As I get older, trying to write a wrap-up post like this over a month after the fact is an exercise in wringing what little I can out of my slowly dessicating brain…anyways.
Pre-Fanime
The drive up was fairly uneventful from what I can remember, compared to the bizarre saga that was driving up for Ursa Major last December. I had slowdowns all through LA, but such is life. I feel like I hit Stockton traffic too, as a bonus. You know, that same stretch of I-5 that’s been under construction for like, twenty years. But that’s just how it goes sometimes. It was also warm enough I had my AC on pretty much the whole time, but that’s not unusual either, just increasingly pricey.
A sympathetic Mr. Bones
Every time I stay at my friend’s house, I am reminded this is a product that exists. I’ve actually looked up the different detergents used in shower products and therefore know how this can be a thing scientifically, and yet. It prolly doesn’t help that in contrast, the face wash I use is specifically engineered so I can rub it into my eyes with no issues (blepharitis babes rise up, or something).
This was disorienting to drink.
Thursday
Due to changes in Parking Policy, I had to think about how early I was going to leave this year, since I would be now competing with people for premium spots. Leave too early and I could give myself a too long day zero, but leave too late and I could give myself a big headache for the rest of the weekend…
I managed to split the difference, and won’t bore you with further details regarding this languid tale of logistics. Speaking of Logistics, I once again waited for my swap meet selling staff partner to finish up with Unloading fairly uneventfully before setting up and taking people’s money for the pile of stuff I had managed to declutter this year. I did fairly well, which, given the severe lack of outside income I have these days, is always reassuring.
Our staff photographer @bon.komera actually got an action shot of me when they stopped by to drop me off more water.
Also pictured, a GRAMM romper that keeps losing buttons – I think I have at least three to sew back on at this point.
Back to the parking situation, after I packed up and dropped off my unsold wares at the hotel, I needed to move my car into its new spot after midnight. Otherwise, I risked it turning into a giant pumpkin, and with how warm it was that weekend, that means a giant moldy pumpkin.
Pictured: not my car
After doing so successfully, I was waiting to cross at a major intersection kitty-corner to the convention center, which, on this weekend in downtown San Jose, is usually relatively safe late at night.
By that I mean, there’s usually a critical mass of weebs out and about, slowly making their way to La Vic’s or wherever, and I’m not too concerned. I am always very concerned about The Party Of Extreme Negligence In Yonder Park, which you may have heard about this year, but I just make sure I stay on the opposite side of the street of those shenanigans.
But anyways. As I made my way past the Mariott, a drunk couple gets into a fight, and while they go their separate ways, there is still some yelling happening, and I’m Monitoring The Situation. But there’s a normal-seeming, physically-large guy waiting to cross with me, so I’m still not too worried. Then a skinny skater boy rolls past us, picks up his board, steps over to the corner…and then gets right in front of my face.
“excuse me, but um, you’re really beautiful”
“Sk8er Boi”, Avril Lavigne (2002)
“you’re really running game on me at one am.”
“oh uh, is it one am? i… didn’t know”
“…”
“uh, sorry”
Technically, it was 12:30am, but I think I’m justified in rounding up. He did skate away after a time, seconds that ticked by excruciatingly slowly, as is often the case in these situations. But it’s times like these I realize why men are often intimidated by me – they think I’m like, a baddie or something. But really, I am just a lady of a certain age who is tired.
Friday
Friday tends to be relatively low-key, if only because I don’t have any Line Management duties. I sat at a door for a shift. I went to go get lunch. I ran into a staff member I know from another department and chatted a bit. I sweated in the crowded food court while waiting for my burrito bowl. (It wasn’t actually that hot, I was just wearing a Layered Look with a Hood.)
My favorite job
(@bon.komera)
After my work duties were finished, I went to check out the Friday swap as a shopper this time, and had the dawning realization “hey! I’m sort of in a current fandom for once!” with regard to hololive member and Picross™ puzzler Juufuutei Raden™. Often, there’s not really much merch I’m interested in at these things, because my weeb interests are increasingly ancient. And I did actually find one (1) seller with Raden stuff, but it was plush toys, and even if I didn’t have a long-standing disinterest in Plushies of People, they also just weren’t well done. Raden is wearing a coord, and if you don’t do a decent job on it, what is even the point.
Cursed carbys
A pattern for a “civil war era” dress – perhaps only funny if you know what the actual 1860’s silhouette should be
The only other person with character goods I was interested in was marking it up as much as it would cost if I bought it new directly. I get the shipping situation is rough right now, but with the weak yen, well. I can do the math in my head, and it wasn’t mathing. So I ultimately left empty-handed. I did run into a few people other there and had some more chats, so there’s that at least.
I headed over to spend the rest of my late night free time at the Gaming Hall, in part to play The Train Game, but also to try to play mahjong IRL. Around Santa Day last year, I decided I would actually just try to play riichi mahjong online after various attempts to learn the game, and as I suspected, it’s actually a lot easier than it’s often made out to be. This is a subject for a different blog post, but for anyone else who was ever interested in learning and got overwhelmed, well, a lot of the teaching materials and tutorials out there are bad, which isn’t surprising, cuz that tends to be the case for most things.
There weren’t too many people at the tables that time of night, but there were two guys playing by themselves with Learner Energy, so I walked over and…they refused to make eye contact with me. Getting the hint, I went and sat down at the tabletop gaming tables nearby to see if any other tables opened up, and not long after, two people went up to the same two guys, successfully made eye contact, and started playing. Was it my outfit? Who knows.
BOLO: strangely dressed woman attempting to join games, do not interact
(@bon.komera edit)
At that point I was no longer in the mood and dedicated my night to the train game, for which I had no competition. I even played a few rounds of DDR to finish off my night, risking injury and receiving insult by the fact that all the songs I remembered from back in the day were in the Oldest subsection of the Historic Anniversary Archive. I also tried one of those new-fangled pinball machines and…maybe did okay? There was a lot going on. More than usual.
Don’t worry, this rule-follower was in sneakers at this point
My walk back to the hotel was sk8r-boi-free, and I headed to bed after washing all the freeze-hold spray out of my hime cut in the bathroom sink, as one does.
Saturday
The first of the big days. The line situation, however, was more or less the same, and I had my preferred space to stage the line in as well as my interdepartmental partners, so it was fine. Just a long shift for a long line. I was grateful my coordinate that day featured an obi, as it helpfully doubled as a back brace.
Bon is always nice enough to try to get a posed coord shot for me, but honestly I always look the best in his candids.
I should tell him to just do a couple drive-bys and call it a day.
After both the fashion show line and the subsequent J-Fashion market line were cleared, myself and an experienced mahjong-playing friend headed over to Gaming Hall to rectify the injustices of the night prior. I was pretty exhausted, but I explained to the other experienced players at my first table that I was mainly looking to physically practice playing, and they understood the assignment. My big achievement was learning how to flip my tiles up semi-okay.
Kelp, is that your friend elegantly pressing the dice roll button for the photo? No idea, honestly.
Later, my friend departed, and I played one more round with a slightly different group. At one point, we were nearing the end of the hand with one person in riichi, and I discarded a safe-ish tile instead of a guaranteed safe one to stay in tenpai, and promptly got double Ron-ed. For people who don’t play, basically I lost really hard right when the hand was almost over. I thought it was funny – again, I was so exhausted, and the people I was playing against were so experienced, I had no delusions of winning hands. But one of my tablemates, the one who didn’t ron me, tried to then give me a bit of a lecture about How to Defend Properly, made all the more inane by the fact that she preceded it by asking me if I had 7pin, which was the tile she was waiting for…and also the only guaranteed safe tile I had left to discard. You can see how annoyed I was by the fact I still remember the exact tile…well, I might be misremembering the suit. For sure it was a 7, tho.
Between how tired I was and having my mahjong mellow harshed, I didn’t really feel like playing more rounds after finishing that one, and headed back.
Sunday
The second of the big days. Even less to talk about line management-wise, as what little hmms and huhs we had the day before had already been provisionally dealt with. At one point, the situation was so chill that a fellow staff member whipped out a puzzle book, to which I joked “you’re stealing my brand”.
“Ah, that explains a lot about my sole wear patterns”
Originally the wolf mask was supposed to be worn like a headband,
but the elastic was too loose and the Kelp was too lazy to remedy that issue.
Also, remember kids, Captain Chris is a silver fox.
One of my later shifts had me once again just sitting at a door mildly dissociating checking badges. After that finished up, I headed back to the Gaming Hall to play even more mahjong with a stream chat regular, and with the power of being accompanied by a normal-looking man, successfully convinced two random guys to play with us. One of them had a similar goal to mine, using this as an opportunity to practice scoring, which was great, cuz none of the rest of us wanted that job. The other, was weirdly obsessed with red fives.
For people that don’t play, red fives, or aka dora, are a kind of bonus tile that’s not necessarily utilized in mahjong, but if you play riichi online, typically is a thing.
No red fives here
While tiles do typically have red bits, like the 5 bamboo on the right or the 5 dots in my discards, red fives are Entirely Red
It turned out that red fives had been removed from all the tile sets in play due to a tournament that was being held earlier in the day, and after we moved from a regular table to an auto table that had opened up and discovered this table didn’t have red fives either, this guy flagged down a staff member, got the explanation, and made them replace the red fives. I would have been slightly embarrassed if it wasn’t fairly clear that I wasn’t with him. After we swapped them in, it became extremely apparent why he was so insistent – near every hand afterwards he would pon a triplet of fives. He was literally the red five guy.
An earlier cheap hand at a Do-It-Yourself table
Anyways, while I was still tired, I was in better shape than the day before thanks to a kind staff member offering to get me takeout for dinner and then cover my door shift for a bit while I ate said takeout, and I was playing against people more my speed and skill level, so I did a little better. My friend had a bit of a monster hand to finish the round and ended up in first place, and I looked down to see, much to my dismay, that the red five guy had edged me out for second. Who’s the fool now? (Still him, bless his heart.)
Medjed Chris couldn’t shield me from Akadora Attendee
I got walked back to my hotel and spent the rest of the night snacking and clearing out my streetpasses.
Shocking choice of background
“Oh, the prefecture Kira Imai is from”
Monday
The last day is usually a combo of shopping and striking, and this year is no different. After yet another shift sitting at a door, I headed over to the con center proper to drop off some donations and do a turn around Artists Alley and Dealers Hall. While Artists Alley was blissfully not that crowded, I was dismayed to see a backwards trend in how many tables were labeling their merch.
You know how people often have all their keychains or enamel pins or stickers or what not on nice board displays nowadays? Very few of those people have an extremely helpful little label like “Uma Musume” or “mihoyo” or whatever so you can easily see at a glance if they’re selling anything you might be interested in. “Kelp, can’t you just, you know, look for your oshi?” No! The lighting is weird, a lot of merch is glossy, people are standing in the way, and so forth. It’s one thing if you have large prints hanging above the crowd, but people are increasingly selling smaller things at shorter heights, and it’s really not that hard to just slap a sticky above each chunk with the name of the thing on it.
I know I’m right too, and not just because when I complained to a vending friend in dealers about it he just gave me a look of deep agreement – a couple of people later showed me photos of FFXIV merch from AA that I had no memory of seeing, something that I was looking for specifically. And you won’t be surprised to hear that yes, these were smaller items likely displayed table-level.
Anyways. One of the other things I was specifically looking for was, once again, Raden, and I completely struck out. Or failed to see what was available. Or both? In any case, I did have the dawning realization that she’s sort of a ‘deep cut’ in terms of hololive’s roster, and this was more or less confirmed by my continued lack of luck in dealers. I did get some free food, a free plush, and a free wave of decision fatigue from glancing at all the fancy keyboards for sale (my current keyboard is literally wearing away, but there’s like no middle ground between the very cheap but very serviceable deal I have currently and Xtreme Gamers RGB BruteForce 5000 or whatever).
My attempt at an aesthetic haul photo
Speaking of computer parts, I spent the equivalent of 32gigs of used DDR4 ram on 1.5 new bonnets instead back at our own vending space, as well as picked up a small silly gift for a friend. Then it was time to pack up. Depending on where I’m at mentally and physically, I’m not always around until the end, but this year I was actually able to stick it out, which tells you how smooth things went.
Another job I can do sitting down
Body bag of Bernies
Anyone focused on my lack of shoes can prolly also see the suspicious stain on my socks
I wore some flats with a narrow toebox and paid the blood price
Post-con
I met up with some friends a few days after at a shopping center where I lived it – I picked the restaurant and it was mid. Then, due to a late arrival and the local area not being replete with late night spots, we spent a good amount of time looking for a second place to hang out, which we did eventually find, but not before I encountered my second spat of emergency vehicles at a freeway exit that day. As the night went on, everyone looked increasingly tired, but resisted my not-so-subtle hints at getting them to call it a night, so eventually I had to just announce I was leaving to put them out of their misery. Was it politeness? Or a sleep-deprived stupor? I can’t know how the other half lives, I guess.
It also meant I set off all three of these mobile alarms when I got back at 2am
The next day I met up for lunch with a different pair of friends whose daughter spent most of the time excitedly chatting with me about everything and anything, as small humans of that age often do. It really threw into contrast how much my sister’s kids don’t like me, which is fine! They’re allowed! But despite the fact I have perfectly overlapping interests with both of them, I am typically shied away from. So much for being a Cool Aunt in my old age.
Most importantly, fried pickles
On the drive home, I thought this time, surely, I would dodge traffic…and lo, there were three accidents in LA as I was driving through it, including a fender-bender that happened in the lane I was in just a few cars ahead. Right before the 60/5/10W interchange. If you know, you know. If you don’t know, well, know that this is the third time I’ve had this happen to me in this exact spot, and I don’t even drive very much.
That just about does it for my semi-annual Big Event Report, and yes, work has very much begun on The Other One and Its Respective Lines.
kelp 