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So hey! I was not around for a lot of January and February because I was once again frantically working on Katsucon costumes. Katsucon was last weekend, and it was good, even if the con seems to be having staffing shortages. I wore my closet Gu Yun cosplay to the danmei photoshoot meetup and was pleasantly surprised that I was not the only non-MXTX cosplayer there - there were about five people from Er Ha (somewhat expected), and then a 4-5 person Word of Honor group (less expected) and three people cosplaying from Qiang Jin Jiu (extremely unexpected). No other Sha Po Lang, but several people did recognize me which was great.

Andy and I also did a paid photoshoot to get good photos of Hua Cheng and He Xuan, so eventually I will have some spooky ghost kings to share.

Of course I got home and Alistair decided to get sick (pneumonia), but also did not want to go in the carrier At All which involved a lot of stress and my hand getting mauled, and the help of some very good friends who drove 45min in the snow to come help me wrangle a cat who had a surprising amount of energy for not having eaten for three days. He is still at the vet hospital but on the mend and probably coming home tomorrow.

I also managed to do something to the muscles of my lower back at Katsu (probably like... standing too long or something dumb), which the shoveling and cat wrangling did not help - sitting and laying is mostly fine, standing and walking around is stiff muscle soreness. Ready to sleep for about a week, I think.

...but not in that order, because I may as well get the bad out of the way first :)

The Bad
* left my credit card in the self-check-in machine and only realized it after I had spent twenty minutes getting through security and was already running late. Thankfully not my main credit card, and I deactivated it online right away, but a somewhat inauspicious start to the trip
* one of our roommates was sick most of the weekend - thankfully, it doesn't appear to have been particularly contagious
* our first year staying at the Embassy Suites, and they instituted some asinine new policy where they had to see everyone's IDs at check-in and guests had to wear neon green wristbands all weekend to access some of the main hotel benefits. It took us probably an hour of waiting in line to check in as a result.
* 9:15am panel slot on Sunday = an audience of approximately five people. I'm definitely not putting us as available for that time next year.
* lost my phone (and consequently, the attached wallet with all my money and ID in it) for about an hour on Saturday.

The Good
* As implied by 'about an hour', I got my phone and all attached stuff back! It had fallen out of my pocket in a busy portion of the convention center, and it took a few tries of the remote ringer (part of Google's 'find my phone' features - you can ping it to ring at max volume no matter what it's set on, as long as it's still on the network). Also learned that if you set a contact number in 'find my phone', whoever finds it can call that number from the phone!
* mostly-full room for our Saturday evening panel!
* Friday night Barzone was small but a lot of fun - there were some pretty sweet costumes, and I was happy to run into a bunch of con-friends there and chat for a while.
* My giant space duck made the trip more or less intact, and was well-loved - I think I got asked for more photos in the hour and a half I wore it than the rest of my outfits for the weekend combined.
* They expanded the photo backdrop section they had last year from two or three to around six, including some really nice ones like a tiny ramen shop, and people seemed to be generally pretty chill about taking turns using them.
* Artists Alley had some great stuff - I don't buy prints, because I have no where to put them, so I was happy to see a lot of expansion into pins/keychains/etc. I ended up buying two enamel pins and a resin skull ring, and wanted to buy some cute cat washi tape but couldn't find the right table again when I went back on Sunday.
* Someone actually recognized me and Andy in our Queen's Cup outfits, which are like... present in two volumes total of a 39 volume series from the early 2000s. I think Kazuki's distinctive hair helped but that was still one more person than I was expecting!

The Weird
* all the public bathrooms in the convention center and the Hyatt were definitely haunted, or at least slightly cursed
* They had this Japanese tableflipping game in the gaming room, which could also go under 'The Good' because man was it fun to play.
* there was a place to add suggestions for new photo backdrops and someone wrote 'loli world (hentai)' because... humanity ಠ_ಠ

Mostly just an excuse to post the photos, which are here, as I am way too unfocused (and have been for most of the year x.x) to do a nice blow-by-blow recap, and it would probably boring as all hell anyway. I ended up going to barely any events because all the ones that looked like they might be interesting were at times where I was getting really tired, really hungry, or both. So I spent a lot wandering around looking at the costumes and having photos snapped of me (everybody digs Leon!). The cosplay was pretty average - nothing really terrible, not too much really great - there were a few gems there, which I tried to get photos of. The one 'con' event I did go to were the two Academie Duello workshops, longsword and rapier, which were both really fun - I'm really tempted to sign up for lessons there, but it's pretty expensive :<

Dealer's Room swag:
-Tokyo Babylon 1 & 7 in English
- Fruits Basket 12-15 in English (slowly catching up!)
- CCS doujin "Honey" - a Tomoyo-Sakura friendship story, and a shorter Touya/Yuki romance story. The art is super-cute, although it's pretty short.

...Yeah, not a lot. The dealer's room was actually pretty well-appointed, but I've seriously cut back on my merch-buying, and all the series I want stuff for are super-old in terms of anime and nobody carries stuff for them any more (hence why I snatched up the CCS doujin)

Making myself write this before I crash and forget half of it. There will be photos later, as a bunch are on my mom's regular film camera.
( AB 05 )