a Kyubey plush to menace my Madoka and Homura ones, some assorted Persona blind-box/keychain stuff, and was talked into buying a trial deck for Weiss Schwarz. In the Artist's Alley I got some amazing soaps that look like amazing gourmet cupcakes, and a candle that looks like an edible raspberry cheesecake, from Crazy Potato Crafts. I'm half-convinced I should label the cupcake soap with 'DO NOT EAT: ACTUALLY SOAP' because I think my dad might try to eat it, even though it's a random cupcake just hangin' out on the bathroom sink.
That's about all the convention specific stuff out of the way! Tomorrow, I'll try to post some pictures ofmyself stuff I bought over the weekend, and maybe talk about some of the horror movies I watched on Saturday.
★ Visited my brother in Burlington to attend this year's Bakuretsu Con; we had attended once before in its inaugural year, 2001, when we were both in high school, but my brother hadn't been back since, and I hadn't been since...2007? 2008? Anyway, it was a fun ~blast from the past~ for both of us, and I tried to get my brother caught up on various nerd culture things since he's a bit out of the loop when it comes to anime/manga things.
★ Signed up for National Blog Posting Month, so expect...regular updates for a month?! Yes, it's true. (Unless I flake out, which is quite likely.)
On to something I always mean to do after cons but never actually get around to doing...
★ Cosplay: OKAY. SO. I have...a lot of issues surrounding my own cosplay. I enjoy doing it, but I'm super terrified of having my picture taken and being posted online. I try to work around this by cosplaying obscure characters from forgotten shows (like Maetel from Galaxy Express) or characters that don't actually require me to show my face or body (Arakune from Blazblue), but at Bakuretsu Con I decided to finally go as Rise Kujikawa from Persona 4, who is neither obscure nor...uh...amorphous. I'd been working on the cosplay for months--I bought the costume (Rise's winter school uniform) at AB, but the alterations ended up being harder than I'd anticipated...I actually had my mom help me with like, everything, haha. I also decided to use hair extensions instead of a wig, because my hair is about the right color and length for Rise's hairstlye; I figured I'd only need extensions to add volume to the pigtails. And I was right, but I didn't realize how difficult it would be to put my hair up into high pigtails in the first place. As in, I'm not able to do it on my own. WHOOPS. Luckily, my sister-in-law was able to help me out in that department.
ANYWAY, I finished the outfit, and I spent most of October trying to hype myself up into actually wearing it this weekend, and...I did! And it went well; there weren't many Persona cosplayers (I only saw a *very* in-character Teddie and a rather shy Yukiko) but a lot of people recognized Rise right away and that was pretty satisfying. I also made myself (well, really my brother) take a few pictures of me so I could get over my fear of having my cosplay posted publicly but. Um. I'm still not confident enough for that yet HAHA SORRY :S
My brother dressed up as a Headcrab zombie from Half-life, which got a lot of Half-life quotes yelled his way. :) I have pictures of that, too, but I need to make sure he's cool with them being posted here. He's not really into cosplay culture; he mostly wanted to dress up for Halloween and to 'fit in.' :P
★ Panels/Events: I only went to one panel this year, "How To Post & Create But Deal With Internet Hate"--my experience with con panels, particularly those at smaller conventions, is that they tend to be a bit unprofessional and aimless in presentation, but this panel was one of the best I've been to in years. A lot of good stuff on how to handle anonymous internet hate of varying types, how to motivate yourself to create after getting discouraged, and how to promote yourself without being weird or obnoxious about it. I was impressed at the amount of factual information the panel moderators were able to give people--one of the mods explained people's browsing habits, and how most people only skim a page for 10-15 seconds and if they don't find something that piques their interest in that time, they'll leave. The moderators also did something I've never seen at a panel before: they went around the room and asked every single person what they were currently working on--or what they wanted to work on--and one (or more) problems they were encountering that they wanted advice about. Part of that was due to the small size of the panel, but I've been to some real tiny panels before and I've never seen the moderators do something like that. It was incredibly thoughtful and I really appreciate how much attention the mods were able to give every attendee. :)
The other major event I went to was a 'Grabbag' video game tournament--basically the organizer picked random games to compete in and whoever won the most won the tournament. In practice, it ended up being a 'popular N 64 games' contest with some Smash Brothers melee on the side, but given that I and my brother wasted a lot of youth playing the N64 we were pretty cool with this turn of events. The first round started as a Star Fox 64 1v1 dog(fox?)fight, and I totally mean to brag when I say that I utterly crushed my opponent. Though to be fair, he probably didn't waste his prime years in high school playing SF64 versus mode like I did and is probably better off because of it. :P But! Still! I played SF64 well enough to draw a few gasps when I dodged or chased down my opponent, and at one point someone shouted "she's not human!" which I am going to assume is a compliment of a sort. Heheh.
Unfortunately I lost in the second round, which was Super Smash Brothers Melee. I'm pretty terrible at that game unless it's set to free-for-all and I can pick off other players while they ignore my shitty but super adorable Pichu. This was a 1v1 single stock match, so I had no chance. XD
My brother made it all the way to the final round, which was a 4v4 Smash Brothers 64 stock match...it was a very close game, and ultimately went to a Link player--a girl who'd basically slaughtered all of her competition prior to the last match, which was fun to watch.
★ Video/Board gaming: There wasn't much of note in the video game room...someone had brought the North American release of beatmania IIDX as well as the official controller. I've only played IIDX in arcades so it was kind of novel to play the only NA console release. Also, somebody had set up Perfect Cherry Blossom on Friday so I introduced my brother to Touhou. (I left out the part about the fanbase's monumental output of porn.)
For board games, we played Kittens in a Blender, which was fun enough with just the two of us but would probably be even more entertaining if we'd played it with a bigger group. We also tried Pandemic but after 15 minutes of setting up the board and trying to figure out the rules of the first turn, we realized it was too complicated for us. Especially when our mood was at 'hahahaha throwing these adorable cartoon kitties into an imaginary blender is fun.'
★ Dealer's Room/Artist's Alley: The dealer's room and AA were rather small, a given considering the size of the convention, but I still ended up buying a lot of stuff. I got a dumpling folder thing, which is a uni-tasker (literally, all this thing can do is fold dumplings) but dumplings are the one thing where I can go 'if it weren't such a pain to fold a batch, I'd make them a lot more' so I feel justified in buying one. Also got a Kyubey plush to menace my Madoka and Homura ones, some assorted Persona blind-box/keychain stuff, and was talked into buying a trial deck for Weiss Schwarz. In the Artist's Alley I got some amazing soaps that look like amazing gourmet cupcakes, and a candle that looks like an edible raspberry cheesecake, from Crazy Potato Crafts. I'm half-convinced I should label the cupcake soap with 'DO NOT EAT: ACTUALLY SOAP' because I think my dad might try to eat it, even though it's a random cupcake just hangin' out on the bathroom sink.
That's about all the convention specific stuff out of the way! Tomorrow, I'll try to post some pictures of
