Post-Con Depression, and a new laptop
Listening to: Transistor Kiraku - Rainy Comet
Tags: irl , con , computers
Over the weekend, I had Kaicon. A very very fun couple of days out... but now I'm tired, and my body hurts, and I'm sad. Won't stop me from blogging though! 
I kept waking up all through Friday night and Saturday morning. Over and over and over... until, at about 4:40 in the morning, I decided I could not bear to try for any more sleep. I was becoming exhausted from the very act of sleeping. I try to wake up at 5 on weekdays anyways, so after some uncomfortable staring at my phone, I resigned myself to climbing out of bed and having a nice hot shower.
How lovely it was to get clean! But while forcing my clothes onto my body after I was done, I heard my father (who is always awake at the strangest times anyway) outside the bathroom door: Mousecky... Why are you showering?
I was startled. I replied: Er... I have a convention today?
Oh! he said. I forgot about that. And that was the end of that exchange, and he left me alone. Thank God for that.
Then came the scary task: doing up my face paint. For day one I cosplayed Kikaider from Muchi Muchi Anago, who is not complete without the shironuri and certainly not complete without the eye spots. I don't do makeup often (other than a healthy amount of guyliner in recent months) and I didn't practice for this very much.
I didn't want to fuck up my good Muchi Muchi Anago shirt by getting makeup all over it either! So I made the decision to re-wear the shirt I went to sleep in and change afterward. This proved to be a good choice... I somehow got white face paint all over the collar lol.
But it didn't take me long. I did it! I had successfully transformed into Kikaider, after putting my shirt on, and tucking my Anago towel into my pants just to rep the band more.
Well, I had almost successfully transformed into Kikaider. 
You see, I had asked my aunt for help because she owns a sewing machine and actually knows how to sew, but she had taken "help me get this project together" to mean "get this thing sewn for me", and I was still waiting on the hat! I'm very grateful of course, but it was so last-minute that it was...worrying lol.
For fear of wasting my phone's battery before I even left the house, I spent a chunk of my morning re-reading volume 1 of My Name Is Shingo. An absolutely beautiful manga, in my opinion, in terms of both art and story. But if I start on that, I'll never get to stop. Maybe in another post.
...and then my dad begged me for a selfie lol
My aunt had promised to show up early in the morning. With her habit of being late, I added fifteen minutes to her promised arrival time. Using that allowance she might have been on time LOL but I had arranged to leave early in the morning for a reason.
With my new hat and Emilio by my side I had really become Kikaider! Well, Kikaider if he was 5'3 and didn't bother to cut his hair.
She drove me to the train station, because the bus is very annoying and she is a kind woman with no other nephews to dote on. I forced her to listen to Plastic Tree the whole way there 
that was great~~
Of course, when I arrived at the station...it was 20 minutes until the next train lol. Just my luck.
I opened the energy drink I had brought with me and sat down with Emilio. Now to wait... I was bored out of my mind but at least I had a railway to stare at. I really like train stations, honestly. it's the autism in me or something but trains are the best...
On the train I put Emilio on the seat next to me. (At 8AM on a Saturday it's not like I'm taking a seat from someone who needs it going to work.) A stop later, a father and his two children boarded... they were on their way to Dreamworld, apparently. How fun! They took immediate interest in me and my robot. I was very glad to introduce him to these two children. They would not stop staring.
Then, a couple of stops later, an older Canadian lady boarded with her dog in a pram. Yes, I'm serious. We had a long chat about just about everything... in particular she recounted her experiences traveling India back in the day along with her heavily-tattooed girlfriend; a couple of white lesbians showing up in a time before smartphones had immediately turned them into a novelty, so she said.
It was interesting to hear about. By the time I had to get off the train I was almost disappointed. It was a very very nice start to my day.
Then came waiting around outside Kaicon...it was something like 9AM now, and the doors open at 10. All us early birds were stamped and allowed into the entrance hall where they had arcade games. I tried to play Dance Dance Revolution but... the machine I was on was totally busted 
and the other one was in use. Not long after I saw a guy messing around with it and Windows 7 showed up on the screen LMAOOO
I spoke about Visual Kei with a Danganronpa cosplayer and was shocked to discover she was 13. Did not speak to her again once I was out of the line! Once the artist's alley opened at 10 and we all filtered in, I wandered around and stared. It was nice. Lots of awesome artists out there...but I am not in many big fandoms sigh. I guess it saves my wallet.
I bought a Kamille Bidan keychain. I love him! He's the absolute best! I have chosen to attach him to the keyring on my pencil case, next to my Uyuni keychain, because they are basically the same person. My friends don't take kindly to this idea... but I know better than them hehehe.
A silent kemono fursuiter was wandering the floor with an extreme amount of animation. Very cute! I complimented him, he bowed and held out a stack of business cards. The problem: with his big paws and my gloves, it seemed impossible to separate just one...
...so he handed me the whole stack and started RUNNING AWAY!! I had to separate one and chase after him through the crowd to give it back. It was hilarious!
I ate my lunch at 11 in the morning. I know I'm greedy but I also didn't have breakfast so it's probably fine. The nachos at the convention center... are not the best. But they were passable and filled me up so well that I could not make myself finish them!
So I went back to the hall to loiter and see if I could sneak more DDR. That was when I taught a Bandori cosplayer and a Junko cosplayer how to change the difficulty on the machine. The Junko coser became frustrated and let me on in her place, and from there I was stuck to the Bandori cosplayer until the end of the day! We wore ourselves out dancing and then wandered the floor.
Hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. I should not have danced myself silly and then resigned myself to walking around for over five hours straight in such an environment. I should have handed the playing DDR and walking around in the opposite order. I also maybe should not have brought Emilio with me, as light as he is. His handle is not comfortable. But I did not consider any of this! My whole body was exhausted when I got home!! I might as well have died. 
...but having my new friend's socials, we organised to go back the next day to spend more time together. Ha ha.
My bones hurt and my muscles ached from use after many years of avoiding exercise. It took me two hours to get home and on the bus two old men were fascinated by my face paint and my robot. One of them was incredibly French, the other served as his interpreter. They wished me luck when I got off near my house.
I took a long shower and passed out without even eating dinner that night. I seriously didn't have it in me!
So when morning rolled around...I questioned all my life choices lol. I had to fight against my need to sleep even more than the eleven hours I had just managed and dress nicely. I wanted to wear my panda onesie, but I had decided that would be better suited for inside the convention, so I had put it in a large bag from Officeworks, with my kig head for Uriel safely on top of it.
The entire journey was spent in a dazed and half-alive state. I changed in the bathroom at the convention centre, played one round of DDR on my own, and then lost my mind and changed back. I was still carrying Jumbo and two panda-theme bags so I was at least representing pandas. Even though Uriel isn't even a panda... LOL. I had organised to match with my new friend.
And surprisingly, the tired feeling dissipated as soon as i got into the event! I had fun waiting around and then became incredibly relieved when she had arrived. We played and walked around again. Eventually we ended up following a gaggle of bronies around... and as it turns out one of them lives on my pensinsula ^_^ hooray! ...and two of them lived in New South Wales and drove all the way up. How. Why?
We're already planning to see each other at the next convention in a month, down in the Gold Coast. So I'm already planning my cosplay... You'll all see 
I died that night too. But now it's time for something even more exciting:
My new laptop!!
She's a cute little Panasonic Let's Note specifically a CF-SZ6Z model. Her screen is 12 inches diagonally with a 16:10 aspect ratio. She's got a cute circular touchpad and a lovely silver-white theming. She's running off an i7 with 16GB of RAM... which is perfectly fine for my use cases, that is, browsing the Web and listening to music...working on my site...sometimes playing Spore or something. Online school stuff maybe. But I don't need much to get along is my point.
...she's also light. Extremely light. Lighter than the first volume of the manga Ajin. My last laptop ws a gaming laptop, so whenever i prepare to lift her up, something horrible happens: I yank her up way too high!
She also didn't have a disc drive. I thought, did I get duped? But to my disappointment the eBay listing didn't mention a disc drive anywhere and the model shoewd off had the same blank front!! I was the stupid one!! But it shouldn't be too hard to obtain and install one~ so I don't have to worry.
I'm keeping Windows on her, but specifically Reunion7, which keeps Windows 10 LTSC looking and feeling just like Windows 7. All the swag, none of the hassle. Even gadgets! Very lovely!! Right now I've just themed her after the album GREENWORLD by FLOPPY, which is very dear to me. I saw the official wallpaper available alongside the interview done for natalie.mu and knew what i had to do.
I've named her Mari. Looking forward to spending as many years as possible with her, unless I end up with a faster Let's Note... 
but don't tell her I said that.
My only gripe is: I can't seem to get circular scrolling drivers working yet. Sigh...
That's all for today though. 