Somehow we woke up Saturday in time for showers and cosplay outfits. Mike #1 caught the first bus out of town and our Mike had his own transportation, so it was just us three... and two costumes. Sarah was busting out her Hermoine again, while Evan...
Arpegius from Interstella 5555. And he's for sale.
Saturday
Face To Face
We didn't have much time to screw around once we got back to the student union. Sarah had a full plate of Vic Mignogna fangirling ahead of her before her shift started and Evan had a long day of convention pimpage. Me? Back to the reg table for another four hours!
The registration table was crowded when the shift began, so the first hour flew by quickly. It was more of the same on duty, but Evan stopped by and had somehow acquired a table to achieve our nefarious purposes. Good thing too, because the reg table was getting crowded with flyers for not only Geek.Kon and Costume Con, but also OddCon, the sheets Karoshi-con and Kitsune Kon gave Evan and me to throw on the fire, and Trainer's Rendezvous, a Pokémon get-together some of Milwaukee's friends are hosting. Evan collected a few of our extras and threw them on his table. He also had his own volunteer work due up, so guess who gets to sit around for two more hours!
Thankfully, I got a couple more photos in before/during my shifts.
Finally, an Ichigo cosplayer I can get behind...
Two Persona 3 protagonists for the price of one...
They see me rollin... they hatin'...
And one more Hetalia photo of Romano sporting a personalized Azzurri kit. Considering the Hetalia soccer project I'm currently working on, this is very inspiring.
...and this hastily-assembled display is my new home. It was nice talking to folks passing by, many of whom were already fans of the con. And it was a lot more relaxing than reg work.
Dr. Scott even stopped by, adding a large paper Yoshi to the display for a brief moment.
Eventually Trae and his fiancé Crysta made their grand entrance and we talked shop for a bit. Crysta creates No Brand's program book and was soon to be entering her cocoon to finish things up, so it was fun bitching about all the submission deadlines everyone inevitably misses. I haven't touched our program book yet, so call it a pre-emptive gripe fest. Mike, who doubles as No Brand's panels coordinator, also appeared and said they had room for a couple more panels on their schedule. Since Tyler and I weren't interested in doing NTAO at No Brand (it'll be at a bigger venue this year- ACen!), when Reanna dropped in I pitched a writing panel to her, figuring it couldn't go any worse than the one I ran with Miles a couple years ago. She accepted, so Mike can haz panel nao.
(Since I'm also Geek.Kon's panel head, I may as well solicit here so you can help plug the gap: Submit Your Panel!)
When I returned to the table after what became an impromptu No Brand summit, I saw that Sarah had texted me and needed food badly. She and Evan were in the masquerade and only had an hour off between orientation and check-in. Before I could act, there they were, fresh out of orientation. The clock was ticking. To make things a little more dramatic, we were in the mood for Jimmy John's. It was three blocks away, and because I couldn't move my car and risk paying for parking I was walking. Would I get back in time? Or would they starve to death in the cavernous green room?
Ten minutes later, I was back with sustenance. I was also in a hurry to get upstairs to the masquerade action as Cheesus and I hatched a brilliant plan to get good seats for the masquerade. Some cons like No Brand and Geek.Kon tolerate camping in line early. Some like ACen and Iowa have a ticketing system that assigns seats in some other fashion than first-come, first-served. This was somewhere closer to Detour's system: hover around the front door long enough and hope you're closest to the door when it finally opens. Knowing this, Cheesus and I arrived ninety minutes early and staked out floor space with a good view of the entrance.
It's amusing that we went through all this trouble. You all know I hate waiting in line for anything, best exemplified in my ACen '05 recap where I avoided lines for the rest of the con after spending four hours in reg. And this masquerade had all the makings of disaster- Evan and Sarah said that due to some confusion over the online registration system, they accepted more entries than desired, most of them reportedly "not that great." The judges were also guilty of the most grievous sin of not pre-judging their entries. They didn't even require a reference picture... especially scary when cosplaying a character from a six-year-old film set entirely to a Daft Punk album.
Still, it wasn't all dead time. We hung out and talked con stuff. I also got a chance to hang out for a bit with the Hetalia crew. Their Russia's already making plans in the likely event that I bring Estonia to Iowa.
The good news is that we were allowed in an hour early. We found good, unobstructed seats in front of their catwalk. I even snuck a quick nap in, punctured only by shouts of "you just lost the game" from one row behind.
It was not a promising start, but this was...
A surprise and deserving show of gratitude for Momo and her years of dedication to the con. Given how often I saw her running around the convention putting out random fires, she deserves it.
Now on with the show...
Evan does some posing as Arpegius...
A Clannad cosplayer sings about that damn starfish in Japanese...
Rengei *nails* the laugh... which effectively makes up for the lack of Caramelldansen.
Doctor Mario operates on Paper Yoshi, invoking some great one-liners- "I know what you're thinking... this pill's too big to swallow, but good news!" And after the loud cries of horror from the crowd... "Yoshi can swallow anything!"
New Geek.Kon staffer Brian sheds his regular Hetalia garb for a stint from Reborn and some spirited singing.
Actually, the costumes overall weren't as bad as advertised, and the skits and singing were very good. An Izumi (FMA variety) sang of her sin while holding baby Wrath, Erika did a great job with a Len Kagamine song until the rampant cell phone lighter waving broke her into laughter, and someone "addicted to repetitive dance moves" got a Maka chop as part of her treatment. Also, Momo held everything together quite nicely, making snide comments and keeping the crowd engaged, despite a few too many cheap crowd pops (namely, going "who likes {insert popular show/game}?" whenever someone from {insert popular show/game} was about to appear). And she made a "lost the game" joke, which would be an automatic penalty game if she wasn't so damn awesome.
Unfortunately, while the crowd got a decent show, they still had to judge everything. This would prove difficult as not only was there no pre-judging, despite my constant peeking at the judges, I only saw one of the three ever actually writing anything down. That couldn't be good.
Worse yet, next was the Character Auction. And there were upwards of twenty or so characters to sell. They'd be at this a while.
While Momo did a nice job as host, Joe appeared quite unprepared for all this, making it clear that he was pretty much winging it.
Here's Evan! You too can own this actual guitar hero from the stars if the price is right!
After Arpegius sold for the respectable price of $17 to a cute (and underage) Rin Kagamine, we saw the reverse in play and the serious creep factor...
Suffice it to say the girls went for more. Not long after Evan was traded, I was out the door. I may not have had anything better to do, but I wasn't in the mood to see girls being sold.
That and Sarah would probably get mad if I bid on any of them.
Next- Condensed Dance Bitching! Time Travel! More Guys Named Mike!