Fanime 2016 (Part 1)

Anyways...

It's cool how many different things there are to learn and be taught by Journey.  This time as I was watching someone play through the game I realized for the first time that during the underground and tower levels there's a vignetting effect at the borders of the screen, making it feel much more "closed off" and giving you a sense that you're in a more..."indoor" space, for lack of a better way of describing it.  It's not until you open up into the snow that the game expands again, to fill your whole "field of view".  It's a clever trick that I never really noticed before.

Fanime has been pretty fun so far!  I don't even know....whether I should do a full write-up of it or not.  I actually just don't know.

I guess I should let the past guide me.  I won't be able to live with myself if I don't at least try, after all, in general.

I got up and got ready on Friday and picked up my badge from Russell (thanks!) and had some lunch at Pita Pit with Kat.  I went through Artist's Alley on Friday, which was uneventful for the most part.  I actually didn't buy a single thing from there, which I think might be a first?  I think my standards are a little higher for artwork nowadays (not to mention I've already got a very sizable collection of prints and such, so I don't need more).  I was half-hoping to pick up a good Undertale print (Steven Universe print would be cool too) but I really didn't find anything that stood out.  I found some that were "fine" but nothing special, so there was no reason for me to pull the trigger on anything.  I think there was a Spirited Away print that I thought was pretty cool and also a Rin/Saber print (from Fate/Stay Night) that I liked, but again, not really anything special.

A handful of people recognized me in my Journey outfit -- of course, the number increases whenever I have my hood/mask on, so I try to do that whenever I'm just walking around the convention hall, but most of the I have it off since it's more comfortable that way.  Ideally if I were to remake or modify the costume, I would have the mask part be an actual sort of "hood" that attaches to the back of the neck so that it just hangs off of the rest of it and I can just reach back and slip it over my head whenever I want.  If I did that I would have to redesign how the hood works in general though, and that's the part of the costume that I understand the =least= for sure, so I don't really know if that will ever happen.  Eh -- it's also the part of the costume that I don't actually care about that much anyways, so whatever.  I actually have to stop by the Artist's Alley at some point on Sunday again because one of the artists didn't have their camera on Friday and wanted a photo of me.

I hung out in the gaming area for a while on Friday to do Tetris Medley tournament stuff, but in the end it ended up taking too long and, since I was feeling a sort of "been there done that" with Tetris Medley and my friends were heading out to dinner, I decided to just drop out and head to dinner with them instead.  I don't really regret it, even though it was a bit unfortunate. (dinner was a good time!)  In the midst of waiting for Tetris stuff I looked around the gaming hall a bit -- no TGM this time unfortunately, so I have no "default" thing to do when I don't have any other good ideas, but it's probably just as well anyways.  I saw that there was a 3rd Strike machine there, which was kind of intriguing!  People were playing on it -- they were..."OK" but not really good; lots of dropped stuff and mistakes everywhere that I could point out.  I was sort of itching to challenge them, but I was waiting on Tetris stuff anyways and didn't really think twice about it.  It might be something worth looking into for Sunday but to be perfectly honest playing fighting games shouldn't really be a priority at an anime convention for me.  As an aside I was trying to take some glances at the melee setups to see how good people were at melee--from what I saw it was "middling"; not terrible but not really anything good either.

After dinner I finished up Artist's Alley and tried to cruise through Swap Meet as fast as I could (which I succeeded at, hooray!).  I didn't get too much at Swap Meet, but I did get a couple of small really cheap Sanrio things (we're talking 50 cents / 1 dollar cheap).  Besides that, I got the things which I actually needed, which were new playing card sleeves -- a Remilia design for $20 and a Kirby design for $10.  The Remilia design seemed a little pricey to me but I didn't mind -- it's not something I'm really going to be buying very often and I do make very good use of these sleeves so it's all good (my current set of remilia sleeves that match my playmat are wearing out a bit).

After finishing up there we actually drove off to Stanford to stop by campus where the kids were hosting a dance...I was super tired at this point but still actually had a lot of fun for the short time that I stayed.  Definitely an exhausting day though; jeez.  It really seemed more exhausting than either of Big Dance (which to be perfectly honest isn't really that tiring?  Or maybe I just think that because the last time we had a proper one was a couple years ago and I've become an old fogey since then D:) and Ludum Dare.  I guess Ludum Dare is more mentally exhausting and Fanime is more physically tiring.  Oof.

I had a slight headache on Friday carrying into a good portion of Saturday (sadface) -- like I said, Friday really took a lot out of me.  I took it a lot easier on Saturday (today).  I went to the Undertale "in character" Q/A panel, which was quite fun!  They had some fun cosplayers who gave some hilarious answers to some of the questions (they also had a truth or dare segment, which was great too).  So that was fun.  Had lunch afterwards and then went to watch all of the Fanimaid performances to go support my friend (yeah!).  Went for some more food/drink and then to the Undertale gathering, which was huge!  Most of it was standard gathering stuff, but there were a few select moments which were very very awesome!

After that we stopped by the WCS dance lesson and then decided to just call it a night for con -- it was only 6 or 7 or so, so pretty early, but I was glad; I really needed a breather after Friday, and I had already told myself before Fanime started that I was going to try and take it a bit easy this time.  We had dinner at Asian Box on Castro, which pleasantly surprised me with its quality (I didn't have a great impression because I was very unimpressed by their catering, but this was much better), then went back to my place where I watched them play Journey.

And now we're here, before the last (main) day of Fanime!  Let's hope that I can still make it a good one.