Day in the Life of an Idiot

Just a head's up, I agreed to participate (as Tate) in the Writing Process Blog Tour next week. So, if you're interested in what I'm currently up to and how I do things, you can check that out. I'll be sure to link the post when it goes live, here. If you want to see what a previous one was like, here's the guy who tagged me, Conrad Zero: http://www.conradzero.com/2014-writing-process-blog-tour/

Otherwise, my weekend was made crazier by having forgotten that this weekend was Anime Detour. I mostly attended Saturday, though I did drop by for a little bit on Sunday morning. Mostly, I wandered the halls admiring costumes and buying too much stuff in the dealer's room. I have a few more photos I can share.

Here's Mason in the DeathNote/Clue x-over tee-shirt I bought him. Being the true and awesome nerd I raised him to be, Mason said, "Well, it really should say 'Mr. Boddy' instead of Colonel Mustard," but, we both agreed that it's still funny.


I only took one picture of a cosplayer on Sunday, but I just HAD to get this guy because he's Sigfried from Soul Calibur, and my nephew Jonathan and I wasted HOURS of our lives playing that years and years ago (and now there's an iPad version of it, so Mason and I have played it too.)


Otherwise, my con highlights were hanging out with one of the con's guests of honor, Christopher Jones at diner on Saturday night. We had a great time talking, but we were hampered from our usual mutual Marvel squee by the fact that I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN CAPTAIN AMERICA YET. (Though plans are in the works. I may be hitting a matinee on Tuesday with my usual Marvel crowd.)

Still, that was fun. A lot of the con, for me, was opportunities missed. Because I was Moon-Mooning, I missed out on a big-screen showing of "BLEACH THE MOVIE: Hellverse." I also didn't realize that one of the GoH's was a Dai Satō, a guy who worked on Samurai Champloo, and who, in point of fact, was a major contributor to some of my all-time favorite episodes. I never even heard him speak. The only thing I can say is that I breathed the same air as he did.

*head desk*

But, the other big thing we did this weekend, was get Mason to his UMTYMP test on Saturday. Mason was very nervous (for good reason--800 people apply, only 50 get in.) He decided he would feel best if he wore one of my ties and a white button down shirt. He looked super-sharp. And, he did his best. The testers are warned that they will encounter questions they'll have to guess at, and he said he'd had to guess a fair amount. But, I'm really proud of him for trying. I'll keep my fingers crossed until the letter arrives in May to let us know if he's been accepted. If we don't get in this year, he can try again next year (and up to seventh grade, I believe. So he has two more shots.)

Today I spent the day working on my next installment for Precinct 13's sequel, despite the depressing statistic (which I should never have checked!!) that half as many people read the second installment as did the first... so, my take away? I started out strong and then sucked it up. *sigh* Story of my life. Ironically, I posted the last of my Harry Potter/Bleach x-over this weekend and got more people to read that in a day than read the second installment of the sequel so far, since last week....

Yeah.

This is why people get discouraged with original fiction.

Anyway, it's a good discipline to have to write a 2,000+ word installment every week, though. That's much more progress than I was making before, which was zero. So good may yet come out of this experiment.

This year I brought along Eleanor Arnason to part of Anime Detour. When she left, she looked a lot like I did that first year--like I wondered what strange alternate universe I'd fallen into.

Detour throws us old-timer SF fans because it's held at the Radishtree, our old haunt, and, because, you know, it's a CON--we feel like we OUGHT TO UNDERSTAND IT, but, in fact, it's totally foregin... and not just because it's based on Japanese Anime. It's just a very different kind of con experience.

I think, thanks to my interpreters and the fact that I cosplayed this year, I finally get Detour... or, at least, I get how *I* can appreicate it and enjoy myself. Cosplaying is actually very central to a large part of this con. I posted pictures of this, but the garden courtyard is entirely devoted to professional stage set ups where you can pose for pictures of the amazing work you put into your costume. Because, damn, people put in serious work on some of these costumes. I didn't even try to take pictures of all the things, but I saw people in full Iron Man armor, and stuff I didn't even know WTF it was, but it looked like a whole LOT of work just to walk around in.

People who aren't in costume actually stand out. That's how many participants are cosplaying. In fact, at one point, I was crowd-watching and I saw a guy in a tee-shirt and jeans and I was like, "Huh, I wonder what show that's from...?" for a good three minutes until I realized HE WAS JUST A GUY IN A TEE-SHIRT.

Panels exist, but not like they do at other cons. The program guide has participants listed by who they're cosplaying so you know, you go to a panel on BBC's Sherlock and the panelists include Sherlock, Watson and Maycroft and they tend to talk about the show as though it was their real lives. At least, that was true on the panel I was supposed to be on last year about Full Metal Alchemist. There are other panels, like the two I participated in this year (fandom on the internet and what you need to know about writing), which were much more like a typical convention panel, but those are pretty rare. I will say that once again (like I did last year) I attended a panel about Bleach and wanted to rip my hair out or possibly pull Zabimaru out of my soul and MURDER THE PANELISTS.

Why?

Because the panel was supposed to be about the big three: Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece and about how they were ending soon and what Jump might replace them with. Last year, like this year, it became clear they were all One Piece and Naruto fans and their idea of talking about Bleach was to put up an annoying Manga panel where Renji is being particularly stupid and then making some dissing remarks about how dumb the filler arcs and then go back to talking about Naruto. They used a panel still last year. The big difference this year is that they let us watch the Anime clip of the same GODDAMN MOMENT. And you know what? None of that was EVEN new this year! It was from the middle of the Arrancar arc. There was only cursory talk about some of the events happening right now, and then on to One Piece or back to Naruto. Me and Ichigo (the other obvious Bleach fan there) were really ticked. Even the guy next to me who loved Naruto and was ticked at how dismissive the panelist were about his Manga as well as ours. The panelists seemed to be the type of young men/boys who thought that to be "intellectual" about an Anime or Manga, meant being rude about it.

And they didn't even seem to be reading JUMP. I actually *subscribe* and could have talked moderately well about the things JUMP seems to be testing out to replace Bleach. A LaCrosse themed Manga? Barrage. And the new one with the Neighbor aliens whose name escapes me. (Truthfully, I'm unhappy with a lot of it and so I skim the stories, but I at least know the sorts of things they've been running recently.) Ironically, the panelists were saying they'd need some new blood to do this panel next year, and I had to wonder how a person got that gig. I may actually have to volunteer.

/rant

I wasn't intending to go on about that as long as I did. Especially since the point really was that Detour isn't about the panels anyway. It's about costuming and previewing new Anime and the dealer's room and all the fan created stuff.

I also lucked out because I happened to know Anton, which means that at Gaylaxicon I got to know J. Michael Tatum there where he's just this guy, you know, and a F*CKING ROCKSTAR at Detour. Thus, as it happens I got to rub shoulders with a GoH, have dinner with him and late night fun at the bar (and, oddly, the furry party, and now I have an inappropriate picture of Michael at the furry party doing rude things with a tanuki that I'm not sure what to do with... I'd use it for blackmail, but since his boyfriend took a picture too, I'm not sure it's worth much.)

So, I mean, I had a blast because OMG Michael is awesome and every time I hang out with him I fall in love just a little bit more.

But, yeah, no. Eleanor bounced right off Detour.

Perhaps some of you may remember that last year, I found the experience of interacting with cosplayers really... baffling. I didn't know if people wanted me to talk to them in character or...? I didn't even know how to really appreciate what they were doing without just being aggressively dorky (at least in my own mind.) I complained that I needed "interpreters." This year, I had two: Teri and Lisa. I started whining about how to interact again, and they patiently explained to this old lady two things: 1) you can always ASK to take a picture and 2) you're simply ALLOWED to talk to anyone in your fandom (if you are also attempting/doing cosplay.)

So, I decided to make this fun for myself and I gave myself a mission: collect ALL the Bleach cosplayers. I have a zillion picutres and I know I missed a Ukitake cosplayer (for a sick guy, he sure disappeared into the crowd fast. Shunpou?)

Okay, I'm not sure how many LJ (or my computer of Little Brain) will let me post, and I will attempt to say something to organize the jumble of awesome that is Detour.

First, given who I was cosplaying, I set out to collect all the Byakuyas (and the one other Renji-grrl):







Then, there were the people whose costumes were just AMAZING. I found the Espada guys particularly frightening because they traveled in a pack :-) :

A fantastic Hollow Ichigo:


Ulquiorra and Yammy:


Yammy and Zommari:


There were also people who not only did their costumes well, but also physically resembled the characters to the point I was like, dang, that's ISSHIN (from across the room) and then, I was like, "Why is he talking to Soi Fon???":


And THIS IS HISAGI, I SWEAR TO GOD:


In fact, he needs another pic:


A Urahara who was selling stuff in the dealer's room and very cagily would NOT tell me if there was any Soul Candy:


And, then, a couple of shots just to give you a sense of the scale of this thing:


Also, cosplay is so much a part of this con that there's a place in the garden plaza/atrium JUST FOR GETTING YOUR PICTURE TAKEN (I did not do this for obvious reasons):