Fanime Day 1

The first full day of Fanime...somehow it felt like I didn't actually do much, but I'm still really exhausted.  I was actually feeling quite tired already at 10/11PM; I guess that's what happens when you spend like 8 hours at con without really taking any time to just chill and sit down and not do much.

I took quite a bit longer than anticipated to get ready (makeup, costume, preparing in case I needed anything, grabbing food for the day, etc), and when I got over to San Jose I had forgotten exactly where the parking lot that I used last year was (yesterday I had used the convention center garage, which was most definitely full today), so I actually spent quite a few minutes just driving around trying to figure out where to park, driving past public parking lots with ridiculous prices like $30 parking.  I ended up going into a garage by Safeway and ended up paying $19 which is kind of sucky but also not actually that bad for a weekday I think.  I probably could have saved $5 or something by parking across the street instead from the looks of it, but oh well, at that point I just wanted to get into the con and be done with it.  Tomorrow I'll go for the one across the street from there; it claims $6 parking on weekends. (?)

I ran into Bleu on my way to the con, yay!  Was nice to see her, and we traded numbers in case I wanted to hang out later.

I saw some LoL cosplayers hanging around outside the convention center, including a Muse Sona, complete with hovering etwahl!  I asked her what she made it out of (spray foam and stuff), and more importantly got to see how she got it to float -- she used thin strings that were attached to her hands, pretty clever!  I'll have to consider that if I ever do that Silent Night Sona cosplay...which I feel like I don't actually want to, now that I think of it.  I'm not enough of a fan of LoL to do that; would much rather just make a Journey cape or something!

Speaking of Journey, today was the day where I went through all of artist's alley, and I picked up some sweet Journey prints!  I basically went through the whole alley and had an "omg" moment each time I saw a Journey print.

I couldn't decide which ones to buy at first (way too expensive to buy =all= of them, unfortunately...), so I ended up just noting them for later, taking pictures of them, and then when I was done going through everything, made the tough choice on which ones to buy and which ones to pass on.  I was so proud to be holding around and showing off my Journey prints...so awesome! ^^  Ah, that reminds me, one of the people said they had another print for sale online of the underground level, so I'll have to remember to check that out at some point...

I also picked up a few random other things at artists' alley, like a postcard, a random print from thousandskies that I really liked, and some LoL stuff.  I ran into Bleu again, too!

After walking back and forth to and from my car to both drop off my prints and to grab the rest of my sandwich, I spent most of the rest of the day in the gaming room playing in the Tetris tourney, alongside Alex and Azura and co.  I got to play and see all these weird Tetris games for the first time, including Tetris Battle Gaiden, Magical Tetris, and N64 Tetris Giga mode...it was actually quite ridiculous.  I was sorely feeling the absence of the TAP machine though, I was really itching to play TGM.  Maybe Alex will manage to have it set up tomorrow.

That was fun anyways.  Oh, apparently there was also a Nidhogg tourney going on; I should have signed up for that, but I didn't know about it, haha.  Oh well.  I would have loved to demonstrate my mastery of the movement techniques in that game, but hey hey, it's fine, it's fine.

Afterwards I went to check the swap meet line again (nope, still linecon city), and ended up running into Josh and Bryan from high school, whoa!  They weren't going to the con, but they happened to be in the area (for Mega Ran's show?  Small world...), so they just wanted to check it out.  I chilled with them for a while and sort of just people-watched for a bit before they took off.

After that I went back into the con, with nothing really left to do--I wanted to go through dealer's hall some other day (it was probably closed by this time anyways), and didn't want to spend that much there since I had already spent money on...Journey prints, haha.  Some of my friends weren't coming until tomorrow, so I wasn't really sure what I should be doing anymore.  I considered driving off to go to FNW, but somehow I didn't feel like that either, possibly because my feet hurt from standing/walking around for a good part of the day.

I ended up running into Russell and Wendy and...someone else from Stanford whose name I don't know, oops.  So I hung out with them for a while and just proceeded to have random conversations, some involving Wendy talking about chickens, and eating knees, also she randomly twisted my skirt.

Yay.

CCY also stopped by and said hi, so all in all that was a pretty successful random encounter, hooray~  It was getting pretty late though, so I left and went home.  Now I need to rest up because I actually need to be at con early tomorrow (as opposed to today) to go to the Rumiko Takahashi gathering at 10:30AM...Some people already recognized me as Kikyo today (and asked for pictures)...it's an interesting feeling, I guess I know how "that" feels like now.