I can't wait for this month's tea party!

A nice little photo studio that ALA provided. I didn't get around to using it this year but I'd definitely use it next y

ALA is a small con which moved to the Ontario Convention Center this year. Despite the irony of hosting a convention with Los Angeles in the name in Ontario, it was quite enjoyable! This was my first year attending, so I can't compare too much to past years, but I have heard that this con has been growing bigger and bigger each year. Specifically, many seemed surprised by how big it had become this year. I feel hopeful that the con will continue to grow bigger and bigger! Good luck, ALA!

I didn't get to hang out with anyone on Thursday like I had hoped, since we got in pretty late and we got sidetracked doing each other's makeup (Kate did me the honor of trying boob makeup for the first time... it's really crazy what a little makeup can do to your cleavage. Seriously, if you're a girl you should try it out. If you're not a girl you should still try it out  ). So instead of going out, we just got settled into the room, did some costests, and then went to sleep. By this time, I was quite exhausted, and decided to leave my false lashes on the table rather than storing them in their box, knowing I'd be using them first thing in the morning anyway. Well, this would be the first and only time that I was this careless with my eyelashes, as it turns out that our particular room was being haunted by the ghost of moving small objects!  When I came back after brushing my teeth, I noticed that one eyelash had moved to the other side of the table, and the other eyelash along with my bottom lashes were nowhere to be found! At this point I panicked! The Ontario Convention Center is thankfully not in the middle of nowhere like I know some conventions are, so there was a target not too far away that I could have traveled to to replace the top lashes, but  bottom lashes are extremely hard to find, and the only place I know of that sells it would be Daiso 13 miles away! My go-to cosplay makeup looks totally ridiculous without bottom lashes, so I immediately started searching everywhere I could possibly think to look. Had I accidentally breathed out too hard and blown the eyelashes away without thinking about it? Maybe I had carelessly swept my arm across them, tossing them to the side? Where could they have possibly gone!? After searching for at least 10 minutes I managed to miraculously find the other lash and one bottom lash on the floor (the bottom lash was tiny and nearly invisible against the carpet by the way, so it is truly a miracle that I found it) but after another 10 or 15 minutes of searching, really couldn't find the other bottom lash.

At this point I was frantically texting all of my friends who hadn't left for the convention yet asking if they could pick me up a new pair of bottom lashes on their way to the con (which humorously involved trying to explain to a bunch of guys who never wore any makeup what a bottom lash is, how to identify it, and why it's necessary in the first place) and went to sleep praying that someone could manage to get it for me. However, by some twist of luck, one of my roommates managed to solve the mystery of the missing bottom eyelash! But when I saw where they were pointing to, the mysteries only deepened... somehow the eyelash had flown up to the TV stand which was behind the table my lashes had been left on initially... as well as a couple of feet taller. Furthermore, the lash wasn't just harmlessly resting on the TV stand but actually stuck to the side of the little card with the Wi-Fi information on it! To this day none of us can figure out how it got there.... but by that point I was just happy enough to see my little bottom lash again that I didn't even mind. Throughout the weekend little things like that would happen too... really spooky stuff, guys. After the eyelash incident I was really careful not to leave any little costume pieces anywhere that it could easily be lost. 

Really though... how did it end up all the way up there!?

Friday

Anyway, Friday came around and I spent the first part of the day wandering the halls and getting my convention feet on. Truth be told, Friday was rather uneventful for me. I gave the dealer's hall/artist's alley a cursory look, which is something I think I'd like to start doing more often on day 1. I think a lot of people put off dealer's hall until the end of the convention, so it was a bit less hectic, and I felt like I could just browse without feeling pressured to buy anything just yet. I hung out with some friends while they did a photoshoot, and even though I wasn't really much help, it was fun to see them again! Afterwards I decided to check out cosplay chess, which seemed like it could have been a really fun event if I was a bit taller or had gotten a front row seat... but as it were I wasn't really able to see what was going on, and the person next to me was taking up 1.5 seats to herself, so I decided to leave shortly after in favor of Karaoke. After totally embarrassing myself at karaoke by accidentally playing the TV size off vocal track instead of the full version without realizing it, I got lost trying to find tabletop gaming for a bit, and eventually decided to just head back to the hotel room. One thing that was a big problem for me is that I am still getting used to wearing contact lenses, and on top of that my contacts didn't end up being exactly the right prescription, so this whole time I was wandering around half-blind and straining my eyes to see stuff... so when I went back to the room for lunch I decided it was time to change out of cosplay and give myself a rest.

This was also the day that I discovered the downside of our beautiful hotels: being located right next to an airport, there is a steady stream of airline pilots and stewardesses, even during the convention, which means that at least in the case of my hotel, there was a sizable population of non-convention guests throughout the weekend. The result of this is that I was constantly getting stopped by these people who were curious about anime, cosplay, and the convention. As innocent and nice as this is, it gets a bit aggravating when the person who stops you won't let you continue walking down the hall until you answer "How do you find out about these things?" "How do you get in [to the convention]?" "How many anime characters are there?" (I couldn't make this up if I tried) and it's amazing how respecting personal space goes out the window for most people when you're in a costume (I'm looking at you, dude who grabbed my convention badge from the lanyard I was wearing to ask me if I was dressed up as the girl on the badge). But I digress.

One isle of artist's alley. So many talented artists!

A little while later around dinner time my friends arrived back at the room, and after much hemming and hawing over where to eat we found ourselves (it is very important that we found ourselves there rather than deliberately going to, according to one of my ALA roommates) at Denny's for dinner. The Denny's in question was really sadly understaffed so this became a two hour ordeal, but at this point I was feeling really tired and it was nice to just sit with my friends and crack jokes at each other about the things we had seen that day.

Once we finally wrapped up dinner, Kate and I headed over to the Radisson for the /cgl/ meetup. Before even going into the party, I just have to say, the Radisson has some of the most existentially terrifying floor plans that I've ever seen in a commercial building. I swear to god, to get to the hotel room where the meetup was being hosted, we had to make no less than 10 left turns in a row. We kept spiraling in circles and somehow would end up in an entirely new hallway, even though regular euclidean geometry would have dictated that we should have just gone in a big circle and ended up back where we began. I kept thinking about American Horror Story: Hotel where the hotel is **SPOILER ALERT** a death trap literally built to confuse and terrify victims with never ending hallways lined with false doors that lead the victim to their death or that the hotel was just a big labyrinth, and that we'd eventually run into a Minotaur. On our way out from the party we somehow ended up on a lower floor which looked like it had come out of a completely different decade, including a long stretch of unfinished construction with painter's tape over all the doors?? Luckily my friend was with me, if I was trying to navigate that alone I'd probably just start crying! But even with each other's support, we were both getting freaked out enough that even though we were trying to get back to the lobby, we still took the very first door we saw leading to the parking lot, just so we wouldn't have to stay inside the building longer. It somehow seemed easier to find the lobby from the outside... 

But besides that, the /cgl/ meetup was basically exactly what I would have expected. (And, for those of you who don't know what /cgl/ is... eh, tread with caution. It's by far not the worst board on 4chan, but a board on 4chan it still is) It smelled awful, the music was too loud, and everyone was really drunk. It was also pretty clear that most of the people there were just from 4chan as a whole but don't really go on /cgl/ too much (since it was about 1:4 ratio of girls to boys, and not that many guys venture into /cgl/ territory that much). I had never been to a /cgl/ meetup since I knew it would be like that, but at a small con with not much else going on... well, now I know that my assumptions were correct! I still had fun hanging out with some friends in the hallway where there was fresh air and we could at least hold a conversation. Even though it's not my scene, I'm definitely glad that I went! In future years it might be fun to show up, but I'll try and get there early so I can leave before the party really turns up. 

Saturday

It might just be due to how busy I've been, or because of my contact lenses, but by Saturday morning I felt very tired still, so I decided to skip my ornate Saturday-morning costume and change right into my comfier Saturday evening costume from the start. Saturday was my photoshoot day, so I was definitely feeling hyped, even though I was still pretty physically out of it. After breakfast my friend and I went straight to the cosplay repair station to put some finishing touches on her costume, and after spending all Fanime sewing, I'm happy to say that this time I only spent about 10 minutes in there! I feel like that's the right amount of time to spend in the cosplay repair room. We finished just in time for the Love Live gathering, which was a ton of fun. I got to run into a lot of friends there, and my friend Blaine who was cosplaying genderswapped Maki and I got to preform Beat in Angel! Even though I cosplay Hanayo, that's one of my favorite dances in all of Love Live, so it was really great to do it with him! I think he also ships Maki and Hanayo (I'm still trying to understand it... but I'll support it anyway!) so it worked out that he got to fulfill his head cannons, even though it's technically supposed to be Rin dancing with Maki. There should be a video up for that soon. I can't wait to see us! The other groups dancing were really cute too. There was a trio including Nico and Hanayo (my OTP!) who did Gee which was over the top moe, a group who did Dancing Stars on Me and a few others who were all totally on point! During the photoshoot portion of the gathering I also got to throw bread at the Honokas which was definitely a highlight of my convention for me. 

The cosplay repair station, which thankfully included a fully functional sewing machine!

After the gathering I went back to the hotel room for a much-needed shower (through all the excitement I had totally forgotten to shower the night before or that morning) and then watched some idol anime while I dried off and prepared for my photoshoot with MVM Photography that evening. The photoshoot was really fun. I love cosplaying Rin and Hanayo with Kate because we both really strongly identify with those characters, and we're also childhood friends in real life, so it just always makes me happy to be able to express my love for the show and characters while also expressing my real life friend-love for someone like that. (incidentally, this also probably is a big part of why I don't ship Rin and Hanayo as anything other than friends, haha) Neither me nor Kate really ship Rin and Hanayo, but I think we still got a good mix of pictures that could really satisfy RinPana fans as well without it crossing a line for either of us. Mike of MVM Photography also did an excellent job of capturing those feelings, and was, as always, incredibly fast to process them and post them online. Here are two of my favorites from the shoot:

You can find more of these pictures on MVM Photography's facebook page or on my Cosplay.com account too! After this shoot, we all went back to Denny's for dinner (truly, is there a convention food more perfect?) with our mutual friend Raz who was going to be joining us for the next photoshoot of the night. We were all getting into that "silly" stage of hunger/exhaustion, so this Denny's excursion swiftly devolved into funny word guessing games, as well as new hilarious "homo" words when no one could guess my word "homodachi" (as in homo tomodachis) but knew it had to start with the word "homo". Some highlights: homodamn, homobodacious, and Homoka (as in homo Honoka). We were also informed by our gracious waitress that although mac and cheese had long since been removed from the Denny's menu, we could still order it from the kid's menu. Three of us went on to order mac and cheese from the kid's menu and even though it was pretty mediocre mac and cheese, all things considered, in that moment it was the best thing I had ever tasted.

Feeling rejuvenated by our breakfast foods, we said goodbye to our photographer friend and set sails to our hotel room, where we had planned to do a self-shot pajama photoshoot with my own camera and a tripod. We hadn't really intended for it to be anything fancy (especially since Kate was the only one who had cannon Love Live pajamas), but I love the idea of self-shot photoshoots, and I thought it'd be a fun way to start practicing. It turns out that Raz, Kate, and I all have very compatible photoshoot styles (similarly detail-obsessed, but all laid back enough to let it go if the others aren't feeling a shot as much as you are), and we ended up having so much fun with it that we spent the whole rest of the night on it! Even though we had initially been doing very pure shots posing with our makeup, of course our roommates walk in the door as soon as I suggest "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if Rin brought yaoi to the sleepover?". So hilarity ensued as our friends (dressed up in Attack on Titan cosplays themselves) step in to see us making exaggerated faces at the Attack on Titan yaoi that one of us had bought in the dealer's hall. I regret nothing. It was perfect.

I'm only about half done editing these photos, but I'm having a lot of fun improving my photoshop game, and so far I think they're turning out really cute, especially considering the very limited equipment we were working with.

Sunday

Finally, Sunday came around. Being the last day of the con, there wasn't a whole lot going on and everything ended pretty early. It was also raining pretty heavily off and on throughout the day, so it was hard to find the motivation to leave the hotel room in the first place. Needless to say, I did return to the artist's alley to spend the last of my con budget. I spent around $50, and I think this is a really good amount for me to spend. Some cons I've definitely spent way too much, and afterwards I really wished that some of the items were returnable.... but on the other hand there have also been cons that I buy almost nothing, and then afterwards I feel like I missed out on some good stuff. Along with some nice mini-prints for my wall, I really love the Love Live art book (and at $10 it was probably one of the best valued items I purchased!) and I'm excited to try out the Visual Novel I found in the artist alley. I also wanted to get something for my boyfriend, who is getting really into One Punch Man. This... proved to be a little challenging though, since he doesn't really put posters on his wall, and generally doesn't like interacting with anime fans in general. So, any kind of poster or key chain which might attract someone's attention and start a conversation about anime was already out of the question. I ended up finding a really nice memo pad and he loved it! I also managed to find a cute zine which I had seen at APE but wasn't able to buy at the time, so that was a nice surprise as well. Overall I feel really good about my catch this time around.

Even if these rumors are not all 100% factual... the mere fact that you can circulate these rumors and they are totally believable says something about this amazing community of ours. 
(I'm joking, of course I love you guys... but seriously, why are we so dumb sometimes?)

Until next time!