Anime Expo recap

Who has tickets to Pirates of the Caribbean tomorrow night at midnight? Skuld has tickets to Pirates of the Caribbean tomorrow night at midnight! w00000t! I am so excited. I know it's going to be horrendously bad, but also oh so good like the first one. *drags out and dusts off the fangirl again* :D This is an awesome weekend! I'm going to be all sleep deprived on Friday morning, but guess who doesn't care! ^___^

Anyhoos, Anime Expo recap!

Friday
Friday evening was basically me finishing up Dave's Mugen costume. =___= I spent that entire afternoon running around lab trying to get my stuff done. >__> I couldn't get out until 6:30pm, and then I went right home and started sewing. I ended up being up until almost 4am working on the Mugen wig, which ended up a horrendous disaster. Never have I failed at anything so hard as I failed at that wig. Let us never speak of it again. I wouldn't even let Dave wear it, it was that bad.

Saturday
Woke up bright and early, put on my Jin costume and hitched a ride to the con at 8:30am with Sakuragi and Dragoon. Got there around 10am, managed to catch the England vs. Portugal penalty kicks, and then proceeded to walk the hot block and a half to the convention center. OH MY GOD. It was so hot. And being in a million layers under my Jin costume just made it worse. I don't think I stopped sweating at all that day, even when I went back inside. *dies*

The pre-registration line was insanely long. O_O I had my badge mailed to me. All I had to do was pick up the little plastic holder and the lanyard, but somehow that took standing 2 hours in line. And that was AFTER I cut in line too. :( You know, they should run that pre-reg thing like the Society for Neuroscience runs their huge 35,000 person conferences. If you pre-reg then you have a lot of plastic holders and lanyards sitting around. Therefore there is no line. :( Thanks for being retarded, AX. I met some nice kids in line and cut in line with some other Samurai Champloo cosplayers. XD Yess! I have skillz!

After that I got to sit in another line for the CLAMP panel, but it was wonderful that Ko let me sit with her (thus cutting in line yet again!) cause she was lonely since her friend Ammie couldn't make it. ;__; *sniffles* I'm glad I got to hang out with Ko practically all weekend, because I hadn't seen her in about 2 years or so. o_o Huzzah, Ko! *huggles* We had a great weekend together!

So the CLAMP panel was basically all about xxxHoliC and Tsubasa. They barely even talked about anything else. Not a single mention of X, which was disappointing. =__= *sighs* I think the only things of note are that CLAMP's favorite series is apparently Duklyon, and that in Holic Mokona draws all the females and Nekoi draws all the males. :( The questions they picked were totally lame.

I also happened to fail at winning the raffle to get into the CLAMP panel, but I'm glad that Ko and Phi got to go. Especially Ko, because she was hardk0re and flew all the way over from Boston. She really deserves CLAMP's autograph because of her k0reness. :D

Sometime on Saturday night Ko, Dave, Zhenhe, and I caught Densha Otoko. I never get sick of that movie. I think the audience enjoyed it too, mostly because of its ability to identify with the complete and total nerdness of the densha otoko main character. :3 Afterwards, Auddess called, and even though we weren't sitting together we all caught Final Fantasy Advent Children. That movie is the best thing on earth. It has everything you need in a good movie. Motorcycles, explosions, monsters, high-speed chases, kickass fight scenes, giant swords, gayness, a full orchestra and chorus, and Sephiroth. WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED A MOVIE? I submit that you are missing nothing. Except maybe plot. ¬_¬

I'm not entirely clear on what happened after FFAC. I think dinner was trying to happen but failing due to massive lines of otaku at every nearby eatery, so I went home, showered, and crashed.

Sunday
I was planning to get up sometime around 9 or 10am on Sunday, but I ended up getting up quarter to noon. And I was still tired. Dave brought his pipe and we smoked up a bit before hitting the con. It was pretty funny because I was completely gone while we were walking around in the Dealer's Room. Apparently people kept asking for pictures of us, or trying to talk to me, but I was just totally out of it and didn't notice at all. XD Not that I normally notice when I'm sober. >__>

I went to the artist's alley and got me two of the yaoi fan badges that Scuttlebutt Inc. makes. :D Now I realize I probably should have picked up their Utena/Anthy yuri badge too...but whatever. XD I spent the rest of the con walking around proudly displaying my love for Zoro/Luffy and Sephiroth/Cloud. (I also probably should've had them commission a Sol/Ky for me. I think I may just do that online.)

After wandering about aimlessly for a while, I decided it would be optimal if we hit up Howl's Moving Castle cause I hadn't seen it before. Whoa, big mistake cause I was still kind of high. (And well, if I wasn't, the movie was trippy enough for me to convince myself I still was.) I also missed the first 5-10 minutes of it so I had very little clue of what was going on. I thought I figured it out halfway through, but then the ending happened and I didn't get it anymore. I FREAKED OUT. I couldn't stop laughing, it was so insane that I didn't understand it. XD

After calming down, we went to Galahad's room to play Apples to Apples and Fluxx. :3 It was total riot. In the first round somebody submitted "Hiroshima - 1945" for the "squeaky clean" category, which was the BEST THING EVER. Hahahahahaha. X3 Also, Galahad was holding onto the Charging Rhinos trump card at the end and never used it. Dude. Charging Rhinos wins everything. Doesn't matter what it is. :p Oh well.

After we got bored of card games, we decided it was still early enough that we ought to hit up IHOP. There wasn't much of a line so we had down and had some good times. :D Good spankin' times, let me tell you. It was so much fun. Jack and his friend Kevin joined us in the festivities. Somewhere during dinner conversation we decided it would be awesome to go bowling. So we did. We found a bowling alley nearby and just went bowling.

Somehow, before we started bowling, I picked something odd and hard plasticky off my shoe and it ended up cutting me pretty deep in my ring finger. :( Somehow it didn't manage to impeded the +5 bowling that my Jin costume was, cause I ended up bowling a 130 for the first game. HOLY SHIT. That's like...the 2nd highest I've ever bowled. WOW. And of course, Dave was still dressed as Mugen and I think he bowled a 157 or something. ¬_¬ I have the feeling that being Mugen automatically gives you +10 at anything that requires skill. Like bowling. Next time I ought to try to play pool as Jin. I ought to never go bowling in regular clothes anymore.

We rounded the night off nicely by stumbling back to our Best Western and playing Card Captor Sakura Shin Tetris. By then I was out of my costume and tired as hell which is probably why I failed so badly at Tetris. XD

Monday
What can I say about Monday? We woke up late again. Yes! My powers of oversleeping have yet to fail me! We scrambled to get everything together for the con and Zhenhe and I hung out because there was very little to do at the con. Halfway through the morning Jack, Kevin, Zhenhe, Ko, and I decided we should go to Rowland Heights to go to Arcade Infinity to play some games, so we did. They had a Japanese Initial D 3 machine, which sadly didn't take American cards. Boo. :( I should've gotten a card anyway, just in case I ever go to Japan and suck at Initial D there. XD I did get a lot of Wangan Midnight MaxTune 2 in though...and that was a blast, actually. :3 They had 4 machines linked up and there were some great 4 person races. *cheers* I actually scraped 2nd in one, and lost horribly in the other two. >_> I find that I am only lucky the first time I play something. *shrugs* Oh well. There's no way I could've won the best guy there, he had a fully tuned Hi-Ace and he was tooling everybody.

We went for some boba and food after the arcade but lost track of time, so we had to scramble home and even so Zhenhe and I were late for our ride from Dragoon. ;____; I am SO SORRY! *sniffles* SO SORRY! *still feels bad* I'll like, treat you to dinner or something sometime cause we made you wait.

Monday night I got home from AX at around 8:30 and promptly crashed. Then I woke up at 8:30am the next morning and I was still tired after having slept for 12 hours. Yeesh.

Anyways, that's my AX weekend. It was a blast as always. :3 When are cons not a blast? I got to meet a lot of people I previously knew only from the internet, and I look forward to hanging out with them more in person! *waves to everybody*

Okay, I should get back to writing my GG AU now. :D Ciao ciao, friends. Pictures will be forthcoming tomorrow sometime between kung fu, dinner, and Pirates.