Monday, September 30, 2013

Video again~

Going to force myself to vlog more! As well as blog of course :)
Why not both?! :D


Tuesday, September 10, 2013

KumoriCon 2013

It has been approximately a week since KumoriCon has finished up and, honestly, I want to say it sucked. I know that cons are only as good as you make them and it takes effort to get together with people to hang out. But something about KumoriCon has been so very stagnant for a few years now; it honestly has felt like the same exact con as years passed. Despite attendance growing for the con what new guests have they brought? Do they ever have a big headliner or someone that will draw people in? ... that, ya' know, hasn't gone for years on end as it is?

That's not to say these frequent guests are bad per-say, but the content starts to get stale. KumoriCon is -heavily- dependent on attendees running panels and still is a con where the dance and cosplay contest are the biggest events (other than late night 18+ panels.)

Mind you I've been going to this con since it first started and only missed one year for being in the hospital.

~~~

All that aside my experiences at con are far from stellar when it comes to staff. It took less than five minutes after leaving my hotel room on the first day for some staff member to yell at me. I was chatting with someone while waiting for the elevator and wasn't much paying attention to things going on so we got on the elevator. Well, if anyone has gone to Kumoricon you'd know that the staff are horrid monster Nazis about NOT riding the elevator up if you mean to go down. I guess I got on an up elevator and a staff member (whom I've had previous issues with through the years and even has argued/bitched at me on Twitter) decided that yelling at me was the most effective way of getting the point across that I did something so horrible it's to be equated to clubbing a baby seal.

Mind you, the person I was chatting with and myself were the only people in the elevator... and crazy staff member and one quiet staff member were the only people that got on the elevator. We were able to ride the thing to the lobby without stopping at any other floor as well.
*sigh*

Whatever- time to con it up. I mostly spent the day trying to find friends and finding the girl who was holding my badge. This year I helped out the host cosplay group by being in their halftime skit show. I was to play a pretty small part as Fionna from Adventure Time! The costume was a loaner and everything ^^;; so all I had to do was show up and do my bit. (which went off splendid if I do say so myself...)

After some trolling about I was able to get my badge and... never have to show it to anyone ever because KumoriCon greatly lacks badge enforcers. No wonder so many people ghost at this con! Yeesh.

I didn't get into cosplay until late at night- in which I ended up wearing Erio! It was a lot of fun to derp around in :) but pretty much no one knew who I was haha. I expect these kinds of things though as I tend to cosplay really random and weird things.. ya' know... characters I like as opposed to popular ones ;P
I tried meeting up with a cosplay friend I met through Twitter but he actually didn't recognize me in cosplay *laugh* It was kind of a silly thing but we later connected anyway so no worries there! :D


Later that night I met up with everyone to rehears the skit. I think I hung around for nearly 6 hours @_@ good lord... I really didn't need to and totally missed some panels my friends were running. In the end I had all of 3 or so lines towards the END of the skit. So I really didn't need to do/remember much. It later did help that I stuck around though as I would hand props off to the stage ninjas as they needed them~ I wanted to help in any way I could since Kayla got me a badge because of it, ya' know?

Next day I hung out with Vince a bunch. We talked about cosplay happenings and things going on in our lives. I'm really happy we've actually been able to become friends lately :D good to find people with similar mindsets that go to con- they keep me sane. I got into Fionna pretty much straight out and ran from my room, to stage, to the room a few times to get things that were either forgotten or were needed to fix some prop problems. I would comment on Kumo's skit show but seeing as how I was not in the greenn room and just hanging around backstage I didn't get to see much. I mean, we could see the screens (well.. the back of them) but the audio was too difficult to hear since the speakers were outwards facing. It's cool though ^_^

OMG there were SO MANY CUTE KIDS IN COSPLAY THIS YEAR. Like, little little kids! Under 10! They were so adorable that I just wanted to hug them all! *squee*

Skit went off pretty much without a hitch :) There were some problems of  Ice King's cookie tray disapperaing somewhere but it was found in time. Kay;a only had 1 backpack so while we were switching we pretty much had to quick pass it back stage- I was worried about this initially but we were so pro at it LOL. I did struggle or anything and had it on at least 7 seconds before I had to go on stage XD of course it's been so so so long since I've been on stage that I was all shakey and nervous... but things were fine :) the skit was fun and I'm glad I didn't fuck up my tiny part ^^;;
Actually TomTheFanboy was awesome and recorded the whole deal!! I'll inbed it at the end of the post or just follow THIS LINK to watch- it's actually pretty long (nearly 20mins!) but that's because it needed to give the judges time to choose winners for the cosplay contests :)

Backstage isn't exciting
Afterwards I only hung out for a short while but went back up to my room to pass out... I'm not sure why I was so tired but it was nap time since nothing was really going on.


I woke up randomly and had a message from Eric that he'd stop by on his way south from PAX! I was super excited! :D I was trying to convince him since KumoriCon was right off the I-5 freeway and I wouldn't be seeing him for a week or so when we meet up in Vegas. He asked me to grab him some energy drinks so I ran to the convenience store real quick and grabbed some snacks as well :) of course he tells me his ETA was 20min but it was more around 30 or 40 *laugh* At this point I was chilling in my lobby chatting with friends when he showed up~ which he got a crazy hug from me for. I might have beena  bit too excited haha. I met his brother as well (who is super adorable!) A local friend who I suspected liked me was acting a bit jealous... so I was an asshole and danced around him a bit just saying "you jelly? you jelly? you jelly?"... to which he admitted to. Don't get me wrong, I feel somewhat like a jerk... but nothing is going to happen.
I showed them around the con a bit. The dance was going on and despite them wanting to go in I couldn't get in touch with friends to let me use their badges ;/ so we hung out in the main area outside of it since people were still dancing there and you could still hear the music. Ironically Gangnam Style was playing LOL and tons of people were dancing! Eric's brother recorded some of it and a cute little Jack Frost kid was dancing too!! I guess his brother really enjoyed his first impression of KumoriCon and said it seemed more fun despite having attended PAX that weekend. I explained to Eric that PAX is more professional and industry while Kumoricon is a lot more of a "hangout and party" convention. It's pretty low key but because of that can be a lot less stressful and much more chill (or incredibly boring lol.)


In they end they only stuck around for about an hour. We walked around the park a bit and Eric played some Final Fantasy songs on one of the pianos they had places randomly throughout the park :) We also played on the swing set a bit too. I hadn't done so in ages and was still twirling around like I used to! I also scared Eric by doing that thing where when you get to the high point you pull up real quick and drop down to shake the other swing haha. At this point I had also found a phone lying on the ground... it started to ring so I answered it and the person was actually the owner looking for it. So I told her where I was and that I'd wait there with her phone :)
Afterwards I walked them back to their rental car and said bye... Eric and I got into a little bickering fight over something small and silly and it resulted in him apologizing up and down to me since he knew I was upset... I find it very difficult to stay upset with him though so I said everything was fine as I knew I'd get over things eventually (I knew I was being silly being so upset anyway.) So I said my goodbyes and sent them on their way.

To which Vince and I met up and decided to be emo kids by buying junky food from the convenience store and lamenting about our feelings while sitting in the park eating the garbage food LOL. Danny (PDXMoogle) grabbed some subway and joined us as well :) I dances around to some of the songs he had on his stereo as I've been learning the dances to some (such as Renai Circulation) and just kinda... chilled. It was nice :) It started to get a bit chilly though so we wandered off to find people. Finally came across Ryan (the guy I was supposed to meet earlier) and THIS TIME he realized who I was lol!! I also finally met Marika :D we sat around and chilled and had more bro-out times. But seeing as it was nearing 4 am we all decided it was time for bed. Funny enough Ryan and I were on the same floor XD I quickly conked out after hitting the pillow.

Next morning I worked on Ranka a bit but wasn't really hard pressed to finish her as I knew I wasn't going to wear her.So I packed my shit up and wore my Ranka wig with some cute clothes I own that still look like Ranka's style... kinda. Took my stuff to Jerry's van and hung around more. Said farewells to Tom and other people I ran into. I giggled that some local lolita girls I was in the NewCon fashion show with didn't recognize me. I guess I look that different in cosplay vs lolita vs normal clothes? I recognized them despite the different wigs and such but I dunno- maybe I'm forgettable ^^;;

A few friends and I tried to head down to the dealers hall as none of us had been there yet... but we got there to discover they closed it AN HOUR EARLY for whatever the reason >:/ WAT!? And to add to it as we were standing around and trying to trade info we had even more staffers yelling at us that we needed to mvoe out of the way because they're cleaning up. I looked around and people were pulling tape off the carpet that was down... nothing more. No moving of guard rails or tables or anything. And this same staffer kept just circling us and yelling at us over and over again; it was annoying. I get it, we need to leave, but you closed down the dealers hall an hour early? And now, despite seeing us writing things down to trade some info she keeps yelling... lady, it's not going to make me move any faster! Ugh!

I also took pictures of Alli in her Dion Roger's Rinoa and of Kayla and Mandy in their Hetalia cosplays. I just kind of took a bunch of random pictures as I had just gotten a new camera and was learning how to use it. Lets just say I took a lot of butt pictures- but they were consensual lol

And then I headed home. Jerry stayed over and slept and I crashed out like a mofo as I had to head to work the next day.

Jared always finds me to take a picture! :D


Long con full of friends. I'm glad all I had to pay for was my room.