February 22, 2007
Well, I was in a hurry Monday night because I was tired, and I missed a couple things. Here they are now, in all their glory.
One of the events at the con was an anime music video contest. The way it was explained to me, you take a song and play it over anime like a do-it-yourself music video. Because I have a head full of bad wiring to begin with I instantly came up with my own idea for a video: Take the Hiruhi dance, and sync it up with White and Nerdy. (Apologies on not being able to show the dumb-ass dance they do in the Hiruhi anime; Youtube seems to have pulled any clips that used to be there.)
I fully expect to share in the prizes (which probably amounts to a box of Pocky) with whoever has the editing skill and the time to assemble the monstrosity I've proposed.
Moving on to easy ways to spend my money, I've been reading the manga I bought, all the first volumes of series. So far I've read one I knew I'd like from seeing the anime (Rurouni Kenshin) one that's based on an anime that I liked (Cowboy Bebop) and one that I'd never heard of before (Samurai Champloo). All of them have been good so far, and at about 10 bucks a pop they're bound to be a minor drain on the wallet.
The two I haven't read yet are Excel Saga, which I've heard is good, and Chrono Crusade, which Dave copsplayed as one of the characters from. So I may be looking at sending about $50 a month over to Amazon for a while. I need to find cheaper hobbies...
And finally, some weirdness from Saturday afternoon. I was walking around taking pictures of the cosplayers. (Oddly enough, almost all of them were cute girls. Funny that.) I asked one if I could take her picture, and she said OK. Then she warned me that she wasn't actually in costume; she just wanted to wear something cosplayish to the con.
Fair enough, I decided, but it still looked good on her. So I took the picture and showed her the preview on my camera's LCD screen. My work done, I went back over and sat with Dave's wife while Dave stood in line to get a voice actor's autograph.*
A couple minutes later the same girl came up to me and gave me her e-mail address; she wanted to see how the picture turned out after I downloaded it from the camera. Now, I realize an e-mail address isn't a phone number, but it's still better than I usually do. And I hadn't even tried! I had no idea what I'd done, and quite frankly I was afraid to jinx it.
Monday night I pulled the pictures from the camera, spun them the right way around in Photoshop, and even tweaked the colors on her picture since it seemed a little washed out. Then I e-mailed both to the address she provided and asked if she was from around here.
She is local, she liked the picture (go, me!) and she was pretty friendly, so I took the next logical step and asked her about her plans for the weekend. Window-shopping was the big item on her list.
For a prom dress.
Now, in my defense, this girl is Asian and I am absolutely horrible at guessing Asian women's ages. In fact I pretty consistently guess them to be about five years younger than they really are, so a friend of mine that I thought was 22 when I met her was really 27 at the time (a year older than me) and I thought her younger sister, getting ready to start college a couple years ago, looked like she was 13. So I took the age I'd guessed for this girl (19) and added my standard error correction to it to get 24.
Works for me, until I find out that for once I basically guessed right the first time. This obviously changed the tone of the conversation for me -- I may talk the talk of the dirty old man but I'm not willing to walk the walk just yet.
But hey, a girl gave me her contact information, even if she did turn out to be 12 years younger than me. I'll take my confidence boosts anywhere I can get them.
* Yes, they bring in voice actors as guests, and they're pretty popular. I don't see why, but to each his own...
