なみのり ピカチュウ (o^ : ^o)

I got a Skype account finally, so you guys should definitely add me! As usual, I'm PacificPikachu there. I'll probably use it for 99% IMing.

Went to Sac-Anime yesterday for the day, and that was fun! I found some friends I hadn't seen in ages and we spent most of the day together, just talking and wandering and enjoying ourselves. I'm pretty happy with how Sac-Anime has grown into a proper, respectable convention! It's not a huge con by any means, but it's growing and it's now just a wonderful place to be. I wish I could have stayed the whole weekend, but honestly, I have no right to even complain with all the cons I've been to this year and the AMAZING experiences I've had at them. (I am not going to get over Yoko Kanno ever, skldjlkahksdjs;khf;slzalsfhajkf!) I'm sure I'll go to the winter SacAnime and I'm thinking of going to SNAFU-Con in Reno in late October as well.

Nerve-wracking thing happened: I lost my Pikachu 3DS XL. I don't even know how I managed to lose it, I have no idea where I left it. I decided to stay calm and retrace where I had been and check Lost & Found before panicking. Didn't find it at the first few places I checked. Went to Lost & Found and there it was! I was so, so, so relieved. I would have been devastated! Now I have even more faith in the general goodness of con people. I hope whoever found it and turned it in has amazing karma and wins the lottery or something.

Swap Meet went decently well! Most of my items at this point are not very expensive so I didn't make a huge profit, but I left with more than I came with AND got a few nice little items. I bought myself a Sylveon pose figure (for 1/2 of what people were charging on the community), the entire series of Ouran for $20 from my Swap Meet neighbor, a Flareon kid, and a Boota hat that I mostly traded for. I wasn't expecting to buy anything, but these deals were too good to pass up, and I don't regret it one bit. I didn't get home until 3 AM, had to get up at 8 AM, so I was pretty exhausted at work (and then my boss turned up on her day off JUST as I was about to leave and gave me things to do, so I ended up staying another hour and a half), bur it was worth it.

Oh, and at Swap Meet the strangest thing happened. A girl my age was looking at my Pokémon stuff, and she asked, "Hey, this is weird, but were you at Fanime 2004?" I told her I was, and she was like, "And you were cosplaying Pikachu? And your friend was cosplaying Faye?" It turned out she had been looking through her Fanime 2004 pictures the previous week and just happened to recognize me. 2004 was her first Fanime, too! Amazing. It makes me happy that other people are still going to cons regularly, ten years later. :D

My mom and brother are in Michigan for my cousin's wedding. They get back tomorrow night, so I've almost survived my mom being gone! When she's gone, I have to feed the horses and do more with the animals than usual, so it can be just slightly stressful, but it's never as bad as I think it'll be. The only thing is that I have a really hard time doing dishes because of the sensitivity of my hands and the fact that I'm really grossed-out by old food for some reason, and we don't have a dishwasher (I know, WTF, why?), so the dishes tend to stack up. I did some dishes tonight, but left the questionable ones. D: I'm glad she'll be home soon, though it's nice not to have someone constantly after me because I'm not cleaning or doing chores. =____=

I'm sad that Shingeki no Kyojin and Free! aren't going to be on air much longer. I really enjoy tuning into them each week, and the fandoms are a lot of fun, too. That said, of course the fandoms aren't going to go away, and I'm basically certain that SnK is going to get a second series. I also have SO much to look forward to the rest of this year, so it's not like I won't be plenty occupied!

Today's episode of SnK was intense, man. I figured out what was going to happen before it did because of snippets of spoilers I've heard, but still. I may have sworn at the screen a few times, hahaha. Brutal episode!

I'm still pretty tired from yesterday, but in fairly good spirits~

So, I'm back from Otakon. I've been sleeping most of the day, but I finally feel up for writing about the Yoko Kanno concert! It was definitely a highlight of my entire life. Words can't even do it justice, but I'll write about it to the best of my abilities anyway.

(Disclaimer: I did not write down the order of the songs, and the playlists I've seen people posting so far are definitely not correct. I'm just going off the best of my memory and what I wrote down a few hours after the concert.)

( Yoko Kanno @ Otakon 2013 )

Yoko Kanno autographs are not going to be by lottery after all, which gives me a much better chance! It's going to be a stressful convention, but oh so worth it. I'm feeling fairly confident that things are going to work out and I am so EXCITED. ♥ :D

I'm leaving for the airport in an hour or two at the most! If you need me, send me a text--(530) 575-5750. I may or may not come online at all while I'm gone, it's hard to say.

I am so amazed that I might be accomplishing my #1 dream so soon. ; A ; I've waited more than a decade for this, though!

( Something unrelated that makes me unhappy )

Guess who's in full-out nervous mode? Meee!

Yoko Kanno autographs will be limited to 200, and will be done by lottery. There will be two autograph sessions, one on Friday and one on Saturday. Still no information on how to enter for the lottery or when it will be drawn.

I'm trying really, really hard to stay positive and not completely freak out. The stakes are high, though--I will be crushed if I don't get to meet her/get an autograph, and if I do I'll pretty much be the happiest person. This is my #1 dream, after all.

I'm getting super irrational, though, where I feel like I have to stare at the computer intently every second as if that will make a difference. Logically, I know it won't, but...ahhh, I'm not logical right now. Anyway, I have to go take care of the animals, so that's going to force me to do something else other than fixating. Seriously, self, fixating is not going to help right now!

I have $100 that I can pay someone for an autograph spot if I must. I just...I cannot miss this chance! T____T

I decided to watch NHK ni Youkoso, seeing as I've wanted to watch it for a while. So far, the storyline seems interesting enough (and I definitely plan to stick with it), but I must complain about one thing! I'm really not impressed at all by the animation. I like the character designs--they're a bit plain, but overall fairly nice, so it's not like I don't like the art style. It's just that oftentimes the animation is off-model and funky and ugly, and the rip I have is the DVD release, too, so it's not like it was corrected later. It's surprising to me, because this series was made by GONZO after Last Exile, and Last Exile was much prettier. I would have guessed that this series came out in about 2002 rather than 2006, and even if it had been made in 2002 I still wouldn't be impressed by it visually. I guess it must have been made on a low budget or something.

It's not that big of a deal, it just surprised me. Anyway, I'm going to resume watching it.

EDIT: I guess it would be more accurate to say that the animation is really inconsistent. Sometimes it looks fine, other times it looks really wonky and bad.

I slept for a long time today, so I think that's helping my slump a bit. I feel somewhat better! And tomorrow I have a day off, so that'll be nice. Finally get to sleep in again.

I also bought my Otakon plane ticket. It was $591, which is so, so expensive! Just as expensive as my round-trip Japan ticket when I went in 2009, and I'm not even leaving the country. But, I've been watching the prices the last few months, and they've barely dropped at all. Apparently it dropped a ton on ONE day when I was gone at Anime Expo, but nothing I can do about that. I have less than a month until I leave, and I guess I don't want to take the chance that the prices will go up, even though I guess there's still a (slim) chance they'd go down. Whatever, at least that's done. Yoko Kanno and Shinichiro Watanabe, here I come!

There's talk at my work about doing a huge (really huge) chicken rescue. This is both exciting and a bit nerve-wracking, as I'm going away a bunch the next month and it'll be intense if I'm barraged with work, but...oh well! It's for a good reason, of course.

My cousin is getting married next weekend. It'll be nice to go away to something other than a con, but I'm also a bit nervous because of my other cousin's baby. D: (For those who don't know, I have a phobia of babies.) Also, I don't like dressing up/formalities. But, whatever, I'll try to make the most of it anyway.

I'm feeling kind of crummy lately--about myself, just tired, blah... I think it's partly from the heat wave we're having, and partly just that I haven't really done anything aside from be on the computer and play Animal Crossing, and work. So, I guess it's good that I'm going away to Anime Expo (I leave early morning Thursday, so I'm getting down to the wire), so I can get away from home and go to an entirely different kind of stressful environment, haha. I'm really in denial that I'm going--it's hard to imagine being there right now! In a way, I think that'll be nice, because I'll get there and finally realize it and then be all excited.

I need to start packing today, because I haven't even done any of that yet.

Going to a psychologist later in the day. I hope they will be able to help me. I'm so sick of being like this all the time. :(

Somebody shared this video on the Natsume Yuujinchou community, and it kills me with its sweetness. So perfectly captures the series and why I love it so much. Got very close to tearing up.



It's going to be in the 100s for the next few days, ughhh. I hate hot weather! At least I'm not at or anywhere near Death Valley--it reached 129 degrees today! D: I always worry about my chickens (and other fowl) in the heat, because I did lose two hens to the heat four years ago when it was like this. My mom and I are spraying them down frequently, so hopefully they'll pull through. They got through today like troopers!

I'm having Anime Expo schedule conflicts! Just on Saturday, thankfully, but Saturday is a mess. I won a ticket to a 50-person exclusive Little Witch Academia party with Otsuka and Trigger, so I'm going to attend that. But it does mean that I'm going to miss Makoto Shinkai screening Kotonoha no Niwa. Meanwhile, Kazuhiko Inoue's panel also conflicts with the Kotonoha no Niwa reception that takes place after the screening. So, basically, three of the things I most wanted to see are in conflict with each other. I think I'm going to go to the LWA event, and then have to decide between the reception for the film (depends what the reception entails, I guess) and Inoue's panel. At least most of the autographs I'm after won't be a problem due to lots of autograph sessions--it's just that I'd really like to have Makoto Shinkai's autograph but it doesn't appear that there are even any autograph sessions for him. I wonder if it'll be a raffle thing at the screening, which would suck because a) I can't go to the screening, and b) I never win autograph raffles anyway, haha. Anyway, I will be super glad if I can get his autograph somehow, but I don't know if that's going to be a feasible goal or not. It's not like I'm going to cry forever if I don't get it, but it's an autograph I'd love to add to my collection if it's possible!

I'll be leaving for AX in a week and a few hours, which is really hard to believe! It came up super fast. It feels surreal and I feel unprepared in pretty much every sense of the word! But, I'm sure it'll be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to several events/possible autographs, and of course, just general convention wanderings, seeing friends, and so on. I'm hoping it won't be a super stressful AX, but I don't think it will be--I only have a few guests I want to see badly, and a few autographs I want to get if possible.

(I'll save the guest-stressing for Otakon, but at least then I'll only have one target, haha.)

It rained for a few days here, which is highly unusual for late June in my area of California. Normally, it doesn't rain from around May to around October, so it was weird that it got cold and rainy all the sudden. It was a decent amount of rain, too! Today it was back to being hot, and it felt like the east coast or Japan more than California, because of the humidity.

Politics have been amazing and crazy over the last slightly more than twenty-four hours! I was following the Texas Senate thing on Tumblr extensively, and, wow, that was intense. And then, DOMA overturned, woohoo! Very exciting. Still lots of other political BS going on, but what else is new?

Otherwise, I've mostly been playing Animal Crossing.