I can't believe it's been a week. ONE WHOLE WEEK.
DAMN.
Here's the con/weekend report I wrote on the plane back:
Whee! I just got back from spending the entire weekend in Boston. :3 It's weird, it really felt like I hadn't left Boston, even though I was gone for almost a year. There were things that were a lot the same, things that were very different. But overall, it really felt familiar and comforting.
It was great to see all my friends again, even if I only saw some of them for a couple of minutes. I really wish I'd had the time to hang out with everybody, to really spend some quality time together, but everything was so impromptu I really have to apologize to everybody I didn't get to see as much as I wanted to. ;____;
So I woke up at 5am on Friday morning to go to them airport to catch my flight. I neglected to bring a book with me, so at the airport they were selling "The Da Vinci Code" and I decided to pick it up for lack of anything better. I was intending to sleep the whole way on the flight, but I only ended up with less than 2 hours of sleeping and I managed to pass the rest of the time reading the book. I just couldn't put it down.
I got in about 4pm Boston time and managed to make it smoothly to Fenway House. Unfortunately it was raining, and that was a bad sign as I had yet to get acclimated to the humidity. Ugh, Boston is humid as hell. I never ever got rid of that damp feeling all evening. =____= Coupled with the fact that my contacts were really bothering me (I think I might've put one of them in inside out, but at this point in time I was so frustrated with just having gotten them in that I didn't want to make another attempt. :( A mistake on my part, I'm sure), and the fact that I was hot, sleepy, and tired, I did not enjoy my Friday evening very much. It was also hell trying to get things organized, especially since my masquerade group was not all assembled on Friday night, and we had no idea what was going to happen on Saturday for the Masquerade. Phew. o_O I was running all over Friday night, let me tell you.
The more I think about some specific experiences the more I realize that about half of my situations could be made into an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm if I bitched more and was slightly less socially conscious like Larry David. Highlights of Friday evening were some guy going as "Dave Rodgers" (it seriously said that on his badge) recognizing the stuffed hachi-roku I was carrying around, but not recognizing who I was cosplaying as. Amusing, let me tell you. Another highlight was meeting up with Ali-chan randomly at the convention center and begging her to buy me something from the food court because I hadn't eaten anything at all that day. Right when I got the pizza, Destra, Dan, and Malima wanted to head over to Pour House. They convinced me it was probably okay to carry my pizza in there, and since I didn't want to hinder the group, I brought my pizza in there. Unfortunately the Pour House management gave me a hard time about it, even though I ordered a drink from them, and eventually we decided to leave cause we figured they'd fuck with our food if we tried to stay. :( *grrr* Stupid Pour House. So we went to the Foggy Goggle instead, very disgruntled. That's why we didn't call anybody else for the original Pour House trip planned that evening, cause we were so unhappy about it. =___= *grumbles*
After coming back from the Foggy Goggle we stopped off for a bit at the Kaiju Big Battel event before going to see the music videos. There were some really crappy ones, but overall I got to see all the good ones. :3 My favorites were by far the Guts/Gattsu music video get to Bon Jovi's "I'd Die for You" and the "action" category Princess Tutu video to some German industrial stuff. One would not normally think that a Princess Tutu video belongs in the "action" category, but it was very well edited, very well executed and put together. It ended up winning best of show, and I think it deserved it. It was really really good. :3 It's been a good couple of years since I've given two shits about anime music videos, so I'm glad that this year when I decided to watch them, they didn't disappoint.
I left the con pretty early Friday night in favor of getting home to meet up with Mike Lewis, Ray, and Laura (Ray's girlfriend) who were coming in from New York City. You guys will never guess what Ray and Mike got for me as a present. XD I'm sure it was a huge pain for them to haul around the city and on the bus, but the very fact that they transferred to the "now we have to deal with this" problem was well worth it. :3 They got me the replica of Sephiroth's sword that I blogged about in an earlier entry. Yup. That sword is longer than I am tall. And you can only guess how long the box is that it came in. I've got it coming to Los Angeles via United People-who-hate Skuld (aka. UPS) so the adventure never ends. Yaaaaay. Anyways, after will came in too, we all decided to head over to Dan's place because a party was happening. I had some drinks, took some hits, and I think we headed home sometime around 3am cause I was just dead on my feet.
Before I move on, I'll just say right now that I hate the "anime dating games" that go on at cons. :( Or maybe the one at Anime Boston was just extra bad. You were supposed to be over 18 to get in, but the entire thing was probably rated PG-13 at most. LAME. I was disappointed. Second of all, if you're going the "yaoi" part of the dating game, make sure everybody up there is a guy. :( While I do enjoy crossplay, the fact that 3 out of your 4 "males" were actually girls is really disappointing. I didn't go to see girls kissing girls. I went to see guys kissing guys, dammit. PENIS OR GTFO! THANK YOU VERY MUCH. The same goes for girls who cosplay Gravitation characters. If I see one more fat, ugly chick cosplaying Shuichi and whining about "Yukiiiiiiiii" all the time, I am seriously going to kill some people. Either that, or spam 4chan with your ugly mug for all 4channers to mock for all eternity. Maybe I just hate ugly people. But I think I just hate Gravitation.
Saturday was pretty much fraught with frustration. I didn't go to a single thing that day except for the Masquerade, and I only went to that because I had to cause I was in it. I put my Jin costume on Saturday morning and went off to the con. It took a long time for my masquerade group--the Bishouen Support Corps--to get assembled, and in between I was chatting with old friends, and running around trying to get everything together. Many thanks go to Byron that day, for lending me various props. I didn't originally have a sword to use for Jin so Byron said in advance that he'd lend me his bokken. I didn't get it registered at security because I was super lazy, and eventually while walking down a semi-empty corridor I got caught without the little yellow tag and they made me go to security. Turns out that practice weapons are considered by the convention center to be weapons, so technically what I had was illegal, which meant I couldn't go on stage with it at the masquerade. Good thing that Byron was going as Zoro from One Piece that weekend, so he let me borrow one of the swords he was using for that costume. THANK YOU. It was key to the entire feel of the costume and I really owe a lot to him for that. :D You saved my ass, buddy.
Now I just gotta see about getting a plastic katana for myself before Anime Expo. *koff*
Anyhoos, about the Bishounen Support Corps and my friends there. :D The whole project was headed by Double Mark, a guy at Tetazoo I've known since his prefrosh days. He went to Otakon 2003 with our group. ^_^ Anyways, he had this great idea of creating a bunch of paramilitary-type costumes as the "Bishounen Support Corps" which were, obviously, there to support the bishounen. He had two schoolgirl fangirls, somebody on sparkles, somebody on background, a photographer, somebody working a fan, and somebody with roses. Needless to say they rushed up behind bishounen and did their thing. They talked to me about three or four days before the con, and I somehow managed, with my connections, to land them a spot as a performance in the masquerade. (Yay, diplomacy checks! :p I have 1337 connections!) We spent all of Saturday running around making sure we had all of our bases covered for the masquerade, and the rest of Saturday was spent actually AT the masquerade waiting. :3 Well, it was time well-spent. ^_^v We won the first place in the novice performance category. Yay!
Pretty immediately after I found out we won a couple of my friends wanted to head out to Red Bones, but by then their kitchen had closed, so we headed out to Sunset instead. Since I hadn't eaten at all that day (I never eat at cons. They're just big diet weekends for me), I got drunk off of one beer. XD I had a really strong buzz going, which lasted me the rest of the night. I don't remember exactly what happened that night, the weekend has turned into one big blur for me. But I think there was some Curb Your Enthusiasm involved.
On Sunday I hit the con for probably a total of 15 minutes. I looked for the third volume of Kuro no Kishi, but it wasn't there. I should've gotten there earlier for it. ._. Cause it's going to be a pain in the ass to find now that Biblos/BexBoy has gone out of business. What I did manage to find however, was the Initial D artbook. OH YEAH! You guys have no idea how happy I was. X3 I just gobbled it up and left the con to go home and bring Byron back his sword I borrowed the previous night. Then me, Destra, Dan, Boing, Lewis, and ray headed out to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox vs. Tampa Bay game. We won, but man, it was a close game in the last inning. Just imagine, bottom of the ninth, we're up 5-1 and suddenly we just can't close the game. We walked people TWICE with the bases loaded, and one of our pitchers could perform well under the pressure. If any Tampa Bay batter had homered, we'd've been SO FUCKED. Finally we managed to pull through and win. THANK FUCKING GOD.
We went to Red Bones that night and later hit Jillians for some pool and bowling before crashing. Monday was me spending time running around and hanging out with various people, including Ali-chan and Yang. :3 Yang and I watched X-Men 3, and somehow I managed to fuck my knee up just by sitting down and watching a movie.
HOW?! I have no idea. My life hates me.
Anyways, I unfortunately neglected to take pictures. :3 Mostly because I'm massively lazy and realize that most costumes aren't worth the effort for me to dig my camera out of my bag. >_> So we're going to have to go off my friends' pictures. Most of my pics are pics of my friends and I together in various places.
But...here is what little I have.
And the rest are in __this___ folder.
It was great to see all of you guys again. :3 And I'm really sorry I didn't get to see all of you guys. Shoutouts to y'all:
Ali-chan: I hope you did well on your quals! Thankfully it's over! Let's meet up next year at Acen!
Byron: Thanks, dude. You really saved me. I didn't get to make good on that offer of buying you a beer, but next time I definitely will! I won't forget!
Christian: We'll race each other someday. SOMEDAY. When I have a kickass car and some skillz. And we'll really see who rules the touge and the wangan. :p Good luck with med school and dealing with the guilt of turning me into a car phile. ^_~
Cocoa: Gah! We missed each other. :( Next time, we'll spend more time together, and we'll go as our Turk characters from Shinra's ___blah____
Dan: I think I pretty much spent the entire weekend with you, which was awesome. Thanks for sending my drivers license to me! I just barely got it! If you're ever over, I'll return the favor. Come to LA sometime and surf!
Destra: Come to LA! I miss you! :D Good luck on getting a job, and I'm glad that Alex gets to hang around for a bit longer. *snuggles* Your ghetto Luffy is the best ghetto Luffy I've ever seen anybody construct in the space of 5 seconds!
Lindy: Have fun in Japan! :D I'm glad I got to see you! I was hoping to run into you and I'm glad I did! I'll never forget our night of misery atop Fujisan.
Mel: I only saw you in your Nana costume once this weekend! Grrrr! I'll drag you out to the west coast sometime. X3
Mel-mel: Kyaaaaa! :D I got to see you again! You were surrounded by people I didn't know, so I didn't want to take away your time, but you looked like you were having fun. Enjoy graduation and the summer before you start college! :D
Mike Lewis: Rawr! That Sephiroth sword is going to be the prize of my room. XD I just hope Sephiroth doesn't show up in my door, take the sword, and try to kill me for magicking it away to SoCal. :x
Mike Pham: What?! No costume! I just saw you in your staff shirt! Thanks for making sure that Initial D was there for me. :D I really appreciate it. Man, driving with controllers is hard. If you're ever out in the LA area, gimme a call.
Plastic Ivy: Wah! I'm sorry you never made it out here! I hope everything's all right with your family, and remember there's always next time.
Ray: Dude! Good luck with grad school. :3 It was great seeing you again, and you better keep in touch!
Yang: Can you tell who converted you to your robotic self, cause I'd like more time too. X3
