ADVENTURES! V.1C: LEAKYCON 2014 ETC. (CONCL.)
(v.1b)
Saturday
So then suddenly, Saturday! I feel like Saturday was weird in that a lot happened but at the same time hardly anything happened? What are Saturdays at conventions anyway. We wake up to these dumb Tin Can Brothers tweeting about this #TinCaNinja thing and I was like oh, please, of COURSE this is my mission for the rest of the goddamn day. I think I already had like 2 or 3 stickers? So I was already fucking Ready for it and god we took it to the extreme. It was nice to not have to strap myself into a cosplay in the morning because getting ready only took like half the time, I just wore my Monkey Island shirt~ and like everyone else was either Definitely Sleeping or like had another thing to do? I don't remember? so I offered to go get myself into a spot in the line for the MinaLima (well, or just Lima) panel since we wanted to do that thing! hehe.
When I got to the mainstage room a line was...kind of forming? Like it was weird because some people ALREADY wanted to line up for I think Potter Puppet Pals or JMOMS or some other shit that was happening but I was like "Is this...are you...in line for MinaLima" and we kind of formed a line even though there was no official lineup happening yet. I got a choice spot really close to the front kind of near a potted plant haha eyyy. There were a couple of cool folks sitting ahead of me that I kind of bro'd around with while I was waiting for other people and eventually Hannah and Kelsey? I think were the people who joined me for the thing I think Sera and Gabi were at another thing or else Gabi was and Sera was sleepinnng. But somehow there was a big cluster of people Not Lining Up up near the door and those of us who were forming the nice orderly line were like, no? wtf? We've been here the whole time so I went up and brought this up with the staff person who was up there and she was like "Yeah......" and what ended up happening was they took our nice line first and THEN let the big mob in after us, god bless. Some of the volunteers were real crotchety but a lot of them were really nice and really looked out for us so thank u friend. There were also virtually no RockStars in here so they let us move up super far! The panel was actually way emptier than it was the year before and we were like, boo but also yay?
It was real cute Eduardo is real cute and Jordan Edwards was moderating and he was also real cute. We got some BUTTONS big ol' MinaLima buttons and those were rad and also they showed some really cool upcoming stuff like an edition of Peter Pan designed by them and also some REALLY RAD NOTEBOOKS, I NEED ONE aaahhhh. So then after it was over, they were trying to show some stuff that was up on the front table on the big monitors but it wasn't really working, so they were just gonna bring the table down to floor level and let us all walk past it and look at all the neat stuff~ but also I was like: I have to TinCaNinja Jordan Edwards. SO I DID. hehehehehe. I went after him under the guise of taking a selfie with him to mess with Maddie, which I also totally did, but mid-selfie I stuck that sticker straight onto his back hehehehehe. IT WAS FUNNY BECAUSE I had to touch his back like A LOT to get it to work because the sticker was stupidly super-stuck to my fingers?? BUT HE DIDN'T NOTICE I DON'T THINK heheheeee the greatest. The worst part was actually trying to get a picture of it without being incredibly conspicuous it took for freaking ever l m a o but there you go. The first of MANY.
So after that I think the next thing that was really happening was this like How Fandom is Changing The World panel which hadn't really been on my to-do list but Hannah Hart and Meghan Tonjes were gonna be there so Sera and Kelsey and Hannah were interested~ IDR was Gabi with us for this or did they go do another thing? I do not think so. But um some stuff was happening and people were walking around and stuff and I don't remember exactly the order that things went down in but Kelsey and I were holding down the fort in a place where a line Was Not Forming just chillin on this bench lol. Some me and Kelsey times on the bench while I kept my phone plugged in (SPOILERS MY PHONE DIED A LOT AT LEAKYCON annoying as hecke tbh). I think Hannah and Sera were getting food! yeah! Bc Hannah brought me some Combos hehe thanks friend. And maybe Sera had to go back to the room for something because she came back late? for the thing? I don't remember. Anyway after looking out for this girl's huge Sherlock cosplay coat while she peed (lol) and trying to dodge that same annoying volunteer girl who hijacked my cosplay panel, we eventually end up I think the legit front row for this panel thing and it was real cool. It was Andrew Slack, Lauren Bird, a cool person from US Quidditch, and then Meghan and Hannah. They talked about a lot of stuff that is super legitimate but is just so not the side of anything that I do? LIKE I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD DO IT but a lot of how I feel about stuff like this is like, I can barely get my own shit together, that takes So Much out of me mentally and emotionally, that it's even that much harder for me to do those same kinds of things on the behalf of other people. So I feel guilty for not giving back more but I have to take the right measures to take care of my own self I think. Shrugs idk idk. It was cool to hear them all talk tho bc they're all very articulate and passionate and stuff and I respect all that business. Neato~~ (My notes say "quidditch girl is cute u know wut they're all cute D:" and that about sums it up lmao)
Then Sera, Hannah and Kelsey were doing the Hannah Hart photobooth so I kind of hung out in the vendor room with Gabi instead! They were eating some vegetables and rice thing that they were nice enough to share a little bit with me, mm broccoli~ and talking to an older woman who makes really rad HP and fandom doll clothes on Etsy. So that was neat!! I also ran into Brandon again but just very briefly, we were really bad at seeing each other the whole time lol. I think this is actually the last time I saw him at all. And I kinda browsed the dealers some, and finally bought my wand~~ :D 13.5 inches, cedar (and laminate but MM IT SMELLS GOOD), with a rly simple shaft/shape and some cool green woodgrain stuff on the handle, and then my core/"essence" was gryphon talon and I got a nice red bag :3 Golly Mr. Laslo is a cool dude. I respect him a lot and stuff. And then we stopped by Ann Arbor Tees I think and LOADED UP ON TINCANBROS STICKERS BECAUSE IT WAS TINCANINJA TIME oh man we got some folks goooddddd. We got Eric Kahn Gale REAL good with a two-pronged attack wherein Gabi ran up behind him and caught him with the sticker like "Oh! Eric!!" and started talking to him and I came in from the other side to secure the photograph. But then some good chats with EKG too mostly about his new book and how hype we are for it, he's such a cool dude~~ Then also, after the photobooth shenanigans were done and we were reunited with the rest of our posse, Corey. hehehe. We were like, how on earth are we going to get Corey, TO NINJA THE NINJA, but we actually did it pretty smoothly AND someone else had already beaten us to it. Jade was like, There's a sticker on your back, and he kind of sighed and was like "of course there is," and glared at us, and we were like IN OUR DEFENSE WE WERE NOT THE FIRST.... good times good times. Also Jade and Eric showed us dog pics!! Of Bowser and Ender!!! IT WAS GREAT. Lol Jade was trying to be chill like "Yeah Chris Allen is dog-sitting for us.......ok let's be real chris lives in our spare room." lolol.
While these shenanigans were happening people were kind of congregating around the open mic space in the vendor room because I guess Jim Povolo was gonna do a thing! So even though we were worried about like a line forming in another place for another thing we just kind of said screw it and stayed for Jim's thing. It was kind of stand-up comedy but also kind of sad?? It was basically a trial run of his Open-Heart Comedy thing that got livestreamed, if anyone watched that - he spoke super candidly about his mental illness struggs and gave us a lot of feelings, and also: Animorphs. I cheered LOUDLY every time he mentioned Animorphs and we had like a fucking bonding moment about this lmao HE RETWEETED ME. Sera and I ended up sitting right behind Brian Rosenthal for all of this and we #tincaninja'd him as well, along with a total stranger because why not man. God bless. This was a great thing that we had not planned on doing that we just did anyway and I was very happy about it yay~~
So the line we were trying to get in was I guess the JMOMS line because we'd found out the day before that they were NOT going to clear the mainstage seating between JMOMS and Starship Requiem, so we were gonna have to go to JMOMS to get decent Requiem seats. BOOOOOO. I just. My sense of humor is not hella compatible with Moses's? And also I feel like once you've seen one JMOMS you've kind of seen them all. I think he's got this bad habit/crutch of leaning on jokes he knows fandom/people in general already finds funny and just playing them out because the same crowd will give the same laugh. Shrug. So like, Wrong Direction/the Warbler boys did a thing (this was actually when Hannah and I got up and peed lol oops) and HE MADE OUT WITH TESSA ONSTAGE AGAIN, AGAIN!! STOP GIVING ME THIS and really the best part of the whole show was Jon Cozart, and I was like, can this please just be the Jon Cozart One-Man Showzart because that's what I'm really here for tbh. snore.
BUT THEN REQUIEM!!! We were able to move up a little once the crowd thinned/reformed and actually had pretty legitimate seats, although of course Gabi was all the way up from with Arianna as per usual. and like okaaayyy I was mostly live-tweeting the best parts of this but here's a bulleted list of the best of what I can remember:
- More jokes about the Tootsie Noodles/Horses feud which are like MY HEART because that's "my" joke from the original starship god bless, I love these fools
- Pretty much anything that ever came out of Nick Lang's mouth - he was doing the stage directions/semi-narrating and would also just insert like parenthetical asides like "That's like a racist joke against robots, so he's really offended" or "That's the noise Mega-Girl makes when she's like, apprehensive" or "Tootsie is really stupid." and they were all PERFECT hashtag #NickLangExplains god
- Tootsie's dad's name is apparently - remember, What You Do + What You Love - Eats Dicks. Because his mom is Dicks. Because that's what she does. THESE HUGE FOOLS
- BHoldz playing Mega-Girl's douchey ex bf ThorX-Zero, who has an "enormous missile launcher," and these were some lines Meredith could barely even make it through oh my god she was SO upset and laughing SO hard because he may have an enormous missile launcher, but, I shit you not, "Enormous missile launchers can hurt people." NO ONE COULD CONTAIN THEIR SHIT so much was happening
- SO MUCH JULIA!!! I LOVE SPECS I kind of want to cosplay requiem!Specs who is legit The Neuromancer and is inside The Sprawl hacking erryone's shit omg babe ♥
- Except for I also kind of want to cosplay PHOTON RAY MEGA-GIRL, AKA THE BEST EVER Denise as Mega-Girl's older sister!! who is apparently identical to her in every way except has a different face plate from a third party where her nose is tinier/more animu and thus she is "Even Cuter." I actually got Sera to save me the url photon-ray and I might switch for a little bit because it was SO GREAT I think if I cosplay her I'm just gonna build her white armor plates in a slightly different array and get a shorter, side-parted wig instead of the longer + bangs situation. Denise and Julia forever basicallyyyyyy
- Jim was Mastermold Mega-Girl, the family matriarch, and I'm pretty sure that's all I have to say
- Tessa Netting playing Darren Criss, literally Darren Criss the human was in it and this is the only time I have ever found her funny/the only thing it would have been acceptable for her to do. People were like "this makes Tessa an official starkid!!" tho and I was like, No
- Since it was just a stage reading and they had no music, every time there would have been a song, they just patched in a tonally-similar Jim and the Povolos song!! That was real fun because we were all singing along and being silly (and by "we were all" I mean "me and Hannah were" but hahaha it was the best). They closed out/played us out of the room with Don't Go and I jammed to it like the rest of the goddamn day heee~
(If you want more details about Requiem, PS, just ask! I'll remember what I can for you!)
I don't remember what our original plans after this were but Hannah, Sera and I were separated from Gabi and Kelsey so we went to the top of this escalator to make sure they'd be able to see us when they appeared? and the StarKids were also coming up this escalator while we were just loitering at the top so we kind of high-fived them all as they went past and told them how awesome they were and stuff and that was really fun hehe. They're all babes basically. Pat Brady was bringing up the rear kind of sighing all-suffering and I was like "lol good luck!" and she goes "It's like herding cats!" Bless her. Then we saw Kelsey and Gabi and were waving at them like Yeah! We're up here! but they were waving back at us like, No! Come back down! and we realized what was happening -
Earlier that day Denise and Meredith had tweeted about using Leaky people to shoot part of the upcoming Loved and Alive video!! and it was happening right then at the bottom of the escalator! So we turned around and went right back down, and stood in this big crowd of silly people dancing and shouting and getting hype and happy. They had to do two shots, one of us from behind Denise as she went down and back up, and then one of Denise from our angle too, so Brian was filming and basically we all just got to be super in love with Denise. WHICH WAS GREAT BECAUSE I AM SUPER IN LOVE WITH HER. I hope the video finally pans out after all this because it was so much fun!! yay!!!
So THEN we'd finally found Arianna, who was strongly encouraging us to go back to the Ann Arbor Tees booth because Ricky was giving away Starship Requiem badge ribbons for people who correctly answered Starship trivia. We'd already gotten ribbons from Samie or someone but we were like, Obviously we have to prove how much Starship trivia we know, let's fucking do this. SO WE DID. Omg we're literal starkid trash like I think Sera and Hannah were even embarrassed by me, Gabi and Kelsey at this point for being so forward and obnoxious but WE DIDN'T CARE. Who was in the romance plot that got cut? Specs and Krayonder obviously. Which actors puppeteered Pincer's claws? Meredith, Lauren and Nick, and Nick was usually whichever claw was closer to the rest of the action because he was more expressive with the puppet stuff. Name the other StarKid actors who appeared in the opening video sequence? AJ, Richard, Britney, Arielle, Chris, Brian, Tyler, Devin, Nick, AND POMME KOCH, WE WERE VERY SERIOUS ABOUT POMME KOCH EVEN THOUGH HE'S NOT TECHNICALLY A STARKID laughs forever. Ricky was so done with us omg. He asked us what G.L.E.E. stood for and we said it in creepy unison, and then I was like "Nooo, I wish my friend Madeline was here, she's got this SICK G.L.E.E. logo tattoo, it's so badass" and Ricky was like "Sick...yes. She sounds...really sick." PFFFFT OKAY ASSHOLE. God we were the worst. We would have stayed there doing it forever too if the vendor room hadn't literally been closing at that point. whoooops. (Also I bought a Tin Can Bros tanktop!! hooray :D)
It was DEFINITELY Time To Eat A Food, and we figured our best bet that didn't involve hiking a mile was just the restaurant thinger inside the Rosen Centre, where people could get pizza and I could get a sandwich and everything could be fine. (Also: Where S1 of Glee was apparently playing on a TV in the real-ass hotel restaurant and we were like ewwwww, Schuester, ewww Finn and Quinn making out. A fucking timewarp.) The line for this ended up taking longer than desired though and Sera and Hannah both really wanted to shower before the dance, so they kinda grabbed their food to go and went back early, and Gabi and Kelsey and I stayed and ate for a little while before we joined them. AND BOY WAS I SAD THAT HANNAH AND SERA HAD ALREADY LEFT, BECAUSE LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED ON THE SKYBRIDGE WITH MARK OSHIRO.
Mark Oshiro and Gabi had kind of semi-befriended each other earlier in the midst of some shitty stuff that had happened re: registration and OATC that Gabi was trying to sort out - basically what happened was an email containing all of their registration information, including their gender identity/preferred pronouns, got sent to Gabi's mom. When that was not information Gabi was particularly interested in sharing with their mom and leakycon why did you do this??? Mark had heard about the situation and was also pissed about it so they were on a customer service crusade or some shit, idk how this all panned out in the end but long story short, Mark and Gabi bros for life or something. So we're done with our food and heading back to our hotel (this was such a dumb thing - go to the Rosen Centre for food, walk back across one skybridge, THROUGH the convention, to the OTHER skybridge, THROUGH our hotel - the fricken worst) when, on skybridge 1, we pass right by Mark and Gabi stops to talk with him. And we're like, oh, we're gonna have to TinCaNinja him, which we do in the sloppiest possible way, but we end up getting absorbed into a real-ass conversation with him and he just tells us...everything. First about life-altering mini-golf.
Apparently it's the worst that's ever happened, Hawaiian Rumble Adventure Golf (I just found their website and oh man). There's like, two courses, one's supposed to be easy and one harder? So they went with the easy one because they're pitiful and it was NOT EASY, APPARENTLY. A detailed account of one hole with a bridge? but the bridge is shitty? and there's a gap in the middle you have to clear, but the felt green is peeling up on one side, so if you don't hit the ball hard enough, it just curves up the peeled-up part and rolls right back at you. But, if you hit it TOO hard, it clears the gap, bounces off the brick border on the other side, and comes back at the bridge, but the felt isn't peeling on the OTHER side of the gap, so it just falls right down into the water. So Mark is serving as Water Ball Retriever and he just...slips...and sits down right into the river. "Sits down on a river" is exactly how he phrased it and he's such a character/story teller and we are laughing SO HARD, FRIEND, NO. So they were doing SO badly and it was going SO slowly that they decided to just all putt at once, just to save time and for shits? And they all went at this one hole and ALL THE BALLS FELL OVER THE SIDE TO ONE SIDE into the "harder" (which mark says is actually easier) course where a like, eight or nine year old boy was playing, and Mark said, VERBATIM, THESE WORDS CAME OUT OF HIS MOUTH, AS THESE GOLF BALLS FROM MARK & CO. ARE RAINING DOWN ON HIM: "There are so many balls, and I just want to put them all in my mouth." !!!!!?!?!?! SO MUCH IS HAPPENING. (Melissa Anelli walks by right when he's telling a dirty-sounding story and she just goes I DON'T WANNA KNOW and he was like NO MELISSA IT'S NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE IT WAS MINI-GOLF omg too much.) Also apparently at one point some balls went over the edge/fence to outside of the thing? And Mark was like "You know you can't lose your ball! If you lose it you can't keep playing and you have to go back and pay to get another one and we gotta have them!" So Mark apparently climbed OVER this fence, out of the golf place entirely, and then BROKE BACK INTO THE PLACE with people's balls from where he went to save them. WE COULD NOT BELIEVE. We were losing our SHIT god I am not conveying this anywhere near well enough to give the Full Effect of Mark's whole rant about these things but rest assured we believed every word he said about his existential crisis at Hawaiian Rumble Adventure Golf. GOD.
He also told us about...BeakyCon???
SO THE STORY GOES Some volunteers were tired and cracked out and shooting the shit and were talking, I think, about registration? and concocted the following scenario: What if, when everyone showed up, we all just had fake beaks on, and we were talking about the whole event as if it was about birds and was called BeakyCon, and like, what is leakycon do you mean beakycon?? So cue laughs. Then later when people were more tired/more drunk a series of circumstances unfolded in which one person remembered they had... a Thing, and someone said, "Oh, Mark will do it!" and mark was like "mark will do what now?" and someone goes up to their hotel room and brings down (drumroll for suspense) (this is not suspenseful at all because this happened weeks ago and everyone has seen it already) an Angry Birds costume. a child-sized Angry Birds costume. BUT THEY WRANGLE MARK INTO IT ANYWAY, and they were taking pics during the process and there's supposedly a good one and a bad one and the bad one looks "like the angry bird is giving birth to me" and somehow the bad one is the one that got tweeted instead of the good one but yeah, Yellow Angry Bird Mark is the head of BeakyCon now, or something, that's a real thing that's happening. And of course the costume was definitely going to be making another appearance. So yeah TL;DR Mark enlightened us to the gospel of BeakyCon and we were beyond ready for it, helllll yes. (Also we did totally #tincaninja him though. Right on his backpack. hehehe.)
Back to the room to get ready for the dance tho!! I was mad cute. Slytherin statuusssss and yeah I knew I was going to regret the shoes and I DID regret the shoes but I looked fly as hell so ultimately I didn't care? ya feel? Right. But omg we took legit forever getting ready and we didn't get over to the dance until like, ten. Whoops? But tbh this was all the jammin time I really needed. Dancing to some stuff, laughing at some drunk guests, chillin with Mark, we met Miss Rhode Island and she was really cool, did some more dancing, and then SUDDENLY THINGS WERE HAPPENING AND I WAS MISSING THEM:
A) THE DRUNK COREY/RICKY DANCE OFF. Kelsey comes RUSHING up to me, Sera and Hannah shouting "DO NONE OF YOU HAVE YOUR PHONES??" (I did not have my phone; I had no pockets, and I can't typically do the stuff-things-in-ur-boobs business, so I legit did not bring anything but my own body) because apparently she'd been trying to summon us to this corey/ricky dance-off the whole time it was happening and we MISSED IT. ONE OF THE GREATEST TRAGEDIES OF MY LIFE TBH. Fortunately, despite Corey and Ricky's continued insistence that it never happened, there is ample photo and video evidence to preserve it forever. But goddddd. (It was great because earlier in the night I had watched a couple girls try to teach Ricky the I'm A Little Teapot dance, FOR SOME REASON, and then during this dance-off, it resurfaced. Booty Had Me Like, I'm A Little Teapot. god, ricky's ass for leakycon MVP.)
B) Jade fucking Ingardona. Also drunk, also beautiful. It was a while before I managed to hop on this train but then I DID and she is just letting it all out, telling all the stories and being delightful and intoxicated and like, I could barely hear anything, because the music was loud and I wasn't exactly welcomed into the immediate/close circle of listening people, but some stuff about Traci hooking her up with Eric - her options being Eric and Jeff, and she goes, I'm so glad I met Eric first, because me and Jeff are THE SAME PERSON we're both assholes, Eric's so nice. And some stuff about the prettiest candy girl and how one day Jade is gonna come home and just find Jeff's skin hanging in the closet because she will have skinned him, and she's not even going to call the police first, she's going to call Jen and Teia because they REQUESTED that THEY BE THE FIRST TO KNOW, oh my fucking god, and just, Eric being a big crybaby and crying at everything, and Eric being gay for Darren apparently, and lord she's just. Jade is everything guys.
Other dance highlights include Jordan Edwards and his boo being REAL cute together, Nick Lang doing Gangnam Style with a bunch of us in a big dance circle, finally getting to meet the LeakyCat, drunk BRosenthal leading a dance train, drunk Corey pointing dramatically at/serenading drunk Julia.... typical dance shenanigans basically. Then big Esther Earl Day cries and videos and CONFETTI and stuff and then two super-impassioned rounds of Total Eclipse of the Heart and then, after checking back in on drunk Jade and making sure she was gonna get back okay (Nick was taking her, sweetheart) AND me totally accosting Jim Povolo for a serious discussion about Animorphs for which he blessedly humored me (he probably thought I was drunk, which I'm fine with), we were OUT. We sat on the floor outside a little while just chillin and drinking some water to kind of get back on track, and chat with friends a bit, and this very intoxicated-sounding person who we THOUGHT was definitely a woman but then they spoke and we were less sure stumbled past us and just goes "Avada Kedavra!" RIGHT AT ME!! LIKE JUST...KILLS ME RIGHT LIKE THAT LIKE WOW THANKS WTF and they stumble along and do it again to another person and that person turns out to be New Friend Maddie? and I was like MADDIE....THEY KILLED US...WE HAVE TO BE GHOSTS TOGETHER NOW WTF and we were so scandalized and offended omg haha. Then we all finally wandered back to the hotel room in a big posse, my crew and Arianna's crew and some house-elves I think looking for rides back to where we were going on the golf carts and they came for us and took us back. How lovely.
The room chills were extra-great that night for some reason, but oh man so nice like Gabi had this chocolate frog from WWOHP that we literally just like...passed around nibbling chunks off like puff puff pass with this chocolate frog so that was p great, and Sera had put tape on her super-blistered foot before the ball and Kelsey was like "I love your tape foot" which was hilarious and quotable, and we just had a bunch of long chats about random topics like our grade school/public school systems growing up, and which Little Debbie's snack cakes were the best, and just about StarKid and how weird Jim Povolo really truly is but how he's also so super great, and gaahhhh idk, FRIENDSHIPZ. How many times do I have to reiterate how much I love you guys...because I will do it. All of the times. Forever.
And then at last, sleep. I'd been sleeping pretty badly with my tiny sliver of the three-person bed and I decided to try to hack a chair-bed? I took the extra blanket and pillow, the armchair, and the desk chair, but the desk chair was a little too high to line up great with the armchair, and ultimately this was a super failed plan. I slept really badly and woke up in the night, moved to the floor, woke up again closer to morning and moved back into the chairs, and then as soon as Hannah got up and moving in the morning, crawled into Hannah's side of the bed. 0/10 would not recommend. As poorly as I was doing in the bed the chairs were even worse somehow. But I guess I had to try? lol fail.
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Sunday
MOVING ON. homestretch! Sunday was mega-chill day as it is at all cons. It was even better because we knew we had another night in the hotel and didn't have to spend too much time getting our shit together in the morning. I wore extra comfy clothes and gave no fucks, god bless. I wanted to go to Pale & Twitchy, so I was up and at 'em the earliest of everyone I guess? To get in line for that, or whatever, and then I was just gonna stay over for the StarKid thing and then closing ceremonies. But they had to move P&T out of mainstage? Yeah I guess it turns out Sony freaks out if you try to play a game through them on a screen that's bigger than a certain size, for some reason. haha weird. So they put it down in a panel room, but down THERE, they were having a hard time getting the internet to load. Plus Anthony wasn't even awake yet pfffft and Melissa kept messaging him trying to get him With It and the whole thing was just #failuretolaunch and I was worried about getting a shit seat for the starkid thing so after a while I just bailed. Some other time, Melissa + GLaDOS. heh. So I found my other friends in that other line and we did the thing hooray.
This thing...was...messy?? Ahahaha. Like I thought it was going to be a lot more than it was, deleted scenes and whatnot, but they didn't even have anything to put up on the monitors video-wise. They kicked it off with that Bonnie Gruesen AVPM prologue that literally everyone has heard already - BHoldz was like, we were trying to find this and it was really hard to find, and Gabi was like, Did you even ask because I bet someone in the fandom would have just delivered it right to you oops. Then a lot of the rest of it was just dumb stories of stuff they cut out that's all like! stories they've told before!! A letdown. They talked about Nick as Damien in AVPSY which was kinda funny and also about some Colin Creevey shit that was going to happen in Get Back to Hogwarts before they cut him where like. IDEK but Colin was going to be some kind of ladies'-man crooner? like that was the joke? and BHoldz sang us a line of this with Colin being like "A heart as big as Peru~~ A heart as big as SPAIN~~" and it was Too Much like please stop omg overwhelming. Also Jim was being super weird and funny the whole time he was kind of the highlight of the whole thing.
But THEN at the END they did this thing that was like Jim doing a reading of the Dragonfae Cards WHATEVER THE FUCK it isssss, and they did one first for just Julia because #juliasfunweekend and then one for the team as a whole. Julia's was funny/sad and silly it was talking about like, letting all her sadness out by communing with a body of water in some way like a river or the ocean or then of course they started making jokes about the pool, and to cry with the water so it all becomes one or some other shit BASICALLY at one point BHoldz was just like "Shut the hell UP let's CRY IN THE POOL!" ahahaha. julia, babe. BUT THEN THE ONE FOR THE TEAM AS A WHOLE, THIS WAS SO MUCH, IT WAS ALL LIKE talking about the coming war?? and how people were going to have to make compromises because of the war?? aND ALL THIS STUFF THAT WAS BASICALLY JUST LEGIT ABOUT THE JULIA/HOLDEN-LANG SCHISM and Julia's FACE through the WHOLE THING was just like, utterly flabbergasted amazed huge baffled mouth-open smile like she was TRIPPIN on it. Eric too a little, Nick (or was it Jim? IDR) was just reading the whole thing out loud and they couldn't HANDLE it julia's face was EVERYTHING. AMAZING. I wish I could find a reference for this stuff online so I could share it a little better but oh man it was just fucking spot-on and Julia knew it, and everyone knew it. so insane.
Also, y'know, StarKid is a cult.
We stayed through in the room after that for the Pottercast thingie and that was fun because in addition to Melissa, John and Frak they got Mark up on the stage too, and they were talking about WWOHP and some Pottermore Quidditch Cup stuff and they called out that aforementioned Celestina Warbeck audience volunteer and it was just funsy fun times. We got on a big tangent about like wizard groceries/wizard produce?? and that was kind of cool, and also started talking about SPEW and whether Hermione continued on with that (she did, we looked it up), and overall it was not QUITE as great as the one last year but it was definitely enjoyable. Then through after THAT, still in mainstage with that baller staff guy who was in charge of mainstage stuff, we love you dude, for closing ceremonies. All Right!! They did this cool review of The Past Five LeakyCons or whatever and had individual special guests come speak to important parts of each one, and the slideshows were kinda crappy but the guests had really great things to say (dylan ♥), and then, at the end, they dropped that great big GeekyCon bomb on us.
Aight cool, I guess. There were a LOT of thoughts and emotions on it right when it happened but I guess in the long run my opinion is the classic Corey Lubowich "I mean, it was fine." I don't HATE it. I think it's fine typed/written but I don't particularly enjoy saying it out loud. I'm not overly fond of the new logo but it mostly doesn't matter to me at all. I guess the main thing is, they were talking about it, and I knew a name change was coming, so I tried to come up with the best one and see if I was going to be right, and the one I came up with was ConVergence. Like, all the fandoms, converging! Cool! And I literally came up with that in about two seconds, and I still think it's better than GeekyCon. Shrug times infinity. The thing I was actually a lot MORE angry about that I will probably make a separate post about later is the fact that next year, it's back in Orlando. I really see NO point in having it in Orlando EXCEPT for the fact that WWOHP is right there. There aren't any other redeeming qualities to Orlando in July/August so...yuck basically, ugh. BUT WHAT CAN YA DO :| I don't want to dwell on this because I'm actually not THAT strongly opinionated about it all, I just think it's dumb.
So after that we kind of filtered down into the rest of the convention center because the con was pretty much over. Did we see Mark again? We might have seen Mark again, or some other friends, who knows. I saw Lizzie and Jordan all over the place just here and there saying hey and then walking away like 800 times over the course of the weekend so really it's impossible to tell. I think the main priority at this point was that a couple people needed to get some food, and literally the only convenient place was just that spot in the Rosen Centre again, so we went over there and got some sandwiches and kind of decompressed/debriefed, especially about closing ceremonies and the whole GeekyCon thing. We ran back into Arianna's group too, but they were just finishing their food, so we didn't overlap TOO too long with them at this time, just enough to all have some bitch-sesh time together and make plans for later to play silly games or some shit, and then they cleared out to do...some other thing I don't remember. And it was just the five of us, some people eating but like me not really because I was still set on us all getting dinner together, so mostly we were just hogging a big corner booth in the hotel restaurant and talking and goofing off. It was nice!! Also Ricky had apparently given Samie ALL OF THE TINCANBROS STICKERS, and she left us with over HALF of them so we just had this giant pile of them - Samie definitely covered an entire coke bottle with them like wallpaper ( This is a trash). What are we even going to do with all these stickers Ricky. Who even is Ricky Winowiecki.
A bunch of StarKids/other guests kept walking by and we would say like one thing to them and just let them on their way - like Julia came and we were like, Did you cry in some water yet? hahaha. Or BROSENTHAL WAS THE WEIRDEST BECAUSE LIKE We said Hey, and he said Hey back, but the way he was walking around our table he honestly moved toward us in a way that super looked like he was just going to like...sit down at our table??? This was WEIRD lmao brosenthal is so much weirder than I think anyone understands he is just a strange dude. Corey came by and I was like "Corey, why did Ricky leave us with all these stickers, why are there so many??" and he was just like "I don't know...I...I don't know." and he looked DEAD and DONE WITH EVERYTHING and I immediately felt bad for bothering him at all like he just looked so fucked. poor friend. The one person we did have a longer chat with was Jade, just to like...recap our great times with her drunk ass omg and she was like SO APOLOGETIC ABOUT IT and we were like no friend, honestly, no big deal (one of her main qualms was she felt bad for telling a story that possibly made BHoldz look like a total asshole bc she didn't want to like shatter our image of him and we were like...jade....we know brian is an asshole it's not a thing pfft) but YEAH she was really cute and our little chat was great. Slytherin bros. (We shared with her the Ricky/Corey dance-off situation and she's like "Oh, that's great, crotch-to-crotch. Surrounded by fangirls and you choose crotch-to-crotch that's just perfect like of course why not.") Also I saw! the commercial! that Dylan Marron is in!! And had A Moment but no one cares about night vale except for you emily calm down lol. Overall this was a great lil time for us and Kelsey has a good Brian Holden story to tell and we kept coming up with random puns off LeakyCon/GeekyCon/BeakyCon to be our potential cosplay group for next year like Kelsey's PeakyCon because of Colorado mountains and I'm GreekyCon because of sorority stuff hehehe. (also I think Sera had to go throw up?? oh no friend. those leftover potato wedges we ate off Jess's plate just straight did not agree with her I guess.) The last Legit Person we saw was MAUREEN and it was great because Maureen is super great (although oops we may have been bitching about a Lit-related thing like RIGHT when she was in earshot sorry friend we love you) and several people wanted legit pictures with her of course but we also, of course, TinCaNinja'd her. Our last great success of the con, hehehe. Cappin the whole thing off.
Finally we gave up on this and trickled back to the first floor of the convention center to FINALLY do what we'd been saying we were gonna do all weekend and playing Telestrations with Arianna's gang (which at this point was just Arianna, Samie, and Jess). THIS WAS ACTUALLY PRETTY GREAT BECAUSE WE WERE ALL like, JUST good enough to not fuck up SOME of the time but still not good enough to not fuck up ALL of the time (insert pussytime joke). hehehehe. Also we were there for A LONG ASS TIME like we were some of the last people in the convention center at all? It was us and this one other larger group of people that we kept running into who I guess had played some games with about half of my group earlier in the convention and there was a dude named Spencer(?) that they kept calling Ferris because of some Ferris Bueller thing look I don't know the full story. ANYWAY BASICALLY what I'm getting at is that we had the con center relatively ~to ourselves? So we started with regular Telestrations like out of the box that comes with it but then progressed to shitty starkid ones and I drew a really excellent picture of Jeff Blim that Samie was very pleased with and Hannah put "Ricky's Ass" for one of hers and overall A++ would play again. But only if I get to be timekeeper because Arianna sucks at it. Also while we were playing some staff people came over and just gifted us ALL THE EXTRA REGISTRATION SWAG? We got eight million "let's geek out" badge ribbons that we converted into #straussycon and #beakycon ribbons (I had "#TROP" and "I guess I gotta find this kid a pair of scissors!" and maybe one other, someone had "Terguson," god knows what else, lmao), eight hundred million MinaLima flyers, some extra tumblr stickers and stuff, god, it was a lot and we just fucking took it. I played "Where's The Dog???" in one round and Kelsey and Hannah were like, the other half of these people don't know what that is, but everyone got it! so ha! Also I kept writing unnecessary comments on other people's like for one AJ-related thing I wrote "A Very Potter Musical: Me And My Dick Heart" which was I guess not a joke that everyone got oops my bad, and for one that was Robert Manion I added "...with a fish" at the bottom and ahahaha. GOOD TIMES BASICALLY. (Also Samie and I legit almost stole some segways. The con was OVER we were not afraid of getting busted if we were ever gonna do it now was the time....)
We were clearing out to head back to the hotel and stuff and right as we were leaving there was this ONE other tiny group of people, which turned out to be those hecka legit Ravenclaw and Slytherin Quidditch cosplayers! They had a shitton of snacks left so they offered us our pick of them and we took...all of the Rice Krispie treats omg there were A LOT and also Jess took some authentic American Easy Mac because apparently it's different from Australian Easy Mac in a way that was significant enough to merit taking it. good 2 know. So we paraded back to the hotel and along the way saw Mark AGAIN and we were so glad because Mark is GREAT and apparently they were going back to Existential Mini-Golf again which we could not advise and yet we were also super into. these guys. Then Arianna and Jess were LEAVING :( and there were sad hugs and things but Samie was staying with us bc she didn't have a place for Sunday night and we were just letting her. and stuff. So we finally all get up to the room and we're like. okay. we wanted to all go get dinner together. WHERE. BUT as usual it's nigh impossible because Kelsey's picky-chan and Gabi's vegetarian and also it was SUNDAY NIGHT so places weren't open like usual and the longer we took deliberating, the fewer things were even open, till finally it was just too damn late to do ANYTHING and I was sad because it had been my dumb idea that I was pushing for in the first place, a Nice Dinner With Everyone after the convention was over, and I felt kind of responsible for the fact that we all got fucked on it rather than just sucking it up and doing something less nice more promptly. Boo. So our only real option was back to the places in the Rosen Centre again so we just hiked over there again. That other group was still in the convention center and we were just the only people there and we were so amused by it, shoutin' out to each other, having a fucking party, and so we got some more sad food at the sad food place (we never even tried the real-ass restaurant because lol poor) and huddled together to eat it and people watch and be pathetic lmao. Apparently at this point Hannah got her hair complimented by Jackie Emerson and didn't even realize who it was. haaaa.
So then BACK to the hotel FOR GOOD I guess and we saw Mark AGAIN and they were BACK from golf and it was a goddamn adventure, and we were so happy to see him just one more time because we love these dudes, and also awkward British Joe gave me an awkward card, and stuff was going on, and everything was silly. BEAKYCON. At BeakyCon the Birdfighters get together to combat World Duck. You heard it here folks. I'm so ready for this next year tbh let's make it weerrrkkk.
I guess in the hotel I decided I was going to go on an adventure to do laundry? Mostly because like I had enough clean clothes tbh BUT my clothes that were NOT clean smelled bad enough that I didn't really want to pack them in with the clean ones because they would just...become dirty. The hotel directory said there was laundry on our floor so I went to go find it but I could NOT and I was like, Am I just a fucking idiot? What the fuck?? so I called down to the front desk to discover that laundry was in the WORKS for the fifth floor but was not there YET so I had to go to floor 3 or floor 7. laaaaame~. So I went up to the seventh floor I guess and had JUST enough money to run a load of wash...but not...to get any soap...OOPS. WELP I GUESS that's how that's gonna go, washing with water only, who the fuck am I. Came back to the room to find everyone opening KINDER EGGS that Gabi got us in Italy and most of the toys were inconsequential (mine was a tiny panther and I was so mad it wasn't the tiny tiger bc tigerfucker, and idk even where this panther ended up I may have lost it entirely whoops) BUT HANNAH'S WAS this fancy fucking TRIANGLE FRISBEE THING?? It was soooo dumb omg and Sera put it together for her and then we tried to play with it out in the hallway but it did not want to fly and was a weird piece of shit. And we were so entertained/cracked out/GIGGLY we kept having to shush each other and remind ourselves that we were in a hotel and OTHER PEOPLE were there and we were just like, losing our shit bc this thing would fly into the walls and the LIGHT FIXTURES we thought we were going to break something, oh my godddddd. Too much. Probably because we're all high off the ridic sugar from the Kinder Eggs + THE MILLION RICE KRISPIE TREATS WE ATE we had a fucking rice krispie treat party. bless.
My laundry was done I guess and I was gonna put it in the drier but the two driers on the seventh floor one was occupied and the other was BROKEN?? so I had to take my HUGE ARMFUL of WET CLOTHES down to the THIRD floor to use their drier and wtf was even happening, my laundry adventure became way too much of an adventure. And I reeeallly wanted to just go to sleep already because everyone else was mostly but I had to stay awake until my laundry was done and it was the worst. I guess I finally made it, though. Samie was literally planning to sleep on the window sill that LITERALLY had a sign on it that SAID "For your safety please do not stand or sit on granite" (Kelsey called it the ILLEGAL GRANITE one time just by a slip of the tongue and then we just kept calling it that just to be assholes lol) but like, we had been sitting on it all weekend and Samie was just straight going to sleep on it. LOL POWER TO YA. (When I woke up she was on the floor. She was not, you will note, in a chair bed. Chair bed was a terrible idea why did I do that to myself.)
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Monday
Was pretty much just packing day/get the fuck out of here day. We didn't have to check out until 12:30 I think which was great because we could sleep a little more, and then we packed like crazy people and high-tailed it. (I think actually Samie left way earlier than the rest of us bc of how early her flight was. By the time I woke up For Real instead of just drifting at like 7:30 she had totally disappeared.) Monday was just so WHATEVER because MOST of what we did was just...sit in the lobby...because we had already checked out of our room but our flights weren't until later so there was no point in doing anything. We saw a sad, solitary Hufflepuff girl doing the exact same thing and I tried to invite her over to join us but nothing really came of it, she just ate a couple of my crackers and zoned back into her headphones. Gabi and Kelsey were the first to leave because of when their flights were, so after some hang seshes where we lurked all over twitter, discovered that a TURTLE CONVENTION was arriving as the next event after us (a woman seriously asked me if I had dyed my hair green for the turtle convention omg), and cried on each other a little about all the Separation Sads, they departed in their Uber and left just me, Hannah and Sera as the Other Three-Fifths of Lang and the EKGS the way it had been p much the whole convention. Soon enough, after more trolling around, enduring horrible construction noises, eating our last sad hotel eatery sandwiches, and dealing with a goofy, potentially-law-breaking Uber driver (seriously who was this guy talking nonsense about the Harry Potter films and totally not really knowing how to get to the airport and cutting through an off-limits service road), we did the same thing.
GOODBYE LEAKYCON 2014. GOOD TIMES WERE HAD BY ALL. I bought a great wand and a dumb tanktop and a pygmy puff; I made a great new Hufflepuff friend outta Phoenix; I stuck stickers on total strangers; I went to fucking Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade. Mark, Jade, Ricky and all our other special guest buddies were wonderful, and they far outweighed the two or three really annoying people that I encountered. And most of all, I was reminded why I do the shit I do - because sometimes, amazing shit like this comes of it. I guess I'm going to GeekyCon next year but it's still LeakyCon in my heart. Hopefully. Whatever. ♥♥♥
Stay tuned next for the rest of Monday, August 4th, which was HORRIBLE, as well as the rest of my adventures to and in and from Chicago in ADVENTURES! V.2: STARKID SUMMER SEASON.
Saturday
So then suddenly, Saturday! I feel like Saturday was weird in that a lot happened but at the same time hardly anything happened? What are Saturdays at conventions anyway. We wake up to these dumb Tin Can Brothers tweeting about this #TinCaNinja thing and I was like oh, please, of COURSE this is my mission for the rest of the goddamn day. I think I already had like 2 or 3 stickers? So I was already fucking Ready for it and god we took it to the extreme. It was nice to not have to strap myself into a cosplay in the morning because getting ready only took like half the time, I just wore my Monkey Island shirt~ and like everyone else was either Definitely Sleeping or like had another thing to do? I don't remember? so I offered to go get myself into a spot in the line for the MinaLima (well, or just Lima) panel since we wanted to do that thing! hehe.
When I got to the mainstage room a line was...kind of forming? Like it was weird because some people ALREADY wanted to line up for I think Potter Puppet Pals or JMOMS or some other shit that was happening but I was like "Is this...are you...in line for MinaLima" and we kind of formed a line even though there was no official lineup happening yet. I got a choice spot really close to the front kind of near a potted plant haha eyyy. There were a couple of cool folks sitting ahead of me that I kind of bro'd around with while I was waiting for other people and eventually Hannah and Kelsey? I think were the people who joined me for the thing I think Sera and Gabi were at another thing or else Gabi was and Sera was sleepinnng. But somehow there was a big cluster of people Not Lining Up up near the door and those of us who were forming the nice orderly line were like, no? wtf? We've been here the whole time so I went up and brought this up with the staff person who was up there and she was like "Yeah......" and what ended up happening was they took our nice line first and THEN let the big mob in after us, god bless. Some of the volunteers were real crotchety but a lot of them were really nice and really looked out for us so thank u friend. There were also virtually no RockStars in here so they let us move up super far! The panel was actually way emptier than it was the year before and we were like, boo but also yay?
It was real cute Eduardo is real cute and Jordan Edwards was moderating and he was also real cute. We got some BUTTONS big ol' MinaLima buttons and those were rad and also they showed some really cool upcoming stuff like an edition of Peter Pan designed by them and also some REALLY RAD NOTEBOOKS, I NEED ONE aaahhhh. So then after it was over, they were trying to show some stuff that was up on the front table on the big monitors but it wasn't really working, so they were just gonna bring the table down to floor level and let us all walk past it and look at all the neat stuff~ but also I was like: I have to TinCaNinja Jordan Edwards. SO I DID. hehehehehe. I went after him under the guise of taking a selfie with him to mess with Maddie, which I also totally did, but mid-selfie I stuck that sticker straight onto his back hehehehehe. IT WAS FUNNY BECAUSE I had to touch his back like A LOT to get it to work because the sticker was stupidly super-stuck to my fingers?? BUT HE DIDN'T NOTICE I DON'T THINK heheheeee the greatest. The worst part was actually trying to get a picture of it without being incredibly conspicuous it took for freaking ever l m a o but there you go. The first of MANY.
So after that I think the next thing that was really happening was this like How Fandom is Changing The World panel which hadn't really been on my to-do list but Hannah Hart and Meghan Tonjes were gonna be there so Sera and Kelsey and Hannah were interested~ IDR was Gabi with us for this or did they go do another thing? I do not think so. But um some stuff was happening and people were walking around and stuff and I don't remember exactly the order that things went down in but Kelsey and I were holding down the fort in a place where a line Was Not Forming just chillin on this bench lol. Some me and Kelsey times on the bench while I kept my phone plugged in (SPOILERS MY PHONE DIED A LOT AT LEAKYCON annoying as hecke tbh). I think Hannah and Sera were getting food! yeah! Bc Hannah brought me some Combos hehe thanks friend. And maybe Sera had to go back to the room for something because she came back late? for the thing? I don't remember. Anyway after looking out for this girl's huge Sherlock cosplay coat while she peed (lol) and trying to dodge that same annoying volunteer girl who hijacked my cosplay panel, we eventually end up I think the legit front row for this panel thing and it was real cool. It was Andrew Slack, Lauren Bird, a cool person from US Quidditch, and then Meghan and Hannah. They talked about a lot of stuff that is super legitimate but is just so not the side of anything that I do? LIKE I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD DO IT but a lot of how I feel about stuff like this is like, I can barely get my own shit together, that takes So Much out of me mentally and emotionally, that it's even that much harder for me to do those same kinds of things on the behalf of other people. So I feel guilty for not giving back more but I have to take the right measures to take care of my own self I think. Shrugs idk idk. It was cool to hear them all talk tho bc they're all very articulate and passionate and stuff and I respect all that business. Neato~~ (My notes say "quidditch girl is cute u know wut they're all cute D:" and that about sums it up lmao)
Then Sera, Hannah and Kelsey were doing the Hannah Hart photobooth so I kind of hung out in the vendor room with Gabi instead! They were eating some vegetables and rice thing that they were nice enough to share a little bit with me, mm broccoli~ and talking to an older woman who makes really rad HP and fandom doll clothes on Etsy. So that was neat!! I also ran into Brandon again but just very briefly, we were really bad at seeing each other the whole time lol. I think this is actually the last time I saw him at all. And I kinda browsed the dealers some, and finally bought my wand~~ :D 13.5 inches, cedar (and laminate but MM IT SMELLS GOOD), with a rly simple shaft/shape and some cool green woodgrain stuff on the handle, and then my core/"essence" was gryphon talon and I got a nice red bag :3 Golly Mr. Laslo is a cool dude. I respect him a lot and stuff. And then we stopped by Ann Arbor Tees I think and LOADED UP ON TINCANBROS STICKERS BECAUSE IT WAS TINCANINJA TIME oh man we got some folks goooddddd. We got Eric Kahn Gale REAL good with a two-pronged attack wherein Gabi ran up behind him and caught him with the sticker like "Oh! Eric!!" and started talking to him and I came in from the other side to secure the photograph. But then some good chats with EKG too mostly about his new book and how hype we are for it, he's such a cool dude~~ Then also, after the photobooth shenanigans were done and we were reunited with the rest of our posse, Corey. hehehe. We were like, how on earth are we going to get Corey, TO NINJA THE NINJA, but we actually did it pretty smoothly AND someone else had already beaten us to it. Jade was like, There's a sticker on your back, and he kind of sighed and was like "of course there is," and glared at us, and we were like IN OUR DEFENSE WE WERE NOT THE FIRST.... good times good times. Also Jade and Eric showed us dog pics!! Of Bowser and Ender!!! IT WAS GREAT. Lol Jade was trying to be chill like "Yeah Chris Allen is dog-sitting for us.......ok let's be real chris lives in our spare room." lolol.
While these shenanigans were happening people were kind of congregating around the open mic space in the vendor room because I guess Jim Povolo was gonna do a thing! So even though we were worried about like a line forming in another place for another thing we just kind of said screw it and stayed for Jim's thing. It was kind of stand-up comedy but also kind of sad?? It was basically a trial run of his Open-Heart Comedy thing that got livestreamed, if anyone watched that - he spoke super candidly about his mental illness struggs and gave us a lot of feelings, and also: Animorphs. I cheered LOUDLY every time he mentioned Animorphs and we had like a fucking bonding moment about this lmao HE RETWEETED ME. Sera and I ended up sitting right behind Brian Rosenthal for all of this and we #tincaninja'd him as well, along with a total stranger because why not man. God bless. This was a great thing that we had not planned on doing that we just did anyway and I was very happy about it yay~~
So the line we were trying to get in was I guess the JMOMS line because we'd found out the day before that they were NOT going to clear the mainstage seating between JMOMS and Starship Requiem, so we were gonna have to go to JMOMS to get decent Requiem seats. BOOOOOO. I just. My sense of humor is not hella compatible with Moses's? And also I feel like once you've seen one JMOMS you've kind of seen them all. I think he's got this bad habit/crutch of leaning on jokes he knows fandom/people in general already finds funny and just playing them out because the same crowd will give the same laugh. Shrug. So like, Wrong Direction/the Warbler boys did a thing (this was actually when Hannah and I got up and peed lol oops) and HE MADE OUT WITH TESSA ONSTAGE AGAIN, AGAIN!! STOP GIVING ME THIS and really the best part of the whole show was Jon Cozart, and I was like, can this please just be the Jon Cozart One-Man Showzart because that's what I'm really here for tbh. snore.
BUT THEN REQUIEM!!! We were able to move up a little once the crowd thinned/reformed and actually had pretty legitimate seats, although of course Gabi was all the way up from with Arianna as per usual. and like okaaayyy I was mostly live-tweeting the best parts of this but here's a bulleted list of the best of what I can remember:
- More jokes about the Tootsie Noodles/Horses feud which are like MY HEART because that's "my" joke from the original starship god bless, I love these fools
- Pretty much anything that ever came out of Nick Lang's mouth - he was doing the stage directions/semi-narrating and would also just insert like parenthetical asides like "That's like a racist joke against robots, so he's really offended" or "That's the noise Mega-Girl makes when she's like, apprehensive" or "Tootsie is really stupid." and they were all PERFECT hashtag #NickLangExplains god
- Tootsie's dad's name is apparently - remember, What You Do + What You Love - Eats Dicks. Because his mom is Dicks. Because that's what she does. THESE HUGE FOOLS
- BHoldz playing Mega-Girl's douchey ex bf ThorX-Zero, who has an "enormous missile launcher," and these were some lines Meredith could barely even make it through oh my god she was SO upset and laughing SO hard because he may have an enormous missile launcher, but, I shit you not, "Enormous missile launchers can hurt people." NO ONE COULD CONTAIN THEIR SHIT so much was happening
- SO MUCH JULIA!!! I LOVE SPECS I kind of want to cosplay requiem!Specs who is legit The Neuromancer and is inside The Sprawl hacking erryone's shit omg babe ♥
- Except for I also kind of want to cosplay PHOTON RAY MEGA-GIRL, AKA THE BEST EVER Denise as Mega-Girl's older sister!! who is apparently identical to her in every way except has a different face plate from a third party where her nose is tinier/more animu and thus she is "Even Cuter." I actually got Sera to save me the url photon-ray and I might switch for a little bit because it was SO GREAT I think if I cosplay her I'm just gonna build her white armor plates in a slightly different array and get a shorter, side-parted wig instead of the longer + bangs situation. Denise and Julia forever basicallyyyyyy
- Jim was Mastermold Mega-Girl, the family matriarch, and I'm pretty sure that's all I have to say
- Tessa Netting playing Darren Criss, literally Darren Criss the human was in it and this is the only time I have ever found her funny/the only thing it would have been acceptable for her to do. People were like "this makes Tessa an official starkid!!" tho and I was like, No
- Since it was just a stage reading and they had no music, every time there would have been a song, they just patched in a tonally-similar Jim and the Povolos song!! That was real fun because we were all singing along and being silly (and by "we were all" I mean "me and Hannah were" but hahaha it was the best). They closed out/played us out of the room with Don't Go and I jammed to it like the rest of the goddamn day heee~
(If you want more details about Requiem, PS, just ask! I'll remember what I can for you!)
I don't remember what our original plans after this were but Hannah, Sera and I were separated from Gabi and Kelsey so we went to the top of this escalator to make sure they'd be able to see us when they appeared? and the StarKids were also coming up this escalator while we were just loitering at the top so we kind of high-fived them all as they went past and told them how awesome they were and stuff and that was really fun hehe. They're all babes basically. Pat Brady was bringing up the rear kind of sighing all-suffering and I was like "lol good luck!" and she goes "It's like herding cats!" Bless her. Then we saw Kelsey and Gabi and were waving at them like Yeah! We're up here! but they were waving back at us like, No! Come back down! and we realized what was happening -
Earlier that day Denise and Meredith had tweeted about using Leaky people to shoot part of the upcoming Loved and Alive video!! and it was happening right then at the bottom of the escalator! So we turned around and went right back down, and stood in this big crowd of silly people dancing and shouting and getting hype and happy. They had to do two shots, one of us from behind Denise as she went down and back up, and then one of Denise from our angle too, so Brian was filming and basically we all just got to be super in love with Denise. WHICH WAS GREAT BECAUSE I AM SUPER IN LOVE WITH HER. I hope the video finally pans out after all this because it was so much fun!! yay!!!
So THEN we'd finally found Arianna, who was strongly encouraging us to go back to the Ann Arbor Tees booth because Ricky was giving away Starship Requiem badge ribbons for people who correctly answered Starship trivia. We'd already gotten ribbons from Samie or someone but we were like, Obviously we have to prove how much Starship trivia we know, let's fucking do this. SO WE DID. Omg we're literal starkid trash like I think Sera and Hannah were even embarrassed by me, Gabi and Kelsey at this point for being so forward and obnoxious but WE DIDN'T CARE. Who was in the romance plot that got cut? Specs and Krayonder obviously. Which actors puppeteered Pincer's claws? Meredith, Lauren and Nick, and Nick was usually whichever claw was closer to the rest of the action because he was more expressive with the puppet stuff. Name the other StarKid actors who appeared in the opening video sequence? AJ, Richard, Britney, Arielle, Chris, Brian, Tyler, Devin, Nick, AND POMME KOCH, WE WERE VERY SERIOUS ABOUT POMME KOCH EVEN THOUGH HE'S NOT TECHNICALLY A STARKID laughs forever. Ricky was so done with us omg. He asked us what G.L.E.E. stood for and we said it in creepy unison, and then I was like "Nooo, I wish my friend Madeline was here, she's got this SICK G.L.E.E. logo tattoo, it's so badass" and Ricky was like "Sick...yes. She sounds...really sick." PFFFFT OKAY ASSHOLE. God we were the worst. We would have stayed there doing it forever too if the vendor room hadn't literally been closing at that point. whoooops. (Also I bought a Tin Can Bros tanktop!! hooray :D)
It was DEFINITELY Time To Eat A Food, and we figured our best bet that didn't involve hiking a mile was just the restaurant thinger inside the Rosen Centre, where people could get pizza and I could get a sandwich and everything could be fine. (Also: Where S1 of Glee was apparently playing on a TV in the real-ass hotel restaurant and we were like ewwwww, Schuester, ewww Finn and Quinn making out. A fucking timewarp.) The line for this ended up taking longer than desired though and Sera and Hannah both really wanted to shower before the dance, so they kinda grabbed their food to go and went back early, and Gabi and Kelsey and I stayed and ate for a little while before we joined them. AND BOY WAS I SAD THAT HANNAH AND SERA HAD ALREADY LEFT, BECAUSE LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED ON THE SKYBRIDGE WITH MARK OSHIRO.
Mark Oshiro and Gabi had kind of semi-befriended each other earlier in the midst of some shitty stuff that had happened re: registration and OATC that Gabi was trying to sort out - basically what happened was an email containing all of their registration information, including their gender identity/preferred pronouns, got sent to Gabi's mom. When that was not information Gabi was particularly interested in sharing with their mom and leakycon why did you do this??? Mark had heard about the situation and was also pissed about it so they were on a customer service crusade or some shit, idk how this all panned out in the end but long story short, Mark and Gabi bros for life or something. So we're done with our food and heading back to our hotel (this was such a dumb thing - go to the Rosen Centre for food, walk back across one skybridge, THROUGH the convention, to the OTHER skybridge, THROUGH our hotel - the fricken worst) when, on skybridge 1, we pass right by Mark and Gabi stops to talk with him. And we're like, oh, we're gonna have to TinCaNinja him, which we do in the sloppiest possible way, but we end up getting absorbed into a real-ass conversation with him and he just tells us...everything. First about life-altering mini-golf.
Apparently it's the worst that's ever happened, Hawaiian Rumble Adventure Golf (I just found their website and oh man). There's like, two courses, one's supposed to be easy and one harder? So they went with the easy one because they're pitiful and it was NOT EASY, APPARENTLY. A detailed account of one hole with a bridge? but the bridge is shitty? and there's a gap in the middle you have to clear, but the felt green is peeling up on one side, so if you don't hit the ball hard enough, it just curves up the peeled-up part and rolls right back at you. But, if you hit it TOO hard, it clears the gap, bounces off the brick border on the other side, and comes back at the bridge, but the felt isn't peeling on the OTHER side of the gap, so it just falls right down into the water. So Mark is serving as Water Ball Retriever and he just...slips...and sits down right into the river. "Sits down on a river" is exactly how he phrased it and he's such a character/story teller and we are laughing SO HARD, FRIEND, NO. So they were doing SO badly and it was going SO slowly that they decided to just all putt at once, just to save time and for shits? And they all went at this one hole and ALL THE BALLS FELL OVER THE SIDE TO ONE SIDE into the "harder" (which mark says is actually easier) course where a like, eight or nine year old boy was playing, and Mark said, VERBATIM, THESE WORDS CAME OUT OF HIS MOUTH, AS THESE GOLF BALLS FROM MARK & CO. ARE RAINING DOWN ON HIM: "There are so many balls, and I just want to put them all in my mouth." !!!!!?!?!?! SO MUCH IS HAPPENING. (Melissa Anelli walks by right when he's telling a dirty-sounding story and she just goes I DON'T WANNA KNOW and he was like NO MELISSA IT'S NOT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE IT WAS MINI-GOLF omg too much.) Also apparently at one point some balls went over the edge/fence to outside of the thing? And Mark was like "You know you can't lose your ball! If you lose it you can't keep playing and you have to go back and pay to get another one and we gotta have them!" So Mark apparently climbed OVER this fence, out of the golf place entirely, and then BROKE BACK INTO THE PLACE with people's balls from where he went to save them. WE COULD NOT BELIEVE. We were losing our SHIT god I am not conveying this anywhere near well enough to give the Full Effect of Mark's whole rant about these things but rest assured we believed every word he said about his existential crisis at Hawaiian Rumble Adventure Golf. GOD.
He also told us about...BeakyCon???
SO THE STORY GOES Some volunteers were tired and cracked out and shooting the shit and were talking, I think, about registration? and concocted the following scenario: What if, when everyone showed up, we all just had fake beaks on, and we were talking about the whole event as if it was about birds and was called BeakyCon, and like, what is leakycon do you mean beakycon?? So cue laughs. Then later when people were more tired/more drunk a series of circumstances unfolded in which one person remembered they had... a Thing, and someone said, "Oh, Mark will do it!" and mark was like "mark will do what now?" and someone goes up to their hotel room and brings down (drumroll for suspense) (this is not suspenseful at all because this happened weeks ago and everyone has seen it already) an Angry Birds costume. a child-sized Angry Birds costume. BUT THEY WRANGLE MARK INTO IT ANYWAY, and they were taking pics during the process and there's supposedly a good one and a bad one and the bad one looks "like the angry bird is giving birth to me" and somehow the bad one is the one that got tweeted instead of the good one but yeah, Yellow Angry Bird Mark is the head of BeakyCon now, or something, that's a real thing that's happening. And of course the costume was definitely going to be making another appearance. So yeah TL;DR Mark enlightened us to the gospel of BeakyCon and we were beyond ready for it, helllll yes. (Also we did totally #tincaninja him though. Right on his backpack. hehehe.)
Back to the room to get ready for the dance tho!! I was mad cute. Slytherin statuusssss and yeah I knew I was going to regret the shoes and I DID regret the shoes but I looked fly as hell so ultimately I didn't care? ya feel? Right. But omg we took legit forever getting ready and we didn't get over to the dance until like, ten. Whoops? But tbh this was all the jammin time I really needed. Dancing to some stuff, laughing at some drunk guests, chillin with Mark, we met Miss Rhode Island and she was really cool, did some more dancing, and then SUDDENLY THINGS WERE HAPPENING AND I WAS MISSING THEM:
A) THE DRUNK COREY/RICKY DANCE OFF. Kelsey comes RUSHING up to me, Sera and Hannah shouting "DO NONE OF YOU HAVE YOUR PHONES??" (I did not have my phone; I had no pockets, and I can't typically do the stuff-things-in-ur-boobs business, so I legit did not bring anything but my own body) because apparently she'd been trying to summon us to this corey/ricky dance-off the whole time it was happening and we MISSED IT. ONE OF THE GREATEST TRAGEDIES OF MY LIFE TBH. Fortunately, despite Corey and Ricky's continued insistence that it never happened, there is ample photo and video evidence to preserve it forever. But goddddd. (It was great because earlier in the night I had watched a couple girls try to teach Ricky the I'm A Little Teapot dance, FOR SOME REASON, and then during this dance-off, it resurfaced. Booty Had Me Like, I'm A Little Teapot. god, ricky's ass for leakycon MVP.)
B) Jade fucking Ingardona. Also drunk, also beautiful. It was a while before I managed to hop on this train but then I DID and she is just letting it all out, telling all the stories and being delightful and intoxicated and like, I could barely hear anything, because the music was loud and I wasn't exactly welcomed into the immediate/close circle of listening people, but some stuff about Traci hooking her up with Eric - her options being Eric and Jeff, and she goes, I'm so glad I met Eric first, because me and Jeff are THE SAME PERSON we're both assholes, Eric's so nice. And some stuff about the prettiest candy girl and how one day Jade is gonna come home and just find Jeff's skin hanging in the closet because she will have skinned him, and she's not even going to call the police first, she's going to call Jen and Teia because they REQUESTED that THEY BE THE FIRST TO KNOW, oh my fucking god, and just, Eric being a big crybaby and crying at everything, and Eric being gay for Darren apparently, and lord she's just. Jade is everything guys.
Other dance highlights include Jordan Edwards and his boo being REAL cute together, Nick Lang doing Gangnam Style with a bunch of us in a big dance circle, finally getting to meet the LeakyCat, drunk BRosenthal leading a dance train, drunk Corey pointing dramatically at/serenading drunk Julia.... typical dance shenanigans basically. Then big Esther Earl Day cries and videos and CONFETTI and stuff and then two super-impassioned rounds of Total Eclipse of the Heart and then, after checking back in on drunk Jade and making sure she was gonna get back okay (Nick was taking her, sweetheart) AND me totally accosting Jim Povolo for a serious discussion about Animorphs for which he blessedly humored me (he probably thought I was drunk, which I'm fine with), we were OUT. We sat on the floor outside a little while just chillin and drinking some water to kind of get back on track, and chat with friends a bit, and this very intoxicated-sounding person who we THOUGHT was definitely a woman but then they spoke and we were less sure stumbled past us and just goes "Avada Kedavra!" RIGHT AT ME!! LIKE JUST...KILLS ME RIGHT LIKE THAT LIKE WOW THANKS WTF and they stumble along and do it again to another person and that person turns out to be New Friend Maddie? and I was like MADDIE....THEY KILLED US...WE HAVE TO BE GHOSTS TOGETHER NOW WTF and we were so scandalized and offended omg haha. Then we all finally wandered back to the hotel room in a big posse, my crew and Arianna's crew and some house-elves I think looking for rides back to where we were going on the golf carts and they came for us and took us back. How lovely.
The room chills were extra-great that night for some reason, but oh man so nice like Gabi had this chocolate frog from WWOHP that we literally just like...passed around nibbling chunks off like puff puff pass with this chocolate frog so that was p great, and Sera had put tape on her super-blistered foot before the ball and Kelsey was like "I love your tape foot" which was hilarious and quotable, and we just had a bunch of long chats about random topics like our grade school/public school systems growing up, and which Little Debbie's snack cakes were the best, and just about StarKid and how weird Jim Povolo really truly is but how he's also so super great, and gaahhhh idk, FRIENDSHIPZ. How many times do I have to reiterate how much I love you guys...because I will do it. All of the times. Forever.
And then at last, sleep. I'd been sleeping pretty badly with my tiny sliver of the three-person bed and I decided to try to hack a chair-bed? I took the extra blanket and pillow, the armchair, and the desk chair, but the desk chair was a little too high to line up great with the armchair, and ultimately this was a super failed plan. I slept really badly and woke up in the night, moved to the floor, woke up again closer to morning and moved back into the chairs, and then as soon as Hannah got up and moving in the morning, crawled into Hannah's side of the bed. 0/10 would not recommend. As poorly as I was doing in the bed the chairs were even worse somehow. But I guess I had to try? lol fail.
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Sunday
MOVING ON. homestretch! Sunday was mega-chill day as it is at all cons. It was even better because we knew we had another night in the hotel and didn't have to spend too much time getting our shit together in the morning. I wore extra comfy clothes and gave no fucks, god bless. I wanted to go to Pale & Twitchy, so I was up and at 'em the earliest of everyone I guess? To get in line for that, or whatever, and then I was just gonna stay over for the StarKid thing and then closing ceremonies. But they had to move P&T out of mainstage? Yeah I guess it turns out Sony freaks out if you try to play a game through them on a screen that's bigger than a certain size, for some reason. haha weird. So they put it down in a panel room, but down THERE, they were having a hard time getting the internet to load. Plus Anthony wasn't even awake yet pfffft and Melissa kept messaging him trying to get him With It and the whole thing was just #failuretolaunch and I was worried about getting a shit seat for the starkid thing so after a while I just bailed. Some other time, Melissa + GLaDOS. heh. So I found my other friends in that other line and we did the thing hooray.
This thing...was...messy?? Ahahaha. Like I thought it was going to be a lot more than it was, deleted scenes and whatnot, but they didn't even have anything to put up on the monitors video-wise. They kicked it off with that Bonnie Gruesen AVPM prologue that literally everyone has heard already - BHoldz was like, we were trying to find this and it was really hard to find, and Gabi was like, Did you even ask because I bet someone in the fandom would have just delivered it right to you oops. Then a lot of the rest of it was just dumb stories of stuff they cut out that's all like! stories they've told before!! A letdown. They talked about Nick as Damien in AVPSY which was kinda funny and also about some Colin Creevey shit that was going to happen in Get Back to Hogwarts before they cut him where like. IDEK but Colin was going to be some kind of ladies'-man crooner? like that was the joke? and BHoldz sang us a line of this with Colin being like "A heart as big as Peru~~ A heart as big as SPAIN~~" and it was Too Much like please stop omg overwhelming. Also Jim was being super weird and funny the whole time he was kind of the highlight of the whole thing.
But THEN at the END they did this thing that was like Jim doing a reading of the Dragonfae Cards WHATEVER THE FUCK it isssss, and they did one first for just Julia because #juliasfunweekend and then one for the team as a whole. Julia's was funny/sad and silly it was talking about like, letting all her sadness out by communing with a body of water in some way like a river or the ocean or then of course they started making jokes about the pool, and to cry with the water so it all becomes one or some other shit BASICALLY at one point BHoldz was just like "Shut the hell UP let's CRY IN THE POOL!" ahahaha. julia, babe. BUT THEN THE ONE FOR THE TEAM AS A WHOLE, THIS WAS SO MUCH, IT WAS ALL LIKE talking about the coming war?? and how people were going to have to make compromises because of the war?? aND ALL THIS STUFF THAT WAS BASICALLY JUST LEGIT ABOUT THE JULIA/HOLDEN-LANG SCHISM and Julia's FACE through the WHOLE THING was just like, utterly flabbergasted amazed huge baffled mouth-open smile like she was TRIPPIN on it. Eric too a little, Nick (or was it Jim? IDR) was just reading the whole thing out loud and they couldn't HANDLE it julia's face was EVERYTHING. AMAZING. I wish I could find a reference for this stuff online so I could share it a little better but oh man it was just fucking spot-on and Julia knew it, and everyone knew it. so insane.
Also, y'know, StarKid is a cult.
We stayed through in the room after that for the Pottercast thingie and that was fun because in addition to Melissa, John and Frak they got Mark up on the stage too, and they were talking about WWOHP and some Pottermore Quidditch Cup stuff and they called out that aforementioned Celestina Warbeck audience volunteer and it was just funsy fun times. We got on a big tangent about like wizard groceries/wizard produce?? and that was kind of cool, and also started talking about SPEW and whether Hermione continued on with that (she did, we looked it up), and overall it was not QUITE as great as the one last year but it was definitely enjoyable. Then through after THAT, still in mainstage with that baller staff guy who was in charge of mainstage stuff, we love you dude, for closing ceremonies. All Right!! They did this cool review of The Past Five LeakyCons or whatever and had individual special guests come speak to important parts of each one, and the slideshows were kinda crappy but the guests had really great things to say (dylan ♥), and then, at the end, they dropped that great big GeekyCon bomb on us.
Aight cool, I guess. There were a LOT of thoughts and emotions on it right when it happened but I guess in the long run my opinion is the classic Corey Lubowich "I mean, it was fine." I don't HATE it. I think it's fine typed/written but I don't particularly enjoy saying it out loud. I'm not overly fond of the new logo but it mostly doesn't matter to me at all. I guess the main thing is, they were talking about it, and I knew a name change was coming, so I tried to come up with the best one and see if I was going to be right, and the one I came up with was ConVergence. Like, all the fandoms, converging! Cool! And I literally came up with that in about two seconds, and I still think it's better than GeekyCon. Shrug times infinity. The thing I was actually a lot MORE angry about that I will probably make a separate post about later is the fact that next year, it's back in Orlando. I really see NO point in having it in Orlando EXCEPT for the fact that WWOHP is right there. There aren't any other redeeming qualities to Orlando in July/August so...yuck basically, ugh. BUT WHAT CAN YA DO :| I don't want to dwell on this because I'm actually not THAT strongly opinionated about it all, I just think it's dumb.
So after that we kind of filtered down into the rest of the convention center because the con was pretty much over. Did we see Mark again? We might have seen Mark again, or some other friends, who knows. I saw Lizzie and Jordan all over the place just here and there saying hey and then walking away like 800 times over the course of the weekend so really it's impossible to tell. I think the main priority at this point was that a couple people needed to get some food, and literally the only convenient place was just that spot in the Rosen Centre again, so we went over there and got some sandwiches and kind of decompressed/debriefed, especially about closing ceremonies and the whole GeekyCon thing. We ran back into Arianna's group too, but they were just finishing their food, so we didn't overlap TOO too long with them at this time, just enough to all have some bitch-sesh time together and make plans for later to play silly games or some shit, and then they cleared out to do...some other thing I don't remember. And it was just the five of us, some people eating but like me not really because I was still set on us all getting dinner together, so mostly we were just hogging a big corner booth in the hotel restaurant and talking and goofing off. It was nice!! Also Ricky had apparently given Samie ALL OF THE TINCANBROS STICKERS, and she left us with over HALF of them so we just had this giant pile of them - Samie definitely covered an entire coke bottle with them like wallpaper ( This is a trash). What are we even going to do with all these stickers Ricky. Who even is Ricky Winowiecki.
A bunch of StarKids/other guests kept walking by and we would say like one thing to them and just let them on their way - like Julia came and we were like, Did you cry in some water yet? hahaha. Or BROSENTHAL WAS THE WEIRDEST BECAUSE LIKE We said Hey, and he said Hey back, but the way he was walking around our table he honestly moved toward us in a way that super looked like he was just going to like...sit down at our table??? This was WEIRD lmao brosenthal is so much weirder than I think anyone understands he is just a strange dude. Corey came by and I was like "Corey, why did Ricky leave us with all these stickers, why are there so many??" and he was just like "I don't know...I...I don't know." and he looked DEAD and DONE WITH EVERYTHING and I immediately felt bad for bothering him at all like he just looked so fucked. poor friend. The one person we did have a longer chat with was Jade, just to like...recap our great times with her drunk ass omg and she was like SO APOLOGETIC ABOUT IT and we were like no friend, honestly, no big deal (one of her main qualms was she felt bad for telling a story that possibly made BHoldz look like a total asshole bc she didn't want to like shatter our image of him and we were like...jade....we know brian is an asshole it's not a thing pfft) but YEAH she was really cute and our little chat was great. Slytherin bros. (We shared with her the Ricky/Corey dance-off situation and she's like "Oh, that's great, crotch-to-crotch. Surrounded by fangirls and you choose crotch-to-crotch that's just perfect like of course why not.") Also I saw! the commercial! that Dylan Marron is in!! And had A Moment but no one cares about night vale except for you emily calm down lol. Overall this was a great lil time for us and Kelsey has a good Brian Holden story to tell and we kept coming up with random puns off LeakyCon/GeekyCon/BeakyCon to be our potential cosplay group for next year like Kelsey's PeakyCon because of Colorado mountains and I'm GreekyCon because of sorority stuff hehehe. (also I think Sera had to go throw up?? oh no friend. those leftover potato wedges we ate off Jess's plate just straight did not agree with her I guess.) The last Legit Person we saw was MAUREEN and it was great because Maureen is super great (although oops we may have been bitching about a Lit-related thing like RIGHT when she was in earshot sorry friend we love you) and several people wanted legit pictures with her of course but we also, of course, TinCaNinja'd her. Our last great success of the con, hehehe. Cappin the whole thing off.
Finally we gave up on this and trickled back to the first floor of the convention center to FINALLY do what we'd been saying we were gonna do all weekend and playing Telestrations with Arianna's gang (which at this point was just Arianna, Samie, and Jess). THIS WAS ACTUALLY PRETTY GREAT BECAUSE WE WERE ALL like, JUST good enough to not fuck up SOME of the time but still not good enough to not fuck up ALL of the time (insert pussytime joke). hehehehe. Also we were there for A LONG ASS TIME like we were some of the last people in the convention center at all? It was us and this one other larger group of people that we kept running into who I guess had played some games with about half of my group earlier in the convention and there was a dude named Spencer(?) that they kept calling Ferris because of some Ferris Bueller thing look I don't know the full story. ANYWAY BASICALLY what I'm getting at is that we had the con center relatively ~to ourselves? So we started with regular Telestrations like out of the box that comes with it but then progressed to shitty starkid ones and I drew a really excellent picture of Jeff Blim that Samie was very pleased with and Hannah put "Ricky's Ass" for one of hers and overall A++ would play again. But only if I get to be timekeeper because Arianna sucks at it. Also while we were playing some staff people came over and just gifted us ALL THE EXTRA REGISTRATION SWAG? We got eight million "let's geek out" badge ribbons that we converted into #straussycon and #beakycon ribbons (I had "#TROP" and "I guess I gotta find this kid a pair of scissors!" and maybe one other, someone had "Terguson," god knows what else, lmao), eight hundred million MinaLima flyers, some extra tumblr stickers and stuff, god, it was a lot and we just fucking took it. I played "Where's The Dog???" in one round and Kelsey and Hannah were like, the other half of these people don't know what that is, but everyone got it! so ha! Also I kept writing unnecessary comments on other people's like for one AJ-related thing I wrote "A Very Potter Musical: Me And My Dick Heart" which was I guess not a joke that everyone got oops my bad, and for one that was Robert Manion I added "...with a fish" at the bottom and ahahaha. GOOD TIMES BASICALLY. (Also Samie and I legit almost stole some segways. The con was OVER we were not afraid of getting busted if we were ever gonna do it now was the time....)
We were clearing out to head back to the hotel and stuff and right as we were leaving there was this ONE other tiny group of people, which turned out to be those hecka legit Ravenclaw and Slytherin Quidditch cosplayers! They had a shitton of snacks left so they offered us our pick of them and we took...all of the Rice Krispie treats omg there were A LOT and also Jess took some authentic American Easy Mac because apparently it's different from Australian Easy Mac in a way that was significant enough to merit taking it. good 2 know. So we paraded back to the hotel and along the way saw Mark AGAIN and we were so glad because Mark is GREAT and apparently they were going back to Existential Mini-Golf again which we could not advise and yet we were also super into. these guys. Then Arianna and Jess were LEAVING :( and there were sad hugs and things but Samie was staying with us bc she didn't have a place for Sunday night and we were just letting her. and stuff. So we finally all get up to the room and we're like. okay. we wanted to all go get dinner together. WHERE. BUT as usual it's nigh impossible because Kelsey's picky-chan and Gabi's vegetarian and also it was SUNDAY NIGHT so places weren't open like usual and the longer we took deliberating, the fewer things were even open, till finally it was just too damn late to do ANYTHING and I was sad because it had been my dumb idea that I was pushing for in the first place, a Nice Dinner With Everyone after the convention was over, and I felt kind of responsible for the fact that we all got fucked on it rather than just sucking it up and doing something less nice more promptly. Boo. So our only real option was back to the places in the Rosen Centre again so we just hiked over there again. That other group was still in the convention center and we were just the only people there and we were so amused by it, shoutin' out to each other, having a fucking party, and so we got some more sad food at the sad food place (we never even tried the real-ass restaurant because lol poor) and huddled together to eat it and people watch and be pathetic lmao. Apparently at this point Hannah got her hair complimented by Jackie Emerson and didn't even realize who it was. haaaa.
So then BACK to the hotel FOR GOOD I guess and we saw Mark AGAIN and they were BACK from golf and it was a goddamn adventure, and we were so happy to see him just one more time because we love these dudes, and also awkward British Joe gave me an awkward card, and stuff was going on, and everything was silly. BEAKYCON. At BeakyCon the Birdfighters get together to combat World Duck. You heard it here folks. I'm so ready for this next year tbh let's make it weerrrkkk.
I guess in the hotel I decided I was going to go on an adventure to do laundry? Mostly because like I had enough clean clothes tbh BUT my clothes that were NOT clean smelled bad enough that I didn't really want to pack them in with the clean ones because they would just...become dirty. The hotel directory said there was laundry on our floor so I went to go find it but I could NOT and I was like, Am I just a fucking idiot? What the fuck?? so I called down to the front desk to discover that laundry was in the WORKS for the fifth floor but was not there YET so I had to go to floor 3 or floor 7. laaaaame~. So I went up to the seventh floor I guess and had JUST enough money to run a load of wash...but not...to get any soap...OOPS. WELP I GUESS that's how that's gonna go, washing with water only, who the fuck am I. Came back to the room to find everyone opening KINDER EGGS that Gabi got us in Italy and most of the toys were inconsequential (mine was a tiny panther and I was so mad it wasn't the tiny tiger bc tigerfucker, and idk even where this panther ended up I may have lost it entirely whoops) BUT HANNAH'S WAS this fancy fucking TRIANGLE FRISBEE THING?? It was soooo dumb omg and Sera put it together for her and then we tried to play with it out in the hallway but it did not want to fly and was a weird piece of shit. And we were so entertained/cracked out/GIGGLY we kept having to shush each other and remind ourselves that we were in a hotel and OTHER PEOPLE were there and we were just like, losing our shit bc this thing would fly into the walls and the LIGHT FIXTURES we thought we were going to break something, oh my godddddd. Too much. Probably because we're all high off the ridic sugar from the Kinder Eggs + THE MILLION RICE KRISPIE TREATS WE ATE we had a fucking rice krispie treat party. bless.
My laundry was done I guess and I was gonna put it in the drier but the two driers on the seventh floor one was occupied and the other was BROKEN?? so I had to take my HUGE ARMFUL of WET CLOTHES down to the THIRD floor to use their drier and wtf was even happening, my laundry adventure became way too much of an adventure. And I reeeallly wanted to just go to sleep already because everyone else was mostly but I had to stay awake until my laundry was done and it was the worst. I guess I finally made it, though. Samie was literally planning to sleep on the window sill that LITERALLY had a sign on it that SAID "For your safety please do not stand or sit on granite" (Kelsey called it the ILLEGAL GRANITE one time just by a slip of the tongue and then we just kept calling it that just to be assholes lol) but like, we had been sitting on it all weekend and Samie was just straight going to sleep on it. LOL POWER TO YA. (When I woke up she was on the floor. She was not, you will note, in a chair bed. Chair bed was a terrible idea why did I do that to myself.)
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Monday
Was pretty much just packing day/get the fuck out of here day. We didn't have to check out until 12:30 I think which was great because we could sleep a little more, and then we packed like crazy people and high-tailed it. (I think actually Samie left way earlier than the rest of us bc of how early her flight was. By the time I woke up For Real instead of just drifting at like 7:30 she had totally disappeared.) Monday was just so WHATEVER because MOST of what we did was just...sit in the lobby...because we had already checked out of our room but our flights weren't until later so there was no point in doing anything. We saw a sad, solitary Hufflepuff girl doing the exact same thing and I tried to invite her over to join us but nothing really came of it, she just ate a couple of my crackers and zoned back into her headphones. Gabi and Kelsey were the first to leave because of when their flights were, so after some hang seshes where we lurked all over twitter, discovered that a TURTLE CONVENTION was arriving as the next event after us (a woman seriously asked me if I had dyed my hair green for the turtle convention omg), and cried on each other a little about all the Separation Sads, they departed in their Uber and left just me, Hannah and Sera as the Other Three-Fifths of Lang and the EKGS the way it had been p much the whole convention. Soon enough, after more trolling around, enduring horrible construction noises, eating our last sad hotel eatery sandwiches, and dealing with a goofy, potentially-law-breaking Uber driver (seriously who was this guy talking nonsense about the Harry Potter films and totally not really knowing how to get to the airport and cutting through an off-limits service road), we did the same thing.
GOODBYE LEAKYCON 2014. GOOD TIMES WERE HAD BY ALL. I bought a great wand and a dumb tanktop and a pygmy puff; I made a great new Hufflepuff friend outta Phoenix; I stuck stickers on total strangers; I went to fucking Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade. Mark, Jade, Ricky and all our other special guest buddies were wonderful, and they far outweighed the two or three really annoying people that I encountered. And most of all, I was reminded why I do the shit I do - because sometimes, amazing shit like this comes of it. I guess I'm going to GeekyCon next year but it's still LeakyCon in my heart. Hopefully. Whatever. ♥♥♥
Stay tuned next for the rest of Monday, August 4th, which was HORRIBLE, as well as the rest of my adventures to and in and from Chicago in ADVENTURES! V.2: STARKID SUMMER SEASON.