MOUSELING.net

Goldnova 2026

A ratty man wishes to travel between cities. He spends three and a half hours being tossed between buses, trains, and buses that are replacing trains.

On the longest bus he gets impatient. He struggles with a hair net and, after pulling a cheap wig from his bag and combing it to Hell and back, transforms into a musician whose existence hinges upon sexual perversion. At his destination, he impatiently sits against a wall to wait for Hatsune Miku and her two friends. Looking up from his phone, he sees Char Aznable...

This is the beginning of a long, long weekend.

To be very honest with you, the first day of Gold Coast Supanova was a bit of a slog. To begin with, my friend Zetsubou-san had so many issues doing his makeup and developed such a headache that he could not don his (stupidly accurate) Amano Tonbimaru cosplay... I got no workable photos of my own Tenma Matsunaga... and, after so much travel, it came to me that I had forgotten my contact lenses at home.

I would not be able to stay the night in the Gold Coast, necessitating lots more travel than I originally planned.

When I met with my friends after what felt like forever of waiting we wandered anywhere and everywhere across the convention centre. Really this is what I get out of conventions these days: interaction with my friends, largely in the form of following them around. Panels aren't as hobbyist as they should be at these types of events, celebrities aren't all that, and I wouldn't dare enter a cosplay competition. So, we wander the market! With plenty of smoke breaks.

I bump into friends of friends and speak to them as new acquaintances. I show them whatever is interesting in my sketchbook, rushing to skip over the pornography with a red face. One person signed a page in my sketchbook for me: I am pro-rape, Anti-consent, Anti-recovery and pro-abuse. Hm. I'll take that to heart.

With my head hung low I admit that nothing from the artist's alley or vendors at any convention interests me anymore. It depresses me. I am decreasingly into anything popular, and none of the AliExpress dropshipped stores will ever appeal to me. I know how to use AliExpress. In fact I know how to use Taobao, and I even teach my friends how to use it! I have no need for you people!

I was so close to buying nothing... nothing! All the way until the end of the day, when I finally checked out whatever the QBD Books/VIZ Media stall was selling, scoured it for more of my favourite manga in the world My Name Is Shingo... and grabbed two volumes of Orochi instead.

I love Umezz so it's not like I can pass that up.

From right about then, it was time for my four hour trek home, unceremoniously... goodbye to dear my friends until the morning. If I did not leave then, before 4PM, my fate was to get home at 1AM... and frankly I can't deal with that when I need to make the journey back in only a few hours!

I passed right out despite getting home before 8PM. And so, when I woke up...

SUNDAY ARRIVES!

Sunday is a good day. The plan for Sunday is to crossplay with my dear friend. We are turning into real men, by wearing middle school uniforms for girls! Yeah! Of course our muses need no introduction: Yoshiyuki Shimizu and Hiromu Toda from the band Shinjuku Gewalt, in sailor uniforms, which they regretfully don't wear very often.

As the much smaller and far more effeminate individual out of the two of us, my duty is to be our Shimizu, who is smaller (height-wise). He is not very effeminate physically but he carries himself a whole lot more awkwardly and is "the woman" out of the two. He is no other than Toda's personal GFRS; he is Yoshiyuki Shemizu...

In the morning I wake up late and quite frankly I am achy and completely over myself. But I drag myself out of bed... I shower and wear very light clothes... I make sure my portable charger, all my cables, my iPod, my wig, my makeup case and my Instax camera. I'm wearing my contacts so I can't lose or forget them. Now I'm finally prepared. I leave for my long long day.

But there's a mistake with my mapping app's routing. I'm an extra ten minutes late. No, twenty, thirty... an hour... back to thirty... what? What the Hell am I supposed to do?! I march on the best I can. Somehow, eventually, I reach my destinationL the Gold Coast Convention & Exhibition Center. My friends are waiting out front for me!

My buddy Ness is in a sick yellow shirt and shorts with an indecipherable print on them. My buddy Zetsubou-san is already in his Toda cosplay, and damn, he looks good. This is his first cosplay ever and he's a natural, not to mention the seifuku hangs off of him in all the right ways. I'm envious...

He hands me a vessel I had forced him to hold for me beforehand: a bright orange tote bag I got for free from an op shop. In this bag is the helmet I carefully painted for my Shimizu cosplay. In this helmet is my carefully folded seifuku, tights & gloves. I smile, take the thing, and enter the men's bathroom to begin my magical girl transformation.

I feel like a pervert taking off my clothes in the stall and stepping into the skirt. Crossdressing is not my forte; I think I have the body for it—my build is something like a skinny rectangle and my waist is thinner than it should be—but I certainly don't have the confidence. I dress strangely but not strange enough to commit to a skirt.

When I'm done, and with a wig net over my mess of curly hair, I drag myself to the sinks where I can access the mirror. Here is where I do my usual shironuri routine, black lipstick as eyeliner and all. It's a treat.

Right across from me, a man further along the spectrum than me asks me a question while he waits for someone else: What are you doing?

I freeze up. My makeup, I tell him.

I thought you were supposed to do boy costumes!

Ah. Yeah. I know, but the guy I'm dressing as likes to dress as a girl, so I have to do this.

His caretaker comes out of the bathroom stall: That's rude! He's a normal guy like you. I am already rather fond of this memory. I wish this poor autistic man who I sadly confused the best in life.

Now, finding my friends again was an issue: when I tried to open the zip on the front of my bag, where I had placed my phone and iPod and house keys, I could not open it. It was stuck on the lining, worse than any zipper I have ever dealt with in my life.

I trekked out to where I had met with my friends before and yet they were gone. I had no idea how much time had passed due to my lack of phone, but I knew it had been too long. I tried to ask the ladies at the cloakroom for help with my zip: they could not pull it open, either... I resigned to just entering the line to the market hall, because Zetsubou-san and Ness are both over 6 feet tall, and we certainly both stand out.

In this line was Zetsubou-san's boyfriend, Tobi, dressed as Toko Fukawa from Danganronpa! Someone I recognise... I desperately call out to him. Now I cling onto him like a drowning mouse in the study on hope. With his contact to the outside world (mobile phone), we find my friends at last.

Despite the amount of moving around and fun I had with my friends, the journey is truly the one thing I can speak about the most. Nothing interesting happens on the second day of a convention that did not happen on the first, unless you leave the center or get up to antics with your friends, and due to my travel constraints I did not have the time for such antics.

On the other hand, the amount of photos possible...

Sadly film is sparse, and I only had eight to last me the day. Two were used for shots of me, one was used for a shot of Zetsubou-san, two were used for us together, one was used for Zetsubou-san and Ness, one was used for Zetsubou-san and Tobi, then the last was used for our photo as a group together.

Hey! This greedy Zetsubou-san guy features in 6 of the 8 photos taken! What a bloody narcissist! I should never have kept offering to take photos of this guy! Ha, ha, just kidding.

On top of the phone photos that I am neglecting to upload and these cheki I took and scanned, Tobi brought his fancy little camera, a black Sony Cybershot. That means I got to get all sorts of pics on there, too.

He said, I know there's a function for video, but I have no idea how to access it despite having had this camera for so long! I took a good look at all the buttons, then flipped one switch. There's a little notch that was previously on a Photo icon, so I changed it to the Video icon. Needless to say he was amazed. Some silly clips came out of that.

Actually, near the end of my day, we stopped by this stall selling replica guns and posed with them a bunch. By the time we were done with our crappy little photoshoot and I put my little pistol(?) away, I turned around and this lady who obviously worked for the vendor was approaching me to ask if we need anything.

No, I said bashfully. We were just looking at stuff and about to leave.

And so we move on... ha ha ha...

I'm looking forward to next time! Mata ne!