telophase | Back at work...

Entry tags:

con,
entertain me

Back at work...

...and totally not happy about it. I'm at work today only because the apartment complex notified the apartments around me that they were shutting the water off today to do plumbing repairs, and I decided I'd rather be miserable in a place with running water. Sum total useful work today: I turned in a form. Which involved me walking over to one office in the library to get a signature and then upstairs (on the elevator, actually, otherwise I'd start coughing and not stop) to turn it in, which made me tired.

Anyway, I'm sitting here trying to stay awake, so to help me: tell me your convention stories. Funny, sad, noncomittal, whatever.

Here's a short one that isn't even mine, it's

mothoc's, but I stole it from him: at A-Kon a couple of years ago, one of the escalators from one convention floor to another stopped, with many people standing on it. Who remained standing on it, until someone near the bottom yelled for them to WALK UP THE STAIRS.

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Oh, convention stories. I have a bunch.

This past A-Kon, I was dressed as Kurapica and was browsing the Dealer's Room. Someone asked if they could snap my picture, so I put down my bags and posed. I went to turn around and pick my bags back up after I was done with the picture. But when I spun around, my cupped hand went straight into this guy's crotch.

After Acen 2005, we were heading home. I had spent a buttload of time and money making my Sai (Hikaru no Go) costume, and wasn't quite ready to take it off, so I was wearing it home. My friend decided that she wanted to stop at the mall and pick up some manga, so we stop at a mall on our way. So here we are, I'm dressed in long, white Heian robes, walking next to my friend (who is half-black--this is important--and dressed as Usopp), and two other friends. This 9-yr-old kid sees me and asks, "Are you part of the KKK?" My half-black friend (who looks completely black) replies, "Yes. We're part of the KKK."

I have more con stories, if you want to hear them xD

Heeee! XD

Absolutely! Tell me more!

Escalators temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience. --Mitch Hedberg

The first one that comes to mind took place during this year's I-Con. There was a small fire during the Anime Dance Party that necessitated evacuating the building. As I was kind of wandering around, keeping an eye on the crowd I found a large group of maybe 40-50 kids who had been in the Party before it got shut down all standing in a circle and chanting.

It seems they had decided to alleviate their boredom by doing the Hokey Pokey.

Once I saw three people sitting around a little table earnestly discussing the geography of the Discworld, trying to remember something. Looking downwards, I think at a diagram they'd been making, they lapsed into a deep, ponderous silence.

Terry Pratchett walked by.

He turned the corner, and seconds later, one of them broke the silence: "Now, wait, is the turtle on top of the elephants?"

The moral of this story is that no, it is not, but Terry Pratchett will not correct you on the matter. (This is because he will always be two seconds ahead of you.)

I was at a convention a couple years ago, and spent some time with Tim and Serena Powers. They were hauling around a large crate filled with tiny, crawling, mewling, barely-eyes-opened kittens. The crate had wire mesh in the front, and sometimes kittens would cling to the mesh and play King of the Hill. While Tim and Serena watched in fascination from the house, a feral mama cat leaped through the open window of their car and, one by one, deposited six kittens on the front seat. Then she left and never came back. Because the kittens had to be dropper-fed and Tim was already scheduled at the convention, they brought the kittens with them. I am pretty sure those were the youngest con attendees.

Have you ever read Tim Powers? I think you would like him.

Ah, con reminiscing~

So my friend and I decide to go to this local convention that kind of... sucks. It's very adult-oriented and the programming is lame, but we wanted to cosplay, darnit!, so we didn't really care. My brother decides to come along, so we in turn decided to drag along a couple of his friends by showing up on their doorstep at 9 in the morning and abducting them. Anyways, so first we get lost going to the convention. We finally get there, hit up the dealer's room, and then realize we're really hungry, so we get into the car to go grab some fast food (we would have walked, but my brother is an amputee, and we didn't know how far we'd have to go). My brother's friend remarks that he doesn't see any restaurants, and we've been driving around for quite a bit. So we decide to screw food and head back. My brother remarks, "Yeah, there's no restaurants, but there's a car repair shop on every corner!" We stop at a red light, and... our car dies. Completely.

Another out-of-con-but-still-in-costume story. So my friend randomly calls me up and asks if I wanted to put on my Chrno (Chrno Crusade) costume and head out to scare some normals. I say, "Why not?" and put my costume on. She picks me up, dressed as Rosette from the same series. I don't know if you're familiar with the series, but Rosette is a nun (kind of. She's from a Protestant sect, but whatever). So we're driving, and there's this religious selling candy on the street to raise money for his church. He sees my friend, gets a really big grin on his face, and jogs over to her window. He looks in, frowns, and says, "Oh. I thought you was a nun..." and turns away sadly.

And I have yet more... xD

Hee.

I've read some of his work and loved it, and wasn't able to get into others. The Stress of Her Regard, The Anubis Gates, and The Drawing of the Dark were all Good, but Last Call and Expiration Date I wasn't able to get into.

XDD

The ones you like are also some of my favorites. You would probably also enjoy Dinner at Deviant's Palace (unusual in being science fiction, but really weird science fiction) and perhaps On Stranger Tides (zombie pirates).

Project A-kon 5, during Night Security's standard securing of the common con area. Ken, also known as Junior Security, disappears from sight for 15 minutes to get his insulin from the crash room. He returns to Security Central (where we are visually securing the area while playing a boardgame) with a stunned look on his face.

Inquiry reveals that, as Ken was rummaging in his bag, he heard a friendly voice ask, "Coming to bed?" Turning around, he was face to face with an attractive, blonde, female member of the Day Security. Stammering out that he had to take his shot and return downstairs with something for another security member, he added that he would be happy... nay, ecstatic ... to return momentarily to do so. Confusion crossed the security femme's face, then realization, and then, "Oh! No,no. I have to get up in the morning." And thusly was Ken dismissed. It was a sad Ken who related this story to the rest of Night Security, who, once our overly caffeinated brains ceased to find this hilarious, all agreed that it did well and truly suck to be Ken.

Picture it. ~~Sicily, 1942.~~ A small con in New Jersey, 2002. I, a cosplayer, was wearing a highly recognizable costume replicating one previously worn by one of the stupidly dressed gentlemen from Dir en grey.

She was wearing a bra and a fluorescent fishnet shug made from a pair of old stockings. Her screech was echoed by dogs four miles away. Despite the fact that I've long advocated sticking an elbow into the noses of all glompers, the unexpected hug was the least of my worries, as she then stepped back and recited a poem at me. Time and shock have erased it from my memory, except for the memorable line "Our doki-doki meter is off the scale."

Really.

She then stuck a sticker on me saying "I was hit on by an otaku."

After that, did she:
a) Go away and leave me in peace, or
b) Start going on and on about how it was okay with her girlfriend if she did whatever she wanted at a con, cause it's a con and whatever happens at a con stays at the con?

And did I then, for the first time in a long career of being hit on by persons from all walks of life, welcome or not, finally have to actually look one in the eye and say the words "I do not want to have sex with you?"

Then there was the phone conversation I had with my brother at Katsucon this year.

MsC_Bro: Sorry, but I don't think I can go to I-Con this year.
MsC: What? Why not?
MsC_Bro: I've already seen my maximum quota of cat-girls for the year.

Can you tell he's a gamer but not an anime fan?

dammit, i came in here to post that.

and damn that hypnotic Asoka icon. Every time you use that, I lose like three minutes of my day.

*posts it again*

*looks at it again*

(dammit)
((oooo, hot))

the first time I went to AWA. I was all by myself and within 5 minutes of being there I picked up a stalker who insisted on personally showing me where everything was...but he wanted to hold my hand to do it. D:

A-Kon used to open the dealer's room onthe first day of the convention by sacrificing someone to the gods of mercantilism. (No, seriously, they did!) They did this by bodily *throwing* someone into the dealer's room, after which people would be allowed to enter normally.

Since I mentioned my friend's Rosette costume...

We were waiting for a friend to finish up his panel so we could order pizza. His panel was next to the ballroom, where the RAVE was going on, so needless to say, there were a lot of intoxicated or otherwise high individuals in the hallway outside it.

This one guy, he must have been in his late 20s/early 30s, dressed in Ikari Shinji's blue plug suit from Evangelion, made completely out of tight tight spandex and not wearing a cup of any kind or anything to better... uh... "hide" his package, approached my friend dressed as the rather provacatively dressed "nun." Around her neck is a clock [picture (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v650/chibinasu/Past%20Cosplays/340778.jpg)]. She thinks he's staring at the clock, but me and the other friend with us both believe he was staring at her chest xD Anyways, as he's staring, he mutters, "That's nice..." and then, still staring at her chest, says, "You have the perfect, uh, hair and eyes for this costume."

Another story of a similar sort. Acen 2005, a friend brought her hot hot hot hot hot hot boyfriend, who happens to be a cop. He's dressed as Roger from Big O, and his girlfriend, dressed as Dorothy, had to go to the bathroom. So we're waiting for her in the hotel lobby. This girl sees him, and says, "Wow, you're so... suave. Really hot." And he's just like, "Uh... thanks?" And she keeps going on and on. He's looking to us to step in and help him out, but we're too busy laughing. So finally, he says, "Actually, I'm here with my girlfriend..." which prompts the girl to turn to the rest of us and literally scream, "WHICH ONE OF YOU IS IT?!?!?!?!" My friend, dressed like this (her crack costume, which we dubbed Kasturba de Ippolita) steps forward and is like, "it's me, it's me..." but Chris (the boyfriend) just said, "Uh... no... she went up to the room."

The Sunday after con, we spent an hour slingshotting marshamallows from our 27th floor window trying to hit my friend's car on the parking lot across the street. This was orchestrated by Chris, who, if you remember, is a cop. (http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y217/nayami_chan/Anime%20Central%202005/kasturba.jpg)

heh, it'd probably have helped if I closed the picture tag ^^;;

Otakon. I forget which one. One of my friends manages, within one day, to get stalked by two very different men. One of whom is, you know, college age, okay, blah blah flirty, blah blah, fine. The other is older, and wants a girl to help him "take his costume off later". The second one is never seen again, but the first one pops up from time to time during the con, until he's told to go away.

She attracts stalkers. It's funny in a very not-funny sort of way, you know?

This is one Dean Haglund told. It happened at DCon this year, to a friend of his, so this is like third hand and I will probably get the details wrong. But anyway, the elevators at DCon are notoriously suck. They're always overcrowded and involve long waits. Sometimes they just break, and since the host hotels have glass elevators out in the middle of the lobby you can watch them freeze and see the people inside as they grow increasingly desperate and stuff. Last year, a cute thing happened with that. One of the elevators got stuck, and there were some kids in Harry Potter costumes out on the balconies around the edge of the lobby. One of them started pointing at the elevator with her wand, and yelling accio elevator or whatever. And the elevator actually started moving. It got stuck again a few floor down, but still that was great.

But yeah, back to the story. This year Dean Haglund's friend was on a packed to capacity elevator with Ray Park aka Darth Maul. Not that Ray Park being there has any bearing on anything but I find it amusing. And it went up to the top, and then it stuck. And then it started falling a few feet at a time, and sticking again, and then falling a few more feet, etc. So they all thought they were going to die. One kid was kneeling on the ground praying to god to save them because he was so freaked. They got on the emergency phone, and the emergency operators told them to quit tying up the emergency phone and they were all… but we’re going to DIE! And meanwhile, as they are all freaking out, thinking they were going to plummet to their deaths, there were people outside taking pictures of the elevator. And apparently at one point they managed to get the doors open, but they weren’t able to get off because people were just standing there taking pictures of them. So anyway, in the end they didn't die and everything was fine. A repair guy climbed on top of the elevator and fixed whatever. And then he rode the elevator down to the bottom, standing on top of it the whole way. I'm sure lots of people took pictures of that too.

And one not elevator related. At Comiccon we were walking from our parking to the convention center. I was dressed as Princess Tutu, and some women we passed along the way asked one of my friends if I was dressed as a CAKE. Hee. I don't know, I guess it was the poofy skirt.

Very first con I ever went to, circa 1976. It was basically Star Trek-oriented, but with a number of well-known SF authors attending. I had just become a Trek fan the previous year, and the ENTIRE cast plus numerous guest stars like Mark Lenard and Arlene Martel were going to be there. Trekkie Nirvana! My mother was skeptical about letting me go, since it was all the way up in funky San Francisco and I was only 14. After a week of begging and assurances that I was plenty old enough to take care of myself in a crowd, she finally agreed. Gee, what could happen? I'm not dumb--I'm not going to go somewhere with strangers! Gosh, Mom, don't worry so much!

With joy and anticipation, I started putting together a costume. I borrowed a velour pullover of not quite the right color for a Starfleet uniform, made a badge and added rolled-up black pants and a pair of vinyl boots from the thrift store. These were not quite right either--they were knee-high, dark brown and crinkly-shiny textured, with big blocky heels. (See 1976, above. The boots are important.) That was the best I could do with limited time and budget.

Then my 12-year-old sister wanted to go too. All right, says Mom after another day of assurances, but stick together and use common sense. Of course we will, Mom! Gee! We got a ride from a friend of hers who was going to the city for the day. We were dropped off in front of the Civic Center, paid our money and walked in with programs in hand. What to do first? Wow, all these events going on at once! We stood in the middle of the lobby consulting the schedule for a couple of minutes, excited as hell.

Then...I felt an odd little tickle on my calf. Very light and gentle, but definitely a touch. I looked down. There was a young man, maybe early twenties, kneeling on the floor next to me. Utterly mesmerized by my vile, crinkly-shiny, brown vinyl boots. Oh, this gentleman was in LOVE. Dreamy pleasure was written all over his face as he tenderly, softly stroked the--

I looked at my sister. She looked back. We booked it. EWWW! Was that a...a pervert? Guess so! Wow, glad we got away from HIM! EWWW!

So we shook ourselves, got back to the con schedule and visited the dealer's room. Out in the hallway, we stopped to orient ourselves and find a screening room--uncut Trek episodes in full color! Wow, cool--we had only a black and white TV at the time. So far, so good--other than the PERVERT, and those weird fanzines with Kirk and Spock kissing--whatever made anyone think of drawing that? EWWW!

And at that moment I felt a wee, gentle tickle on my calf...and looked down.

Maybe Mom had a point about San Francisco after all. But we lost him for good the second time--and no, I never thought of finding a security person. It took me years to warm up to slash, I'm afraid, and it was all the fault of one lonely guy with a yen for vinyl...

MM

One of my favorite only-at-a-con incidents happened at this past FanimeCon. I was dressed as Hakkai, and my friend was dressed as Gojyo, complete with shakujo. We were in the Artist's Alley, and suddenly a Stormtrooper (as in Star Wars) tapped my friend on the shoulder.

He took her shakujo, gave her his laser gun, and they proceeded to have an impromptu standoff, after which he bowed to her and returned both weapons to their proper owners. It was awesomely random.

PHOTO EVIDENCE!

(The Konzen in that picture wasn't with our group. She snuck up behind me and bapped me over the head - FUCKING HARD OW - with her paper fan. And stalked us. It was worrisome.)

At Katsucon 2004, my friends and I came out of the dealers' room to find that the entire hotel was at a standstill - all escalators had been stopped, doors outside closed, no one allowed to leave. When we asked someone what was going on, we were told that someone had passed out and they found a white, powdery substance on their person. All the otaku just sat down and pulled out some manga. It was like that for about 45 minutes.

Also, L'arc en Ciel concert at Otakon 2004 was the best. ever. After the concert, the swarm of otaku flowed into the street and we stopped traffic on our trek from the arena to the convention center.

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Back at work...

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