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.

Christmas
Really quite awesome this year! Presents include quite a haul of Sharp Things (specifically, two craft knives, a hack saw and an electric jigsaw), which is faintly scaring my housemates despite both of them having contributed to the problem. This was all to the good - I was in need of a decent craft knife, and no longer have regular access to my Dad's tool collection. Especially good considering what my plans for the rest of the holiday period included.

We also had my uncle from out of state over for Christmas this year, plus some of our oldest family friends who are practically family themselves, which was really nice - felt more like we had the whole family present than we usually manage. ^_^

Today
A Happy New Year to you all! Dragged ourselves out of bed to attend a send-off lunch for my uncle (whereat we proved once again the sad fact that the fact one has spent $37.50 on a steak does not mean it will taste better than one bought for $20, or indeed much good at all. Bleh. Expensive restaurants = so not worth it.)

The Rest Of The Time In Between
Mostly hung around the house and tried not to die of heat exhaustion. X_X Dear Summer: I know we've given you a lot of crap this year for all that unseasonal raining on everything, but you didn't have to return to form quite that suddenly.

Other good news: Missed out on the highest value scholarship I was going for, but I did land one worth an extra $5000 a year more than what I was originally getting, which was also $5000 more than I'd been lead to believe I had any chance of getting at all, so that was pretty good. ^_^

Questionable news? We got a letter in the mail a week or two ago to say the estate agency in charge of our house was being changed and not to pay any more rent until we heard anything new. We have still not heard anything new, and to all appearances the new agency is closed for Christmas. I hope they weren't expecting to get any rent any time soon... *shrug*

( Most of the rest of that time has gone into making this )

That said, IIIII think I am about done with being stuck in the house by now. Anyone want to go to the beach sometime? Got any interesting plans coming up soon-ish? Anything? >.>

Finally done! ^^; Meant to have this posted ages ago (and I've still got all our WEWY stuff from the same trip to cover yet ><), but as so often happens with good intentions like that, distractions are plentiful and free time rather less so. Anyway, better late than never and all that, there is more than enough to cover.

Since I've already talked about the more general experience of the Tokyo Gameshow in a previous post (and the Squeenix closed theatre session elsewhere) I'll just summarise here: most of the interesting GG-related stuff happened on day two of the convention. I was cosplaying Millia, and velithya (my partner in crime for the purposes of this report) was there as Sol. We were there with a bunch of other friends as well, but they were cosplaying from other series, so won't feature so prominently in this report.

The ArcSys booth was pretty low-key this year. I was expecting they'd probably have some major promotional stuff for that upcoming shameless GG clone BlazBlue game, but there was next to nothing there about it. As compared to the giant display they had last year when they had Overture to promote, there wasn't much more than a small presentation area. This is not entirely a bad thing - as friends of mine had reported from last year, the advantage of being fans of a game made by a small company with a booth that doesn't get as much attention as the big industry names is that the staff are a lot less busy and a lot happier to talk to you or, say, track down Ishiwatari Daisuke for a cosplayer who wants a photo with him. Queues for the signing in the afternoon were much shorter too, which you learn to seriously appreciate after seeing how bad they get around places like the Squeenix booth.

The staff also included a helpful English-speaking staff member was nice enough to answer a couple of our bigger questions, which I'll cover here before I get bogged down with posting all those photos down below.

( At long last, answers to a couple of those big Overture-related questions )

( The rest of the report and lots of photos )

Saturday night was the annual PAniC ball. I would give the experience two thumbs up - it had pretty much everything that was seriously lacking at the Amaranth ball, being a dance floor big enough to actually dance on, a proper photographer, announcements that were audible and quite decent food. Still noisy and crowded, but that's always the case. I do still feel a bit like all the time and space it takes for everyone to eat a three course meal interferes with what these events are really about - ie, catching up with people, dancing, taking photos and ooh-ing and ah-ing over everyone else's costumes. But I'm probably just biased by so many years at the Swancon Masquerade, where you'd better believe the budget for that kind of food has gone somewhere more important.

The plan was to pull out my Millia/girl!Ky balldress again for the event, which should have been a nice, easy costume since it was finished months ago. Only... I pulled it out a week before the ball to make one or two very minor repairs, and found myself thinking, "You know what this really needs to count as a real alternate Guilty Gear costume? BUCKLES!" And so those minor repairs became a bit less minor, required a couple of emergency supply trips and chewed up a lot of what was left of my week. It was, however, completely worth it - I was quite happy with how the costume turned out originally, but the new additions made all the difference. Also, since I had a girl!Sol in an awesome coat to take me to the ball this time, that killed any thoughts about spending any part of the evening claiming to be Millia, but that was completely worth it too.

Spent so much time dancing we hardly got many photos taken this time around and haven't gotten many of them back yet, but velithya has a few posted that we took after we got back. <3

Did not get much sleep Saturday night, mooched around on Sunday and didn't get much sleep for Monday either, now seem to be coming down with YET ANOTHER minor cold. >_< Goddamnit, I am taking my immune system back for a refund if this gets any worse! This year has been ridiculous!

My post backlog hasn't gotten any shorter in a while either. *sigh*

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 )

( The Tokyo Gameshow: Cosplay, general fannishness and queues galore )

( Post TGS: Shibuya, Osaka, hot springs and doujinshi shopping )

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 )