Fanime 2018

Ugh, life.  Ok, let's get to it...

Fanime 2018

Fanime was this past weekend and it was a pretty fun one!  Fanime seems to have a different storyline for me each year -- last year, for example, was characterized by a lack of plans and a lot of just hanging out, but also by going to see aivisura perform and staying through B&W ball for the whole time with the rest of the Stanford crew.  This year it seems that the narrative was just taking it super easy and not really doing that much at all.  It was quite a different Fanime experience than I'm traditionally used to, but not bad by any means; in fact I was quite happy with how it went.

Wore the Journey cosplay to Fanime for what seems like the umpteenth time -- since VBall I've been a fully embroidered red cloak!  Next year I'll be adding more to the sleeves, I think...anyhow, I actually never bothered to put on the hood + mask once throughout the entire weekend -- next time I'll probably not even bother bringing it, unless by some small miracle I find it in myself to make another (not so scrappy) one.  I did meet one fellow Journeyer at con and ran into them once or twice throughout the weekend, so that was nice!  Other than that, people liked the costume a lot; someone even just came up and wanted to give me a hug, haha.  Oh, also!  For the first time I had a complete stranger recognize who I was and they told me they were a fan of my music.  So that was pretty awesome.  I've often had people from different slices of my life know the other parts of me, like people whom I meet through dance who happened to know of my music or whatever, but this was the first time a fan of mine just out of the blue recognized who I was.

Went to the Joe Hisaishi concert on Friday and aivisura's performance on Saturday!  Honestly I was way more pumped for aivisura's set, but I guess that's not surprising since I really love their music.  The Hisaishi concert did have some quite nice moments though.  aivisura played a few SU songs, they did their Yuri on Ice cover again which was really great (I still remember getting chills the first time they performed it), and then they also played Diamond Dove, Lonely Rolling Star, and ended with an encore performance of Here's How, which I totally called from a mile away, hahaha.  It was great getting to hear Lonely Rolling Star again and Here's How is such a great live piece, it's always fun.  Also, either it was just me, or Surasshu really leveled up his game!  He sounded so much more confident compared to the first time...good stuff!  Also, I've always been a fan of the aivisura sound in general but this concert gave me another chance to re-appreciate surasshu's drum sequencing -- it's something that I'll probably try and take a few notes from in the future.

No TGM in the gaming hall this year!  Which probably contributed a lot to the fact that I didn't have a ton of stuff to do, haha.  There were a bunch of Melee setups though, and I pulled out my laptop and ran faster melee for a while.  Played a bunch of friendlies with a random Marth main who was there, which was pretty fun, and got to play with some friends too.  No Bishi Bashi or 3rd Strike or anything like that either, but the most random thing they had there was a machine of...KeyboardMania!  Wow!  That's definitely something I didn't expect.  The machine was completely inaudible and neither me nor my friend had headphones so the only way I could hear any of the music was to put my head awkwardly right next to the speaker, but it was still sort of fun anyways, especially when we decided to try a really hard song and both try to "help" each other on the same side -- after 3 tries, we passed in the end!  They had the staples there too -- IIDX and PopN and everything, but it was free play and long lines, so bleh.  It was actually a shame they didn't have some random shmups or metal slug or whatever for me and my friend to goof off on, but whatever.

Let's see...what else...the Roti Canai at IPOH Garden was pretty yummy and there was this running joke about going back there and just continually eating more Roti Canai but in the end we actually never did.  Good to remember that option for future years, though!  The weather was actually pretty nice for the whole weekend -- was cloudy for the first half which was quite nice, until Sunday when the sun came out, but I didn't spend all that much time outside so it was just fine.

Perhaps the thing that struck me most about this time at Fanime was just how many different people and friends I ran into at con that I knew from various places.  I had friends from social dance, friends I knew from music production, and in general just lots of different sets of people; I was impressed by how many people I knew that were all at the same event; I didn't even run into quite all of them either.

Most disappointing thing was definitely the Stardew Valley cosplay "gathering", which aside from a nice Harvey, was unfortunately basically empty.  Whelp...

My loot haul was small yet good!  I got 3 different letter sets -- a Little Twin Stars one from Swap Meet (just $3!!!), and two others (Little Prince!) from Artist's Alley.  I also bought a nice microfiber cloth, also from Artist's Alley, which I'll probably use as a gift since I already have my Little Twin Stars microfiber cloths (thanks BZ!).  I saw some big Cinnamoroll plushies for sale in the Dealer's Hall which made me happy -- of course I had no need for them as I already have my very own big Cinnamon at home, but still nice to see Cinnamoroll getting more love.

As far as other people's cosplays go, probably the most notable ones were:

- A really awesome genderbent Moana (as a guy) + Maui (as a girl)
- Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo!  Wow, did not expect to see her cosplayed!
- A whole gang of chefs from OverCooked
- Apparently there were a few other Gakkou Gurashi cosplayers too, whom I unfortunately did not run into, but that is super awesome!  Gakkou Gurashi <3
- A really giant Totoro

and there was also this guy in the Gaming Hall that looked uncannily like my brother. O_o  Seriously though, he totally looks like it...

Anyhow, that about wraps it up.  Pretty fun times and getting to top it off with the GCC dance on Sunday was pretty fun as well (that meant no B&W Ball for me this year).  Despite not staying at con super long each day, everything must have added up because Sunday night I slept for like 12-13 hours lol.  It was glorious.

Other Life Stuff

Unfortunately my respite was a bit short-lived as I went right back into the grind with more on my plate than I'd like...Monday I finally got around to doing a clean reinstall of windows (server 2016) on my desktop to fix some issues that popped up ever since the upgrade from ws2012.  I ran into a couple hiccups but things are more or less running smoothly again now, though I haven't brought =everything= back online yet.  I'm still trying to get the bottom of this strange issue where SSD access seems to slow down after extended usage, but it's not consistent and disappears after a clean reboot so it's difficult to track.  Hopefully I'll be able to track it down or it'll go away on its own...

We are finally more or less done with Goodnight Meowmie (v2.02), though I still need to finish writing the post-mortem report and make some gifs for promotion and all that.  Hopefully I can make that one less thing to worry about soon -- already got too much to sort out with all the other stuff I need to do.

As an aside, I'm actually feeling strangely unconfident about my music production recently, as I feel like it's been a while since I've properly felt really "in the flow" of things on that side.  I think part of it is I've done some more intellectual projects and need to get back into the swing of just going with my first instinct and not second-guessing myself or trying to plan for anything.  Well, nothing I can really do about that at the moment, though.