TL;DR CON REPORTS, VOLUME VII
So....ahoy.
After returning to campus around 3:30 yesterday, taking a shower, catching up on LJ, eating some real food, going to a three-and-a-half hour sorority meeting, catching up on everything else, and GETTING SOME MOTHERFUCKING SLEEP, I'm here to bring you the convention report for Nekocon 2009. For once we don't quite have a clever nickname! The following is the best we could do.
Thursday I packed and stressed like a madwoman! Avery was supposed to get here then but...she couldn't. She was still doing a lot of costume stuff. WHICH WAS SAD. Because like, when are we ever going to get to just go to a convention where we've knocked out all the costume stuff in advance and aren't freaking in the hotel room? (I guess we mostly managed this at AMA but we were taking all old costumes to that....) So I just ran around trying to make sure I had done everything possible to make Avery have less to do. :/ Plans were for purpleyedemon and I to leave Friday morning at like 9:00 to get Kyrie in the line to pick up her registration, and then go meet up with Michelle and Avery to get into the hotel. I had a hard time sleeping. (This pattern would continue.)
Friday - Us And Our Bros Are Making Our Own Fucking Fun
Kyrie and I got stuck in some hellacious traffic behind some pretty shitty vehicles (a big awkward truck, a creeper black minivan whose license plate said "SKIDROE," etc.) but meanwhile I was texting Michelle and timing-wise, it actually kind of worked perfectly. By the time we got there at like 10 Michelle was ready to come find us, and we unloaded our stuff into a room that wasn't ours because we couldn't check in until noon. I LOVE STAYING IN THE EMBASSY SUITES. ugh if it weren't so expensive I would have done it for every Nekocon ever. There's fridge space and room space and showers that don't suck and continental breakfast! Once we were mostly good to go up there Kyrie and I went back down to the convention center for her to get her badge. We spent a few minutes waiting in the wrong line because there didn't really look like there WAS another line...because there wasn't really? idk. But soon a staffer pulled her out of the at-the-door line along with a bunch of other confused people and she went up to get her pre-reg. There was a little bit MORE confusion while she had to work through their group situation. I just kind of hovered at her shoulder.
Meanwhile, two other hilarious things were happening:
1 - This guy dressed as Michael Jackson, who we think was the same guy I'm talking about in strikethrough about two-thirds the way down my AMA report, started having a dance-off with this really hilarious Luigi cosplayer we'd been staring at for a while. The embarrassing part was that Luigi was winning. fffffff. They had a big circle of people around them and everything. I had to run over and take a picture (from my angle they were horrendously backlit by the giant front windows of the HRCC and you couldn't see them at all).
2 - the group on the pre-reg pick-up computer next to us, talking to a girl dressed as Maho from BECK, looked oddly familiar. Or, well, they didn't even look familiar so much as I just got this feeling. This tall lanky dark-haired kid was speaking for the whole group, and then, when they asked for names, he distinctly said Bobby Birmingham. I started grinning, and laughing, and talking just a little bit louder to Kyrie as she worked all her stuff out... I mean, I was practically shoulder-to-shoulder with him in this pre-reg clusterfuck, and I was losing my shit. I made a couple of off-handed comments back when he said stuff but it wasn't until he said something about "Team JYB" (which he wrote on his badge!) that I was like "Fuck yes you are!" and he turned and looked at me.
BB: "...HOLY SHIT!"
Me (trolling him): "HOLY SHIT! :D"
So we loitered there laughing at the MJ/Luigi dance-off for a while until I got a call from Avery telling me that she was coming over! She appeared a few moments later and we rofl'd a bit at Team JYB before ninjaing off to go talk to Con Ops and get our comp'd registration 'cause we were doing two panels and they said they would do that.
Well, we got up there and...our names were not on any list of people doing things. Um. Okay Nekocon. We pointed out to them quite clearly that both our panels were on the master programming schedule, one of them was in the programming booklet (because we'd submitted the other one too late), and that we'd been told by Membership that Con Ops would waive our fee for doing two panels. It took a bit of coaxing, and I think the chick working there didn't really want to, but the guy working there finally gave us our free badges. We got to pick red, blue or purple lanyards and so naturally I picked red!! since I already had a green one from last year, and my whole outfit was Slytherdor-themed and kind of slutty-moe, and I could wear them both together (once Avery managed to get my fucking stubborn badge to go into the plastic sleeve D:). I actually wrote my name on mine, thinking I should do that as a panelist, but Avery just wrote "EFF." ♥
So we got in contact with Michelle and then went and carted all of Avery's stuff up into the hotel room. We still had some work to do on our Saturday costumes, but we were going to wait and do that once we switched to OUR room as opposed to Michelle's station manager's room, so what Avery did instead was put on her Friday costume (since I was providing her with the shirt for it, haha) and be girl!Scout. (It occurred to her way after the fact that it would be funnier if she'd had a box of Girl Scout cookies. I laughed at that. ffff) We mostly loitered in the hotel room eating things and laughing at things and trying to get ahold of Michie to make sure she wasn't going to flake on us learning our skit choreography and planning out our schedule and stuff until it was close enough to noon that Michelle could go check us in. Kyrie decided at some point that she was going to go back to campus for lunch with Morgan to try and calm her down from something, and that she probably wasn't going to stay at the hotel that night either because of some Cait and Ashley stuff...I really don't know what was going on with basically anyone but me and my skit crew (and not even Michie) at this point. But she left, Avery and I tried to get our Voice Actor Bingo stuff together, and then I went down with Michelle to get her luggage from her car (we had to get a cart, and we were just going to use it to take everything from the room we'd been in on the 9th floor to our new official room on the 6th floor).
Loitering in the lobby looking for a luggage cart I ran into Angelique from AMA! ♥ She and Aleece were creeping around trying to find the people they'd arranged to share a room with, who hadn't rendezvoused with them on time and whose number they couldn't get at unless Aleece could find a place to get WiFi on her DS. I stopped and chatted with Angelique for a bit before we ran out to get Michelle's stuff, and by the time I came back Aleece was there too - I realized I'd seen her earlier, but hadn't recognized her under the giant 'fro of her Lambo costume! We were all really excited to see each other, and I pimped our panels out to them and they seemed pretty stoked (Aleece was even going to skip karaoke to come to Awesomely Bad, which I thought was pretty awesome of her). I also offered to let them come hang out in our hotel room if they couldn't find the other person for theirs, but they stayed in the lobby for a bit.
We went up to the ninth floor, got all our fucking shit (and like, with all of Michelle's HUGE costumes she had a LOT of shit) and then popped back to the sixth floor and into our REAL~ room. It was basically like the other room in reverse. Eventually Angelique and Aleece decided they were going to leave their stuff in our room, since they were having such a hard time finding their other roommates, and then we all headed back to the convention - since we didn't really have enough time before our first panel to do anything at this point (Voice Actor Bingo was at 1:30!) we mostly just got our shit together for that and left to go over to the con. We wandered around a little, looking for familiar faces both cool and lame (and saw at least one or two of them) and trying to make sure that we knew where everything was that we needed to get at. It was around this time that we started realizing there weren't a whole lot of really good cosplayers here! I did find a cute Aisha and take her photo, and Avery trolled some other faggoty (RED) Scout, but no one was really jumping out at us. It was okay though, because we were going to bring it on Saturday!
Yeah, okay: Michie, Avery and I were going to be the Zuka Club girls from Ouran. (Think about it in terms of height and you can probably pinpoint which of us was which - and Michelle was our Haruhi to molest.) Kyrie had figured it out at this point, so there was basically no one we were still hiding it from. The only thing that was secret any more was the contents of our skit. And THAT was just...bzonkers.
But anyway, our panel!! We got there and people were ALREADY WAITING FOR IT. Which kind of rocked! We had technically difficulties for, like, ever, and pretty much the only folks there were Team JYB (now with more Chie!) and a couple other people who'd been there at AMA and then some new folks in the back - none of whom came up as contestants but at least three of whom seemed to really know their shit. We used a lot of the same questions as last time because we had to throw it together last-minute, but a good number of new ones too, and mostly this panel wasn't Voice Actor Bingo, it was SHUT UP, BOBBY! Every member of Team JYB came up as a contestant at least once, making up five of our six individual contestants and three of our four team contestants. RIDICULOUS. The other guy was this older, chubbier guy who knew the answers to basically everything. This panel was even more fucking hilarious the second time around! I was just sad that Cait couldn't be there to school everyone because of whatever complications were happening back on campus (and, as a result of that, Kyrie and Ashley weren't at the panel either). And even the round I had explicitly said "Oh, use these questions if Bobby comes up"? HE FAILED. Way to be, talking shit on Twitter and not backing it up, Nurse Birmingham. But seriously, this panel was great. It cemented the realization that I really want to be friends with Team JYB and not just perpetually troll the crap out of them. Well, okay, I do that to my real friends too, but still. We just kind of...ignored most of the other people at the panel in favor of harassing them and laughing at them harassing each other, and it was pretty great. :D
After that was over I needed to drop my laptop back off in the hotel room, and I think it was at this point that Avery also just gave up on being Scout because she really wanted to be in her awesome Slytherdor outfit that went with my awesome Slytherdor outfit.
We'd also spotted a Greg-hosted panel we wanted to go to that was supposedly at 3:30, about how to identify bootleg merchandise (and like, I cared about the subject but I mostly just wanted to see GREG!! and it was his first panel of the day~). In the meantime, Kyrie and friends were back at the convention, and we really wanted to go to the dealers' room and artists' alley, so we decided to fill in our gap with that! Our missions were cute cell phone straps and maybe some snacks.
AND I FUCKING FOUND THE BANANA POCKY. DO YOU GUYS REMEMBER MY LOVE FOR THE FUCKING BANANA POCKY? I have legit not seen this at a convention since 2005, despite my desperate looking for it - it's a seasonal thing, I'm sure. I saw those fuckers and I bought two fucking boxes - one to share and one to keep entirely for myself (that I haven't even opened yet as I type this - I might save it for Me & My Dick on Friday...). We also saw a LOT of cute phone charms, though most of them seemed a little overpriced. And I found this really cute Kyouya patch at a booth way in the back that I really wanted Kyrie to come get! We tried to get in contact with her because she'd told us she was in the dealers' room when we'd come back down from the hotel, but apparently by this point she'd made it to the artists' alley. We told her we were heading to a Greg panel and she rounded up Cait and Ashley - and Tanisha! - and we all went together. (It actually ended up being at like 4:00 though. Thanks, retarded Nekocon rescheduling! BASICALLY THANKS, EVENTS. >:[ )
Greg was really cute as usual and talked about really important things as usual! He's just a really smart guy and it's cool to hear him talk about stuff that's important to him. We were all really excited to see him, too, especially after we'd been so concerned that he might not even be there at all (thanks, Nekocon website). His hair was purple! It was also kind of loonnng, idk how I felt about this. I think he looks a lot cuter with shorter hair. Also, I was kind of bummed that it wasn't green...I'd been secretly hoping it would be so that we could match. But when I raised my hand for a question/comment (I actually forget what it was that I said) he complimented my hair color! (And Avery's...but hers was fake, lolwigs.) He ALSO~ let drop a comment at this point that he WAS going to be at Guests Uncensored on Saturday night, meaning there WAS a Guest Uncensored on Saturday night even though it wasn't on the schedule!! And he talked about DJing at the rave that night which got me FUCKING STOKED.
During this panel, though, I saw that he had a pineapple phone charm!! It was actually a pineapple Peek-A-Pooh, because he always has Peek-A-Pooh charms, but it basically sold me on getting the moemoe pineapple one I had already seen in the dealers' room, so I went and bought that once his panel was over. Overpriced but worth it! I love it so much~~ Then we went to the artists' alley, which we hadn't made it to before we had to dip out and get to Greg's panel on time, and I gotta say, this year? The AA brought it way more than the dealers' room did. I think it's just because I don't care about stuff that's popular any more. Avery said it best when she said something like "I keep forgetting that all the stuff I like is obscure." But in the AA, amid all the people whose buttons we've looked at like six times at every convention ever and our bro Ricky Bryant that we just can't stop unintentionally trolling, I knew we'd at least find some Potterfags.
AND BOY DID WE EVER, BECAUSE WE FOUND THE CHICK FROM FUCKING CHISTUDIOS. I had seen that picture of Renji before - I think every Bleach slashfag has seen that picture of Renji - but I didn't realize she'd ever drawn Stupid SEXY Harry Potter or that she was going to be making fucking adorable chibi buttons. I wanted like, all of them!! (well okay except for most of the Death Eaters. I just don't care about Lucius or Shnappi, really.) I really had to figure out how much money I was going to have and how many of them I was going to be able to buy. After a while I just couldn't take it any more and we had to leave to peruse the rest of the artists' alley. Everything was so fucking cute!! There was this chick who'd made little knit bunnies in all the rainbow colors - I really wanted to get historygeek90 the brightass purple one but it was a fair bit overpriced for a tiny squishy bunny - and like, this other chick who'd made moemoe jewelry of like pieces of toast and sticks of pocky and MORE LITTLE PINEAPPLES and ugghhh I just wish I could have bought tons of crap. And that chick with the Mr. Saturn she wears on her head and the Camp Whispering Rock t-shirt, ffffff. (No one makes those shirts in the right colors from the game! Are brightass red and brightass yellow really that offensive, lol?) I didn't buy anything at this point but I scouted out some stuff that I seriously wanted to with a vow to return the next day.
We left the artists' alley to wander some more and ended up running into Aleece and Angelique again! They'd found their roommates and wanted to come up with us and get their stuff, so we headed back to the hotel room, since I had to get my laptop again for Awesomely Bad anyway. On our way out we passed a Kakashi cosplayer that apparently Aleece was going to fight?? IDK THIS WAS HILARIOUS. He jumped up on the little platform underneath the stairs and was darting kind of...away from her but not BECAUSE he was trying to get away from her, he was just going in that direction, and I don't remember if it was Aleece or Angelique who was shouting at him but they were shouting about how he and lambo!Aleece were going to fight. Kyrie, Avery and I were weak (I think I was the weakest, I was just kind of dead for some reason) and the Kakashi was just really confused.... Then we left the convention center and were headed through the breezeway back to the hotel and Angelique just kept talking about her penis. It's apparently quite large. Larger than Aleece's prop Lambo bazooka (that we had to E6000 back together fff). I think the reason I didn't actually freeze to death between the con center and the hotel is that I was just laughing too hard.
Of course, we got back into the hotel, and I immediately stopped laughing because I was kind of angry because there were other Lobelia cosplayers and they even took our idea of having the fucking flowers. It was like that other Sasha and Milla all over again and I was just kind of...sad. Because their Benio was amazing (although they didn't have a Hinako at this point) and we still didn't know what was going on with ours and I kind of just wanted to kidnap her. Seriously, all the way up to our room I was just like "Ugh that Benio." BRB RAGING.
We spent a good bit of time fucking around with Aleece and Angelique up in the room before they left, though - it was great to see them again, they're fucking hilarious. I decided that they were kind of like if Avery and I fused with Alex and Tanisha (I guess Alex-me is Aleece and Avery-Tanisha is Angelique, idk). We tried to plan out more of our day to build in costume-finishing time, and we realized the best opportunity we'd have for that was between our Awesomely Bad panel from 7-8 and Richard Epcar's panel which started at 10. Bitchin'. (Unfortunately the Greg Ayres autograph sessions for Friday night almost completely overlapped with Awesomely Bad - almost! We were going to have a half-hour afterward in which we could BOOK IT and try to flag him down, eeee.) But we were also really stressing about where Michie was, since I had texted her a lot earlier in the day and never gotten an answer. I hadn't had time to teach her (or Michelle, really, but Michelle's part was way easier) the choreography for the skit, and it was making me kind of have a freakout, and IDK which one of us said it first but either me or Avery was just like, "We should just go steal that other Benio and make her do it." AND AT FIRST IT WAS KIND OF A JOKE SUGGESTION BUT WE ACTUALLY ENDED UP GOING BACK DOWN TO THE LOBBY AND ASKING HER??? Avery and I went and Kyrie came for moral support (though I was like, "Is it a good idea to just leave Angelique and Aleece alone in OUR hotel room??? lol..."). It must have been Avery's idea originally because I was like, "you have to talk to her it's your idea" and she was like "idk what to say" and I was like "just be like 'our Benio might flake and we're worried and you're awesome so would you maybe it's not that hard just as backup'" and she was like "WELL YOU DO IT THEN YOU'RE THE EXTRAVERT!" so...I did. TAKING MATTERS INTO MY OWN HANDS-CON.
I said something along the lines of, "This is going to be a really weird question," and she said "Trust me, nothing you can ask will be weird to me," so I could already tell that she was pretty fucking cool. I asked if she might do us a favor and be in our skit for the masquerade, and she told us that she'd totally have done it if she weren't already entering the masquerade as Gunner Yuna. We explained about our problem and she told us she supported us, and pulled some EPIC IN-CHARACTER BENIO AWESOME on us, it was fantabulous. Their Maihara was great, too! She had an amazing jew-nose. We struck up a whole conversation with them about us being in the masquerade last year, and she told us that she LOVED the Ness Dance because she'd been kind of drunk and it was just amazing if you were kind of drunk, and I rofl'd a little. Basically all my rage at our costumes being stolen vanished because they were just fucking awesome. They even offered to possibly bequeath their flowers to us! (But sadly that never happened. BUT STILL~! ♥) Appropriately, I am now kind of gay for them.
We hung out with Aleece and Angelique some more, ate some food some more, and then headed back over for PANNEL DOS! This one had even MORE technical difficulties than the first one, but once we got them worked out it went REALLY well. Avery sat at the front with the microphone and trolled everyone and I hovered at the cart to play the videos and occasionally dance. Awesome people who attended this panel included: Cait, Ashley, Kyrie and Tanisha (though Cait and Ashley left early for Greg autographs); a really cool girl in the front who was totally AVPM-fagging with us (when our audio wasn't working and Avery was like "maybe we'll just sing for you" she was like "SING GRANGER DANGER!! lol"); most (or maybe all? I don't remember I couldn't see anyone) of Team JYB; Aleece and Angelique, natch; and, you know, enough people to fill our room and then some standing in the back, which was great. I TOLD Events that we'd need a big room because this panel always filled up quickly! but apparently that didn't pan out. Thanks, Events. AT LEAST WE HAD OUR A/V EQUIPMENT, UNLIKE AMA ffffffff. We played the usual favorites as well as 3x the DJ Ozma in honor of A&A and a couple more horrifying Avery finds. She told me she was spending most of the time looking at people's facial expressions and judging audience reaction, and that during at least one video everyone just looked fucking traumatized. For the most part Bobby people seemed to enjoy things, though. :3 Staff even had to come in and tell us our audio was too loud, which I thought was pretty hilarious. I guess the worst part about this panel was the guy that made up the Spider-Dong song during the Spiderman video.
Srsly, some guy sitting behind me and to the left was just like, "Spider-Dong, Spider-Dong!" to the tune of the old Spider-Man theme, and like...that was okay. That was almost kind of funny. But there was this one guy like one row behind me and across the aisle that had been fucking annoying the entire panel, and he took it upon himself to continue the lyrics with "It is wide and really long. Shoots a web on your face, gets it all over the place!" KIND OF APPALLING. When I told Avery about it later she was drinking water and almost did a spit-take. XD
I packed up my laptop as quickly as I could once it was over (while being assured by multiple departing people that "we weren't kidding when we said Awesomely Bad!" - well, yeah, duh, that was kind of the point) and then we FLED! to the Bazaar room where the artists' alley and lots of the autograph sessions were to get ahold of Greg. We still had about 20 minutes before it was supposedly over by the time we got there, but the whole place was empty and according to the staffer guy that was there the line was closed! LAME. Fortunately! I just had to be like "But we were hosting a panel, and it just ended, pleeaasssee???" and flash my associate's badge and they let us in. And then we were the only people there and we got to have a good long chat with him! We talked about my hair and Avery's wig and his hair and how Manic Panic doesn't work for him (after that conversation, and looking at his hair now that it's long and seeing what it looks like when he straightens it, I've come to the conclusion that we probably have really similar hair), and we talked about Ghost Stories (because that's what Avery was having him sign) and how we want to cosplay from it and how I'm going to be Leo ♥, and about my mom (because she and Greg are bros) and about the DANCE WHICH WE WERE TOTALLY GOING TO, it was really awesome~~ I love him to DEATH, he is basically the coolest guy ever. He signed my scrapbook and took up practically a whole page (which I totally planned in advance for, fortunately, by skipping a whole page in between that and my previous pages, ffff). Ugh, so fucking awesome, Greg Ayres. ♥ ♥ ♥
WELL, so then we went back to the hotel room and frantically worked on costumes! I was making fuku bows and actually not doing too badly at it, and idk what Avery was doing on the ironing board in the other room, probably attaching the cuffs to our sleeves at this point? HOORAY FOR HEAT'N'BOND AND E6000. We gave up on entering the craftsmanship part of the masquerade. It was basically costumescostumescostumes until the Epcar panel, but also suiting up for the FUCKWIN GREGRAVE. Michelle bought us moe glowstick hairclips/earrings! Avery's were kind of shitty though. And the glowsticks I got that were supposed to be white were definitely blue. We were kind of late getting out of there to go hit up Epcar because we were trolling around with Michelle and her friend Jerusha (COOLEST NAME EVER AMIRITE?) and then when we got there we didn't even stick around for very long - I mean, we'd already seen most of them, and if we didn't get in line for the rave, AMA was going to happen again and we'd miss all the funnnnnnnn~~~
The line was a'ight. Tanisha cut in with us - we were letting her stay in our room so she could go to the rave because Cait, Kyrie and Ashley had already left to go back to campus - and she was wearing some crazy rave-ringlet falls she'd bought in BRIGHTASS GREEN that we just kept boinging at her out of ADD. We tried to get our glowsticks prepared with the fasteners on them but they were the SHITTIEST FASTENERS EVER and I ended up cracking nearly all of them in the process, so we just put them on. The girls in front of us were some cracked out high school/early college chicks who kept doing the Time Warp and yelling at each other, and the guy behind us was disturbingly androgynous unless he spoke (like, he could be a masculine flat-chested chick or else a kind of weenie guy). Also, Tanisha gave me cookies! :3
The rave was supposed to start at 11 but as usual the line didn't even really move until 11:15 or so and we ended up only dancing for about an hour and a half. BUT IT WAS A GLORIOUS HOUR AND A HALF. Tanisha, Avery and I stayed at the front almost the entire time so that we didn't miss any of the GREG ACTION and we were frequently in the path of a spotlight - at times Tanisha was backlit Jesus-style and her falls were RIDICULOUS. The music was GREAT AS USUAL BECAUSE GREG IS FUCKING AWESOME. He managed to work in just the tiniest bit of Sandstorm as between-song space-filler, it was a great way to appease people! It was always JUST enough that you could kind of tell that it was Sandstorm, but never enough for the crowd to think that he was actually going to play it and start screaming out of glee/raeg. He played DotA by Basshunter and I mouthed-sang along to the whole thing and JUMPED LIKE A ROCKER, and he played Dragostea Din Tei and I was totally one of the first people to realize that he was about to play that, and he played this SICK mix of Smooth Criminal by MJ and that is totally my favorite MJ song, and he played some stuff that was really fun to dance to that I didn't recognize but that Avery totally did, and a mix of some Kanye raeg, and a Lady Gaga song because he fucking loves Lady Gaga like any self-respecting homo musicfag, AND HE ALSO PLAYED THIS AMAZING MASHUP OF HARDER, BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER/GIMME MORE BY BRITNEY. He was like "This goes out to all the haters. A friend of mine told me that if you wake up with three haters and you don't go to bed with four, you're doing something wrong. So, for that girl that was talking shit about me on the Nekocon forums last year, this is for you. Since apparently you hate Daft Punk." And he was giving everyone the finger and pretending to lick his own nipples and just being FILTHY, FUCKWIN GREG. I FUCKING LOVE HIM. favorite gay man ever.
Avery crapped out around 1, and because I am a brosuke I left with her (my arms were kind of dying anyway - I swear if I could go to a rave every weekend my arms would be amazing), and so then back in the hotel room with Michelle and Tanisha we showered and kept working on our costumes. I made as much progress on the bows as I could before I felt like I was going to die, and then we just went the fuck to bed. GREAT FRIDAY OR GREATEST FRIDAY? This totally cancels out how awful Friday was at Katsucon and then some, ugh. ♥ It was like, it doesn't matter that there isn't a whole lot of programming I want to go to, or that nothing in the dealers' room is really impressing me, or that none of the costumes are really impressing me, I AM MAKING THIS CON BE FUN AND IT HAS NO CHOICE, THE BITCH. Our panels and our dancing and our faggotry. And Greg's faggotry, and Team JYB's faggotry, and A&A's faggotry. It was just fucking fun. :D
What was not going to be fun was going to bed at 2 with plans to get up at 7, meaning I fell asleep around 2:30 and woke up around 6:30. FOUR HOURS OF SLEEP AND I'M SUPPOSED TO BE A LOBELIA GIRL IN THE MORNING WHOOOOOO
Saturday - Screw The Rules, We've Got A Fanclub
So yeah, that up at 6:30 thing. I rolled over a little in my half-sleep and apparently I rolled over JUST ENOUGH to get a sharp stabbing shooting pain up my right calf. I thought I was going to fucking die. I'd also gone to bed with my hair wet and was amazed that it wasn't quite as miserable to look at as I'd expected (still miserable to touch, though, gross. Michelle was kind of horrified that my hair still wasn't dry upon waking). Michelle and I went down with our only two breakfast tickets to pick up food for everyone, grabbing a little bit of everything, and then we frantically made costumes while awaiting Michie's arrival - she'd informed me, finally, the night before, that her plan was to arrive around 8:30 so she could pick up her badge and get in costume before the mandatory 9:30 cosplay rehearsal. While I sewed Avery into her skirt (we SO did not have the time or patience to put fasteners in!) and she E6000'd things and cut/styled Michie's wig and Michelle squirmed into her compression shirt (she is...too busty to be Haruhi naturally lol) we looped our skit audio ENDLESSLY. I felt really bad for Tanisha because we were basically driving her insane with it, but it was just too fucking funny for us to NOT de-sensitize ourselves to it (and we had to make sure everyone knew which lines were theirs - Michie and I both knew all the freaking words and it was easy for me to accidentally start singing Avery's parts too). Because oh yeah, Michie showed up! and I sewed her into her skirt too, and Avery stitched me into mine, and we kept working on the tops and I kept doing it wrong and Avery was mad at me .___. because she was already frustrated that her wig wasn't doing what it needed to do and the hotel hair dryer was really shitty ("I could blow harder than this!" "That's what she said!") so that wasn't making it better. Eventually we just had to send Michie down in her skirt/socks/shoes to get her badge, and we kept working right up until fucking 9:27 to try and get things together but it wasn't ready and we, too, had to go just costumed from the waist down. Only Michelle was 100% Haruhi.
Frantically, we were waiting and waiting for an elevator - because as much as we had to wait, trying to go down the stairs from the sixth floor in shoes that were a) a whole size too big on both of us, stuffed with tissue paper at the toes and b) HEELS would have been even worse. Fortunately! a staffer guy who was also waiting for an elevator told us that Tex had JUST gone down to get his coffee and that we'd probably be okay running as late as we were. While we were waiting we heard a sad, sad sound of a lot of change falling down the elevator shaft - eventually it stopped on our floor and two or three really sad people, one of whom was holding a busted-upon cashbox, were taking up most of the space...we didn't bother trying to get into that one, and we took the next one that came by - we gave up and just went up to go down. Then we darted over to the convention center and up to main events as quickly as we could and...waited. Practiced our choreography a bunch! Eventually they lined us all up and Tex explained the rules, which we kind of knew already.... And a group in the front was like, "We're not in our masq costumes, we're in other ones, we're not ready yet" and he was like "You retards, I guess that's okay but this was supposed to be a dress rehearsal," and I was like "...oh shit I guess I have to UM, HI, WE'RE ONLY IN COSTUME FROM THE WAIST DOWN?? I'M SORRY BUT WE'RE NOT READY YET!!" and Tex was like...kind of pissed lol but it all worked out. So they started calling us by number and we...weren't number 2 again!! awesome!! So we spent more time rehearsing and I actually started to feel confident about the choreography! We were lucky #13. :D Ahead of us was a moe high-school-age The World Ends With You group. It took us, like, two seconds to get our badges (they were Vash-nekos this year as opposed to the Sailor Moon ones from last year lol), sign our papers and crap, give our audio to the tech guys, and go assure the 1-Up Pimp (insert eyeroll here) that my last name is pronounced with a long U and that our intro was, in fact, "From the people who brought you 2008's Ness Dance, Box of Scraps Cosplay presents: I Sakura Kissed a girl...and I liked it."
Take from that what you will, fools. 8[
Rehearsal went pretty well except Avery forgetting to do like, one thing, which kind of threw the rest of us off. Plans after that were to hit another Greg panel - "From Host Club to Hospital," talking about his Ohayocon heart attack, poor thing :( - and then go finish our costumes between 1 when that was over and 4:30 when we had to be back at the masquerade. THIS WAS A GREAT PANEL AS ALL GREG PANELS ARE. He talked about Ouran, and Ghost Stories, and Saiyuki and...Pretear 'cause this girl off to the side was fagging about Pretear idk, and he talked about his brother's cute pen pal relationship with Nabeshin and the hilarity that ensued when Nabeshin tried to email him in English without his interpreter (I...don't feel like "I love you, but I will not allow you to make love to my backside" needs any further explanation), and he talked about what really happened to him at Ohayocon and how awesome Chris was sticking by him and the horrendous rumors that went around (apparently before HE even knew what was going on, the internet was saying he had died and I just dk). AND OH BY THE WAY, HE WAS DRESSED AS MAX FROM WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. It was the freaking. cutest. thing. that I have ever seen. Greg was so damn CUTE this weekend! ugh! I think it had to do with Jerry Jewell and Troy Baker not being there to turn up his filthy. XD He talked a bit about how he'd always idolized Max because he too had been sent to bed without supper a lot, and him and Chris growing up, and oh god so moe. But it was running seriously over, and we just couldn't stick around any more, so we went baaack to the hotel room AGAIN to finish FUCKING EVERYTHING. I...kind of hate my Maihara wig! I couldn't bend my head more than like 30 degrees forward without the bangs raping my face, and like every wig ever (SINCE I AM ALWAYS THE LONG-HAIRED CHARACTER WITH NO BANGS can't wait to be fucking Ivysaur) the wig's hairline in the front crept perpetually away from my hairline in the front, buuuttt MICHIE LOOKED FUCKING AWESOME. SRSLY, AVERY HAS PHOTOS OF THIS. Her wig was close enough to her regular hair color that Cait actually asked her if she had legit cut it! AND I KNOW SHE HATES THAT EVERYONE KEEPS SAYING THIS BUT I THINK SHE SHOULD. You can't blame me, saturnsmelody17, I continually advocate short hair for everyone. :B
By the time we finally finished up with that - and trolling each other a lot in the hotel room, Kyrie included, and eating some more food (lol was this when we ordered the pizza? idek but those were the garlickiest breadsticks fucking EVER) - there wasn't much time left between then and the masq itself... I did go back to the artists' alley and buy TEN BUTTONS FROM THAT HP CHICK (Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, the twins, Draco, Remus, Sirius, Neville, and FABULOUS DUMBLEDORE~), and Avery got a cute dolphin phone charm, and Michie got a couple of the buttons, and Kyrie got a couple of them...but mostly we just took some faggy photos all over the stairs in front of the fountain (the light there was kind of sparkly and magical~) and then found Michelle and hopped in the line for DOING IT FORREALZ. OH HOLY BALLS. We practiced a bunch more in line, and people kept SINGING at us. It was like when you cosplay Hard Gay. Everywhere we went there was a person or two calling "LobeliAAHHH~~!" We spotted our Yuna-Benio and Lenne-Maihara friends from the night before and they were just as excited to see us as we were to see them, and uh, Avery and I really had to pee. Like REALLY. We were making terrible jokes with everyone! I helped the TWEWY folks in front of us solve a necklace dilemma they were having and they made some comment about the world ending and Avery and I were like, "With you~!" XD And then we were discussing our relative relief that we weren't skit #2 again, and Avery was like "But it was okay! We were number two, because we were the shit!" and I was WEAK AND NEARLY FELL ON THE FLOOR. And I was like, "DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH, I'M PISSING." greatest ever.
The 1-Up Pimp was tl;dr everywhere and then it took forever for the entries ahead of us to happen...there were a bunch of walk-ons and yet it still seemed an eternity. The first one we were in a good position to watch was a bunch of Sailor Scouts - Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and...Neptune? - doing a Spice Girls song with a really boring dance, and then the TWEWY kids did a parody along the lines of "I'll Make A Cosplayer Out Of You" and the lyrics weren't that stellar but they were pretty cute, lawl. Then WE WENT ON. 1-Up Pimp (sans pimp cane, he was basically just 1-Up Guy) read our description and OUR FANCLUB IN THE AUDIENCE ROARED IN EXCITEMENT. IT WAS KIND OF MARVELOUS. My wig was eating my face though and for the duration of the skit itself no one...really cared. THIS AUDIENCE WAS KIND OF LAME EXCEPT FOR OUR FANCLUB?? it was so weird to me, because usually the masq audience is pretty amazing. It was about here that I started to realize that Nekocon '0Nein was basically AMA and Nekocon '08 having a baby that wasn't quite as cool as Nekocon but wasn't quite as boringlame as AMA. BUT IT WAS OKAY.
THE INSTANT WE WERE DONE AVERY AND I FLED TO THE BATHROOM TO PEE WHICH WAS KIND OF GLORIOUS. None of the skits after ours that we actually got to watch were too tremendously fabulous except for this guy that did a soldier from FFVII and like, HAD EVERY MOVE DOWN PERFECT as though the audience were Cloud kicking his ass and obviously had some stage-combat training because it was pretty flawless and convincing! He won a judge's award. So did we! It was red contacts. I got to keep them because they were 0.00 prescription and everyone else in our skit was blind. The people cheering loudest for us were actually the other Lobelia/FFX chicks, who were sitting right in the front row. They won a craftsmanship award, I forget which, for being basically awesome. (ehhTHE MYOOTANT~ won Best in Show and TWEWY kids won best performance...uhm, really? Whatever, I'm trying not to be bitter about this.) Do judges' awards count toward not being Novice-level any more? 'Cause if so..we're not. hurfdurf.
Once that was over we went to de-Lobelia because our feet were dying. On the way out I trolled some neonorangehair!Hitachiin twins pretty hard... they were taking a photo of this big FFVII group, and I popped up behind them and did basically what Michie's doing here. Most of them missed it...one or two of them broke photo just a little...AND THE BARRET FUCKING DIED. It was hilarious. BUT YEAH THEN NO MORE COSTUMES. This was basically cosplaying-for-two-seconds-con. After that, we ate some more food, and we couldn't really decide if we wanted to go to the rave or not but we DEFINITELY wanted to go attack Information and find out when the Guests Uncensored panel was supposed to be, so we got some street clothes on and did that. BUT THERE WASN'T ANY. GREG LIED TO US T_____T; alas alas. So we um. Kind of just hung out for a while and like. Went to Anime Name That Tune again? GOD THAT GUY HAS A SPICE & WOLF BONER. As usual, I knew basically nothing. Avery knew a fair number more than I did. (She also knew way more of the animu in Animix that they played during the masq intermission...I am such a n00b, wtf.) THERE WAS THIS SONG FROM RECORD OF LODOSS WAR THAT I TOTALLY KNEW THOUGH and I was so pissed when it didn't come to meeee ugh. That Team Aqua girl Karen was there and I was totally rooting for her but she only got second. The people in the room were basically nerdy white kids on the left, Azns on the right in the front and black folks in the back...kind of hilarious.
After that we just went to the video game room! Something we hadn't done. There was NO BRAWL but DDR was happening and I got my ass kicked by songs I didn't know because it wasn't Max 2 or Extreme and also I haven't played in forever and also my belt was not really effective and also the mat was busted-ish. SO I LOST REALLY HARD HAHA. Then we played around on the Korean ParaParaDance machine and Avery got fucking addicted to it, hahaha. Then as we were leaving we ran into drunk Team JYB. HILARITY. Well, mostly it was Bobby being buzzed and Joe being "drunk and sick" (me: "Don't be drunk and sick!" Avery: "yeah, not drunk AND sick, you can be one or the other...") and Chelsie kind of nagging them to calm down and come with her because I guess she was driving idk. BOBBY GAVE US HIS BAT AND AVERY SLEPT WITH IT?? IDK how I feel about this. We ah, went back to the hotel and watched a bunch of AVPM and then just went to bed haha. LOL, SATURDAY. or something.
Sunday - Bitch We Don't Do Shit On Sundays
Our plan was to get up at 10 because the first thing we wanted to do was Epcar/Stern autographs at 11 (and then maybe the Para Para panel at 1 after Avery's newfound addiction, wtfwtf). However, MY ASS WAS AWAKE AT 6:30 AGAIN. And everyone else (and by "everyone else" I mean Michelle and Avery, lawl) by 8 or so. We packed and watched a bit more AVPM and did a whole lot of nothing and ate some breakfast (me and Avery with the meal tickets this time, Michelle wasn't hungry really) and PACKED AND PACKED and I...could not find my shoes for like half an hour and I was like "THE ROOM ATE THEM!" Because Nekocon hotels have eaten THREE of my nerd t-shirts in the past and it wouldn't surprise me if they ate my one good pair of sneakers too. BUT SOMEHOW THEY WERE...IN MY BAG ALREADY WHERE I DID NOT PUT THEM. a poltergeist, I swear. Greg kept talking about haunted hotels scaring the shit out of Chris Patton. We loaded up the car and then crept back over to the con with my laptop (and my $20 more to buy things from ChiStudios girl~~) so that Avery could get directions home. Since I had my laptop, I was like "We should camp out somewhere and listen to AVPM and see if we get a crowd!" because people playing gay shit like Caramelldansen and that damn Lucky Star song do shit like that all the time, but that...didn't really work. We DID see the other Hinako, and then a moment or two later the other two as well, and chat some more with them, with mutual congratulations all around. (Turns out the other Hinako was the one who'd given us the judges' award! :3 lobelia RABU RABU.)
Then we crept on the artists' alley with Team JYB! They all like Avery more than they like me, haha (except for Chelsie, we're bros...the boys do though. Boys always like Avery more than they like me, it's whatever, I'm just boring I guess lawl), they kept hanging out with her but I just like...went back to ChiStudios girl and bought A PRINT OF THIS SEXY SHIT and her Oliver Wood button for Avery ♥ 'CAUSE I'M AN FAGGOT. We ran back into Michie and Kyrie, too, and that wasted time until our autograph line happened. A chick a line-bend in front of us that we'd spotted earlier had a bag COVERED in pins, and we struck up a conversation with her that started at pins and went to Vic-bashing and ended with us possibly being persuaded to try to go to Tekkoshocon this year (IF WE CAN STAY WITH YOU, shounenhero???? :D ♥). Katie Morris dressed as Ed from Bebop was also randomly in the line right ahead of us. And then Ellyn Stern who was kind of loopy/boring/not caffeined-up enough yet and Richard Epcar who's just a broseph and KYLE HEBERT WHO WAS UNEXPECTED AND MADE OF WIN signed my scrapbook for me~~ By the time I got to Kyle there wasn't a lot of room and he wanted to use another page and I was like "ooh, you could go across the bottom!" so that's what happened there (thanks, Greg and Ellyn, for eating all the space lawlwhut). We chatted with him a little about how fun he is to follow on Twitter and then left with Michie and Kyrie and Joey to go to the dealers' room and buy some ramune. Once we were there Team JYB was magically there AGAIN. They are legit our friends now. ♥ I got KIWI RAMUNE SO DERICIOUS and Avery got lychee and they were COLD, I HAVE NEVER HAD RAMUNE COLD, pretty awesome.
Then we just kind of...sat around chatting for a while. And Chelsie (formerly known as Kyonko, btw) and I were getting blinded by the sun, and Cheri and a friend of hers came by and borrowed Bobby's badge so they could go get Greg's autograph (which was where Kyrie and Michie were), and Joe was 80% sick and 20% hung over and so was quiet and somehow FREEZING while the rest of us roasted in the sun, and everything everyone was talking about was stuff that Avery and Bobby and Joe and Nick had played/watched/seen/done and that I hadn't, so I just kind of sat there awkwardly and could only contribute every once in a while and felt super uncool. Kyrie came back after a bit but Cheri and her friend...didn't, and Bobby was starting to get really frustrated because he needed his badge back, and at some point Aleece stopped by to say that she and Angelique were leaving and BYE~ and we were like UNTIL NEXT TIME, FAGETS~ and Kyrie was reading Ouran and Avery and Bobby kept trolling Joe with Bobby's wiffle bat and...stuff. Idk I just felt really out of place here and don't remember much of what was said because I was barely part of the conversation because A) I was blinded by the sun and couldn't see anyone and B) I didn't have anything to really contribute because everyone else was cooler than I was, especially Avery. AT ONE POINT Avery kind of sat on Joe and Joe had "ASS" written on his hand and so when Avery sat on him it...stuck out from under her ass and that was funny so we took a photo.
Cheri & Friend FINALLY came back (after I had gone to check on where they were TWICE wtf) and by that point me and Blind Chelsie went and sat on the floor against the wall where we could A) actually see and B) not roast to death, and I chatted with Cheri and Kyrie a bit, but that didn't last long because I just felt even MORE excluded from the other group and Kyrie was like "I'mma leave so if I'm taking you back to campus come with me" and since we'd given up on the parapara panel I was like "??" but Avery said she'd take me back so we stayed. And talked to Bobby some more but I wasn't doing much talking. IDK I just want to be friends with them but I don't feel like I'm cool enough. .___. This happens to me all the time, mostly with cool nerd boys. I'm such a lame girl.
But yeah eventually we had to just...leave. I needed to be on campus in time to take a shower before dinner so I could get some food before the meeting. Avery brought me back and THAT ONE FUCKING SECURITY DUDE totally gave her shit and was like "we don't do dropoffs, you have to be registered as a guest" so I had to register her and it was the gayest shit ever and then she helped me carry my stuff a bit but she just left. And I was so fucking sad because the con was over, and because this really was US MAKING THE CON AWESOME-con. Because it was Shut Up Bobby/Damnit Michie-con. Because it was "THANKS, EVENTS"-con. Because there really wasn't just one nickname to slap on this, and the reason we couldn't do that is because it was just so freaking awesome. The only name to give it is Nekocon. :D
SO SOME CON STATS!:
Merch purchased: Pineapple phone charm (With jingly bell!) to match/troll Greg; TEN CUTE HP BUTTONS and a stupid sexy Harry Potter print from ChiStudios awesome lady; two boxes of banana-choco pocky and some kiwi ramune mmm dericious
Cosplay: Maihara Chizuru on Saturday! (In case you missed the little hint I dropped there, our skit was a parody of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" rewritten about Lobelia molesting and trying to convert Haruhi. Avery provided her own singing voice, but I was Michie and Michie was me, so I had to sing like a man and then it came out of Michie's mouth and that was just freaking hilarious.) AND, slutty Slytherdor on Friday; not really a costume but definitely an outfit that I planned carefully. ffff
Sources quoted: The usual, like our self-made memes (particularly the "Thanks, _____, for all the ______ you provide us with" and "Shut up Bobby!"/"Damnit Michie!" - you guys know I love you, though, don't h8) and Dave Chappelle and the Awesomely Bad videos, and also lots of AVPM and stuff that other people (A&A, Team JYB) had said that was particularly funny
Items trolled: Team JYB, a FFVII group/some Ouran kids, a RED Scout, the Para Para machine, Tanisha's rave falls, the hotel bathroom like always
MVPs: Team JYB, Aleece and Angelique, our Lobelia sisters, Greg as always, the BRO staffers that looked out for us when the fail staffers tried to fuck us over, the other BRO staffer that fixed all our technical difficulties, Kyrie for being made of win, Michelle for hotel rooming it up, Michie for being fierce, a really cute Kyouya cosplayer for soothing Kyrie's fury at a really crappy Kyouya cosplayer
failfolks: ehhTHE USUAL~, the staff that tried to fuck us over, COSPLAYERS IN GENERAL FOR NOT BRINGING IT
And as always, be sure to check out Avery's post of photos. Not a whole lot of them since there...wasn't a whole lot worth photographing, but you can see us being fabulous fierce bitches and having a gay old time~
Now I'm back at school and going to classes again and that just kind of sucks. My one bright spot is FAGGY FAG FAGGING with singingblonde16 about AVPM, since she watched it over the weekend and is JUST AS GAY FOR IT AS I AM, which is kind of extraordinary. She LOVES Joey. And so do I. And she is totally invited to my Me & My Dick party on Friday that will conveniently be immediately after the sisterhood that I have scheduled. TOTALLY AWESOME.
So that was my weekend. How was everyone else's? :D
FUCKING EDIT: Shitty-ish recording but t-there you have it, lawlwhut. MAI WIG.
After returning to campus around 3:30 yesterday, taking a shower, catching up on LJ, eating some real food, going to a three-and-a-half hour sorority meeting, catching up on everything else, and GETTING SOME MOTHERFUCKING SLEEP, I'm here to bring you the convention report for Nekocon 2009. For once we don't quite have a clever nickname! The following is the best we could do.
Thursday I packed and stressed like a madwoman! Avery was supposed to get here then but...she couldn't. She was still doing a lot of costume stuff. WHICH WAS SAD. Because like, when are we ever going to get to just go to a convention where we've knocked out all the costume stuff in advance and aren't freaking in the hotel room? (I guess we mostly managed this at AMA but we were taking all old costumes to that....) So I just ran around trying to make sure I had done everything possible to make Avery have less to do. :/ Plans were for purpleyedemon and I to leave Friday morning at like 9:00 to get Kyrie in the line to pick up her registration, and then go meet up with Michelle and Avery to get into the hotel. I had a hard time sleeping. (This pattern would continue.)
Friday - Us And Our Bros Are Making Our Own Fucking Fun
Kyrie and I got stuck in some hellacious traffic behind some pretty shitty vehicles (a big awkward truck, a creeper black minivan whose license plate said "SKIDROE," etc.) but meanwhile I was texting Michelle and timing-wise, it actually kind of worked perfectly. By the time we got there at like 10 Michelle was ready to come find us, and we unloaded our stuff into a room that wasn't ours because we couldn't check in until noon. I LOVE STAYING IN THE EMBASSY SUITES. ugh if it weren't so expensive I would have done it for every Nekocon ever. There's fridge space and room space and showers that don't suck and continental breakfast! Once we were mostly good to go up there Kyrie and I went back down to the convention center for her to get her badge. We spent a few minutes waiting in the wrong line because there didn't really look like there WAS another line...because there wasn't really? idk. But soon a staffer pulled her out of the at-the-door line along with a bunch of other confused people and she went up to get her pre-reg. There was a little bit MORE confusion while she had to work through their group situation. I just kind of hovered at her shoulder.
Meanwhile, two other hilarious things were happening:
1 - This guy dressed as Michael Jackson, who we think was the same guy I'm talking about in strikethrough about two-thirds the way down my AMA report, started having a dance-off with this really hilarious Luigi cosplayer we'd been staring at for a while. The embarrassing part was that Luigi was winning. fffffff. They had a big circle of people around them and everything. I had to run over and take a picture (from my angle they were horrendously backlit by the giant front windows of the HRCC and you couldn't see them at all).
2 - the group on the pre-reg pick-up computer next to us, talking to a girl dressed as Maho from BECK, looked oddly familiar. Or, well, they didn't even look familiar so much as I just got this feeling. This tall lanky dark-haired kid was speaking for the whole group, and then, when they asked for names, he distinctly said Bobby Birmingham. I started grinning, and laughing, and talking just a little bit louder to Kyrie as she worked all her stuff out... I mean, I was practically shoulder-to-shoulder with him in this pre-reg clusterfuck, and I was losing my shit. I made a couple of off-handed comments back when he said stuff but it wasn't until he said something about "Team JYB" (which he wrote on his badge!) that I was like "Fuck yes you are!" and he turned and looked at me.
BB: "...HOLY SHIT!"
Me (trolling him): "HOLY SHIT! :D"
So we loitered there laughing at the MJ/Luigi dance-off for a while until I got a call from Avery telling me that she was coming over! She appeared a few moments later and we rofl'd a bit at Team JYB before ninjaing off to go talk to Con Ops and get our comp'd registration 'cause we were doing two panels and they said they would do that.
Well, we got up there and...our names were not on any list of people doing things. Um. Okay Nekocon. We pointed out to them quite clearly that both our panels were on the master programming schedule, one of them was in the programming booklet (because we'd submitted the other one too late), and that we'd been told by Membership that Con Ops would waive our fee for doing two panels. It took a bit of coaxing, and I think the chick working there didn't really want to, but the guy working there finally gave us our free badges. We got to pick red, blue or purple lanyards and so naturally I picked red!! since I already had a green one from last year, and my whole outfit was Slytherdor-themed and kind of slutty-moe, and I could wear them both together (once Avery managed to get my fucking stubborn badge to go into the plastic sleeve D:). I actually wrote my name on mine, thinking I should do that as a panelist, but Avery just wrote "EFF." ♥
So we got in contact with Michelle and then went and carted all of Avery's stuff up into the hotel room. We still had some work to do on our Saturday costumes, but we were going to wait and do that once we switched to OUR room as opposed to Michelle's station manager's room, so what Avery did instead was put on her Friday costume (since I was providing her with the shirt for it, haha) and be girl!Scout. (It occurred to her way after the fact that it would be funnier if she'd had a box of Girl Scout cookies. I laughed at that. ffff) We mostly loitered in the hotel room eating things and laughing at things and trying to get ahold of Michie to make sure she wasn't going to flake on us learning our skit choreography and planning out our schedule and stuff until it was close enough to noon that Michelle could go check us in. Kyrie decided at some point that she was going to go back to campus for lunch with Morgan to try and calm her down from something, and that she probably wasn't going to stay at the hotel that night either because of some Cait and Ashley stuff...I really don't know what was going on with basically anyone but me and my skit crew (and not even Michie) at this point. But she left, Avery and I tried to get our Voice Actor Bingo stuff together, and then I went down with Michelle to get her luggage from her car (we had to get a cart, and we were just going to use it to take everything from the room we'd been in on the 9th floor to our new official room on the 6th floor).
Loitering in the lobby looking for a luggage cart I ran into Angelique from AMA! ♥ She and Aleece were creeping around trying to find the people they'd arranged to share a room with, who hadn't rendezvoused with them on time and whose number they couldn't get at unless Aleece could find a place to get WiFi on her DS. I stopped and chatted with Angelique for a bit before we ran out to get Michelle's stuff, and by the time I came back Aleece was there too - I realized I'd seen her earlier, but hadn't recognized her under the giant 'fro of her Lambo costume! We were all really excited to see each other, and I pimped our panels out to them and they seemed pretty stoked (Aleece was even going to skip karaoke to come to Awesomely Bad, which I thought was pretty awesome of her). I also offered to let them come hang out in our hotel room if they couldn't find the other person for theirs, but they stayed in the lobby for a bit.
We went up to the ninth floor, got all our fucking shit (and like, with all of Michelle's HUGE costumes she had a LOT of shit) and then popped back to the sixth floor and into our REAL~ room. It was basically like the other room in reverse. Eventually Angelique and Aleece decided they were going to leave their stuff in our room, since they were having such a hard time finding their other roommates, and then we all headed back to the convention - since we didn't really have enough time before our first panel to do anything at this point (Voice Actor Bingo was at 1:30!) we mostly just got our shit together for that and left to go over to the con. We wandered around a little, looking for familiar faces both cool and lame (and saw at least one or two of them) and trying to make sure that we knew where everything was that we needed to get at. It was around this time that we started realizing there weren't a whole lot of really good cosplayers here! I did find a cute Aisha and take her photo, and Avery trolled some other faggoty (RED) Scout, but no one was really jumping out at us. It was okay though, because we were going to bring it on Saturday!
Yeah, okay: Michie, Avery and I were going to be the Zuka Club girls from Ouran. (Think about it in terms of height and you can probably pinpoint which of us was which - and Michelle was our Haruhi to molest.) Kyrie had figured it out at this point, so there was basically no one we were still hiding it from. The only thing that was secret any more was the contents of our skit. And THAT was just...bzonkers.
But anyway, our panel!! We got there and people were ALREADY WAITING FOR IT. Which kind of rocked! We had technically difficulties for, like, ever, and pretty much the only folks there were Team JYB (now with more Chie!) and a couple other people who'd been there at AMA and then some new folks in the back - none of whom came up as contestants but at least three of whom seemed to really know their shit. We used a lot of the same questions as last time because we had to throw it together last-minute, but a good number of new ones too, and mostly this panel wasn't Voice Actor Bingo, it was SHUT UP, BOBBY! Every member of Team JYB came up as a contestant at least once, making up five of our six individual contestants and three of our four team contestants. RIDICULOUS. The other guy was this older, chubbier guy who knew the answers to basically everything. This panel was even more fucking hilarious the second time around! I was just sad that Cait couldn't be there to school everyone because of whatever complications were happening back on campus (and, as a result of that, Kyrie and Ashley weren't at the panel either). And even the round I had explicitly said "Oh, use these questions if Bobby comes up"? HE FAILED. Way to be, talking shit on Twitter and not backing it up, Nurse Birmingham. But seriously, this panel was great. It cemented the realization that I really want to be friends with Team JYB and not just perpetually troll the crap out of them. Well, okay, I do that to my real friends too, but still. We just kind of...ignored most of the other people at the panel in favor of harassing them and laughing at them harassing each other, and it was pretty great. :D
After that was over I needed to drop my laptop back off in the hotel room, and I think it was at this point that Avery also just gave up on being Scout because she really wanted to be in her awesome Slytherdor outfit that went with my awesome Slytherdor outfit.
We'd also spotted a Greg-hosted panel we wanted to go to that was supposedly at 3:30, about how to identify bootleg merchandise (and like, I cared about the subject but I mostly just wanted to see GREG!! and it was his first panel of the day~). In the meantime, Kyrie and friends were back at the convention, and we really wanted to go to the dealers' room and artists' alley, so we decided to fill in our gap with that! Our missions were cute cell phone straps and maybe some snacks.
AND I FUCKING FOUND THE BANANA POCKY. DO YOU GUYS REMEMBER MY LOVE FOR THE FUCKING BANANA POCKY? I have legit not seen this at a convention since 2005, despite my desperate looking for it - it's a seasonal thing, I'm sure. I saw those fuckers and I bought two fucking boxes - one to share and one to keep entirely for myself (that I haven't even opened yet as I type this - I might save it for Me & My Dick on Friday...). We also saw a LOT of cute phone charms, though most of them seemed a little overpriced. And I found this really cute Kyouya patch at a booth way in the back that I really wanted Kyrie to come get! We tried to get in contact with her because she'd told us she was in the dealers' room when we'd come back down from the hotel, but apparently by this point she'd made it to the artists' alley. We told her we were heading to a Greg panel and she rounded up Cait and Ashley - and Tanisha! - and we all went together. (It actually ended up being at like 4:00 though. Thanks, retarded Nekocon rescheduling! BASICALLY THANKS, EVENTS. >:[ )
Greg was really cute as usual and talked about really important things as usual! He's just a really smart guy and it's cool to hear him talk about stuff that's important to him. We were all really excited to see him, too, especially after we'd been so concerned that he might not even be there at all (thanks, Nekocon website). His hair was purple! It was also kind of loonnng, idk how I felt about this. I think he looks a lot cuter with shorter hair. Also, I was kind of bummed that it wasn't green...I'd been secretly hoping it would be so that we could match. But when I raised my hand for a question/comment (I actually forget what it was that I said) he complimented my hair color! (And Avery's...but hers was fake, lolwigs.) He ALSO~ let drop a comment at this point that he WAS going to be at Guests Uncensored on Saturday night, meaning there WAS a Guest Uncensored on Saturday night even though it wasn't on the schedule!! And he talked about DJing at the rave that night which got me FUCKING STOKED.
During this panel, though, I saw that he had a pineapple phone charm!! It was actually a pineapple Peek-A-Pooh, because he always has Peek-A-Pooh charms, but it basically sold me on getting the moemoe pineapple one I had already seen in the dealers' room, so I went and bought that once his panel was over. Overpriced but worth it! I love it so much~~ Then we went to the artists' alley, which we hadn't made it to before we had to dip out and get to Greg's panel on time, and I gotta say, this year? The AA brought it way more than the dealers' room did. I think it's just because I don't care about stuff that's popular any more. Avery said it best when she said something like "I keep forgetting that all the stuff I like is obscure." But in the AA, amid all the people whose buttons we've looked at like six times at every convention ever and our bro Ricky Bryant that we just can't stop unintentionally trolling, I knew we'd at least find some Potterfags.
AND BOY DID WE EVER, BECAUSE WE FOUND THE CHICK FROM FUCKING CHISTUDIOS. I had seen that picture of Renji before - I think every Bleach slashfag has seen that picture of Renji - but I didn't realize she'd ever drawn Stupid SEXY Harry Potter or that she was going to be making fucking adorable chibi buttons. I wanted like, all of them!! (well okay except for most of the Death Eaters. I just don't care about Lucius or Shnappi, really.) I really had to figure out how much money I was going to have and how many of them I was going to be able to buy. After a while I just couldn't take it any more and we had to leave to peruse the rest of the artists' alley. Everything was so fucking cute!! There was this chick who'd made little knit bunnies in all the rainbow colors - I really wanted to get historygeek90 the brightass purple one but it was a fair bit overpriced for a tiny squishy bunny - and like, this other chick who'd made moemoe jewelry of like pieces of toast and sticks of pocky and MORE LITTLE PINEAPPLES and ugghhh I just wish I could have bought tons of crap. And that chick with the Mr. Saturn she wears on her head and the Camp Whispering Rock t-shirt, ffffff. (No one makes those shirts in the right colors from the game! Are brightass red and brightass yellow really that offensive, lol?) I didn't buy anything at this point but I scouted out some stuff that I seriously wanted to with a vow to return the next day.
We left the artists' alley to wander some more and ended up running into Aleece and Angelique again! They'd found their roommates and wanted to come up with us and get their stuff, so we headed back to the hotel room, since I had to get my laptop again for Awesomely Bad anyway. On our way out we passed a Kakashi cosplayer that apparently Aleece was going to fight?? IDK THIS WAS HILARIOUS. He jumped up on the little platform underneath the stairs and was darting kind of...away from her but not BECAUSE he was trying to get away from her, he was just going in that direction, and I don't remember if it was Aleece or Angelique who was shouting at him but they were shouting about how he and lambo!Aleece were going to fight. Kyrie, Avery and I were weak (I think I was the weakest, I was just kind of dead for some reason) and the Kakashi was just really confused.... Then we left the convention center and were headed through the breezeway back to the hotel and Angelique just kept talking about her penis. It's apparently quite large. Larger than Aleece's prop Lambo bazooka (that we had to E6000 back together fff). I think the reason I didn't actually freeze to death between the con center and the hotel is that I was just laughing too hard.
Of course, we got back into the hotel, and I immediately stopped laughing because I was kind of angry because there were other Lobelia cosplayers and they even took our idea of having the fucking flowers. It was like that other Sasha and Milla all over again and I was just kind of...sad. Because their Benio was amazing (although they didn't have a Hinako at this point) and we still didn't know what was going on with ours and I kind of just wanted to kidnap her. Seriously, all the way up to our room I was just like "Ugh that Benio." BRB RAGING.
We spent a good bit of time fucking around with Aleece and Angelique up in the room before they left, though - it was great to see them again, they're fucking hilarious. I decided that they were kind of like if Avery and I fused with Alex and Tanisha (I guess Alex-me is Aleece and Avery-Tanisha is Angelique, idk). We tried to plan out more of our day to build in costume-finishing time, and we realized the best opportunity we'd have for that was between our Awesomely Bad panel from 7-8 and Richard Epcar's panel which started at 10. Bitchin'. (Unfortunately the Greg Ayres autograph sessions for Friday night almost completely overlapped with Awesomely Bad - almost! We were going to have a half-hour afterward in which we could BOOK IT and try to flag him down, eeee.) But we were also really stressing about where Michie was, since I had texted her a lot earlier in the day and never gotten an answer. I hadn't had time to teach her (or Michelle, really, but Michelle's part was way easier) the choreography for the skit, and it was making me kind of have a freakout, and IDK which one of us said it first but either me or Avery was just like, "We should just go steal that other Benio and make her do it." AND AT FIRST IT WAS KIND OF A JOKE SUGGESTION BUT WE ACTUALLY ENDED UP GOING BACK DOWN TO THE LOBBY AND ASKING HER??? Avery and I went and Kyrie came for moral support (though I was like, "Is it a good idea to just leave Angelique and Aleece alone in OUR hotel room??? lol..."). It must have been Avery's idea originally because I was like, "you have to talk to her it's your idea" and she was like "idk what to say" and I was like "just be like 'our Benio might flake and we're worried and you're awesome so would you maybe it's not that hard just as backup'" and she was like "WELL YOU DO IT THEN YOU'RE THE EXTRAVERT!" so...I did. TAKING MATTERS INTO MY OWN HANDS-CON.
I said something along the lines of, "This is going to be a really weird question," and she said "Trust me, nothing you can ask will be weird to me," so I could already tell that she was pretty fucking cool. I asked if she might do us a favor and be in our skit for the masquerade, and she told us that she'd totally have done it if she weren't already entering the masquerade as Gunner Yuna. We explained about our problem and she told us she supported us, and pulled some EPIC IN-CHARACTER BENIO AWESOME on us, it was fantabulous. Their Maihara was great, too! She had an amazing jew-nose. We struck up a whole conversation with them about us being in the masquerade last year, and she told us that she LOVED the Ness Dance because she'd been kind of drunk and it was just amazing if you were kind of drunk, and I rofl'd a little. Basically all my rage at our costumes being stolen vanished because they were just fucking awesome. They even offered to possibly bequeath their flowers to us! (But sadly that never happened. BUT STILL~! ♥) Appropriately, I am now kind of gay for them.
We hung out with Aleece and Angelique some more, ate some food some more, and then headed back over for PANNEL DOS! This one had even MORE technical difficulties than the first one, but once we got them worked out it went REALLY well. Avery sat at the front with the microphone and trolled everyone and I hovered at the cart to play the videos and occasionally dance. Awesome people who attended this panel included: Cait, Ashley, Kyrie and Tanisha (though Cait and Ashley left early for Greg autographs); a really cool girl in the front who was totally AVPM-fagging with us (when our audio wasn't working and Avery was like "maybe we'll just sing for you" she was like "SING GRANGER DANGER!! lol"); most (or maybe all? I don't remember I couldn't see anyone) of Team JYB; Aleece and Angelique, natch; and, you know, enough people to fill our room and then some standing in the back, which was great. I TOLD Events that we'd need a big room because this panel always filled up quickly! but apparently that didn't pan out. Thanks, Events. AT LEAST WE HAD OUR A/V EQUIPMENT, UNLIKE AMA ffffffff. We played the usual favorites as well as 3x the DJ Ozma in honor of A&A and a couple more horrifying Avery finds. She told me she was spending most of the time looking at people's facial expressions and judging audience reaction, and that during at least one video everyone just looked fucking traumatized. For the most part Bobby people seemed to enjoy things, though. :3 Staff even had to come in and tell us our audio was too loud, which I thought was pretty hilarious. I guess the worst part about this panel was the guy that made up the Spider-Dong song during the Spiderman video.
Srsly, some guy sitting behind me and to the left was just like, "Spider-Dong, Spider-Dong!" to the tune of the old Spider-Man theme, and like...that was okay. That was almost kind of funny. But there was this one guy like one row behind me and across the aisle that had been fucking annoying the entire panel, and he took it upon himself to continue the lyrics with "It is wide and really long. Shoots a web on your face, gets it all over the place!" KIND OF APPALLING. When I told Avery about it later she was drinking water and almost did a spit-take. XD
I packed up my laptop as quickly as I could once it was over (while being assured by multiple departing people that "we weren't kidding when we said Awesomely Bad!" - well, yeah, duh, that was kind of the point) and then we FLED! to the Bazaar room where the artists' alley and lots of the autograph sessions were to get ahold of Greg. We still had about 20 minutes before it was supposedly over by the time we got there, but the whole place was empty and according to the staffer guy that was there the line was closed! LAME. Fortunately! I just had to be like "But we were hosting a panel, and it just ended, pleeaasssee???" and flash my associate's badge and they let us in. And then we were the only people there and we got to have a good long chat with him! We talked about my hair and Avery's wig and his hair and how Manic Panic doesn't work for him (after that conversation, and looking at his hair now that it's long and seeing what it looks like when he straightens it, I've come to the conclusion that we probably have really similar hair), and we talked about Ghost Stories (because that's what Avery was having him sign) and how we want to cosplay from it and how I'm going to be Leo ♥, and about my mom (because she and Greg are bros) and about the DANCE WHICH WE WERE TOTALLY GOING TO, it was really awesome~~ I love him to DEATH, he is basically the coolest guy ever. He signed my scrapbook and took up practically a whole page (which I totally planned in advance for, fortunately, by skipping a whole page in between that and my previous pages, ffff). Ugh, so fucking awesome, Greg Ayres. ♥ ♥ ♥
WELL, so then we went back to the hotel room and frantically worked on costumes! I was making fuku bows and actually not doing too badly at it, and idk what Avery was doing on the ironing board in the other room, probably attaching the cuffs to our sleeves at this point? HOORAY FOR HEAT'N'BOND AND E6000. We gave up on entering the craftsmanship part of the masquerade. It was basically costumescostumescostumes until the Epcar panel, but also suiting up for the FUCKWIN GREGRAVE. Michelle bought us moe glowstick hairclips/earrings! Avery's were kind of shitty though. And the glowsticks I got that were supposed to be white were definitely blue. We were kind of late getting out of there to go hit up Epcar because we were trolling around with Michelle and her friend Jerusha (COOLEST NAME EVER AMIRITE?) and then when we got there we didn't even stick around for very long - I mean, we'd already seen most of them, and if we didn't get in line for the rave, AMA was going to happen again and we'd miss all the funnnnnnnn~~~
The line was a'ight. Tanisha cut in with us - we were letting her stay in our room so she could go to the rave because Cait, Kyrie and Ashley had already left to go back to campus - and she was wearing some crazy rave-ringlet falls she'd bought in BRIGHTASS GREEN that we just kept boinging at her out of ADD. We tried to get our glowsticks prepared with the fasteners on them but they were the SHITTIEST FASTENERS EVER and I ended up cracking nearly all of them in the process, so we just put them on. The girls in front of us were some cracked out high school/early college chicks who kept doing the Time Warp and yelling at each other, and the guy behind us was disturbingly androgynous unless he spoke (like, he could be a masculine flat-chested chick or else a kind of weenie guy). Also, Tanisha gave me cookies! :3
The rave was supposed to start at 11 but as usual the line didn't even really move until 11:15 or so and we ended up only dancing for about an hour and a half. BUT IT WAS A GLORIOUS HOUR AND A HALF. Tanisha, Avery and I stayed at the front almost the entire time so that we didn't miss any of the GREG ACTION and we were frequently in the path of a spotlight - at times Tanisha was backlit Jesus-style and her falls were RIDICULOUS. The music was GREAT AS USUAL BECAUSE GREG IS FUCKING AWESOME. He managed to work in just the tiniest bit of Sandstorm as between-song space-filler, it was a great way to appease people! It was always JUST enough that you could kind of tell that it was Sandstorm, but never enough for the crowd to think that he was actually going to play it and start screaming out of glee/raeg. He played DotA by Basshunter and I mouthed-sang along to the whole thing and JUMPED LIKE A ROCKER, and he played Dragostea Din Tei and I was totally one of the first people to realize that he was about to play that, and he played this SICK mix of Smooth Criminal by MJ and that is totally my favorite MJ song, and he played some stuff that was really fun to dance to that I didn't recognize but that Avery totally did, and a mix of some Kanye raeg, and a Lady Gaga song because he fucking loves Lady Gaga like any self-respecting homo musicfag, AND HE ALSO PLAYED THIS AMAZING MASHUP OF HARDER, BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER/GIMME MORE BY BRITNEY. He was like "This goes out to all the haters. A friend of mine told me that if you wake up with three haters and you don't go to bed with four, you're doing something wrong. So, for that girl that was talking shit about me on the Nekocon forums last year, this is for you. Since apparently you hate Daft Punk." And he was giving everyone the finger and pretending to lick his own nipples and just being FILTHY, FUCKWIN GREG. I FUCKING LOVE HIM. favorite gay man ever.
Avery crapped out around 1, and because I am a brosuke I left with her (my arms were kind of dying anyway - I swear if I could go to a rave every weekend my arms would be amazing), and so then back in the hotel room with Michelle and Tanisha we showered and kept working on our costumes. I made as much progress on the bows as I could before I felt like I was going to die, and then we just went the fuck to bed. GREAT FRIDAY OR GREATEST FRIDAY? This totally cancels out how awful Friday was at Katsucon and then some, ugh. ♥ It was like, it doesn't matter that there isn't a whole lot of programming I want to go to, or that nothing in the dealers' room is really impressing me, or that none of the costumes are really impressing me, I AM MAKING THIS CON BE FUN AND IT HAS NO CHOICE, THE BITCH. Our panels and our dancing and our faggotry. And Greg's faggotry, and Team JYB's faggotry, and A&A's faggotry. It was just fucking fun. :D
What was not going to be fun was going to bed at 2 with plans to get up at 7, meaning I fell asleep around 2:30 and woke up around 6:30. FOUR HOURS OF SLEEP AND I'M SUPPOSED TO BE A LOBELIA GIRL IN THE MORNING WHOOOOOO
Saturday - Screw The Rules, We've Got A Fanclub
So yeah, that up at 6:30 thing. I rolled over a little in my half-sleep and apparently I rolled over JUST ENOUGH to get a sharp stabbing shooting pain up my right calf. I thought I was going to fucking die. I'd also gone to bed with my hair wet and was amazed that it wasn't quite as miserable to look at as I'd expected (still miserable to touch, though, gross. Michelle was kind of horrified that my hair still wasn't dry upon waking). Michelle and I went down with our only two breakfast tickets to pick up food for everyone, grabbing a little bit of everything, and then we frantically made costumes while awaiting Michie's arrival - she'd informed me, finally, the night before, that her plan was to arrive around 8:30 so she could pick up her badge and get in costume before the mandatory 9:30 cosplay rehearsal. While I sewed Avery into her skirt (we SO did not have the time or patience to put fasteners in!) and she E6000'd things and cut/styled Michie's wig and Michelle squirmed into her compression shirt (she is...too busty to be Haruhi naturally lol) we looped our skit audio ENDLESSLY. I felt really bad for Tanisha because we were basically driving her insane with it, but it was just too fucking funny for us to NOT de-sensitize ourselves to it (and we had to make sure everyone knew which lines were theirs - Michie and I both knew all the freaking words and it was easy for me to accidentally start singing Avery's parts too). Because oh yeah, Michie showed up! and I sewed her into her skirt too, and Avery stitched me into mine, and we kept working on the tops and I kept doing it wrong and Avery was mad at me .___. because she was already frustrated that her wig wasn't doing what it needed to do and the hotel hair dryer was really shitty ("I could blow harder than this!" "That's what she said!") so that wasn't making it better. Eventually we just had to send Michie down in her skirt/socks/shoes to get her badge, and we kept working right up until fucking 9:27 to try and get things together but it wasn't ready and we, too, had to go just costumed from the waist down. Only Michelle was 100% Haruhi.
Frantically, we were waiting and waiting for an elevator - because as much as we had to wait, trying to go down the stairs from the sixth floor in shoes that were a) a whole size too big on both of us, stuffed with tissue paper at the toes and b) HEELS would have been even worse. Fortunately! a staffer guy who was also waiting for an elevator told us that Tex had JUST gone down to get his coffee and that we'd probably be okay running as late as we were. While we were waiting we heard a sad, sad sound of a lot of change falling down the elevator shaft - eventually it stopped on our floor and two or three really sad people, one of whom was holding a busted-upon cashbox, were taking up most of the space...we didn't bother trying to get into that one, and we took the next one that came by - we gave up and just went up to go down. Then we darted over to the convention center and up to main events as quickly as we could and...waited. Practiced our choreography a bunch! Eventually they lined us all up and Tex explained the rules, which we kind of knew already.... And a group in the front was like, "We're not in our masq costumes, we're in other ones, we're not ready yet" and he was like "You retards, I guess that's okay but this was supposed to be a dress rehearsal," and I was like "...oh shit I guess I have to UM, HI, WE'RE ONLY IN COSTUME FROM THE WAIST DOWN?? I'M SORRY BUT WE'RE NOT READY YET!!" and Tex was like...kind of pissed lol but it all worked out. So they started calling us by number and we...weren't number 2 again!! awesome!! So we spent more time rehearsing and I actually started to feel confident about the choreography! We were lucky #13. :D Ahead of us was a moe high-school-age The World Ends With You group. It took us, like, two seconds to get our badges (they were Vash-nekos this year as opposed to the Sailor Moon ones from last year lol), sign our papers and crap, give our audio to the tech guys, and go assure the 1-Up Pimp (insert eyeroll here) that my last name is pronounced with a long U and that our intro was, in fact, "From the people who brought you 2008's Ness Dance, Box of Scraps Cosplay presents: I Sakura Kissed a girl...and I liked it."
Take from that what you will, fools. 8[
Rehearsal went pretty well except Avery forgetting to do like, one thing, which kind of threw the rest of us off. Plans after that were to hit another Greg panel - "From Host Club to Hospital," talking about his Ohayocon heart attack, poor thing :( - and then go finish our costumes between 1 when that was over and 4:30 when we had to be back at the masquerade. THIS WAS A GREAT PANEL AS ALL GREG PANELS ARE. He talked about Ouran, and Ghost Stories, and Saiyuki and...Pretear 'cause this girl off to the side was fagging about Pretear idk, and he talked about his brother's cute pen pal relationship with Nabeshin and the hilarity that ensued when Nabeshin tried to email him in English without his interpreter (I...don't feel like "I love you, but I will not allow you to make love to my backside" needs any further explanation), and he talked about what really happened to him at Ohayocon and how awesome Chris was sticking by him and the horrendous rumors that went around (apparently before HE even knew what was going on, the internet was saying he had died and I just dk). AND OH BY THE WAY, HE WAS DRESSED AS MAX FROM WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. It was the freaking. cutest. thing. that I have ever seen. Greg was so damn CUTE this weekend! ugh! I think it had to do with Jerry Jewell and Troy Baker not being there to turn up his filthy. XD He talked a bit about how he'd always idolized Max because he too had been sent to bed without supper a lot, and him and Chris growing up, and oh god so moe. But it was running seriously over, and we just couldn't stick around any more, so we went baaack to the hotel room AGAIN to finish FUCKING EVERYTHING. I...kind of hate my Maihara wig! I couldn't bend my head more than like 30 degrees forward without the bangs raping my face, and like every wig ever (SINCE I AM ALWAYS THE LONG-HAIRED CHARACTER WITH NO BANGS can't wait to be fucking Ivysaur) the wig's hairline in the front crept perpetually away from my hairline in the front, buuuttt MICHIE LOOKED FUCKING AWESOME. SRSLY, AVERY HAS PHOTOS OF THIS. Her wig was close enough to her regular hair color that Cait actually asked her if she had legit cut it! AND I KNOW SHE HATES THAT EVERYONE KEEPS SAYING THIS BUT I THINK SHE SHOULD. You can't blame me, saturnsmelody17, I continually advocate short hair for everyone. :B
By the time we finally finished up with that - and trolling each other a lot in the hotel room, Kyrie included, and eating some more food (lol was this when we ordered the pizza? idek but those were the garlickiest breadsticks fucking EVER) - there wasn't much time left between then and the masq itself... I did go back to the artists' alley and buy TEN BUTTONS FROM THAT HP CHICK (Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, the twins, Draco, Remus, Sirius, Neville, and FABULOUS DUMBLEDORE~), and Avery got a cute dolphin phone charm, and Michie got a couple of the buttons, and Kyrie got a couple of them...but mostly we just took some faggy photos all over the stairs in front of the fountain (the light there was kind of sparkly and magical~) and then found Michelle and hopped in the line for DOING IT FORREALZ. OH HOLY BALLS. We practiced a bunch more in line, and people kept SINGING at us. It was like when you cosplay Hard Gay. Everywhere we went there was a person or two calling "LobeliAAHHH~~!" We spotted our Yuna-Benio and Lenne-Maihara friends from the night before and they were just as excited to see us as we were to see them, and uh, Avery and I really had to pee. Like REALLY. We were making terrible jokes with everyone! I helped the TWEWY folks in front of us solve a necklace dilemma they were having and they made some comment about the world ending and Avery and I were like, "With you~!" XD And then we were discussing our relative relief that we weren't skit #2 again, and Avery was like "But it was okay! We were number two, because we were the shit!" and I was WEAK AND NEARLY FELL ON THE FLOOR. And I was like, "DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH, I'M PISSING." greatest ever.
The 1-Up Pimp was tl;dr everywhere and then it took forever for the entries ahead of us to happen...there were a bunch of walk-ons and yet it still seemed an eternity. The first one we were in a good position to watch was a bunch of Sailor Scouts - Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and...Neptune? - doing a Spice Girls song with a really boring dance, and then the TWEWY kids did a parody along the lines of "I'll Make A Cosplayer Out Of You" and the lyrics weren't that stellar but they were pretty cute, lawl. Then WE WENT ON. 1-Up Pimp (sans pimp cane, he was basically just 1-Up Guy) read our description and OUR FANCLUB IN THE AUDIENCE ROARED IN EXCITEMENT. IT WAS KIND OF MARVELOUS. My wig was eating my face though and for the duration of the skit itself no one...really cared. THIS AUDIENCE WAS KIND OF LAME EXCEPT FOR OUR FANCLUB?? it was so weird to me, because usually the masq audience is pretty amazing. It was about here that I started to realize that Nekocon '0Nein was basically AMA and Nekocon '08 having a baby that wasn't quite as cool as Nekocon but wasn't quite as boringlame as AMA. BUT IT WAS OKAY.
THE INSTANT WE WERE DONE AVERY AND I FLED TO THE BATHROOM TO PEE WHICH WAS KIND OF GLORIOUS. None of the skits after ours that we actually got to watch were too tremendously fabulous except for this guy that did a soldier from FFVII and like, HAD EVERY MOVE DOWN PERFECT as though the audience were Cloud kicking his ass and obviously had some stage-combat training because it was pretty flawless and convincing! He won a judge's award. So did we! It was red contacts. I got to keep them because they were 0.00 prescription and everyone else in our skit was blind. The people cheering loudest for us were actually the other Lobelia/FFX chicks, who were sitting right in the front row. They won a craftsmanship award, I forget which, for being basically awesome. (ehhTHE MYOOTANT~ won Best in Show and TWEWY kids won best performance...uhm, really? Whatever, I'm trying not to be bitter about this.) Do judges' awards count toward not being Novice-level any more? 'Cause if so..we're not. hurfdurf.
Once that was over we went to de-Lobelia because our feet were dying. On the way out I trolled some neonorangehair!Hitachiin twins pretty hard... they were taking a photo of this big FFVII group, and I popped up behind them and did basically what Michie's doing here. Most of them missed it...one or two of them broke photo just a little...AND THE BARRET FUCKING DIED. It was hilarious. BUT YEAH THEN NO MORE COSTUMES. This was basically cosplaying-for-two-seconds-con. After that, we ate some more food, and we couldn't really decide if we wanted to go to the rave or not but we DEFINITELY wanted to go attack Information and find out when the Guests Uncensored panel was supposed to be, so we got some street clothes on and did that. BUT THERE WASN'T ANY. GREG LIED TO US T_____T; alas alas. So we um. Kind of just hung out for a while and like. Went to Anime Name That Tune again? GOD THAT GUY HAS A SPICE & WOLF BONER. As usual, I knew basically nothing. Avery knew a fair number more than I did. (She also knew way more of the animu in Animix that they played during the masq intermission...I am such a n00b, wtf.) THERE WAS THIS SONG FROM RECORD OF LODOSS WAR THAT I TOTALLY KNEW THOUGH and I was so pissed when it didn't come to meeee ugh. That Team Aqua girl Karen was there and I was totally rooting for her but she only got second. The people in the room were basically nerdy white kids on the left, Azns on the right in the front and black folks in the back...kind of hilarious.
After that we just went to the video game room! Something we hadn't done. There was NO BRAWL but DDR was happening and I got my ass kicked by songs I didn't know because it wasn't Max 2 or Extreme and also I haven't played in forever and also my belt was not really effective and also the mat was busted-ish. SO I LOST REALLY HARD HAHA. Then we played around on the Korean ParaParaDance machine and Avery got fucking addicted to it, hahaha. Then as we were leaving we ran into drunk Team JYB. HILARITY. Well, mostly it was Bobby being buzzed and Joe being "drunk and sick" (me: "Don't be drunk and sick!" Avery: "yeah, not drunk AND sick, you can be one or the other...") and Chelsie kind of nagging them to calm down and come with her because I guess she was driving idk. BOBBY GAVE US HIS BAT AND AVERY SLEPT WITH IT?? IDK how I feel about this. We ah, went back to the hotel and watched a bunch of AVPM and then just went to bed haha. LOL, SATURDAY. or something.
Sunday - Bitch We Don't Do Shit On Sundays
Our plan was to get up at 10 because the first thing we wanted to do was Epcar/Stern autographs at 11 (and then maybe the Para Para panel at 1 after Avery's newfound addiction, wtfwtf). However, MY ASS WAS AWAKE AT 6:30 AGAIN. And everyone else (and by "everyone else" I mean Michelle and Avery, lawl) by 8 or so. We packed and watched a bit more AVPM and did a whole lot of nothing and ate some breakfast (me and Avery with the meal tickets this time, Michelle wasn't hungry really) and PACKED AND PACKED and I...could not find my shoes for like half an hour and I was like "THE ROOM ATE THEM!" Because Nekocon hotels have eaten THREE of my nerd t-shirts in the past and it wouldn't surprise me if they ate my one good pair of sneakers too. BUT SOMEHOW THEY WERE...IN MY BAG ALREADY WHERE I DID NOT PUT THEM. a poltergeist, I swear. Greg kept talking about haunted hotels scaring the shit out of Chris Patton. We loaded up the car and then crept back over to the con with my laptop (and my $20 more to buy things from ChiStudios girl~~) so that Avery could get directions home. Since I had my laptop, I was like "We should camp out somewhere and listen to AVPM and see if we get a crowd!" because people playing gay shit like Caramelldansen and that damn Lucky Star song do shit like that all the time, but that...didn't really work. We DID see the other Hinako, and then a moment or two later the other two as well, and chat some more with them, with mutual congratulations all around. (Turns out the other Hinako was the one who'd given us the judges' award! :3 lobelia RABU RABU.)
Then we crept on the artists' alley with Team JYB! They all like Avery more than they like me, haha (except for Chelsie, we're bros...the boys do though. Boys always like Avery more than they like me, it's whatever, I'm just boring I guess lawl), they kept hanging out with her but I just like...went back to ChiStudios girl and bought A PRINT OF THIS SEXY SHIT and her Oliver Wood button for Avery ♥ 'CAUSE I'M AN FAGGOT. We ran back into Michie and Kyrie, too, and that wasted time until our autograph line happened. A chick a line-bend in front of us that we'd spotted earlier had a bag COVERED in pins, and we struck up a conversation with her that started at pins and went to Vic-bashing and ended with us possibly being persuaded to try to go to Tekkoshocon this year (IF WE CAN STAY WITH YOU, shounenhero???? :D ♥). Katie Morris dressed as Ed from Bebop was also randomly in the line right ahead of us. And then Ellyn Stern who was kind of loopy/boring/not caffeined-up enough yet and Richard Epcar who's just a broseph and KYLE HEBERT WHO WAS UNEXPECTED AND MADE OF WIN signed my scrapbook for me~~ By the time I got to Kyle there wasn't a lot of room and he wanted to use another page and I was like "ooh, you could go across the bottom!" so that's what happened there (thanks, Greg and Ellyn, for eating all the space lawlwhut). We chatted with him a little about how fun he is to follow on Twitter and then left with Michie and Kyrie and Joey to go to the dealers' room and buy some ramune. Once we were there Team JYB was magically there AGAIN. They are legit our friends now. ♥ I got KIWI RAMUNE SO DERICIOUS and Avery got lychee and they were COLD, I HAVE NEVER HAD RAMUNE COLD, pretty awesome.
Then we just kind of...sat around chatting for a while. And Chelsie (formerly known as Kyonko, btw) and I were getting blinded by the sun, and Cheri and a friend of hers came by and borrowed Bobby's badge so they could go get Greg's autograph (which was where Kyrie and Michie were), and Joe was 80% sick and 20% hung over and so was quiet and somehow FREEZING while the rest of us roasted in the sun, and everything everyone was talking about was stuff that Avery and Bobby and Joe and Nick had played/watched/seen/done and that I hadn't, so I just kind of sat there awkwardly and could only contribute every once in a while and felt super uncool. Kyrie came back after a bit but Cheri and her friend...didn't, and Bobby was starting to get really frustrated because he needed his badge back, and at some point Aleece stopped by to say that she and Angelique were leaving and BYE~ and we were like UNTIL NEXT TIME, FAGETS~ and Kyrie was reading Ouran and Avery and Bobby kept trolling Joe with Bobby's wiffle bat and...stuff. Idk I just felt really out of place here and don't remember much of what was said because I was barely part of the conversation because A) I was blinded by the sun and couldn't see anyone and B) I didn't have anything to really contribute because everyone else was cooler than I was, especially Avery. AT ONE POINT Avery kind of sat on Joe and Joe had "ASS" written on his hand and so when Avery sat on him it...stuck out from under her ass and that was funny so we took a photo.
Cheri & Friend FINALLY came back (after I had gone to check on where they were TWICE wtf) and by that point me and Blind Chelsie went and sat on the floor against the wall where we could A) actually see and B) not roast to death, and I chatted with Cheri and Kyrie a bit, but that didn't last long because I just felt even MORE excluded from the other group and Kyrie was like "I'mma leave so if I'm taking you back to campus come with me" and since we'd given up on the parapara panel I was like "??" but Avery said she'd take me back so we stayed. And talked to Bobby some more but I wasn't doing much talking. IDK I just want to be friends with them but I don't feel like I'm cool enough. .___. This happens to me all the time, mostly with cool nerd boys. I'm such a lame girl.
But yeah eventually we had to just...leave. I needed to be on campus in time to take a shower before dinner so I could get some food before the meeting. Avery brought me back and THAT ONE FUCKING SECURITY DUDE totally gave her shit and was like "we don't do dropoffs, you have to be registered as a guest" so I had to register her and it was the gayest shit ever and then she helped me carry my stuff a bit but she just left. And I was so fucking sad because the con was over, and because this really was US MAKING THE CON AWESOME-con. Because it was Shut Up Bobby/Damnit Michie-con. Because it was "THANKS, EVENTS"-con. Because there really wasn't just one nickname to slap on this, and the reason we couldn't do that is because it was just so freaking awesome. The only name to give it is Nekocon. :D
SO SOME CON STATS!:
Merch purchased: Pineapple phone charm (With jingly bell!) to match/troll Greg; TEN CUTE HP BUTTONS and a stupid sexy Harry Potter print from ChiStudios awesome lady; two boxes of banana-choco pocky and some kiwi ramune mmm dericious
Cosplay: Maihara Chizuru on Saturday! (In case you missed the little hint I dropped there, our skit was a parody of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" rewritten about Lobelia molesting and trying to convert Haruhi. Avery provided her own singing voice, but I was Michie and Michie was me, so I had to sing like a man and then it came out of Michie's mouth and that was just freaking hilarious.) AND, slutty Slytherdor on Friday; not really a costume but definitely an outfit that I planned carefully. ffff
Sources quoted: The usual, like our self-made memes (particularly the "Thanks, _____, for all the ______ you provide us with" and "Shut up Bobby!"/"Damnit Michie!" - you guys know I love you, though, don't h8) and Dave Chappelle and the Awesomely Bad videos, and also lots of AVPM and stuff that other people (A&A, Team JYB) had said that was particularly funny
Items trolled: Team JYB, a FFVII group/some Ouran kids, a RED Scout, the Para Para machine, Tanisha's rave falls, the hotel bathroom like always
MVPs: Team JYB, Aleece and Angelique, our Lobelia sisters, Greg as always, the BRO staffers that looked out for us when the fail staffers tried to fuck us over, the other BRO staffer that fixed all our technical difficulties, Kyrie for being made of win, Michelle for hotel rooming it up, Michie for being fierce, a really cute Kyouya cosplayer for soothing Kyrie's fury at a really crappy Kyouya cosplayer
failfolks: ehhTHE USUAL~, the staff that tried to fuck us over, COSPLAYERS IN GENERAL FOR NOT BRINGING IT
And as always, be sure to check out Avery's post of photos. Not a whole lot of them since there...wasn't a whole lot worth photographing, but you can see us being fabulous fierce bitches and having a gay old time~
Now I'm back at school and going to classes again and that just kind of sucks. My one bright spot is FAGGY FAG FAGGING with singingblonde16 about AVPM, since she watched it over the weekend and is JUST AS GAY FOR IT AS I AM, which is kind of extraordinary. She LOVES Joey. And so do I. And she is totally invited to my Me & My Dick party on Friday that will conveniently be immediately after the sisterhood that I have scheduled. TOTALLY AWESOME.
So that was my weekend. How was everyone else's? :D
FUCKING EDIT: Shitty-ish recording but t-there you have it, lawlwhut. MAI WIG.