Back from another year of Swancon (+ couple of days to recoup, + after party at pancakes). Wasn't much at this year's con that could compare to what an awesome guest of honour Rob Shearman made last year (being one of the writers on the new Doctor Who and all around very approachable and excellent value on every panel I saw him on), but it was still overall a very enjoyable con. Attended many entertaining panels, got to catch up with all the usual suspects and an old high school friend I hadn't expected to see there as well, and as usual when many fans conglomerate met a couple of new awesome people as well. The music at the Masquerade was the one big let down this year - hardly anything worth dancing to was played all night, but the Millia/Ky balldress got me some very nice reactions from people, even if no-one had any idea who I was meant to be. Also finally got to bring out some of the crazier clothes bought in Japan, ate some of the best Chinese food I've ever had, and, more importantly, failed to get sick*, failed to get too horribly over-tired at any point and had no cosplay worries to stress about at all. That may well have been the most relaxed Swancon experience I've ever had. :3

*At least until the day after, and even then only a mild sore throat that's mostly gone already.

So of course we get home to discover that a letter we should have gotten to remind us our lease is running out didn't reach us for some reason, and now we've got rather less time than we were thinking we did to make up our minds about whether we want to move or not (probably yes), whether we need to find a new housemate to replace jaseroque when she leaves us soonish (also probably yes, and certainly at least one or the other), not to mention actually find a new place and/or housemate before crunch time.

Not sure what we're going to do about it all yet, but if any of you are expecting to be looking for a place to stay around Perth in the near future, now could be a really excellent time to let us know.

If anyone actually noticed I've been around online lately... even less than usual, then it's safe to say that that thing where Waicon was last weekend probably had something to do with it.

After attending every one since 2004, the point has been reached now that I don't think there's much I can say about this year's Waicon that I haven't already said about a previous one - or about several Waicons, if not about every other con I've ever been too. It was even bigger than last year, pinneagig's store make a killing, and despite all last minute stress our costumes came out great - business as usual. Preparations take over your life for anything up to several weeks beforehand, then the con takes over your life, then you wake up Monday morning feeling vaguely hung over yet strangely convinced it was all worth it and completely prepared to do it all over again at the next opportunity.

I also realised that excluding one or two posts about a giant key I've said sweet bugger all about what I was I've been working on that kept me so busy in the lead up. Oops?

Anyhow, apart from recyling my well-traveled Millia costume for its first appearance in the state from whence it hails, my new costume for this year was Syaoran from Tsubasa (the scary one-eyed black-coated version who escapes from Fei Wong's hideout somewhere around volume 16-ish. I would use the general nickname fandom uses to distinguish him from his counterpart, but it's still a bit spoilerish). I've wanted to cosplay that version of Syaoran ever since I encountered him, but didn't get to it last year as Hiei turned out to be more than enough of a job by himself. Putting it off a year did have the advantage that by the time I got around to doing it I'd been to both the Genghiscon and Swancon Jedi Bootcamp sessions of '08 (Star Wars-inspired fight choreography workshops, for the unaware) and came away itching to find an excuse to use some of those moves in a cosplay skit. Lucky me, Syaoran carries a sword. This will be important in a minute.

So how did it all go?

• I WON BEST INDIVIDUAL SKIT ON THE FIRST DAY!!! I was not expecting this. The limit of my weapon handling experience comes down to a bit of background in gymnastics, a bit more in some poi twirling, and having been to Jedi Bootcamp sessions for a couple of weeks. The whole skit consisted of less than a full minute of sword-twirling to music - I didn't think it was going to be long enough to even be considered eligible. But clearly the judges thought otherwise, so who am I to complain? :3
  
  
• WE WON BEST GROUP ON THE SECOND DAY!!! This was a narrower thing than you may think. jaseroque - who was to be the A.B.A. to go with my key - has a history of finishing her costumes at the very last minute, and this year it was something like five minutes before we went up on stage. So not kidding there. But she made a fantastic A.B.A., and velithya joined us again as Sol, the walk-on went well and everything paid off on the day.

Moving on from the Amaranth ball, the main event of our Melbourne trip was the con itself. If I had to sum up the whole Manifest experience in brief, it would be with this picture:



( The longer version will be kept behind the cut - very image heavy )

Leaving all those Japan posts for a bit to try and clear out some of my posting backlog. Time to share a bit of what we were doing in Melbourne last month, starting with the Amaranth Ball.

( The Manifest Ball - cosplay photos galore, a little image heavy )

Back from Melbourne! This marks the first time I've been on the Internet since Wednesday afternoon, despite there being a pay-per-use computer right down the hall from us at the hotel. And yet I have not experienced the slighest bit of web withdrawl. This should tell you all you need to know about how busy the last couple of days have been. x_x

The best way I can describe Manifest is that it felt like a medium-sized con that got scaled up to a very large con without anyone making most of the organisational changes required to make this go smoothly. The venue for the ball was so small and full of so many people that there was next to no room left for anyone to dance or take photos without being in everyone else's way. The non-preregistered queue for the con took hours to get through on the first day and only got longer on the second, and the hall for the cosplay comp is so far from being large enough that apparently a lot of people have to be shuffled into secondary halls to watch via a video feed. Traders were apparently moved this year because there wasn't space for them in the main building, which meant there was quite a walk to get there, and even the new venue quickly wound up so packed the queue to get in sometimes went all the way down the stairs. Also, there were no maps to show where everything was, no programs available on the first day, and the art show turned out to be an empty room. So in short, I'd say I we get better value out of our local Waicon most years, but the people were really friendly and like just about any event that lets us get dressed up and hang out with friends and other fans, a lot of fun was had.

Many photos were taken (velithya's got nice one of me and her up here), but most of them are still on pinneagig's camera and she isn't back until Tuesday. So I'll leave this as a preliminary con report for now and go get some much needed rest.

It occurs to me it's way past time I said something up here about my plans for the next month, given how crazy, epic and generally incompatible with a good eight hours sleep per night they're looking from this angle. The short version is that I am going to be leaving for a few days in Melbourne tomorrow, coming home then heading to Japan a week later, with the rollerskating national champs squeezed in the middle. Yeah, somehow all this seemed like a good idea. (I would blame this on a whole lot of wonderfully crazy friends who kept making awesome-sounding plans, and I'm bound to regret it somewhere in the middle, but hopefully not that much if it's half as much fun as it ought to be~)

( Plans also include Manifest, the Tokyo Gameshow, and a lot of cosplay )

Perth sure has been accumulating extra cons at a frightening rate over the last couple of years.

Last weekend was Perth's first Supanova, which meant probably neither the organisers nor the customers knew quite what they were getting into and half the guests canceled at the last minute, possibly because they weren't even sure where this 'Perth' place was meant to be. On my side it was one of those cons where you wind up spending most of your time wandering around the vendors' hall (which did take up most of the con) looking at everything twice and vaguely wondering where all the other stuff that's supposed to be going on is supposed to be and whether it would be worth checking out even if you could find it, and waiting for the cosplay competition to roll around. Not a candidate for this year's most memorable con, but I Still had a decent time, and just about any comp harveystoat is MCing for is going to be worth being around for.

Things didn't go entirely as planned. We were going to pull out our Yu Yu Hakusho costumes again on one of the days, but then jaseroque couldn't find her obi and pinneagig was still getting over being sick and decided she didn't feel up to it, so it wound up with just me as Hiei, which was not quite the same. pinneagig did bring out her Kaylee 'Shindig' dress on the other day though, which was pretty much a must after one of those last minute guest changes meant Jewel Strait - as in, the actress who played Kaylee on Firefly - was coming to Perth (and there was much rejoicing!) So we got a photo taken with her and pinneagig's giant hoop skirt autographed, which is as close to asking an celebrity to sign a piece of our underwear as any of us ever intend to come.

The guests also included the voice actor who did Axel and Reno, which was unexpectedly great because not only does that make him one of very few English speaking voice actors who I recognise and don't secretly want to garrote who's performance genuinely impressed me, but also because he and his director/fellow voice actor/general partner in crime have a great sense of humour and host a pretty terrific Q&A panel. This included a performance of 'The Yaoi Song' - which they apparently had to write to dispel the all the Internet rumours that arose after they an incident when they once walked into a yaoi screening at a con by mistake, and it was every bit as hilarious as it sounds.

And this weekend I've got the rollerskating state championships to get ready for. Some months it just never ends... x_x

...another post-Swancon wrap-up post. (For those who might be reading this who don't have a clue what I'm on about, Swancon is our main annual sci-fi con in this city - runs over Easter every year.) In short - it was a great con, and a good time was had by all. In not-so-short - I must have been to a few too many good Swancons by now, because I went to so many panels and found myself vaguely thinking "well, this is interesting, but not as interesting as such-and-such a panel I went to two years ago... I wonder if there's something better on somewhere that I'm missing?" etc. There was no video stream this year and not much in the way of interesting writing panels either. Of course, going into something as tiring as a con already sleep deprived doesn't help any, but mostly I think I'm just becoming a bit jaded and picky. Possibly a bit bored with the same venue they've had for the last three years running too - must be past time for a change.

However! All that said, this was not a con without its share of highlights. Screw what they might have tried to tell us about this being a general-purpose fandom con, I think everyone who was actually there would have to agree it was in fact a Doctor Who con that just happened to have a few extra activities provided on the side. *g* They had a replica rent-a-TARDIS in the foyer, complete with flashing lights and speakers to play the theme music off a CD (for those who are wondering, the replica version is quite distinctly not larger on the inside. Cue endless strings of photos of people playing the 'how many of us can we fit in TARDIS game'). There was a replica Dalek (also complete with flashing eyes and voice synthesizer) that appeared at the Masquerade and later hung around in the foyer for the rest of the con. There was a whole room of photos from a collection from series shown on the BBC since way back in the dark ages of the black and white era, which naturally meant an awful lot of pictures of a lot of different doctors. cielrose, k_chan009, velithya and jaseroque all came dressed as characters from the latest series for the occasion too (cue many, many more photos) - and all did a damn good job with those costumes. Possibly a little too much success getting into character in certain cases too, for that matter... XD

But best of all was one of the guests of honour this year was Rob Shearman - one of the writers from the new series, who I can say with only minimal bias is one of the best value guests they've ever had. He's basically an old Doctor Who fan who actually got to live the dream of being able to write for his favourite show, but still had this great self-deprecating sense of humour about how the experience compared to expectations, whether he'd buggered it up in practice and how well he and the other writers all survived the gauntlet of fan opinion; and listening to him talk about it remained engrossing through every panel I saw him on throughout the con. We even got to talk to him a fair bit (well, mostly jaseroque did, because she's like that) and he was all around a pretty cool guy who sounded genuinely disappointed to have to go home again at the end of the con. Only wish I could've gotten to talk to him a bit more. This was a very good con to be a Doctor Who fan.

And no Swancon report is ever complete without a mention of the Masquerade - and I swear, the quality of the costumes there has been getting better every year. pinneagig and I just wound up recycling our Firefly costumes from last year this time, but what the hell, that giant layer-cake hoop skirt of hers deserved a bit more wear. The big highlight from this one was cielrose and jaseroque's Labyrinth costumes - barely were we getting over the realisation that cielrose is in fact David Tennant, when we had to deal with the knowledge that she is David Bowie as well (and jaseroque may very well be Jennifer Connolly too). XD The dance skit they put together to Dance Magic Dance came out great on the day too - I sure hope I can get hold of a video. =3 Seriously, I have got to get hold of some photos to link to - the resemblance is uncanny.

Came home tired but thoroughly convinced it was all worth it. A good four days spent pretty much entirely in the company of other fans is always going to be an Easter well spent.

So, most of this weekend went to Genghiscon. It's about as small as cons get (less than a hundred attendees), but compared to all the crazy stress of cosplay and never enough sleep that we get with bigger events like Waicon or Swancon, it's damn nice just to have a small, relaxed weekend fan get together for a change.

Highlights from this year's con:

• harveystoat playing the ukelele inside a dalek made from cardboard boxes.


• Everything from Saturday morning involving harveystoat and/or kae_dash and/or the giant pile of cardboard boxes out on the lawn leftover from the laser tag saloon (and which got significantly flatter as the morning went on). Some of this may even make it to youtube.


• Watching them and others find out why people don't usually play hacky sack with a cardboard box, and inventing a cringe worthy new definition for the word 'kickboxing'.


• Attending Jedi Boot Camp with kae_dash on Saturday night, where we all learned to wave a foam-rubber sword around in all kinds of fun twirly ways that are laughably unthreatening but look really awesome (especially when someone's doing them with a glowy replica lightsabre in each hand).


• Discovering that half those neat showy light sabre move are almost exactly like ones from poi twirling, and easier for us to pick up than they had any right to be. Woo!

WAI-CON IS OVER! Not that it wasn't great fun, but it's a hell of a stressful kind of fun. OMG, I have free time again. XD;;

In brief: WE WON BEST GROUP COSPLAY ON THE FIRST DAY!!! *victory dance* Made a killing at our stall, sold lots of doujinshi, caught up with a lot of people, oo-ed and ah-ed a lot over everyone else's costumes, took some rather stupid photos and were generally run off our feet.

( In not-so-brief )

So anyway - I'm kinda glad it doesn't happen more than once a year, but somehow or other, it always manages to be worth all the effort in the end. Lisa's got our day one photos up already, and we should get to sorting through what we've got from day two within a couple of days.