I was a cosplay guest, contest judge, and Q&A master at cosplay repair all weekend. I was actually contacted as a potential vendor, but I don’t have anything to sell, so I asked about being a cosplay guest and BOOM! there I was. I invited my friends Kat and Sam along for the trip, and I’m really really happy that they decided to come along because we had SO much fun. It was really easy to vlog with three people, and we ended up getting HOURS of footage that we now have to sift through… oh, and its spread over five different devices (three phones and two cameras). We also made it our mission to do our first CMV (cosplay music video) to showcase the amazing cosplayers that attended ComiCon Erie. Doing the CMV really helped us to network with other cosplayers and make new friends (even if it were just for the weekend). We hope to get the CMV put together and uploaded as soon as possible so that we can share it with the awesome folks at ComiCon Erie and (hopefully) get even more cosplayers to come out for their show next year. For its first year, ComiCon Erie did a really good job. It had the right balance of all the fandoms – comics, tabletop gaming, sci-fi, anime – and the dealer’s room/artist alley was a pretty decent size. We were scared because we didn’t know what to expect with the convention and hoped it would be more like Tekko and less like Steel City Con. We were pleasantly surprised. There were things to do and people to see and food to eat – that’s a big one that a lot of cons fail to address, I think. The availability of food was nice, even if it was concession items – and they were cheap! We lived off of pretzel sticks (which we called bread dicks because of Sam) all weekend and they were delicious. SO! Here’s my recap of my ComiCon Erie weekend. Day Zero Travel day! We decided to leave on Thursday after work and travel up towards Erie to stay Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. The plan was to leave around 5 pm because I worked until 4 pm, but that didn’t happen because Kat got stuck in like three major traffic jams and a 50 minute trip took her about 2 hours.. and then we needed to go to Walmart for supplies, so we didn’t end up leaving my house until around 7 pm. Oops. We traveled west to grab Sam before heading north to Erie. Imagine cramming three people into a small car.. each person with at least two big bags of things.. some of us (me in particular) with four or more bags.. plus bags of food and prop weapons/armor. Yeah. It wasn’t fun. We ended up getting to our hotel/bed and breakfast around midnight or 1 am and literally THIRTY SECONDS after getting out of the car, the entertainment started. You see, lightsabers are like bug lights and drunk people are like mosquitoes and when you accidentally turn on a lightsaber in the darkness where there are bars around, you attract drunk people. Two guys approached the car and one of the guys (the drunker of the two) stopped and stood like two feet away from me. I asked if he needed anything and he said he was just waiting for a friend. Okay. We gather what we had - which was like three bags, three lightsabers, and a big sniper rifle, and headed into the lobby of the hotel. I made sure to close all the doors/trunk and lock my car. Inside the lobby, I watched the drunker of the two men walk to my driver-side door and try to open it, so I went back out onto the steps and kindly asked him to walk away from my car. He immediately got defensive and started walk-running down the middle of the road as he yelled nonsensically. The other guy hung around and ended up standing about two feet from my driver-side door. I asked him to leave because he was making me uncomfortable and he just kept saying that he wasn’t doing anything and even said “What are you going to do, shoot me?” to which I replied with a “No, but I’m going to call the police.” Thankfully, a campus cop was driving by and I flagged him down. He kept the drunk guy busy with conversation while we finished unloading the car and eventually got him to leave.
After the con was over, we went back to the hotel, went to the McDonald’s across the parking lot for dinner, and then got ready for the cosplay afterparty. It was a lot of fun - Bourbon Barrel (where it was held) was really nice, though no one was dancing and the DJ was playing some good music, so Sam, Kat, and I started dancing and, sure enough, soon we had several people on the dance floor. When we got back to our room, we concrunched a little bit because I had to add elastic to my leg armor and Kat had to fix up her Ursula, which she didn’t end up doing because Sam and I convinced her to be a Sith with us, to which she agreed. We kind of pieced together a costume out of random pieces that we had, and it ended up looking really great!
Sam was always the first person asleep and always the first person to complain about being tired the whole weekend. What a baby!
Be on the lookout for the numerous vlogs that we accumulated over the weekend! I will be posting them here and on social media when they are done.
0 Comments
Four State Comic Con took place at Hager Hall in Hagerstown, Maryland on September 9-10th. I was invited by Mr. Downs Cosplay to help officiate the cosplay contest and take part in a panel with Sharon Rose Cosplay, and I was all-too-happy to help!
On Sunday, I came back in as Sinon for our panel. Granted, I wasn't planning on cosplaying after Saturday because I was tired.. but my husband said to me: "You're doing a panel, shouldn't you cosplay?" and I begrudgingly pulled on Sinon and drove myself the 30 minutes to the con from my house (which was nice). Our panel was called: Cosplay, It's About Everyone, Not Just Me! We talked about how we, as cosplayers, can support one another and foster a positive environment for new and veteran cosplayers. It was nice to speak to people and share ideas with Mr. Downs and Sharon Rose. It was my first time doing a panel. I had fun! I'm used to being in front of people, so I wasn't too nervous about that - plus I wasn't alone. Everyone seemed super receptive and had experiences to share, as well! I think the best part of this convention was making new friends! I really had a chance to speak to some people that I only had slight exposure to, and would like to think that new friendships have begun to blossom - which I"m super excited about because the are amazing cosplayers whom I can learn so much from! The next Four State Comic Con is on March 24-25, which is two days after my birthday! I'll be there with Mr. Downs again!I always considered myself to be fairly prepared for the convention scene once I started taking cosplaying seriously, but it wasn't until Colossalcon that I really adopted the title of 'con-mom, and this past Otakon really cemented it'. What did I do to deserve this? WELL... if not for the fact that I basically bring my ENTIRE craft room with me to cons, you know - glue sticks, glue gun, safety pins, straightener, hairspray, makeup, baby powder, superglue, needle, thread, velcro... and the list goes on - then perhaps it's the fact that I am constantly taking care of everyone else.
At Otakon, I was the last person ready to leave - and people ended up waiting on me - because I was busy getting everyone else ready. I am by no means complaining about this - it's in my nature to help others and I really don't mind - but I was styling wigs and fixing makeup and putting on lashes and painting nails and adjusting armor and yada-yada-yada for hours while I was trying to piece together my cosplay in the meantime! I even con-crunch WHEN I FINISHED MY COSPLAY A WEEK BEFORE THE CON. Tell me how that works. Ha. Every night of Otakon, I was up late helping everyone finish cosplays - we were making props and styling wigs and painting. My first con where I was NOT con-crunching my cosplay... I was still freakin' con crunching. So, yeah.. I'm a con-mom. I'm 100% con-mom and I wouldn't have it any other way. As far as the Walter E. Washington Convention Center goes, I thought it was a fairly nice venue inside. There seemed to be a lot of space because for the amount of people there, you could still move around; granted, you didn't have a lot of space, but there was some - enough. It had a strange layout - a lot of up-and-down on escalators, but that's fine.. unless you're in awkward armor. The location of the convention center was not in the least my favorite. It was smack-dab-center in D.C. and so, unless you wanted to walk, there wasn't much as far as photoshoot locations - aside from the small copse of trees and yard across the road. Parking was awful.. and traffic was worse. At least the commute from where I was staying wasn't a horrible ride to the parking garage. We had to park about half a mile from the venue and had to walk, which is fine - I don't mind walking - but it was either super hot or pouring out. We used Parking Panda to reserve a parking spot, and thank goodness we did because finding a spot to park was a nightmare. Most of the people who were working the convention - volunteers or convention workers, I don't know who was who - were pretty rude. I mean, I can understand it to some degree - you are one person trying to organize 20,000-30,000 people to ensure everyone's safety and what not, but sheesh - smile a bit. The cosplay was amazing, of course! I've come to the conclusion, though, that of the maybe 50 people that ask for a picture, maybe three will post them on some sort of attainable social media.. which is annoying. I suppose part of it is my fault because I always forget to give out my business cards. I can't comment on panels or anything because I never end up getting to go, but the dealers' room and artist alley were massive! They were almost overwhelming with how absolutely massive they were and I had a hard time focusing and finding a starting point. There was such an array of things in both rooms to pick from, and I especially liked the free Crunchyroll bags.
Overall, I had fun at Otakon and look forward to next year. I will definitely try to get a hotel close enough to walk to and from the con and I will only room with people that I know and want to hang with, because it's hard to coordinate a bunch of people traveling together when that's all you do.
Originally, I wanted to leave my house around 6 pm on Wednesday. Ha. Didn't happen. I think I ended up leaving somewhere between 10:30 pm and 11 pm because I was having an anxiety attack over the turd of a scythe I had. I ended up just wrapping the thing in silver fabric to cover up all the crap. My first one turned out fine, but the second one.. was just a disaster.
Friday I was excited for Friday because I was planning on debuting my new Kabutops cosplay! I got into the cosplay no problem and off we went to Day 2 at Colossalcon.
On top of this, I almost passed out twice. I think it was a mixture of heat, dehydration, not eating, and my shoes completely ruining my feet. I got a piece of pizza and a diet Coke to get some food in me, but ended up completely snapping off my chest plate in line because I had to sit down (before I fell over). It was awful. I did my one CMV shoot (that was so much fun - I can't wait to see the final result) and then contacted my second photographer to ask if we could move the shoot forward. He was amazing and so accommodating - he shot some of my Kabutops on Friday and some of my Sith on Saturday to make up for missing part of the shoot on Friday. I'm SO EXCITED to see the Kabutops pictures. What he showed me were fantastic. I went back to the hotel, ate, and changed into my sith to meet up with some more friends and hang out for the rest of the night (now that I felt better). We ended up making friends with another Star Wars cosplayer (a Mandalorian, to be exact) and enjoyed hanging around with the crazy drunks that plagued the Kalahari on Friday night. Got back to the hotel around midnight/1 am and crashed hard. Saturday I just wanted to do chill on Saturday. The plan was to wear Kabutops again and then change, but after Friday, the last thing I wanted to do was get into Kabutops again. So I got dressed in my swimsuit/vacation sith and went off to meet up with some friends (new and old) for a day of chillin' and drinkin'.
So - I was staying on the floor of my friends' hotel room until Saturday night because some other friends and I got another hotel room. I went back and packed up my stuff before heading to the new hotel. First thing to go wrong: it was bike week and the parking lot was FILLED with bikers who were drinking and partying and revving their engines and being really loud and obnoxious. Whatever. I was upstairs and with the door closed and the A/C on, you couldn't really hear them too badly. I got a much-needed shower and sat down to play some Warcraft while I waited for other people to show up. No internet. Apparently at this hotel, Apple products don't connect to the internet. Great. I decided to watch T.V. instead. Nope. Didn't work. The lady at the front desk came up to fix it - she was SO nice and fixed the T.V. no problem. I can live without internet if I have T.V., plus it was like 10:30 pm and I was about ready to sleep anyway. Then I get a text from the people I was supposed to be sharing a hotel room with. They're not coming. Everyone bailed. So I'm left alone in this damn hotel room. I was so upset that I cried for a good 30 minutes before just packing up all of my things and driving the 4 hours to my parents' house. It was awful. I'm still exhausted from it. The most expensive shower I've ever taken... So what did I learn from my weekend at Colossalcon?
I feel like I was a bit of a butt during the con because of things that happened. I feel bad because the con was great and a lot of fun, but things were happening out of my control and it was just seriously affecting my attitude.
So.. I've been planning on going to the Harrisburg Comiccon for awhile now, and it just so happened to fall on a weekend when my mom was coming to visit, so I ended up dragging he along! I'm really happy that she had such a good time and could get a taste of what it's like. I also got to meet up with my friend (whom I've known for 25 years - yeah, we're old), so it was a great girls-day-out. ^_^ SO - dpiddy was there, and if you don't know who that is, look him up on Youtube immediately. I was sort of fan-girling all day to get a picture with him, so I slowly slunk towards him with the intention of getting a picture.. but instead he asked me to be in his video! I about died.. and I got to slap the heck outta him (even though I still feel bad about it)! That was probably the highlight of the day. ^_^ I entered the cosplay contest - mostly because my friend wanted to enter. I pulled out the night before because I really didn't think my Sora cosplay (which is literally hot glued together) stood a chance, but when I got there, I was shoehorned into signing up (thanks, Matt). Prejudging was first, so I had a chance to stand in line for an hour before talking to three judges for three minutes about my cosplay - of which, the keyblade (one of the most essential parts) was bought. Aha. I was a wreck, but we made it through! During the actual showcase, we were invited up onto the stage to introduce ourselves, our cosplay, and show off a bit. That was fun and everyone just looked so great! Once everyone did this, they announced the winners. I was NOT expecting to even place (1st, 2nd, OR 3rd), but when they got to the first place, Maiacat Cosplay was announced as the winner! I kind of sat there in disbelief for a minute - mouth agape and eyes wrought with confusion - before I made my way to the stage to accept my prize, which was a bag of goodies and a trophy! I was so excited, and (it sounds corny) but it made it even better that my mom was there! ^_^
|
AuthorMaiacat Cosplay Archives
July 2018
Categories
All
|