SDCC: Friday and Saturday photos

Hopefully, it was worth the wait, but here’s the second batch of my Comic-Con photos, which encompasses most every picture I snapped on the Friday and Saturday of the convention.

After feeling like I wasn’t getting a whole lot of costume pictures due to the fact that either the quality wasn’t up to my expectations, or I simply couldn’t find any I wanted to photograph, I pretty much spent most of Friday and Saturday seeking out costumers, amidst trying to be creative and taking funny pictures of friends as well.

Admittedly, I felt a little weird putting watermarks on the photos of my friend Cliff in his Sterling Archer costume, as frankly I’ve never taken picture taking that seriously, nor do I think I’m particularly good at it to really warrant it. But I do believe in the ideas and the direction we went with the photos, and I figure if these shots gain any sort of notoriety, may as well try to segue them into credit nobody else can claim.

Anyway, the pictures from the rest of my Comic-Con trip, after the jump. 

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Professional gamers LOL

One thing that has been absolutely hilarious to me lately is the raging that people do when it comes to arguing over professional gamers as if they were professional athletes. The story is a little old now, but about a month or so ago, there was a “professional” League of Legends player who was given a one-year ban for being what most 22-year old mouth-breathing internet-dwelling socially inept male virgin gamers are: a dick. In the midst of this all, there’s a pathetic little internet verbal battle royale about how it’s right, how it’s wrong, and then there are the people that just show up to troll for the sake of trolling and other dickish behavior because most of the people involved in these barbs are just like the guy that was banned in the first place: dicks.

Throughout all of this, I can’t help but take some steps back and look at the scenario in context: many people arguing over the banning of a guy who plays video games that managed to go so overboard with his toxic conduct to where someone of authority actually did something about it.

Take a few steps more back: many people are arguing over a kid who plays video games.

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Reflecting on past September 11ths

I was combing through some old bookmarks, and I came across a link to an old convention acquaintance from back in the day, Nikkou. She had some notoriety back then as one of the two people responsible for bringing the infant internets the Anime Web Turnpike, the at-the-time largest weekly updated conglomeration of anime-related links from all facets of anime fandom.

Apparently, a lot like me, she cherished her nerdy friends to to where she would go through the effort to put up some sort of page of reminiscing of past days, going so far as to mention me by name and by an old sketch I had done, portraying an old Otakon web design panel that I was somehow a part of. It was at this panel, or rather afterward, where I would actually meet Nikkou, and she saw it fit to rectify the issue that hadn’t been an Anipike Guest Author, like my peers on the panel. My old collection of links actually exists to this day, on an Anipike classic archive section, which broke on September 11, 2000. To no real surprise, almost 90% of the links I posted 12 years ago aren’t valid anymore, ironically including my own website, which happened to be on a different URL then.

Regardless, this was 12 years ago. 12 fucking years ago.

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Americas untamed, indeed

I really enjoy nature television shows. When I saw promos for National Geographic’s Untamed Americas series, I immediately set a DVR timer for it.

Overall, I think the four-episode series was a little on the weak side, but I get the impression that their field crew got a handful of amazing video and shots, that series like this are created, so they could have a place to showcase them. For every amazing footage of a spirit bear or an owl, there are usually clips of wolves or cougars and other predators failing at capturing their prey.

But if there was one thing that genuinely stuck with me watching the series, it would have to be this fox somewhere in the arctic.

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This store really exists

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this.  When it was still in business, the Borders in this mall was notorious for having a bunch of teenage otaku losers loitering in the manga aisles, sitting around, not buying anything, and reading all the manga they wanted like a free all-you-can-eat buffet.  With the departure of Borders, it would seem appropriate that these weeaboos would need an outlet for their fixation with all things anime and manga related.

But man, talk about a lack of effort in some regards.  A nondescript black sign with the most weeaboo word in the entire fucking weeaboo dictionary in all-caps Lucida Console?  That just screams “quick, let’s get a store together, name it something really attractive to weeaboos, and fill it with popular anime and Hello Kitty shit, as soon as humanly possible and sell it at marked up prices.

I’ll give this place until April at the latest, before it goes under.  Remember, I used to work at an anime store in a shopping mall.  And I can’t imagine this place having as much distributor connections as the place I once worked too, so that means higher costs to the consumers.  So in other words, this place could very well become a show room for the many anime crap retailers across the country, and very well be gone by April.

But seriously, “Kawaii?”  I’m still kind of surprised it’s taken this long before this to actually come to fruition.

Dragon-Con Stories: The missed connection

If I had one genuine gripe about Dragon-Con weekend, this would be it.

She laughed with me, and not necessarily at me, at my completely failed attempt to pop off the cap of my Blue Moon bottle on the door hinge, resulting in a shattered bottle tip, and foam gushing out.  She gave me no indication, be it through our lengthy conversation or body language, that she minded my lame flirting and loitering around her, while she was stuck at another convention’s marketing table.  The words came easy, and the topics transitioned seamlessly as we conversed about various topics from movies, Emma Stone, whom I name-dropped as a comparison to her own eyes (which is obviously a good thing), to anime conventions and costumes, based on the cornucopia of people to watch.  What started out as an innocuous complimentary remark turned into a pleasant encounter.

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