Responding to comments... 'cause "yay! comments!"

Rebecca said… Good grief, what a PAIN! As if working a full-time job (don't remember if you still work the part-time one too) isn't enough distraction. Does the hacking fiasco mean: 1) You now have a different webhost. 2) You're looking for a different webhost. LOL

Yes, I am working 2 jobs. I wasn't for a while, but they invited me back at Waldenbooks in October. Did you know that employees of Waldenbooks get 33% off on purchases at Waldenbooks and Borders? Yeah, I'm pretty much working for the discount. Whoot Manga! Not that I have time to read what I buy these days. Besides the 2 jobs (I work about 50-60 hours a week between the two) I've also taken on a plush commission that's eating up what little free time I have. I'm making a Zoidberg doll (from Futurama). I'm having a lot of fun making it, but any time I'm sewing I can't be working on the site. I need Herminone's time turner thingie! Or they need to add extra hours in the day. I don't sleep much, which helps some. During the week I typically don't go to bed until 1 or 2 am and get up at 7 in the morning. It seems like I have at least 3 things to do for every hour I have in the day. I'm really looking forward to finishing this commission so that I can have some more time to work on the site. I feel guilty working on the site instead of the commission I've been paid for. I keep thinking about quitting the Waldenbooks job, I don't make much money for it but the discount is just soooooo tempting that I'll probably keep with it. My dream is to be able to make enough from my con trips to live on, so then I can quit my bank job and be a professional fangirl! How cool would that be! Even cooler is... last summer proved that's not an impossible dream. I just have to work harder. As to the webhost situation. No, I'm actually staying with Ace-host. Ace-host is about my 4th (paid) host for the site, the others have been dollarhost (good, reliable, but 0 features and not enough bandwith), alwayswebhosting.com (sucked! my site was down more then it was up with them it seemed!), infinology.com (so-so, expensive and terrible customer service! They banned anime websites from their packages). Ace-host is cheap, has a ton of features and gives me a lot of bandwith and diskspace to work with. Currently I have 100 gigs of bandwith a month and 5 gigs of diskspace. I was at 80 gigs and 3 gigs, but they bumped both over this past snafu. Some version of the "RandomFandom" website has existed since at least 2001 (that's the oldest backup I have, but I really think it's been around since 2000). Older websites of mine, that had different names and slightly different content focus (kind of like beta versions of this site) have been around since 1997. So you could say Randomfandom is over 8 years old! Wow, it's been a prety wild ride [oldfogey] I remember when the big news was that you could now change background colors and imbed images right in the webpage[/oldfogey] This site may be a pain in the tucus sometimes (like now with the hacker thing) but I have way too much fun with it to give up.

Thanks for the update. Nice to see the year in review - sorry you missed out on Katsucon because of some stupid wedding (oh wait, that was my wedding, never mind). :) Next year you can tell people you went to "Cotonou Con" I wonder if there are any cons in Africa? - Shelly

Lol, your wedding was worth missing Katsucon for. ^_^ Besides, the split hotel format for Katsucon was seriously strange! I didn't even know there was another part of Artist Alley in another building till after it had closed! How weird! I'm glad I wasn't selling there, I think I probably would have been hidden in one of those corners. I checked out anime-cons.com and there are no anime cons in Africa. We'll have to have a mini-con at your house, since we'll have all anime fans in Cotonu in attendence after all.(I'm assuming.)

Quickie Con Year in Review: January - Ohayocon '05 - Airport lost my luggage for a day and a half. Great venue, but we had to share it with a "Teens for Jesus" summit (We called 'em God Con). Made decent money and had fun in Otaku's Choice. Febuary - Katsucon '05 - Only got to go Sunday. Split building con had me confused. Really glad I wasn't selling there. May - Anime North '05 - Wow, lots of running back and forth. Was on 2 panels, sold really well in the Artist Alley (thanks to Jade) ^_^ Enjoyed spending time with Regina and seeing her perform. Missed all of Friday, bits and peices of Sat, but Sunday was all con. ^_^ Got to stay and extra day because it was a long weekend. July - Anime Expo '05 - ROCKY start, Expo's Artist Alley needs some SERIOUS administrative re-working. Despite that had a lot of fun w/ all the people I got to meet (the RSC girls, Rod, Mishi & Eric) Having my booth next to Clega sealed my *need* for a BJD. Totally surreal being in the Artist Alley. August - Otakon '05 - Everytime I take my car somewhere I have trouble (blown tire this time in Rochester). It was fun getting in early to Baltimore and seeing the Aquarium. Artist Alley was huge and overwhelming. Did very well. ^_^ Made enough to buy my first doll, Irish (an obitsu 60cm). Got to talk w/ Mindy for a little bit. Only got to see a little bit of the convention (AMVS!). Really need to get a partner who still loves the anime/manga scene like I do. September - Onna '05 - Got to meet up with Cat again and saw Usa-p and Christy for the frist time in 2 years. Finally got to meed Elina. Had fun playing the phrase game, got to be on another panel. It was fun actually "attending" a con instead of working a con. I really hope there will be another one. ^_^ That's a quick year in review for the cons I've been to, if anyone was interested.

(You know it's bad enough that I hardly ever update this, but I've noticed that when I do, it's usually while I'm at work. You know, when I'm being paid to do something else.) Because people have asked, here is a quick run-down on the "evil hacking incident" mentioned on the first page. About 2 months ago, about the same time as I got back from Otakon my website was hacked. One minute it was there, the next the index page had been altered to read "Kittens?" and nothing else. The rest of the site was fine. I immediately changed all my passwords, fired off a note to my webprovider, ace-host.net, and reuploaded the page. On review, I remembered that Shadow had told me that my phpBB2 board needed updating and that there was a hack that could let people in a backdoor. So figureing that might be it, I updated the messageboard and went about my life. A full MONTH later, ace-host.net shuts down my website, email and ftp access with no warning. They splash a note across my domain saying that I should contact support/billing. (Which makes it look like I haven't paid my frickin' bill which I had a week earlier!!) After about a week of give and take between me and my host as I try to get them to give me back access to my website, they FINALLY tell me why they shut down my site a month after the original incident. Apparently my account had been sending out massive amounts of denial of service type attacks. They noticed the spike and traced it to a file evidently placed during the initial hack. I'm unsure of that. I caught it literally as it was happening, I suspect one of my hostees might have been running the same faulty board I had been and I just got re-hacked. Ace-host and I argued a bit more back and forth as they were going to deny me access to any of my files and just wanted to wipe the whole account. Now I'm pretty good about backing up my files and all, but not *that* good. Especially with the more interactive sections like the Oekaki and the messageboard. I was especially worried about the Oekaki. I hadn't backed it up at all, mainly 'cause I wasn't sure how. I didn't want to loose all the great artwork people had put up on the site! So I put my foot down and after a *lot* of arguing they finally gave my a zip of my site. 90% of the site was updated from older backups, but at least now I can go through the 10% with a fine toothed comb and eventually get it back up. Here is the short list of what still needs to be done: 1) Restore the messageboard "skin" so that it matches with the site. 2) Restore the "Shop" section of the site. 3) Restore the Links section of the Fruits Basket Resources 4) Restore the Oekaki board 5) Restore Otakon 2005 photos to the gallery The main thing preventing me from doing 1-4 is plain old remembering how to do it. It's been a long time since I initiall set those sections up (years in some cases) and I just don't remember how. In some cases, like the links section, the software has been upgraded from semi-useful and free to chock full of features and way to expensive for me to buy. It'll take me a while to get things sorted out. Stupid hackers.

I've decided that I can't start any more posts with "well" or "ok." Looking over my lists of posts almost 90% start with one or both of those words. If I type it that much I wonder how often I say it. Maybe I actually sound like Joe Pesci and no one ever told me.

It's not my fault! I've been visiting blogger every day for the past 2 weeks fully intending to finish talking about AX (so I could start talking about Otakon). But it's those damn, "Bloggers of Note" conspiring against me! It's them and their clever prose and interesting links to other bloggers that keeps me from being productive. Stories of journalists down in the Katrina ravaged south, Emergency Room Nurses, Sleep researchers, audacious twins, pompus fake lawyers. How am I supposed to compete with that? You know, I get requests from people at cons and things to write more in this. And I do see (according to my server logs) that people do actually seem to be looking. No one ever talks though. A friend suggested that I exhaust people with my long posts. By the time they're done slogging through them they're just to exhausted to comment. Well, wow... now I feel like an 8th grade social studies book. I haven't written any more about Sunday or Monday at AX, and I haven't even started on Otakon or my trip. But I'm going to leave this a short and sweet post. I bet no one will comment anyway. Shelly is here in the states, not surfing online from Africa and therefore will not read this for quite some time and she's pretty much the only person who ever does.

Well, it's taken me a little while, and I've been to another convention in the mean time, but I'm back to blog about the rest of Anime Expo! (Then I'll blog about Otakon and my whirlwind trip surrounding it.) Okay, so I have to admit, I don't really remember much of Saturday. At all. But it's not because a lot of time has passed on Sunday of the convention I couldn't remember what had happened Saturday. I remember how it started and how it ended, and that's pretty much it. The started way too early, to claim my dealer room space I had to be at the dealer room doors at 8 am. (8 am at a con!)Cat helped me lug my stuff down and we got dealer's badges from Lynn (such a nice lady!) and I, Mishi and Eric got our stuff set up. Rod turned up a little later with his and Mishi's 3 year old son. Such a cutie, and well-behaved for a 3 year old. He liked the buttons so I gave him a couple. ^_^ Rod spent most of the day riding the escalator with him to keep him entertained. I sold a lot of buttons and the day dragged in the morning and then flew in the afternoon. The dealer's room was open from 10 am to 6 and really, I hardly remember any of what happened during that time. (Other then my booth was right next to the Clega booth... it was selling a lot of Ball-Jointed Doll stuff. Since I've been looking at them for months before hand seeing them close up more or less cinched the deal for me. I knew eventually I'd have to get one.) I also met Grace and Deda sometime during the day. I have no idea when. I swear, once I get behind my table my brain shuts off and any sense of time is completely lost. I spoke to one or two people who figured out I was Merrow. That was the one very disappointing thing about Expo. A bunch of people had planned to stop by my table in the Artist Alley, and I had no way to tell them that I'd been moved to a completely different place. =/ I mostly had to depend on people either recognizing the hat or seeing my name on the card and asking if that was me. (Which some people actually did, and one girl looked at my card and squealed which made my day.) The thing I like most about cons is getting to talk to people in person. Dealer's room is so impersonal, no one expects to really be able to chat with a vendor there. In the Artist Alley people know you're a fan so they're more likely to talk. Once the dealer's room closed we met up with Deda, Grace, Suey, Van and Cat and we once again left the con. I never leave the con... and yet, here I was, again, leaving the con... We visited more Japanese bookstores, this time Kinokuya. It was pretty funny. Van practically raped their manga magazine section, she had thier counter *covered*. It was like a scene out of the Read or Die Ova. Especially at the end when they realised she was the girl who has the same amount mailed to her each month through subscriptions. (As my uncle says, they looked like they could have kissed her full on the lips and been damn happy about it.) Grace, Deda, Suey and I sat in the car as we waited and looked a the Pinky St. figures they Grace and Deda had bought while we waited for Van to conclude her monsterous purchase. We were all hungry and talked Cat and the now poor Van into getting something to eat. We settled on the diner attached to the hotel. Van did a little story-time with the latest episode of Fruits Basket from Hana To Yume which Grace and I swooned over. It was really fun sitting and chatting with everyone about various mangas we were all reading. It was like a live action friday night RSC chat. ^_^ Everyone was pretty tired after the long day. Deda and Grace decided to crash, as did Van. Suey went to meet up with a friend of hers to watch anime. I would've liked to check out something of the con, which I expressed kind of late to Cat as she was driving back to the hotel. If I'd said something she would have been willing to drop me off and pick me up later, but I felt too guilty to do that and felt it would have been to inconvenient. The hotel room we got was great, but I would've liked one within walking distance so I wouldn't have to be so dependent on Cat and her car. I think Anime Expo is the con I spent the least amount of time doing "Con Stuff" at. When we got back to the hotel room we fully intended to go right to bed... But Adult Swim was on and Cat had never seen Samurai Champloo before. (It was the episode with the guy with the beat-boxing retainer.) We got through Samurai Champloo, Inuyasha and Spiral before Cat called it a day. I stayed up through Paranoia Agent getting my stuff ready for the next day. And that was Saturday.... and I think I'm going to post this now. I intend to finish this today... but we'll see how that goes. Only Sunday and a little bit of Monday left to go!

Okay, so in July I went to Anime Expo in Anaheim California. It was over the Fourth of July weekend, and yes, I realise that was over a month ago. >_< (and I never even blogged about Anime North I went to in MAY! Why? I had so much fun and was on a panel and everything!) Man, I'm so bad at this! Why am I so bad at this? I like writing, and I like talking (too much sometimes my friends tell me) so why doesn't it occur to me to blog more often? I get to tell stories and to people who actually want to hear them (or, at least I assume they do...) I don't know... I always end up being prodded into it. So this post is dedicated to Pelli, who asked about my trip ^_^ So, AX is the largest anime convention in the country. I was really, really, really excited about going. Not only did I have an Artist Alley table in the largest convention in the country I was planning to meet up with a bunch of the girls from the RosettaStone Cafe ( a neat little mailing list to discuss anime, manga and manwha). I'd even made up new pins to give out for Furuba Fans (from FruityGroup and here at RandomFandom), and a special one for the RosettaStone girls. I'd worked really hard before the con. I'd made over 3,000 pins, 2 dolls (Haru and Momiji) for the artshow. I had 2 zodiac sets, 2 tic-tac-toe boards, all sorts of good stuff! Then came time for the actual trip, I wish I would have had more time but I only get so many days off from the bank you-know-who, so I couldn't leave until Thursday (June 30th). Here is how it was supposed to work. I was going to take a 7 pm flight, fly to DC, transfer and get into San Francisco around midnight. There Cat, Suey, Van and a bunch of other girls and I were going to road-trip the 7 or so hours to Anaheim. Of course, that didn't work out. My first flight was delayed an hour, and then the second flight was delayed too... I didn't get in until after 2 am! >_< But I got to meet Cat, Van and Suey (who were holding up a sign with my name on it at the airport) and we piled into the car to start our trip. I was in and out but the highlights were Van's Ipod with 1001 songs on it, Van's dramatic reading of some book and some yaoi title, and driving through just beautiful countryside. There was one point where we came around this curve and we could see this valley full of clouds that kind of hugged the side of the roads with wispy tendrils across the actual road... Then we drove into it... and couldn't see anything. Does anyone remember the old Atari game "Enduro?" It was an endurance race game where you drove through different weather conditions. When you got to fog the screen would go white and all you saw was taillights just before you were about to run into someone. That was what it was like. So you could imagine that slowed us down a little. We didn't get to Anaheim until around 9 o'clock. We stopped at off at Cat and my hotel room, which was pretty cool it had a little kitchen and everything. It was kind of far from the convention center so we had to drive down. I lugged all my stuff down and then we had to try to find registation. OK. AX is the largest convention in the country. You'd think they'd be pretty organized right? They've been in this convention center for a while, so you'd think they'd know where to put signs up to direct people, educate their staff on where to direct people. Yeah, no. not at all. We asked like 8 people (as I'm carrying around my 80 pound box of AA stuff) where Artist Alley registration was and where general registration was. We got a different answer each time. We finally stumbled into where the AA registration was and Cat, Suey and Van seperated out to go down to general registration. And thats where things went wrong. I got up to the front of the AA line and ws told that they had my Art Show registration, but despite sending me a confirmation and cashing my check I had NO Artist Alley table and was in fact on the waiting list. Now I don't swear very often but, WTF!?! So I calmly, but firmly, explained to the very confused AA staff person, that I'd spent $400 on a plane ticket, $40 on an AA table, $45 on the con ticket, money on a hotel room and other travel expenses, and made over $4000 in merchandise. And that I'd be expecting that $5,000 in compensation from the convention. Now I've missed out at AA tables before. I had a similar situatation at Katsucon 04, but that was my fault. My check wasn't cashed, I hadn't gotten a definitive confirmation, so I didn't blame the AA much at all. That was on me. In this case, when I'd sent in my AA registration I was *really* close to the deadline. First I called the con (they had a phone number on their website) and asked if they were sold out in the AA and was told no, and that they pretty much just expected to keep adding tables for the amount of artists registered. That sounded a little odd, so I put my home phone number, my cell phone number, my work number, my work email, 2 private email addresses and said if there was any problem to please contact me along with my registration info. Now they knew before the convention that they had over-sold the AA. IF they hadn't cashed my check, if they hadn't sent me a confirmation, if they had contacted me in the month between when they cashed my check and when I got on that plane then it would have been my problem. But since they had done all those things, I explained, that put the problem square on their feet and I expected them to fix it or compensate me for the problem. I didn't yell, I didn't swear, I was just very, very firm on this point. I'm only 5'2" tall, I don't think I'm very intimidating. Apparently I'm wrong. The AA guy looked like he was about to faint. He looked pretty shell-shocked so I said, basically, that I knew he was just the guy supposed to be taking names and giving out table numbers, and that he didn't have the authority to help me, but I was sure he could escalate this to someone, AA head, Legal Aide, someone who could help me. He said he'd try to get in touch with "Joy" (I think) and asked me to step aside, I took roughly 4 steps to the side (enough to let the line progress) and plopped my stuff down. He started to give me a look and say something, but I pointed out that this was much too important to risk being forgotten about, so I'd stay right there, thank you very much. And that is where things started to go right again. I'd managed to plop my stuff down next to Mishi and Rod Basler, of Basler Arts. It turned out that I was *not* the only artist who'd this had happened to. From my estimation, AX had oversold the artist alley by about 35-40 artists. They'd had around 50 spaces available, they managed to fit over 70 in, and then there were more beyond that who they couldn't fit in. As I sat there commiserating with Rod and Mishi for being in the same situation I was in we heard several other artists being turned away and having the same problem. Unbelievable. But at this point all we could do was wait so Rod, Mishi and I talked about the kind of art we do and how we'd gotten to the covention and things. (Mishi does these really neat expressive paintings, Rod does body airbrushing and had lots of photos of women he'd made up to look like cheetah schoolgirls, earth mother cat-women and other equally cool things) They had another friend coming, Eric, who did commissions and also sold art supplies. It turns out that Mishi and Rod were friends with Lynn (I think ^^; I'm so bad with names) the head of the Dealer's Room. It also turned out that someone didn't claim their table in the Dealer's room. Lynn said Rod and Mishi could take the table, and set up on Saturday morning. The table was right next to the Anime Insider booth, and couldn't have been more than 6 feet long, and even though there were 3 of them sharing it already, Mishi and Rod invited me to join them. Can I just tell you how COOL these 2 were? They totally could have just said, sorry, hope it works out, we're really tight on space, etc, but no, they reached out a hand and helped me out. Too awesome, for words, really. This is why I love going to cons, by the way, because the people I meet are just the best people on earth. But, this meant that I had the rest of the day free. So I called up Cat and explained everything that had gone on, found out that they where still in line for registration (this is over an hour later). So I basically sat on my heavy box and waited. Turns out that Mishi and Rod know a lot of people, I got to meet Raven, the very goth dj (I think he was doing the dance at the con, but I'm not sure) He promised to bring up our situation at the gripe session at the end of the con. Once Suey, Van and Cat had gotten through the registration line and we'd reunited we decided to go get lunch and then check out some of the local Japanese bookstores. I wanted to see the AMV contest, which is a ticketed event, but I heard it was easy to get into last minute. That didn't really work out. We got so distracted by the bookstores (we went to Book-off, a used Japanese bookstore and Sanseido... which we found by accident while looking for Kinokuyia) we totally missed the contest. Van went nuts, as expected, spending over $200 at the two stores. Since I can't read Japanese I was pretty good. At Book-off I found a couple of cool Japanese beading books (they have the coolest craftbooks, even if you can't read the words the diagrams are so well done you can easily follow along anyway) at Sansiedo I found Fruits Basket vol 17 (Hana-chan on the cover, yay!). We got back around 9, just in time to watch the fireworks over Disneyland from Van and Suey's room. I was really and amazing show, and we had just a perfect view. Then we went to grab some food and head off to bed. I should mention that Cat was running on no sleep, I was just amazed that she remained standing. I think Suey managed to stay up even later, going to watch some anime with a penpal. Van sensibly crashed. And that was Friday... This is really long, so I'm going to continue the rest of it a little later. REALLY! I promise. I will talk about Saturday and Sunday too. I will, I will, I will, I will!

Well..okay, it's January, a time for new beginnings and it's just two weekends ago that I went to another convention (Oyahocon '05). What does this mean? Time for me to blog again! (And spout [possibly] false promises that I'll do it more regularly.) So the new year has flown by for me so far. I can't believe that January is so close to being over. Like so many others, every year I make a resolution. Some work out better than others. My last years resolution to blog more didn't really work out... my resolution to get out of debt did though it didn't actually finally happen till this month. This year I've resolved to 1) exercise more (so far...not happening I need to set up my ddr pad again) and 2) plan ahead more. The second is actually working out. I've already scheduled all my days off for the next year and made myself a little dayplanner with extra paper. Every day I make a to-do list and I've actually been pretty good at actually doing most of the things on it. Though "Blog about Con" has been on my list since the 20th, but at least it stayed on the list. Okay, so I guyes you guys actually want to hear about the con? or at least thats what I tell myself because I know people look at this and since my day-to-day life is pretty boring I have to figure that it's for the con reports. So, my trip to Ohayocon 2005 started off pretty rocky. I find it rather amusing that the trip to each convention seems to be an adventure all it's own. I've come to expect it. I left my house friday morning around 5:00 am for my flight out at 6:30. I had a pretty simple itinerary. Leave Syracuse at 6:30, fly into Pittsburgh for a short layover and get to Columbus Ohio by about 10. When I got to the airport I checked through pretty quickly (a minor hitch with the carryon luggage I had full of metal buttons. When the security people look at the buttons they always ask..."Do you sell these are are they all yours?" what would I do with 40 each of each button??) When I got to the gate I was supposed to leave from I was called to the podium and asked if I could switch to an earlier flight that was supposed to go to Philadelphia and then to Columbus at 9:30. My checked bag would be removed and follow me. Sounded good to me. Too bad it didn't work out that way. The weather was bad, it was snowing and cold so they had to de-ice the plane before we could leave. But the hose on the truck deicing the plane broke and the only other truck was servicing another plane so we had to wait for it to finish and refill. At this point I fell asleep (before we even took off), and when I woke up we were arriving in Philly... at 10. =/ I'm kind of glad I was out of it. Apparently it was a rough flight and there was a girl who obviously had flight anxiety crying about how we were all going to die. I felt bad for her, but if I'd had to be aware of her crying the whole flight I probably would have hated her. So of course I missed my connection and had to get on the next one at 10:30, that flight was slightly delayed because the flight crew was on another plane... that was late arriving. -_- Anyway, I finally get to Columbus around 1 pm. My checked bag did not arrive with me. It went to Pittsburgh. >_< I gave my hotel's address to the baggage man and mentioned that my name wasn't on the hotel's room and gave them my cellphone number as a contact number when my bag arrived. It was supposed to be there by 3. So then I set about actually getting to the convention. Lynn (the friend who convinced me to go to Ohayocon) had given me a number to call about getting picked up, which I thought was really nice. Of course, thats when I was supposed to be getting in 10 so I figured that things might be different now. So I talked to a guy (after getting his cellphone voice mail several times which was a long clip from Bebop...Spike talking about the white cat)and he had no idea, so I called the hotel to find out if they had a shuttle. They didn't but there was a hotel shuttle that serviced several of the hotels that only cost me $9, so that was a minor issue. Of course, before getting that far I had to figure out which hotel I was staying at and it's phone number, unfortunately that information I'd put into my checked baggage. I made a few quick phonecalls and finally got ahold of Sandy at work who got the hotel information despite the fact that the con website had exceeded it's bandwith. (!) So I got to the convention and found my table pretty easily. There didn't seem to be much organization to artist alley (no place to check in, ect) but there didn't seem to be much need for it either. Everything was clearly marked, so I just set my stuff up. Unfortunately, not having my bag meant not having over half of my merchandise and all of my displays, but I did have my buttons. So I set them up and my little painted figurines. Happily my little figurines brought people over to my boring table, which was especially good since early friday the tables on either side of me back in my corner were completely empty. I finally met up with Lynn a little later (after talking to the phone number guy one more time and asking him to pass on a message). Lynn and I didn't get to talk much the whole convention as she was super busy. This caused a little problem later on when I wanted to go up to the room and couldn't find her, but finally I just decided to camp my butt outside the hotel room and one of the like 8 people in the room came up around 1am and let me in. Once I'd gotten a little sleep I was in a much better mood. I honestly don't remember much about friday because I sat zoning out at my table most of the day. The only thing I remember was making an Alice from Alice 19th cosplayer's day by actually recognizing where she was from. I think more people would have realized if she'd done one of the fancier costumes, but she just did Alice's jumper with a mirror (and she had the hair down.) The second day was pretty fun, I finally got my bag first thing that morning and the three other tables in my row were filled with nice and friendly people. The day really flew by, it seemed it was night-time before I realized it. I did get to make another cosplayer's day, a girl dressed as Suppie from Card Captor Sakura. She was so happy I knew who she was and knew the name right off the bat. She said a couple of people had recognized her as the other 'cat thing' from CCS, but no one else had guessed she was Suppie. I also got to meet Scott Mcniel. Because apparently the guy sitting at the table next to me, Morgan, has been going to Cons forever and knows everyone. It was nice sitting next to him for that reason. Scott came by to talk to him and Morgan gave him some hot wings, blazing hot wings. At first Scott was like, wow, those have a little bite to them... then he was tearing and losing his voice. It was pretty funny. He was pretty friendly and very approcable. I said hello and thats about it. Unfortunately I blanked and I couldn't remember a single one of his roles, other than that I knew he was in something I liked. =/ What a miss opportunity. If I'd known he was Kouga from Inuyasha I totally would have begged an autograph off of him. I think he really got Kouga's attitude down. Usually I don't like the English voices of characters I really liked in the Japanese, but while the portrayal is very different I think it got the character dead on. Also going on at this con, starting on Saturday was what came to be dubbed by the other con-goers as "God Con." It was actually a religious youth group conference called "Dare to Share." What it meant was christian youth groups and their chaperone's from all over Ohio were converging at the convention center and mixing with the general insanity of the anime convention. The cosplayers got really interesting reactions, and so did some of the artists. There was one girl dressed as a manga only character from Hellsing. I'm not familiar with the character, but it's a werewolf who wears a Nazi Uniform. She had doggie ears and tail and of course, a nazi armband with the swastika on it. I hadn't thought much of the costume when I saw it, it was very revealing and the ears and tail was actually kind of cute, the nazi costume honestly didn't make much of an impact. The Japanese dress their villians in variations of it so often it didn't really register. But she said she could hear the God Con-goers going "OMG a NAZI!" every time she went everywhere and a couple people told her she was endangering her soul. And I saw some of the eyes pop at the Felicia from Darkstalker's cosplayer. She was dressed pretty much like this cosplayer, except without the fleshtone bodysuit and she looked like...12. She was a tiny little girl (I think she was actually older then she seemed and was just very short.) Jen, a member of the rosettastone list, was visiting my table with her young daughter when she walked by and they both did a little eye-popping of their own. Jen extracted a promise from her daughter that she would NEVER dress that way. Anyway... The God Con people apparently harrassed some of the cosplayers and some other congoers got preached to, but I kept getting the curious. Artist Alley was very accessible and had a lot of random traffic from the curious who weren't actually registered. I spent very little time at actual con activities, but I didn't see much badge checking going on at all, it was very laid back. The God Con'ers I had we mostly very enthusiastic about this whole 'anime thing.' I spent a lot of time explaining what anime was, why we were having a convention about it and why people were dressing up. Apparently I was the one with the "Ask Me, I'm friendly!" sign on me... or perhaps it was, "Ask me, I'm not scary!" I also got a lot of people who wanted to share that they did know what anime was. I got one girl who was really just plain cute, she was so eager to share that she'd watched an anime and really liked it. It was called "Cowboy Bebop" and she wanted to know if I'd ever heard of it. ^^; I said, "Oh, yeah... I'm familiar with that one..." I didn't have any bad experiences with them, but I know the girl next to me, who drew pretty boy angels and demons, got asked why her art was all influenced by evil. -_- It was an interesting little addendum to the convention. I closed up my table around 11 and found Lynn in the Otaku Choice video room, I got the room key and dumped my stuff and then came back down. The Otaku Choice event was really neat, they had like 200 video choices for the fans to choose from and everybody got to pick at the end of each show what would be watched next. I came in to it when they were playing Panda, Go Panda, and there was a whole mystery science theater 3000 thing going on with the audience. I'll never see it the same way again. We then watched the first ep of Technolyzer (soooo wwwweeeiiird) and then some Invader Zim. It was a good time. ^_^ There was some talk about making the Otaku Choice and all day thing instead of a night block event and I think that's a Good Idea. It was Lynn's baby and she pulled it off really well. I stayed as long as I could stay up... It's here that I should mention that the crew I was staying with were very much party people. I got one of the guys to escort me up to the room, at around 3 am. I was the first one back. I took the opportunity to take a shower and another of the guys came in. We grabbed beds and slept. Sometime later the rest of the crew managed to get in, and I had a very sleepy conversation with Lynn that I don't really remember. (other then agreeing that yes, I was glad I came.) The next morning I got up around nine, as did the guy that had come in right after me. He shook his head at the people passed out like corpses around the room and shook his head as we were leaving around 10, "We sleep at night." He said. I agreed, but it was more like, we sleep before dawn... In the elevator down I once again got to meet Scott Mcniel, he seemed fascinated with my buttons that I was wearing on my black cape, or perhaps it was my chest that they were pinned on. (J/K) "That's a lot of pins." He commented and I agreed. A lot of people say that when they see me with all my button designs on. I have over 50 designs now, so it does look quite impressive when they're all on. A Naruto Cosplayer (not Naruto, but another character from it) asked if I knew when the dealer's room was open because she was looking for something to do. I said, "No but you can come see the fine artists in Artist Alley and buy stuff from us." [Big Smile] Everyone in the elevator (always crowded at a con) liked that and laughed. Scott said that it was very slick and he was impressed. ^_^ Sunday in artist alley was pretty slow. Morgan, the very nice guy at the next table, watched my table while I ducked into the dealer's room for the first time. I did a quick circle and spent a lot of money. (Well not too much really.) I bought a hentai fruits basket doujin (A Kyoru, the only fb doujin I found). I also bought a chococat purse and cellphone case for my sister. I bought some Fruits Basket picture frames too. I'm pretty sure they were a bootleg item, but they were clever and not a knock-off so I bought them anyway. They were these rubber animal bobble heads that had Fruits Basket portraits inside. The portraits were from the postcard calender, but the animals bobbles were cute and the idea was clever so I didn't mind paying the money I paid for them. (they were quite cheap.) I got a Yuki Mouse, a Haru Cow, a Rin Horse, a Kagura Pig, a Hatori Dragon (my favorite, the dragon was super cute) a Momiji rabbit, and Ritsu Monkey. They were sold out of the Kyou Cat and the Shigure Dog (darnit!). I don't know if they had a Kisa Tiger, Ayame Snake (how would you make a snake bobble head?) or any of the other characters. I also bought something I thought of was just hilarious. It was a small stationary set bought from Kawaii Gift's booth, something called Parasite Pals. Click the link to see pictures of the cute pink case with Holly Hostess and her Parasite Pals Dig Dug the head Louse (lice), Blinky the Eyelash Mite, Zzeezz the Bed Bug and Tickles the Tapeworm. The best part was the tag let me quote: Here is the girl with small friends of life present for always. Some irritation she finds with them, but much fun and love is to be shared! Hope for you to enjoy the friends as like Holly. The good fun of Parasite Pals are bring us together. First time I've ever heard of Parasites bringing people together. But then I've never seen parasites as cute as these either. Tickles the Tapeworm is my favorite. I closed up around 4 or so, most of the other artists were already gone. Before then the Suppie from Saturday came back and was very disappointed to find out that I hadn't seen her masquerade skit. So instead she performed one of the songs for me, a very cute song about Takoyaki. ^_^ She danced with a fan and everything, so cute! I love enthusiastic fans! She also sang two other songs for me "What do to with a problem like Kikyo" (sung to What do you do with a problem like Maria from Sound of music) and "My anime things" (sung to my favorite things, also from sound of music) Both had really clever lyrics that I wish I could remember. Suppie girl, if you're out there, please email me! The flight home was very uneventful, thought I had a pleasant conversation with a guy I know I've seen at other conventions. I think I've remembered everything that was interesting at the con, but if I think of anything else I'll be sure to mention it. Oh, I also met several Fruitygroup and LemonGroup Members, it was all very nice to meet you. Feel free to email me anytime!