I <3 Gunblood.
I just got back from Kumoricon where I staffed the Sakuracon booth with hazel_secrets [Michi], Mira, and Audrey [and Eileen, kind of.] It was my first anime convention other than Sakuracon, and it was incredibly fun. Just in the months since Sakuracon I've gotten acquianted with a ton of people in the local cosplay community through Gasukan and joining Sakuracon staff, so I was constantly running into people I know, which was a big difference from the Sakuracons and Emerald City Comicons I've been to in the past where I really only knew the one or two friends I was there with, and the handful of people from my high school I would run into every once in a while. I only went to the dances and one panel, but I still had a lot of fun just hanging out in cosplay.
Friday [Day Zero]
Outfits: Fluer-de-lis lolita dress, Mello
I went over to Michi's house in the morning with my giant suitcase and slightly less giant suitcase, plus the stuff that wouldn't fit in there/I didn't want to get smushed. My costumes made the abundance of baggage necessary. I had three pairs of boots plus two other pairs of shoes, petticoats, excessive amounts of bling, four wigs, and all the other necessary items for the five costumes [plus two variants] I was taking. I'm glad that I only have three costumes planned for Yaoi-Con now, since I'll be dragging my bags all the way to San Francisco rather than just to Mira's van.
Mira came to pick us up after having to run around on behalf of the PAX-goers, and we got to play suitcase Tetris with six people's luggage [Yuki rode down there with us]. We stopped at Taco del Mar for lunch, then made our way down to Portland, arriving there in the evening. The convention was held in the Lloyd Center Doubletree, which was also where we were staying. Upon arriving there, Michi, Audrey and I decided we were underdressed [even though I was wearing lolita] when we saw all the cosplayers hanging out in the lobby. After we got settled in our room, we changed into costumes. Mira said she wanted to keep the room clean, but that didn't last long. It quickly turned into some sort of cosplay explosion zone. I wore my Mello costume [without the scar since I was too lazy to apply it]. We set up our booth, then headed over to the mall for dinner at the food court. We wanted to go to the ice rink there in costume at some point, but didn't have time. I had bourbon chicken, which was coincidentally the same thing I had for dinner on day 0 of Sakuracon this year. I may have to make it my official pre-con meal or something.
After returning to the hotel, Michi ran downstairs to a friend's room to have her Zechs wig styled. I was bored, so I ended up inviting myself over there when Heat came to retrieve her gun and Heero shirt. It turned out that all the members of their Gundam Wing group were congregating in there and getting into their costumes, so I was totally from the wrong series. But Brad Swaile makes that crossover work. Quatre's entrance to the room made it 50% more gay [which is saying quite a bit, considering that Mello was already there]. Mello and Heero contemplated shooting things and blowing things up [possibly while they're still inside them]. We went to lurk in the lobby, and had the not-so-great idea that we would rather get down there from the 12th floor via the stairs rather than the elevator. We got all the way down to the 2nd floor, just to find that the stairs we were taking wouldn't let you go to the first floor without the fire alarm sounding. We were not yet aware of the layout of the place, so we didn't know about the main staircase down the hall that we could have taken. Because of the capacity limit on the elevators, it ended up taking our group way too long to get down to the first floor because we had to split into three separate groups.
Saturday [Day One]
Costumes: Esther Blanchett, Tamaki Suou, Mello
I started out the day in my Esther costume. I've come to the conclusion that I don't enjoy cosplaying nice, modest, relatively sane characters nearly as much as certain other personality types. Not that I won't ever do it again if I happen to really like a certain outfit. I'm also partial to crossplaying lately. We went down to run the booth in the dealer's hall, where my costume quickly grew uncomfortable due to the heat of the room combined with many layers of clothing. My rosary broke when I caught it on a chair, which happened to my Mello one a week ago. I rethreaded Mello's with stretchy string which did a good job of preventing that from happening again, but I should have done that with Esther's as well. On top of those costume issues, Eileen was being ridiculously cute as Hunny from Ouran, so I was eager to change into Tamaki to match her. I ended up doing so around 1:00 pm. I was slightly annoyed when mistaken for Hunny, especially since I wasn't even carrying Eileen's Bun Bun for her at the time. I bought Esther Blanchett, Abel Nightroad and Tamaki Suou keychains from the Artist Alley and Lavi and Arystair Krory cell phone charms, all of which are now on my iPod case. I also got a print of Sailor Star Healer fanart.
After closing the booth at five, we returned to our room for a while a made plans to go out to dinner with Mira's friend. Michi had to run off to go do something, and got trapped in an elevator for over ten minutes. On Friday, the staff had put signs in the elevators reminding people that they each had a maximum capacity of ten people, but someone had decided to be petty and tore them down. Overcrowding caused the elevators to break down more than once. They ended up stationing a con staff member in each elevator during the busy hours to enforce the capacity limit. I feel sorry for them, since they were volunteers who got stuck in elevators for hours at a time and had to put up with a lot of shit from hotel guests [the ones who seemed to be causing the most issues about it were the hotel guests who weren't part of the con]. The elevator issues discouraged me from my plan to ride up and down while playing the second closing theme from Death Note. I'll have to save that for some future occasion.
Once Michi [aka Mori] was liberated from the elevator, we walked a couple blocks to a pasta restaurant. It seemed very delicious at the time, but that may be because pretty much all we had eaten that day were the McDonald's breakfast sandwiches Mira had brought us that morning. And those weren't so much food as bundles of calories to choke down until you were not-hungry enough to not be able to force yourself to eat anymore [not that we weren't thankful that she was considerate enough to bring us food in the first place]. Even though I was starving at first, I was still only able to eat half of my pasta. I took the rest back to the hotel room since I knew I'd be hungry again after the dance.
Upon returning to the hotel, I changed into my Mello costume. This time it was the stylized original design version, which went through a series of titles, including Sexy no Jutsu!Mello, Sexystylized!Mello, and Raver!Mello. At the time we decided that Slutty!Mello was the best one to introduce it as. Audrey was Misa to accompany me. Which is a totally cracky combination of characters, but at least we looked awesome and were from the same series. Michi was Casual!Zechs. Audrey and I decided that she had to match us, so we deemed her to be Near's great-grandchild via artificial insemination. A title which Michi did not enjoy. While waiting for the dance to start, we lurked in the lobby, then at the park across the street with some other congoers who were playing with various glowy raver things. We ran into Stark and got creeped out by a Russian guy, which caused us to return to the hotel.
Misa and Mello had awesome raver tiem. We met drunk!Light, who had some awesome sunglasses which, in retrospect, I should have stolen to complete my costume. I challenged Near to a dance-off, which I totally won, even though Misa was like "We're all winners here!". I had gotten a new fancy official Death Note to replace the one I had made myself, but it kept trying to fall out of it's temporary Ryuk-ish Death Note holder, so I shoved it down the back of my shorts. We figured it was okay if it suffered a little, since by the time Mello gets the Death Note, it's been burried in the woods, shot in a rocket, and down Light's pants. Kumoricon had a lame 12:00am curfew that night, which pretty much ended the dance event though it was supposed to go until 2:00am. But I most likely would have left around then anyway to head over to the crossplay panel. Sadly, almost everyone there knew Audrey and kicked her out since it was after curfew, even though she had an Industry badge rather than a Minor badge. I escorted her back to our room before going to the panel, which caused me to miss Roy being presented with a penis-shaped donut. But I still got to eat part of one of the balls. It was a pretty good donut, too. The other girls at the panel cursed me and my tiny boobs that don't take much effort to hide.
Michi and I returned to out room at 2:00am, and by the time I was out of the shower everyone else had gone to bed. As anticipated, I was starving, so I retrieved my leftover pasta, just to realize that we didn't have any sort of eating utensils. I didn't want to wake anyone with lights, so I sat on the floor next to the bathroom and decided that pasta is totally a finger-food.
Sunday [Day Two]
Costumes: Sailor Star Healer, Mello
My Sailor Star Healer costume made it's third convention appearance in the morning, but I decided that Slutty!Mello needed to make an appearance during the day so I changed around 1:00pm. We ate breakfast in the hotel's restaurant, and decided that if we were to eat there again then we'd have to request a table in the corner since we were right next to the hall to the Creation Station and people kept coming over to talk to us while we were still half-asleep and eating.
The Mello and Matt dolls came down to help us man the booth once again. I continued my mission to high-five every D.Gray-man character and most of the Death Note characters I saw. Audrey and I agreed that high-fiving is the new glomping [unless it's a Wammy Boi, which deserves both]. I continued to see a Mello cosplayer with yello-green hilighter colored hair who made my brain hurt. Someone suggested that I get Matt doll a car, so I think I'll dig out my old Barbie convertibles for him. An Allen Walker rubbed a half-eaten apple on Sailor Star Healer's shoulder during a glomp/high-five session. I bought a Strawberry Pocky tray which we ended up placing the booth's Jolly Ranchers on, then organizing in the most OCD way possible. I labeled our candy display the L Trap.
When we went back to our room, we saw that our neighbors had put a sign on their door declaring it their group's official headquarters. Not to be outdone, we created a bigger, prettier sign declaring out room the Sakuracon Official Headquarters, which included a label warning innocent bystanders that our room may include seizure-inducingly cute chibis, skimpy Death Note character costume variants, excesses of bling, grumpy OZ officers, vinyl, and Obaasan the cosplay Nazi mom. [There may have been other warning's I've forgotten, and I could have put more but I ran out of room.]
We had dinner at the food court again. I got Subway, partially because it's slightly more convenient than pasta for eating with one's hands at 2:00am. I ran over to Claire's right before it closed to buy glitter spray for making people fabulous/terrorizing people since I had forgotten to pack mine. I had been planning to go to the Masquerade as Formal!Yaten Kou, but I was having too much fun cosplaying Mello [honestly, I probably would have been happy cosplaying him the whole weekend], so I just stayed in that costume. I just wish I had anticipated that I would wear Mello to the Masquerade so I could have bought a Phantom of the Opera mask.
Misa and Mello had time to kill before the Masquerade, so we hunted down Darkain [AKA Mr. Vincent Millenium Valentine] for photos in the park. We just happened to find him right as it was getting dark, and he was suddenly in high demand since he's known for awesome night photography. After getting some photos, we returned to our room to retrieve some super glue for his broken equipment and prepare for the dance. Mira, Eileen and Yuki decided to go to Voodoo Donuts [the source of the penis donut]. After going back to the park to deliver the glue to Darkain, we ran into Kumi-chan and co., who gave me the amazing revelation that the proper name of my costume was Hard Gay!Mello. Next time I wear it, I'll need a hat and sunglasses.
We got in the ridiculous line to wait for the Masquerade, since it's not like we had much else to do. While hanging out there, we met some awesome Gunblood cosplayers who convinced us that Gunblood is our new favorite anime. Ryoko is my favorite character, since she looks like Matt on a bad day [possibly associated with drunk!Light].
Some of the Masquerade music was pretty lame. The swing music was cool, but some of the slow songs sounded more like background music from The Lord of the Rings than a waltz. Misa and I took a break from dancing to run upstairs for donuts. We got there to discover that some immature asshole had ripped down our sign. Mira, Yuki and Roy informed us that they had been sitting in the room watching Kung-Fu Panda when they heard a ripping sound followed by laughing and running, and Roy jumped up to try and catch them but they were gone by the time he got to the hall. I made a new sign without the full warning label, but with the addition of the message "We <3 Gunblood". Next con, we're going to print out a bunch of copies of the sign ahead of time so we can easily replace stolen ones, and include messages on the back for the idiots who steal them.
The Masquerade transitioned to the not-rave without a break, and they also decided to extend to curfew until 2:00am, which I liked. The water coolers stayed filled, but they ran out of cups, which was really annoying. We were planning to go across the hotel to see if the other water coolers had cups, but noticed the abandoned coffee cart first and decided to just steal a stack of cups from there, since Petty Theft Which May Or May Not Benefit Others is the second step in the Being Devious Without Killing People 5-Step Program that Mello and Misa were forced into. [Going To See A Family-Friendly Musical is Step Three.] We sat around and loudly complained about how we had been forced into the aforementioned program by people like Near.
I lost at Rock-Paper-Scissors over who got the first shower, and we watched Talk To Me while eating leftover Subway sandwiches until we all got too tired to watch the rest of the movie.
Monday [Day Three]
Costumes: Yukito Tsukishiro, Casual!Mello
I started out the day as Yukito and packed up the cosplay explosion that was our hotel room for noon checkout. Yuki and Mira were in the room with me as I was finishing up packing, and I went down the hall to get ice for my Cherry Pepsi to go with half of a bacon and maple donut. As I returned to the room, I knocked on the door, then pulled down the sign since we were about to check out and I didn't want to leave it there for the maid to remove. Yuki heard the sign being ripped off and thought it was someone stealing it again, so she ran to the door and threw it open dramatically to catch the thief just to see that it was me this time.
Due to the tempermental elevators and tons of congoers checking out at the same time, getting downstairs was pretty difficult. During the busiest times, it was best to get downstairs by getting on an elevator that was going up, riding it to the top and then going back down, otherwise all the elevators going down would be full. I got on one that was going up, which became full at the next floor up. We got up to the top floor, where the con staff emmebr working in the elevator informed the people there that it was full. Most people had been pretty understanding when that happened, but a disgruntled old woman came and stood in the doorway of the elevator to stop the doors from closing so we were stuck on the 15th floor until she would move. She was yelling at us about how she had been waiting there for a long time and we had to get off at the top floor if the elevator was going up and she wasn't going to move until we all got off and she got to go down on the elevator. I half expected her to go even more psycho and lash out at the staff member. After like five minutes she finally gave up and took a different elevator down.
Once I finally arrived at the Sakuracon booth, I helped Audrey and Eileen make our table fabulous with drawings. I added the Gunblood logo to Audrey's wonderful fanart of them, and also drew Hard Gay!Mello, the Flying Tofu, and improved our L Trap. I did some last minute purchasing of a Death Note t-shirt for myself and a Misa necklace for my sister [since she loves Misa and is going to cosplay her eventually].
We left the con at 2:00pm because Mira wanted to get out of there early, that's when the dealer's room closed, and there wasn't much else to do. We stopped at a Burger King to get Eileen lunch and use the restroom, and I decided to change out of my Yukito shirt/jacket/tie and into my new Death Note shirt since it was more casual and comfortable. I immediately realized that this made me look like Emo!Yukito, since I was wearing black almost-skinny pants and black Converse, and still had on the press-on nails from my Mello costume [which were much less annoying when I used the glue rather than the stupid sticker-tab things to apply them]. The thought of Yukito being emo disturbed Touya-Michi and myself, so I switched to my Mello wig when we got to Baja Fresh to get lunch for myself and Audrey, and deemed myself Casual!Mello. [Stoner!Mello was also used at one point.] I could still pass as a guy half the time when I took the bindings off my chest. And I'll just say that I had Shinigami eyes since I didn't change from my orange/gold contacts to my blue ones.
On the way back, we went on an epic quest for Mexican Coke, since the others in the van are Mexican Coke pushers and decided to drag me into it. We got off the freeway like three or four different times looking for the gas station that they knew sold it.
[I'm referring to Coca-Coal, not Cocaine.]
Although I could have just had someone else take photos of my new Mello variant, I decided that the only way I could do that particular costume justice is with MySpace-style bathroom camwhoring.
I've most likely forgotten something and will add more about the con later, along with photos by other people. Here are the few that I took.
The view from our room's balcony:
The Sakuracon booth:
The Mexican Coke pushers:
Casual/Emo/Stoner!Mello:
Friday [Day Zero]
Outfits: Fluer-de-lis lolita dress, Mello
I went over to Michi's house in the morning with my giant suitcase and slightly less giant suitcase, plus the stuff that wouldn't fit in there/I didn't want to get smushed. My costumes made the abundance of baggage necessary. I had three pairs of boots plus two other pairs of shoes, petticoats, excessive amounts of bling, four wigs, and all the other necessary items for the five costumes [plus two variants] I was taking. I'm glad that I only have three costumes planned for Yaoi-Con now, since I'll be dragging my bags all the way to San Francisco rather than just to Mira's van.
Mira came to pick us up after having to run around on behalf of the PAX-goers, and we got to play suitcase Tetris with six people's luggage [Yuki rode down there with us]. We stopped at Taco del Mar for lunch, then made our way down to Portland, arriving there in the evening. The convention was held in the Lloyd Center Doubletree, which was also where we were staying. Upon arriving there, Michi, Audrey and I decided we were underdressed [even though I was wearing lolita] when we saw all the cosplayers hanging out in the lobby. After we got settled in our room, we changed into costumes. Mira said she wanted to keep the room clean, but that didn't last long. It quickly turned into some sort of cosplay explosion zone. I wore my Mello costume [without the scar since I was too lazy to apply it]. We set up our booth, then headed over to the mall for dinner at the food court. We wanted to go to the ice rink there in costume at some point, but didn't have time. I had bourbon chicken, which was coincidentally the same thing I had for dinner on day 0 of Sakuracon this year. I may have to make it my official pre-con meal or something.
After returning to the hotel, Michi ran downstairs to a friend's room to have her Zechs wig styled. I was bored, so I ended up inviting myself over there when Heat came to retrieve her gun and Heero shirt. It turned out that all the members of their Gundam Wing group were congregating in there and getting into their costumes, so I was totally from the wrong series. But Brad Swaile makes that crossover work. Quatre's entrance to the room made it 50% more gay [which is saying quite a bit, considering that Mello was already there]. Mello and Heero contemplated shooting things and blowing things up [possibly while they're still inside them]. We went to lurk in the lobby, and had the not-so-great idea that we would rather get down there from the 12th floor via the stairs rather than the elevator. We got all the way down to the 2nd floor, just to find that the stairs we were taking wouldn't let you go to the first floor without the fire alarm sounding. We were not yet aware of the layout of the place, so we didn't know about the main staircase down the hall that we could have taken. Because of the capacity limit on the elevators, it ended up taking our group way too long to get down to the first floor because we had to split into three separate groups.
Saturday [Day One]
Costumes: Esther Blanchett, Tamaki Suou, Mello
I started out the day in my Esther costume. I've come to the conclusion that I don't enjoy cosplaying nice, modest, relatively sane characters nearly as much as certain other personality types. Not that I won't ever do it again if I happen to really like a certain outfit. I'm also partial to crossplaying lately. We went down to run the booth in the dealer's hall, where my costume quickly grew uncomfortable due to the heat of the room combined with many layers of clothing. My rosary broke when I caught it on a chair, which happened to my Mello one a week ago. I rethreaded Mello's with stretchy string which did a good job of preventing that from happening again, but I should have done that with Esther's as well. On top of those costume issues, Eileen was being ridiculously cute as Hunny from Ouran, so I was eager to change into Tamaki to match her. I ended up doing so around 1:00 pm. I was slightly annoyed when mistaken for Hunny, especially since I wasn't even carrying Eileen's Bun Bun for her at the time. I bought Esther Blanchett, Abel Nightroad and Tamaki Suou keychains from the Artist Alley and Lavi and Arystair Krory cell phone charms, all of which are now on my iPod case. I also got a print of Sailor Star Healer fanart.
After closing the booth at five, we returned to our room for a while a made plans to go out to dinner with Mira's friend. Michi had to run off to go do something, and got trapped in an elevator for over ten minutes. On Friday, the staff had put signs in the elevators reminding people that they each had a maximum capacity of ten people, but someone had decided to be petty and tore them down. Overcrowding caused the elevators to break down more than once. They ended up stationing a con staff member in each elevator during the busy hours to enforce the capacity limit. I feel sorry for them, since they were volunteers who got stuck in elevators for hours at a time and had to put up with a lot of shit from hotel guests [the ones who seemed to be causing the most issues about it were the hotel guests who weren't part of the con]. The elevator issues discouraged me from my plan to ride up and down while playing the second closing theme from Death Note. I'll have to save that for some future occasion.
Once Michi [aka Mori] was liberated from the elevator, we walked a couple blocks to a pasta restaurant. It seemed very delicious at the time, but that may be because pretty much all we had eaten that day were the McDonald's breakfast sandwiches Mira had brought us that morning. And those weren't so much food as bundles of calories to choke down until you were not-hungry enough to not be able to force yourself to eat anymore [not that we weren't thankful that she was considerate enough to bring us food in the first place]. Even though I was starving at first, I was still only able to eat half of my pasta. I took the rest back to the hotel room since I knew I'd be hungry again after the dance.
Upon returning to the hotel, I changed into my Mello costume. This time it was the stylized original design version, which went through a series of titles, including Sexy no Jutsu!Mello, Sexystylized!Mello, and Raver!Mello. At the time we decided that Slutty!Mello was the best one to introduce it as. Audrey was Misa to accompany me. Which is a totally cracky combination of characters, but at least we looked awesome and were from the same series. Michi was Casual!Zechs. Audrey and I decided that she had to match us, so we deemed her to be Near's great-grandchild via artificial insemination. A title which Michi did not enjoy. While waiting for the dance to start, we lurked in the lobby, then at the park across the street with some other congoers who were playing with various glowy raver things. We ran into Stark and got creeped out by a Russian guy, which caused us to return to the hotel.
Misa and Mello had awesome raver tiem. We met drunk!Light, who had some awesome sunglasses which, in retrospect, I should have stolen to complete my costume. I challenged Near to a dance-off, which I totally won, even though Misa was like "We're all winners here!". I had gotten a new fancy official Death Note to replace the one I had made myself, but it kept trying to fall out of it's temporary Ryuk-ish Death Note holder, so I shoved it down the back of my shorts. We figured it was okay if it suffered a little, since by the time Mello gets the Death Note, it's been burried in the woods, shot in a rocket, and down Light's pants. Kumoricon had a lame 12:00am curfew that night, which pretty much ended the dance event though it was supposed to go until 2:00am. But I most likely would have left around then anyway to head over to the crossplay panel. Sadly, almost everyone there knew Audrey and kicked her out since it was after curfew, even though she had an Industry badge rather than a Minor badge. I escorted her back to our room before going to the panel, which caused me to miss Roy being presented with a penis-shaped donut. But I still got to eat part of one of the balls. It was a pretty good donut, too. The other girls at the panel cursed me and my tiny boobs that don't take much effort to hide.
Michi and I returned to out room at 2:00am, and by the time I was out of the shower everyone else had gone to bed. As anticipated, I was starving, so I retrieved my leftover pasta, just to realize that we didn't have any sort of eating utensils. I didn't want to wake anyone with lights, so I sat on the floor next to the bathroom and decided that pasta is totally a finger-food.
Sunday [Day Two]
Costumes: Sailor Star Healer, Mello
My Sailor Star Healer costume made it's third convention appearance in the morning, but I decided that Slutty!Mello needed to make an appearance during the day so I changed around 1:00pm. We ate breakfast in the hotel's restaurant, and decided that if we were to eat there again then we'd have to request a table in the corner since we were right next to the hall to the Creation Station and people kept coming over to talk to us while we were still half-asleep and eating.
The Mello and Matt dolls came down to help us man the booth once again. I continued my mission to high-five every D.Gray-man character and most of the Death Note characters I saw. Audrey and I agreed that high-fiving is the new glomping [unless it's a Wammy Boi, which deserves both]. I continued to see a Mello cosplayer with yello-green hilighter colored hair who made my brain hurt. Someone suggested that I get Matt doll a car, so I think I'll dig out my old Barbie convertibles for him. An Allen Walker rubbed a half-eaten apple on Sailor Star Healer's shoulder during a glomp/high-five session. I bought a Strawberry Pocky tray which we ended up placing the booth's Jolly Ranchers on, then organizing in the most OCD way possible. I labeled our candy display the L Trap.
When we went back to our room, we saw that our neighbors had put a sign on their door declaring it their group's official headquarters. Not to be outdone, we created a bigger, prettier sign declaring out room the Sakuracon Official Headquarters, which included a label warning innocent bystanders that our room may include seizure-inducingly cute chibis, skimpy Death Note character costume variants, excesses of bling, grumpy OZ officers, vinyl, and Obaasan the cosplay Nazi mom. [There may have been other warning's I've forgotten, and I could have put more but I ran out of room.]
We had dinner at the food court again. I got Subway, partially because it's slightly more convenient than pasta for eating with one's hands at 2:00am. I ran over to Claire's right before it closed to buy glitter spray for making people fabulous/terrorizing people since I had forgotten to pack mine. I had been planning to go to the Masquerade as Formal!Yaten Kou, but I was having too much fun cosplaying Mello [honestly, I probably would have been happy cosplaying him the whole weekend], so I just stayed in that costume. I just wish I had anticipated that I would wear Mello to the Masquerade so I could have bought a Phantom of the Opera mask.
Misa and Mello had time to kill before the Masquerade, so we hunted down Darkain [AKA Mr. Vincent Millenium Valentine] for photos in the park. We just happened to find him right as it was getting dark, and he was suddenly in high demand since he's known for awesome night photography. After getting some photos, we returned to our room to retrieve some super glue for his broken equipment and prepare for the dance. Mira, Eileen and Yuki decided to go to Voodoo Donuts [the source of the penis donut]. After going back to the park to deliver the glue to Darkain, we ran into Kumi-chan and co., who gave me the amazing revelation that the proper name of my costume was Hard Gay!Mello. Next time I wear it, I'll need a hat and sunglasses.
We got in the ridiculous line to wait for the Masquerade, since it's not like we had much else to do. While hanging out there, we met some awesome Gunblood cosplayers who convinced us that Gunblood is our new favorite anime. Ryoko is my favorite character, since she looks like Matt on a bad day [possibly associated with drunk!Light].
Some of the Masquerade music was pretty lame. The swing music was cool, but some of the slow songs sounded more like background music from The Lord of the Rings than a waltz. Misa and I took a break from dancing to run upstairs for donuts. We got there to discover that some immature asshole had ripped down our sign. Mira, Yuki and Roy informed us that they had been sitting in the room watching Kung-Fu Panda when they heard a ripping sound followed by laughing and running, and Roy jumped up to try and catch them but they were gone by the time he got to the hall. I made a new sign without the full warning label, but with the addition of the message "We <3 Gunblood". Next con, we're going to print out a bunch of copies of the sign ahead of time so we can easily replace stolen ones, and include messages on the back for the idiots who steal them.
The Masquerade transitioned to the not-rave without a break, and they also decided to extend to curfew until 2:00am, which I liked. The water coolers stayed filled, but they ran out of cups, which was really annoying. We were planning to go across the hotel to see if the other water coolers had cups, but noticed the abandoned coffee cart first and decided to just steal a stack of cups from there, since Petty Theft Which May Or May Not Benefit Others is the second step in the Being Devious Without Killing People 5-Step Program that Mello and Misa were forced into. [Going To See A Family-Friendly Musical is Step Three.] We sat around and loudly complained about how we had been forced into the aforementioned program by people like Near.
I lost at Rock-Paper-Scissors over who got the first shower, and we watched Talk To Me while eating leftover Subway sandwiches until we all got too tired to watch the rest of the movie.
Monday [Day Three]
Costumes: Yukito Tsukishiro, Casual!Mello
I started out the day as Yukito and packed up the cosplay explosion that was our hotel room for noon checkout. Yuki and Mira were in the room with me as I was finishing up packing, and I went down the hall to get ice for my Cherry Pepsi to go with half of a bacon and maple donut. As I returned to the room, I knocked on the door, then pulled down the sign since we were about to check out and I didn't want to leave it there for the maid to remove. Yuki heard the sign being ripped off and thought it was someone stealing it again, so she ran to the door and threw it open dramatically to catch the thief just to see that it was me this time.
Due to the tempermental elevators and tons of congoers checking out at the same time, getting downstairs was pretty difficult. During the busiest times, it was best to get downstairs by getting on an elevator that was going up, riding it to the top and then going back down, otherwise all the elevators going down would be full. I got on one that was going up, which became full at the next floor up. We got up to the top floor, where the con staff emmebr working in the elevator informed the people there that it was full. Most people had been pretty understanding when that happened, but a disgruntled old woman came and stood in the doorway of the elevator to stop the doors from closing so we were stuck on the 15th floor until she would move. She was yelling at us about how she had been waiting there for a long time and we had to get off at the top floor if the elevator was going up and she wasn't going to move until we all got off and she got to go down on the elevator. I half expected her to go even more psycho and lash out at the staff member. After like five minutes she finally gave up and took a different elevator down.
Once I finally arrived at the Sakuracon booth, I helped Audrey and Eileen make our table fabulous with drawings. I added the Gunblood logo to Audrey's wonderful fanart of them, and also drew Hard Gay!Mello, the Flying Tofu, and improved our L Trap. I did some last minute purchasing of a Death Note t-shirt for myself and a Misa necklace for my sister [since she loves Misa and is going to cosplay her eventually].
We left the con at 2:00pm because Mira wanted to get out of there early, that's when the dealer's room closed, and there wasn't much else to do. We stopped at a Burger King to get Eileen lunch and use the restroom, and I decided to change out of my Yukito shirt/jacket/tie and into my new Death Note shirt since it was more casual and comfortable. I immediately realized that this made me look like Emo!Yukito, since I was wearing black almost-skinny pants and black Converse, and still had on the press-on nails from my Mello costume [which were much less annoying when I used the glue rather than the stupid sticker-tab things to apply them]. The thought of Yukito being emo disturbed Touya-Michi and myself, so I switched to my Mello wig when we got to Baja Fresh to get lunch for myself and Audrey, and deemed myself Casual!Mello. [Stoner!Mello was also used at one point.] I could still pass as a guy half the time when I took the bindings off my chest. And I'll just say that I had Shinigami eyes since I didn't change from my orange/gold contacts to my blue ones.
On the way back, we went on an epic quest for Mexican Coke, since the others in the van are Mexican Coke pushers and decided to drag me into it. We got off the freeway like three or four different times looking for the gas station that they knew sold it.
[I'm referring to Coca-Coal, not Cocaine.]
Although I could have just had someone else take photos of my new Mello variant, I decided that the only way I could do that particular costume justice is with MySpace-style bathroom camwhoring.
I've most likely forgotten something and will add more about the con later, along with photos by other people. Here are the few that I took.
The view from our room's balcony:
The Sakuracon booth:
The Mexican Coke pushers:
Casual/Emo/Stoner!Mello:
