InsaneJournal

Youmacon '07 report!
Wow. That's really all I can say right now.

After a full day of rest from the con, I am finally coherent enough to make a con report.

And right now? All I can say is wow.

Youmacon '07 rocked my world.

Overall, it was possibly the best con experience I have ever had.

I have had Ohayocons where I had more fun and Otakons where more exciting things happened, but Youmacon really took the cake for overall quality experience.

Thank you to everyone I met who was awesome to me. None of you are probably ever going to see this, but I thought I'd say it anyway. Thank you to all of the staff who made the weekend such a success.

There was no con drama at all, which is a first for me. There was no time where someone either staff or attendee seriously made me upset or angry. Just about everything went well. For that I am very grateful.

Alright, let's break this down.

Thursday

The first thing we did on Thursday was pick up Laci at about seven or eight. It was pretty awesome, as we had missed her a lot. After that, we headed over to the con center.

Thursday was the sleepover. I was dressed as pajamas Haku, complete with backpack and stuffed bunnies. Lyndsay was dressed as pajamas Naruto with a shirt that read "remind me of your name again in the morning" while Candice wore a shirt that said "girls just want to have fun" as bedtime Sasuke. Laci was Itachi with a shirt that read "wicked" and Akatsuki-print pants. Tea was dark-blue pajamas Naruto and her shirt read "the rules don't apply to me." I meant to wear my "I do very bad things and I do them very well" shirt, but we were pressed for time leaving. I really wish I had because the sleepover room got really hot really fast. xD;

There was punch and goldfish and chex mix and fortune cookies there. None of that was as good as the raspberry cheesecakes and peanut butter/chocolate chip cookies Brittany (who was dressed as pajamas Sakura) brought. They gave us goodie bags at the door with things like fruit chews and pixie sticks and play-doh. We all had raffle tickets. Of the four prizes, three of them went to our group. xD; Lyndsay won a red umbrella, Brittany won a yellow umbrella, and Candice won a Hello Kitty blanket. xD Bekki commented that the raffle looked so rigged because of that.

We played spoons and a rousing came of My Cat Eats Poop.

That was an interesting game. How you play is like this:

A group of you all sit in a circle with paper and pens. At the start of the game, you write something at the top of the paper. A sentence, any sentence. You pass the paper to the person next to you. They illustrate your sentence, then fold over the sentence so the next person can only see the illustration, then they pass it over. The person who gets it now writes a sentence about the illustration, then folds over the illustration and passes it again. This repeats until everyone is out of paper and then you unfold the papers and read from top to bottom. It's kind of like telephone, but with paper. It's pretty awesome, and a riot. We got some really interesting things and there was a whole round of beating on Sasuke, which made Candice very, very sad. I had the dubious honor of sitting next to Lyndsay, so everything I got was extremely lewd.

We met a Shippuden Sasuke there, and a very tall Rabi. They were both pretty cool.

Friday

We got off to a late start on Friday. It didn't matter anyway, as opening ceremonies weren't until two. I was dressed as Allen Walker in his second uniform, Lyndsay started off as Yukina and Laci as her Karasu, Tea was Shippuden Naruto and Candice was blue outfit Sasuke.

We arrived and for the most part meandered around the con. There wasn't a lot we wanted to do on Friday. Tea went off to a Japanese mythology panel at some point while the rest of us were in the game room. We visited the Fansview photo booth for the first time. Then we spent the next, oh, what seemed like six hours waiting for the AMV contest to start. We spent most of this time sitting down playing cards or dancing in the lobby to the Spoony Bards. We took some crack crossover pictures too.

About an hour after it was supposed to open, we finally made it to the AMV contest and sat down for it.

I thought the AMV contest was run really oddly, because they had the videos sorted by category on the little papers but assigned seemingly random numbers to them and then played them in numerical order. It was really strange to go from a drama video to a comedy video and back again. I was still laughing from the comedy video and then BOOM, a downer. :<<< Very upsetting. Hopefully they won't do it again next year.

Both Lyndsay and I had videos entered this year. Hers was Holy Land, a Simoun AMV under romance. Mine were Why the World Hasn't Ended Yet, an X AMV in comedy and Everything to Lose, a Haku AMV in drama.

One thing I really noticed was that a lot of the AMVs were in the wrong category. Both competing entries in Action were anything but. Some under drama were more comedy or action or romance than anything. A lot of the ones in romance were more upbeat or drama. A lot of the ones in upbeat weren't really all that upbeat. It was just strange. I don't know if there's anything the AMV staff can do about video editors being too dumb to know which category to submit under, but that didn't make it any less dumb.

Anyway, after that we chilled out until the yaoi and yuri panels. Tea and I went to visit Ken and Kyle for a little while because we had some dead time before the panels. That was pretty awesome. At some time I met up with Ben from HS again after not seeing him for about a year.

The yaoi panel was a riot, as expected. I was merely a spectator for the yuri panel, but it went really well for our first, I think. It was pretty well-received and the turnout was great.

We headed home as soon as that was over because we were so tired.

On the way back, we got pulled over by this TOTAL BITCH OF A COP. Tea started crying because she was tired and didn't know why she was getting pulled over because she was following the speed limit and all that. The cop kept telling her to stop crying and acted like since she was emotional she had to be unfit to drive and was just... a total bitch. Like condescending and liked to throw around her authority and it was just the last thing we needed. But since Tea hadn't done anything wrong, she had to let us go and we got home just in time to pass out.

Saturday

Four hours of sleep later (literally), Saturday started off really freaking early. It was because the Naruto photoshoot was at 11:30. What the crap is that? :<<< I had to wake up at nine in the morning to get new hair extensions for Shikamaru. We managed to get out the door in time though.

Myself as Genin Shikamaru, my brother as Chouji, Tea as Shippuden Naruto again, Lyndsay as Naruto, Laci as Sai, and Candice as black outfit Sasuke.

The photoshoot was pretty fun. I ran around all silly with my brother a lot. We visited the Fansview photo booth again and got a print of my brother and myself as a gift for my mom. We met up with her, hugged, talked a little, and then had to leave to go out to buy an eyeliner sharpener for Allen. I think of the fact I forgot the eyeliner sharpener that morning as divine intervention to prevent me from being miserable for the rest of the weekend.

We got out to the car an hour before we were scheduled to run our D.Gray-man panel.

As soon as I was in the car, I came to the horrifying realization that I left my boots at the apartment.

Tea got on her driving no jutsu and we raced home, grabbed the boots, some other random costume components I forgot, I changed in less than five minutes, and we all piled back into the car again.

I forgot the eyeliner sharpener again, but, well, I had everything that was important.

We raced back to the con and I got there in time to swim through the little crowd of people waiting to get into the panel, set up as they were letting people in, and we ran the panel without another hitch. It was very well-recieved from my perspective and about twenty-some people showed up, so it wasn't a bad turnout at all. It was pretty funny though. Of all the cosplayers we had, the Exorcists and Noahs segregated themselves on each side of the middle aisle. The panel ran very well.

After that it was straight to the D.Gray-man photoshoot, which was fun. The kids were pretty amazing. I met the most awesome Road and Tyki duo. There was a distressing lack of good Rabis, though.

After the photoshoot I had to go to cosplay shougi check-in. Just before then I ran into Juliana. I really missed her, so that was awesome. Mario Party was running late so set up for shouji was late too. That took the next few hours out of my day and I spent most of it watching the game. When Tea showed up, we started a rousing game of poker. On our way out we briefly met up with Emily.

When shougi was over, we left for dinner at Red Robin. Our waiter was a total fanboy.

Somewhere in all this I lost my badge, but Jay and the rest of the staffers were really nice and helped bail me out there so I could make it to the panel I had to run.

After dinner, it was back to the con center to wait for our X panel to start. Which took forever, because the masquerade was going on and our panel was in the room that was currently being used as the green room. They cut our panel short by at least twenty minutes, which was not okay. The turnout to the panel itself was great, though, and a good time was had by all.

Later that night we attended the fanfiction panel and I laughed harder than I had for anything in ages. We cleared out to go to the Mario Party After Dark, but because the dance was running late, we decided to go home to sleep instead of wait. We're glad we did. Apparently the Mario Party After Dark didn't start until a full hour later.

Sunday

It was really hard to get out of bed on Sunday. Everyone got back into their Naruto costumes for the impromptu Naruto photoshoot. We first took a tour of Artist Alley and the dealer's room. Youmacon was actually really kind to my wallet as there was positively nothing I wanted in the dealer's room. There was this one girl in Artist Alley doing really amazing Fushigi Yuugi art, though. I really loved it all. She said she would be at Anime Central, so I definitely intend to keep an eye out for her.

Then we went to the Sailor Moon panel, run by Sailor Man and friends. That was pretty freaking amazing. There's something about Sailor Man and the way he talks and moves and everything that's just really awesome. I stayed for the duration of it, then we headed out for the impromptu Naruto photoshoot.

We met up with a small group of us and took some pictures. Everyone was awesome. Being Shikamaru, there really weren't a lot of pairing pics I could involve myself in so I spent most of the beginning of the photoshoot napping off to the side. Then we played a rousing round of Shikamaru Says, which involved the YMCA and all sorts of shenanigans. The Hamburglar crashed our shoot and we all chased him down. By 'we' I mean everyone but Shikamaru and Sasori, who walked slowly behind everyone looking fairly exasperated.

After the photoshoot we wandered around the con a little longer, then left for good with the intention of getting food. We went to the coney island across the street and midway through our meal, we ran into our Naruto photoshoot friends again. It was pretty amazing. xD; Someone random in the restaurant went, "There are more ninja coming." and we looked up and lo and behold, in came Orochimaru, Kakashi, Kabuto, and their friends. They sat down next to us and we had a great time.

The Kakashi was the most in-character I had ever met. She hid behind her menu to eat and siphoned water through her mask.

At some point or another we started taking off our wigs, which surprised them all because they all thought we had been using our real hair. x33333 The guy who had been cosplaying Gaara exclaimed, "Everything I've ever known is a lie!" It was really all quite awesome. x3 At the end of the meal, though, we parted. It was very sad.

We took Laci back to the airport, said our goodbyes, came home, and promptly died.

Youmacon this year was fucking off the hook. <3