Love In The Asylum

I think my favorite part of conventions (you know, aside from the awesome people, and the panels, and the autographs, and the events, and the spending money on piles of stuff) is when you walk into an elevator full of 8 people in full cosplay and one businessman in a suit wondering how the fuck he ended up there. That look of utter bewilderment gets me every time. (In fairness, I can see how sharing an elevator with a Legolas on a leash would be a bit baffling if you were caught unawares.)

In related news, I am at Yaoi-Con! My roommate seems cool and is neither a 45-year-old dude or a serial killer (well, I haven't checked her basement, so it's hard to say for certain, but she doesn't look like a serial killer!). I skipped the opening ceremony in favor of doing school work, but I may go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight. And tomorrow there will be many panels of awesomeness and the AMV and cosplay contests. Yay Yaoi-Con! This is really my favorite part of fall, I swear.

Internet in the room is super spotty, so I may or may not be around this weekend. But I will be thinking of you all while I hang out with all the other geeks and ogle beautiful boys. :D

Hey internets, I need your help!

My dearly beloved Freshman Guy got in touch with me this weekend and told me that, due to unforeseen financial difficulties, he was going to have to bail on going to Yaoi-Con with me this year as we had previously planned. This isn't his fault, and I don't blame him at all (goddess knows I've been in his place before), but it does leave me high and dry without a roommate for the convention.

Financially, I can probably squeeze the full cost of the room into my budget - I'm getting a good bit of money refunded from my aid this term, and I was careful this summer, and I'll be going back to work next week. But money's always tight, and if I do that I'll have to a) be super careful with my grocery budget the rest of the semester and b) severely cut down how much swag I'm comfortable buying. Neither of those are fun things! So I'd really like to finagle a new roommate.

I've got reservations for two nights (Fri Oct 29 and Sat Oct 30) in the Hyatt Regency (the hotel hosting the con) for a two-bed double room. I know a few people on my flist were going or thinking of going this year, so if you're still looking for a roommate, or you know someone else who was thinking of going who needs a roommate that you could direct my way, I'd really appreciate it! I've got other avenues to pursue - last time I checked, the convention forum has a section for roommate hunting - but I'd figured it's better to start with people I at least somewhat know.

 
Happy Halloween! It is my second favorite holiday, and by far the most awesome. I hope you all are dressing up and going to parties and eating candy and doing other awesome Halloween type things!

Most Awesome Costumes Of The Day: a TDK!Joker (on crutches), a Soubi (with cigarette), and a Captain Hammer and Doctor Horrible who ran into each other in the Fanmarket and staged a fight. 

I have spent an insane amount of money today, but the Steve/Tony fanart and the Jo Chen Firefly print in my bag say it was TOTALLY WORTH IT. 

I wish I could go to more conventions. Any conventions - sci fi/fantasy, show-specific, anime, comics, filk, really anything! I read people's posts about going to DragonCon or the Stargate conventions or ComicCon San Diego and I am so incredibly jealous, because it sounds like so much fun. I'd love to go sleep in hotel rooms and drag all over a convention hall, meeting up with other geeks, going to panels, standing in line for ages to get things signed, going to hotel room meet-ups from my lj comms, all the stuff other people talk about.

I guess I'm not just not that good at dealing with the idea that other people are having fun without me. *grins* Plus it makes me feel like a bit of a bad geek, since I'm not doing enough of the 'cool' stuff. As much as three days in a hotel arguing about Dick Grayson vs Jason Todd vs Tim Drake vs Damien Wayne can ever be considered cool (side note: colourofsaying  has listened to me talk about this stuff so much that she, who has never read a comic in her life, has actual opinions on it). I'm mature enough to know that as fun as it would be, I really can't afford it, but not, it seems, mature enough not to pout about it.

At least there is YaoiCon, which is always tremendous fun. I'm about 99% positive I'll be going again this year. I already made the hotel reservations ages ago, since those go so quickly, but I've been holding off on registering until I knew whether or not Hanjuuluver was going to be able to go. To avoid a repeat of last summer's mess, she is most pointedly not mentioning to her parents that she'll be going, but since they moved the date back so far, she needed to make sure it wasn't going to conflict too badly with her finals. But it all looks good, so we'll be there! Anyone else?

(I'm thinking about going to WonderCon in San Francisco next year too, but we'll see how my finances shake out. I can probably scrape up the funds to do it without too much guilt if my aid package next year is good and I make money working over the summer. Otherwise it's just too much not in the budget. As is anything in a city I can't reach on the CalTrain.)

So Yaoi-Con is officially on! I found someone else to be my roommate - a girl who lived in my dorm last year and had mentioned some interest in going when I was talking about it in May - and we just got off the phone making our plans on when to meet up and go down there. We are leaving at around 4.30 friday afternoon, which means we should be at the hotel by 6pm. Spending the night friday and saturday, doing all the events, and going back to campus late sunday afternoon. I am so psyched! I'm already making a list of the panels I want to attend - Yaoi Madlibs, Male Homosexuality in Japan, Fandom Wank (!), Stargayte (!!!), plus all the special events. Yay!

So, other people on my flist, are you going? Will I see you there?

While we are on the subject of things that involve gay boys, I saw a review of BBC Wales' Merlin on somebody's flist that described it as Smallville only with King Arthur instead of Superman, and that is so accurate. Like, honestly, right down to the pretty dark-haired boy full of angst. And the gay. Gods, I love BBC Wales sometimes. Seriously, if you have ever wanted to see Arthur and Merlin be fantastically homoerotic at each other (and you don't mind glaring historical inaccuracies) check this out, because it is made of awesome. Cute and pretty and fun and just *grins* 

Well, I spent my last day home on break scrubbing burner plates with steel wool until my fingers bled and polishing cabinets, but on the bright side, I earned enough money this week to pay for my registration for Yaoi-Con! Yay! I don't think my grandma would have written that check if she understood what Yaoi-Con actually is, but  hey, that's why I didn't tell her. I'm sending my registration packet in as soon as I have a chance to photocopy my state-ID-that-I-got-because-I-still-don't-have-a-driver's-license. Also, I made the hotel reservations today for me and Envy! More yay! Can you tell I'm ridiculously excited about this? Considering the convention isn't for six months, I mean. But still!

On the family drama front, New Boyfriend is probably going to be out on bail in short order, but the terms of his bail include not being allowed to buy or drink alcohol, moving into a halfway house, and not coming back into the county at all, so I'm a little less worried about going back to California now that my mom can call the cops if she just sees him at Walgreens or something. It's also looking like my cousin's going to get out on bail - he stole a car just before Christmas - which is more of a good thing. Except for him being a monumental fuck-up who never learns from his mistakes and will probably end up back there within a month, but hopefully 3 months in jail will have made enough of a difference that he'll clean up his act a little. 

Reason #543 I Love my family and their total lack of class:

Joan (my mom's sister): So I was reading about this woman who ran a whorehouse...

My mom: Are you going to tell the story about the husband?

Joan: the one with the knife or the septic tank?

Please to note that this conversation took place while we were out to dinner at the restaurant they have at the country club, and was followed by the story about the tiny crab in my mom's mouth and preceded by a half hour of landscaping/construction talk and frequent horrible bug stories.

As for fandom, I finished my Seph/Zack/Cloud FST and posted it in

ffvii_yaoi, which really surprised me greatly, since I never finish that kind of thing. I finished my Sasuke drabbles and posted them to my ff.net account, also a major relief since I've been sitting on them for about 2 months and they were driving me crazy, and I'm getting back into posting my FMA and KH drabbles. Also, a week's worth of hardcore sleep and destressing has caused my plot bunnies to start to come back to life, so hopefully I'll be able to get some more writing done soon. That would make me really happy =)

 

In summary, spring break=good and productive.

First off, let me just say that that was FUCKING AWESOME. This probably reveals me as both an utter geek and a total noob, but fuck. This was probably the highlight of my entire fucking year. I know I'm saying fuck a lot, but non-swear words cannot convey the awesomeness that was Yaoi-Con. Even with the utter travel failure.

A Less Than Brief Summary of the Epic Travel Failure and The Yaoi of Total Win

So, I left my dorm at 8.30. For some strange reason, I was under the impression that the B-line bus ran on the weekends, but of course it doesn't, so I sat at the bus-stop for THREE HOURS. I probably could have walked to the train station, except for the tiny detail of me not knowing where it is in relation to my dorm. So yeah. And then, when the bus /finally/ came, it was about ten minutes late. Which, you know, not such a big deal, except that it got the train exactly two seconds before the 11.30 train left. So I had to spend another hour sitting in the train station, listening to Jingo on my mp3 player and starving to death (didn't eat breakfast, since they don't feed us on the weekends). Got on the train, and all was well, until we got to Millbrae - once again, got there just as the BART was pulling out. There's another twenty minutes of waiting. 

Fiiiiiiinally got to the airport where I was going to catch the shuttle to the hotel. Much to my amusement, just as I got there Numa Numa started playing on my mp3 player, which is interesting only in that that was the song used in the first yaoi amv I ever watched. Heh. Anyway, the shuttle took forever to get there, too - I think I waited at least 45 minutes, even if the boredom was alleviated by a long pointless conversation with Envy involving heavy criticism of the abuse of side characters in HP interspersed with me swearing at the shuttle and her swearing at the worms she was trying to suck into a pipette. But, eventually, the bus did get there, and I rode it, and then I was at Yaoi-Con and ALL WAS RIGHT IN THE WORLD!

It was - wow, every time I try to think about it I go all incoherent and want to start babbling. I saw the best Axel cosplayer EVER. I saw people from fandoms I have never heard of, mostly video games, who nonetheless looked /incredible/ in their costumes. I saw several guys being led around by collars and chains. I saw an Advent Children Cloud and a Leon holding hands. I saw SO MANY GW cosplayers and wtf? I thought we were a fairly small fandom...I attended a workshop on writing fanfiction that was amazing and fun and one of the instructors was incredibly British and both of them were hysterically funny and many dirty jokes were told and horrible fanfics quoted. I spent more than 150 dollars - I bought Only Our Ring Fingers Know, Shout Out Loud, two Death Note doujin, 3 Gundam doujin, and 3 FFVII doujin, with varying degrees of porn (one FF doujin I bought almost entirely because the cover said "Go! Nude! Go! even though it was only supposedly shonen-ai), a Gaara keychain, a Death Note L (the letter, not the character) keychain, and Kakashi and Iruka pins. I went into the video room and watched anime whose titles I cannot remember and whose plots I couldn't follow because I wasn't close enough to read the subtitles. I saw so many Roys and Eds!!! And a Reno!!!

In short, it was FANTASTIC, even though I was only there for about 4 hours and even though it was insanely hard to get there. But really, this was just an experiment - to see if I could get there, to see if I would like it or if it would be really weird, etc. And yes, I liked it!! So next year, I'm going to have a lot more of a plan (instead of deciding to go at the last minute). Really really I'd like to save up my money - starting, say, tomorrow - and get a hotel room with someone, either Envy or a random roommate, to split the cost, and do the whole weekend - take the Caltrain up on Friday afternoon and come back on Sunday afternoon/evening. It would be exhausting and expensive, but I really want to do the whole thing. I'll keep my fingers crossed(and try to find a job)!

Getting back also proved to be a trial. I got back to the airport and decided that I was fucking starving (because of the time problems, I hadn't eaten since yesterday), so I went to look for a place to eat. While doing this, I managed to get horribly lost, and it took me almost twenty minutes to find the restaurant I was looking for. I got dinner, then left to catch the BART back to the Caltrain. Minor problem? I thought I was on one side of the airport, and I, um, wasn't. Which I realized when I walked to the part of the terminal where I thought the BART was and ended up in a totally empty construction-ish area. Not cool. So I went back to where I was, actually checked a map, realized I had to take the Airtrain to the BART, tried to find the Airtrain and got lost again, this time by going to the wrong floor. And then I got to the right floor, except that it was the wrong parking garage. Wandered around in what was probably a stupid and dangerous way, but finally found the train, took the BART etc, and once again, I arrived at the Caltrain on the second to when the train did, but with no time to get my ticket and get on. So I spent another hour sitting in semi-darkness in a rather sketchy train station. But I caught the bus back in Palo Alto okay, and managed to get off at my stop, and thus all ended well. 

It's hard to be unsatisfied with anything that happened today when my entire bed is covered in gay porn.