Friday (One) | Friday (Two) | Saturday (One) | Cosplay | Saturday (Two) | Sunday

So the cosplay contest brought the house down. Literally...

and then...

Ya, that wall's not supposed to move like that.

Saturday (Two)
Whack That Onigiri!

After the cosplay, we had the dance. Two-and-a-half hours of bopping around like a lunatic (and thusly almost breaking my camera), cashing in on Man Auction purchases, and seeing what kind of crazy stuff the DJ had this year. Also, anybody was welcome on stage to strut their stuff.

...Or see how many people you can get on the stage before it collapses. Not like we're strangers to property damage.

Tony hijacked his friend's wheelchair and barreled around the dance with the occasional fangirl on his lap.

Thankfully for him they didn't play the oft-requested Time Warp. He would have been a great Dr. Scott...

This was the first picture I took in night-mode on the camera. For a brief moment I thought I was good at it.

As evidenced by the power beam emanating from Sean's chest, I still need to practice.

Unless he actually had a power beam. A power beam... of love!

Speaking of love...

Heather gets her dance with Vinnk. He actually cut in while I was dancing with her, so to make up for it, he gave me the dance with convention director Japanese Peso that he had inadvertently won. It was... um...

Well, for all of you who haven't been to No Brand, how many of you have slow-danced with a convention director?

 Didn't think so.

Fearing more damage to the foundation, the random glomping was restricted this year to "the nearest person" and "Neil." Rumors of spontaneous, unprompted glomping throughout the dance persisted. We enjoyed it anyway.

After that it was time to cut the cake. The 202 Cake!

Isn't it pretty? Unfortunately the mention of cake serves as a magnet drawing in everybody on the floor. This cake didn't last long.

What did last long, however, was the 202 pinata, which was slated for destruction right about now. So we all headed up to the parking garage where Jasmine explained the rules:

Actually, there weren't any rules. There were, however, weapons-

There's normal weapons like the frying pan and the kendo stick...

Or, for the Gardening Ninja enthusiast, a rake. We also found a sawhorse lying around- it worked pretty well.

In the end, the Holy Fry Pan did the most damage.

See, it's red, that means damage.

Not enough, however, and we eventually decided to use the most potent weapon of all, gravity, and flung that thing down to the next level.

After two levels, it burst open and revealed all its goodies. Let the sugar-induced chaos ring!

Crappy picture perhaps, but it sure captures the mood!

I put the camera down long enough to claim some treasure. In the end, good fun and we learned an important lesson- don't put pixie sticks in a pinata that's destined to be thrown down a parking garage ramp.

While a few unlucky souls attempted to clean up, a few of us headed back to 202 to set up the karaoke machine for some EALA fun, hopefully getting back on track towards completing one of my last three objectives.

With the con's karaoke room only playing music that's *supposed* to be in English, it was 202 or bust for me. Unfortunately, the power on the microphone was pretty limited and didn't really sound good at all. Also, I have learned that nobody actually wants to listen to karaoke- only wait to get up there themselves. This was a problem, since the only lyrics we had were... in English.

I did the Chobits opening as a test run, and attempted Ready, Steady, Go in Japanese. I can do a near-spot-on Hyde when my voice lets me. Unfortunately, being 1:00 AM and having been outside for an hour, my voice didn't let me. It was ugly, and we all wisely decided to play DDR instead.

But I passed my EALA binder around and got people to flip through it, looking for something.

Objective 4: Karaoke from the English Anime Lyrics Archive.
Mission... CLOSE ENOUGH

When I noticed that several 202 folk were missing, I headed down to the convention karaoke room, which was working late to give everybody a shot onstage. After my failure at performing alchemy, I shied away from it (partially because there weren't many songs I felt like doing). One of the karaoke regulars from Green Bay, Bryce, convinced me to join him for Semisonic's "Closing Time," the last song of the night.

We were quickly joined by everybody in the room. Up on stage.

Joy.

Since every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end, a few of the Green Bay folk thought it would be swell to play hide 'n seek on the convention grounds. I decided to play along since everybody else was pretending to play along. The "shoe of choosing," which selected the piñata whackers earlier that night, chose me. I went to the counting place, counted to 50 quickly, went back out into the hall and found that Tony and Dani hadn't bothered hiding. We all agreed to forfeit and went back up to the room. Jasmine joined us as well.

Three hours later, after Tony insisted that I could not sleep on the bed (since I was not paying) and Jasmine could not sleep in the room (since she was in 202), Jasmine and I were sleeping comfortably on the bed when the rest of the players came in and asked why I hadn't found them yet.

I was never all that good at hide 'n seek.

It's getting blurrier, and we're losing it, but there's one more day to go!