Photos: Dragon*Con 2017

[2020 note]: Among many of the things random visitors might be remotely interested in seeing, would be convention pictures from years past.  And of the several cons where I took my camera with me to take photos, Dragon*Con 2017 would be one of them.

I’ll be honest, this was a particularly trying D*C for me, and there was a lot going on in my personal life that was justifiably distracting me from having any semblance of genuine enjoyment during the weekend, and it was pretty evident as far as I was concerned.  But it wasn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the company of many friends that I did get to see.

However, the fact that there’s literally only a singular gallery from the convention itself should say enough about where my head really was, but there’s still some good stuff amongst the photo dump.

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Writing because I suddenly have nothing else to do

Ever since the move, things have been pretty busy, to say the least.  Between all the unpacking, resolving of the old apartment, clearing out my storage unit, and doing stuff in the new place like painting and organizing, and on top of it all, planning and preparing for mythical gf’s birthday party, I began to make a joke about how I was going to work so I could relax.  While at work, I could sit down, not be doing physical activities (except for going to the gym) and actually be somewhat dormant.  In my downtime, I could actually write a little bit.

But then work got busy, and I didn’t have time to write, and the workload at home didn’t relent, so I couldn’t really find time to write there either.

Fortunately, the party has come and gone, very nicely I might add, and suddenly the rush and the urgency in which things needed to be done, came to a screeching halt.  Whereas I’ve been working my ass off for the last three weeks and change, suddenly I don’t have to have my foot lead-footing the gas anymore, and I’ve hit points where I’m actually hitting walls of progression where I can’t actually accomplish tasks without requisite materials or conditions.

Needless to say, I have time again, and frankly I don’t know what to do with it all of a sudden.  My televisions and computers haven’t really been properly set up yet, both of which are also relying on requisite hardware/conditions in order to do so, so I can’t just do what I’d been doing in the past, and marathon some show to pass the time.  I can’t really do that many more chores or tasks just yet, because some require more time than I have after a day of work, and are better suited for weekends.

So last night, I did something that I haven’t done in what feels like ages; I retired pretty early, crawled into bed, read a book for a little while, and then went to sleep at a sensible time.

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Photos: Mythical GF’s Jazzy 20’s Murder Mystery Birthday Party

[2020 note] This was unposted content back from 2017, mythical (then)-gf’s 25th birthday party; but not just any old birthday party, it was a murder mystery party, where everyone was assigned a role, and played a part throughout the evening, as the story of the Grand Gatsby’s speakeasy unfolded.

Looking back through these photos, it was a wonderful party, where everyone participated to the nines, and it was a fantastic way to break in our new home with a big party that was part-housewarming, part-birthday, and part-murder mystery costume party.

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The other side of the table

As closing day for my new home approached, I knew that I was going to meet the sellers of the place eventually.  There was admittedly a little bit of apprehension in the thought, since these are basically the people that I’d been playing hardball with in negotiating listing prices, how much of the closing costs I wanted them to cover, and the additional costs I made them incur in repairs and requests found through home inspection, and now I was going to have to face them so they could hand the keys of their property over to me.

This was somewhat a new experience to me; the last time I was at the closing table, I was the seller, and the buyer was tremendously low-maintenance, was willing to cover most of the closing costs, and barely asked for any work at all.  And the first time I purchased a home, it was brand new and purchased directly from a builder, so there was nobody on the other side of the table that I had the innate feeling that I was taking something from them, regardless of how legitimate and normal the transaction was.

Furthermore, I had my suspicions initially based on an errant piece of litter on the property that the prior owners may have been Asian, and it was confirmed during the process that despite not being anywhere near Duluth or Suwanee, they were in fact Koreans.  Yeah, I lol’d too at the strange coincidence of it all that I would of course, pick the home of other Koreans to choose to plant my new roots into.  So, I knew going into closing day, that I would be coming face-to-face with other Koreans, after I had kind of put them through a little bit of the ringer, just so they could sell their home.  I wasn’t necessarily scared to face them, but there’s no denying that my requests probably cost them a little bit of money they probably were hoping to not spend.

Regardless, the whole closing process wasn’t at all a bad one; the seller(s) were really nice people, and there was no indication that they were at all sour over the expenditures necessary to make the sale happen.  I was amused by their realization that mother couldn’t speak to daughter discreetly in Korean without me being able to understand it, so most of the correspondence was kept in English, for the sake of the other non-Koreans involved in the process.

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So good.  Master of None, Season 2

I’ve (attempted to) articulated before on how much I loved Netflix’s Master of None, and applauded it on its sheer realism and top-top shelf writing and direction.  The whole minority and LGBT-aware aspect of it took a back seat to the fact that it was simply a dynamite show, that I could not get enough of and was sad when the first season came to an end.

It was wonderful news when the second season was confirmed, and it was happy days all over again when I found the time to binge through the first half of it, and turned into a melancholy end of a good roller-coaster ride as I methodically watched the last few episodes.

Seriously, Master of None is pretty much on my perma-list of favorite television shows.  Ever.  Up there with Parks & Recreation, Black Mirror, and a few other titles that are probably up there that have the unfortunate distinction of being left off because they’re not as fresh on the brain.

Season 2 of Master of None did not disappoint, and I’m hard pressed to say that I didn’t not enjoy a single episode.  Even the prototypical palette-cleanser episode, I Love New York, which barely featured any of the actual cast was done in a manner that was still captivating, entertaining and generated humor in creative and believable ways.

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Photos: Momo-con 2017

[2020 note] This is more or less lost content that I never made a post about from 2017.  But it’s basically the photo dump of all the photos I took at Momo-con that year, and because I imagine photo galleries are the one thing that never gets old from the rando-internet traveller, they’ll always have some relevance on the web.

I vaguely remember this was the first time I was getting to use my new L-series lens at a convention, and thinking how heavy it was, but the photo quality that came from it was worth it, as I had some photoshoots of mythical then-gf in her Sweetheart Annie costume, as well as my famiry friends rocking Bioshock cosplay.

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Good guy Aaron Hernandez?

Feeding into the whole notion that NFL Network Ocho AKA ESPN only cares about the NFL above all else, I was peeved when a good weekend of baseball, and hell even basketball was derailed by the frantic news of known asshole and murderer, Aaron Hernandez’s death.

Now I’m not going to pretend like I’ve bothered to go in-depth into all the details, because when the day is over, I couldn’t possibly give two shits about Aaron Hernandez, and at a first blush situation, I think it’s better that he’s dead, because he’s one less deadbeat that the country and its tax payers have to worry about sustaining inside of a prison, where he serves absolutely no purpose or benefit to the rest of the world.

My first thoughts were that since the death happened pretty quickly after he was somehow acquitted of the double-homicide charge that he was partially in prison for in the first place, I figured some prison guards or rogue law enforcement basically beat the guy to death, made it look like a suicide and called it a day, to prevent the guy from actually getting out of incarceration.

But this is a case where not knowing all the facts makes me look foolish, because although he was acquitted of the double-homicide, he was still going to be serving the rest of his life sentence for the supposed single-homicide that he was also accused of.

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