Fanime 2019 report, etc.

I guess I may as well try to be good about linking to previous posts...here is Fanime 2018.

Blogging just to say "blahblahblah happened" and reporting on it is actually strangely exciting.  Reminds me of good old times...let's get into it!

As I mentioned earlier, I didn't have much lined up for Fanime this year and I had to leave early on Sunday to go teach private lessons (and also left Friday night to go to dance) so I wasn't even there for all that long anyhow.

Arcade gaming -- seemed pretty cool this year, but I didn't really have the time nor desire to really play a lot.  Arcade machines were set up as free play this year which is cool but may have contributed to long lines and/or the machines always being occupied at any given time and I really did not feel like trying to wait for a machine to open up.  That said I did hop on TGM3 for a bit, though not as much as I normally would because A) the sticks and controls felt a bit weird which threw me off a bit and B) I'm really not used to playing on a cab so just the actual size and style of the CRT display kind of throws me for a loop visually.  It was a different setup than the old one (my user data wasn't there) so I created a new account...was initially thinking that maybe I'd play until I got a promotional exam or something, but it became pretty clear that I really wasn't able to perform well on that cab at all, so I stopped.  Unfortunate really, but maybe for the best as I didn't have that sort of time to throw around anyways.

I also saw somebody playing 3rd Strike and he wasn't button mashing so I hopped on and played a bunch of friendlies with him!  They were pretty fun matches!  Despite my rust, I took most of them =O  He was a Hugo player, so a relatively unfamiliar matchup for me and though I had some trouble recognizing certain mixups like dash -> SPD or his running command throw, I think the hardest part was knowing what buttons to press in neutral because Hugo has such good long ranged pokes that beat out a lot of moves from afar.  He switched up to Makoto for a couple games as well and then back to Hugo and finally took one, after which I switched to Ken and played a few more before somebody else asked to play and I hopped out.  Good times.

Didn't get to hop on either (there were 2!) of the Bishi Bashi games unfortunately -- again, just didn't have the time or willingness, since I already had other gaming plans, etc. and people were already playing.  I guess these sorts of things are great for those times when you go to con early Friday or whatever and it's super not crowded.  I'll have to remember that for next time, that going on Friday during the day is actually probably a great idea to get all the Artist Alley stuff/etc done with since you want to go through those when it's less crowded, then you can do photo posing and all that when more people are around...

Went to one panel this year, Queerness and Magical Girls, which was great!  It also reminded me of just how awesome Madoka was, haha, but also had a lot of good content and great things to think about.  Yay~

We went to IPOH for roti, yay~

For my own gaming, I brought my laptop complete with Melee setup and a small group of us sat down to play some friendlies.  There ended up being 4 of us so I decided we should try out the epic "Dual 1v1" mode of 20XX where you play two simultaneous 1v1 matches (that can't interact with each other!) on the same stage, then the winners of both face off in a 2-stock match.  It was pretty hilarious, especially since having both matches going on in the same space was super visually distracting, and after one match finishes the victor is free to just spam tech skill as much as they want in an attempt to distract the other match, and do things like charge f-smashes, do rolls to confuse techchases, and general other shenanigans.  We played a few doubles matches as well -- 2v2 is not something I play very often (well, not that singles is either), but I knew that more than anything it's important to just look out to fish for kills whenever one of them is at high %.  That's one of the great strengths of Fox in a 2v2, his upsmash is just such a great quick kill option that can be thrown out whenever opportune, and it doesn't require the precision of a tipper marth fsmash or something like that.

Watched one or two of my friends perform at Fanimaid Live, so cool and so good!  Woo~

Also played around with some Puyo Puyo Tetris as well as Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes with another friend, which was great!

Artists' Alley and Dealer's Hall: Went through, bought some Journey pins and a necklace from Stephanie Kao (already have some of her prints!) -- only thing I bought all con, but it's nice to have a Journey necklace!  You know, to go along with my Journey messenger bags and Journey lanyard and Journey phone charms as I'm wearing my Journey cosplay lol.  Didn't make it all the way around Dealer's Hall (again, didn't really have the time to spare) but didn't quite care either.

I did make sure to spend at least some time going around with my hood/mask on, which surprisingly was more comfortable than I remembered for some reason.  I also discovered that the trick for photos is to just find a good spot somewhere in the main hallway (not blocking traffic) to just sprawl out and do a meditating pose -- then a ton of people just start taking photos as they pass by.  So I'm glad I got a chance to do that before leaving con for good.  I unfortunately (this always seems to happen) didn't actually get any photos of myself personally, but also didn't feel too bad about that considering I didn't have a ton of free time.

Overall a chill con as expected, though Saturday was quite a long day still.  No B&W ball this year since I had to go teach private lessons and dance with the Stanford kids, so a bit of a shame, but honestly I wouldn't have been able to handle that much dancing (let alone social energy) this weekend anyways.  But yeah, overall pretty satisfied with how things went.

Speaking of dance, that went well too.  Private lessons are always a challenge trying to really drill down and distill useful practical knowledge in a short timeframe, but they're fun and they also really push my own understanding of dance as well, so great all around.

For now in the aftermath of the weekend I'm just taking it easy I guess.  I didn't do that much today besides spend some time cleaning up and trying to work on All in a Day's Work 4.  Oh right, and I also was notified of some website blatantly stealing one of our games, sigh.  DRM sucks and all until you are an indie game dev where it's actually quite easy for people to steal your games.  It sucks because I've already implemented a crude site-lock for these games but unfortunately this site simply embeds the itch.io-hosted html5 index.html file in an iframe, so there's not that much of a good way to prevent it.  I can at least make their lives harder if the itch.io folks will maybe let me change the urls around by deleting old builds, but we'll see.  In the end, this kind of stuff is always an arms race and if people REALLY want to steal your stuff, there isn't that much you can do to stop them as an individual unless you want things to get hairy.  Beh.  Well, if I find myself with some extra time, maybe I'll look into more creative solutions, involving working around Same-Origin Policy blahblahblah.  But it might not be super doable if I also want to support itch.io.  Bleh.

But anyhoo, All in a Day's Work 4 wil be my main project moving forward for the week I'm sure.  Don't think there will be a postmortem for Inflate Me to the Moon (the only thing I'd really talk about is the SPC-style music).  There is still a fair bit of work left for All in a Day's Work 4 though.  I've gotten the album design all done at least, which is great, and I =thought= I had the tracklist done, but then I remembered that there are actually a bunch of OHC entries I did after I stopped making my "Monthlies" series where they were WIPs or other projects, so they've never been formally released.  Things like the WIP version of "Convergence", or "Song of the Sea", or even some Mysterious Space songs.  And some of those are actually pretty great!  So I had to try and make some room in the tracklist for those.  In the end I decided to cut out a few of the more recent songs and just save them for All in a Day's Work 5, because there are just too many songs that I want to put into these albums!  (figures, since it's been soooo long since All in a Day's Work 4)  Anyways, I still have to do the liner notes for all that and make =sure= that I've included all the tracks I want in the order that I want, so that'll be my main thing for the coming week....though I am also very overdue for some letter writing time.

Let's hope we can have a good week this coming week.