May 2008 – the flying squirrel

Anime North Wrap-up

So Sunday, as usual, was pretty laid back and low key. We got up, checked out and packed up the car. Jeremy and I had breakfast went to the dealer’s room. I bought a bunch of stuff, including the next five volumes of Nodame Cantabile and the Princess Tutu box. I usually get something reasonably macho to balance out the girliness when I get stuff like that, but I didn’t find anything that struck my fancy.

There were some decent deals to be had, but honestly, I have a whole tonne of crap at home that I haven’t read or watched yet. I have to start digging into that before I should do any serious buying.

I also got a couple random soundtrack CDs for Ellen. I just hope they don’t suck.

For lunch, Jeremy and I went up the street to Zet’s–a greek place slash greasy spoon diner. The pork souvlaki on a bun was really good, if incredibly huge.

We struggled to find something to fill the time Sunday afternoon. After another trip around the dealer’s room, we watched AMVs for a bit. Sadly, I can’t find any of the ones I liked on YouTube. C’mon people! I agree with Karl: combining Sailor Moon with Evil Dead: The Musical’s “All the Men In My Life Were Killed By Candarian Demons” was a masterstroke. I also liked using the Littlest Hobo theme with [Junkers Come Here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y5N_iQJyZk), but only because I really like The Littlest Hobo theme.

A bunch of us went out for the traditional post-con meal. After the usual people-wrangling, we ended up at Kelsey’s and mostly watched Elliot play with her new Artist Alley Avatar toys. Which was cute.

We made it back home after I got a bit lost in Mississauga, marking the end of another Anime North. The End.

Anime North Continued

I’m back spending the end of the day hanging out in the hotel room, writing up a brief con report post.

Saturday is now traditionally Photo Scunt day, and that’s pretty much all we did. We weren’t quite on the ball this year, so we ended up without any listings in the convention program and without any real place to set up. The latter was sorted out pretty quickly, though. John and Morag showed up with a whole bunch of computer equipment and we spend the latter part of the morning and early afternoon just getting set up.

Despite not having advertised we still managed to get as many groups as we could handle. It was fun, even though John erased the two best categories (Creative and “Wrong”). The groups struggled a bit with our (mostly John’s) sense of humour. The fact that two entries were worth zero points–“Goggles” because they do nothing and “The cake”, on the basis that it *is* a lie–didn’t go over so well.

After the scunt wrapped up, we went out to one of the Hakka Chinese places up on Derry Road. Asian Wok ‘n’ Roll. I kinda like that place.

We didn’t have a whole lot to do after we got back. We mostly hung around the Moonlight Ball setup stuff and helped a little bit. After that I just wandered around for a little while and ended up running into Jeremy and coming back here to do this.

So now you’re caught up.

Live from Anime North: Day 1

I took the day off work today. That let me sleep in, try out some Wii Fit yoga and slalom games and take my time getting into Anime North.

I picked up Jeremy and stopped in Kitchener to get gas when I realized I had left my wallet at home. So I went home, got my wallet, got gas, got some cash at a bank machine and end up helping a nice if confused lady in a wheelchair navigate the parking lot to Conestoga Mall. So I was about an hour late getting out of Kitchener. Traffic sucked and we went into Mississauga to get some card readers for the photo scunt (more on that tomorrow). We took city streets the rest of the way to the hotel to avoid traffic jams. All in all, I made it to the con about 4 hours later than I was expecting.

We didn’t do much today besides poke around the dealer’s room and try to find people. Since we’re staying at the Doubletree (note to self: never again), we had a bunch of annoying key issues. All sorted out now, though. Jeremy and I had dinner at Kelsey’s, and I think I’m regretting it a little.

I saw a bunch of inspiring photo scunt additions, but as I was going to write them up in an email to amend the official list, I seem to have forgotten all the good ones. Or at least what I thought were the good ones. It doesn’t seem worth the effort now.

John shows up tomorrow, whereupon the show really begins.

Sushi pillows!

Jo, my fabulous former roommate, is starting up an online business to sell giant-sized plush replicas of Japanese delicacies. This is something that must be encouraged.

[SkyeFish Sushi Bar](http://sushi.strayfish.ca/index.html) will soon start selling lovely sushi pillows for reasonable prices! It looks like they’re going to be doing online sales at some point, but for now, they’re just selling at conventions, starting with Anime North next week.

It’s May. I should post something

Not to belabour the obvious, but I’ve seriously gotten out of the habit of blogging. I’m not going to beat myself up over it or anything. Suffice to say I’m still around, and still doing stuff. I’m reasonably contented with my lot in general, so it’s not like I have lots of pent-up frustrations to vent about.

Little things, though:

* Went to see Iron Man last night. The first movie I’ve seen in ages and ages. Well, since the film festival last year at least, but that’s a different sort of experience. I went with a couple people from work. Iron Man’s good, silly fun. Thus, I heartily recommend it.
* We had a wonderful team-building exercise thing at work in Toronto on Tuesday. I suck at team-building exercises. This is probably not news. I took the opportunity to slip away and check out the windmill at the CNE grounds.
* I finished Phantom Hourglass last night. Good little game. The side quests seem kinda tacked on, but it’s neat going around solving puzzles and collecting stuff. I never did figure out how to get to the chest on the first island, though. Maybe I should look that up, since it’s been taunting me since the beginning of the game.
* I have Mario Kart for the Wii! I haven’t played that much, though. Supposedly it’s good for multi-player, but I’ve never been all that excited about playing against strangers on the Internets.