Megacon 2005

Megacon 2005 in Orlando Florida - Special Guest Psycho le Cemu!

Me and Fraggle got in on Friday night and not a whole bunch noteworthy happened on Friday, except to say that within 10 minutes of being in the hotel, we saw a Rock Lee cosplayer, YAY! Evan got in a few hours later, so we ordered a pizza cause we're lazy and shit. We weren't gonna be able to get Master Shake done on time, though. >_< And that's pretty much Friday night. Heh. Oh, and I did some really obnoxious shit to the Gideon bible (I read it religiously, ha-ha) in the hotel room. I'm already going to hell anyway, so it can't hurt.

Saturday we got up and got into our costumes - me as Chouji and Fraggle as Ed from Fullmetal Alchemist. The clasp on her jacket kept breaking and having to be superglued, and I was having just soooo much fun with spirit gum and gauze (and later ended up dumping half the damn bottle down my leg while trying to fix the gauze, because it kept falling >_>). But both costumes looked great, although if I go as chouji again, I'm gonna say fuck it and use masking tape or SOMETHING because the gauze is too much trouble. We got to the convention hall and literally the minute we stepped off the shuttle and before we even got in the doors, some people grabbed us with a bunch of other random cosplayers for a pic, so we obliged. I even had a bag of chips as a prop (and then as breakfast, heh). Got our tickets, got in line to get into the dealer room since it was a few minutes before it opened, and I got a pic of a good Luffy cosplay.

When we got in the dealer room we of course pretty much headed straight for the Jpophouse Booth so we could get our VIP stuff and cause I wanted to see if they had any good stuff. Our tickets? FRONT ROW, BAYBEE. Although we wouldn't find this out til tomorrow, cause it looked like they were in the second row. Got the canvas bag, the nifty postcards with the Frontiers costumes, and they were giving ALL FIVE of the Frontiers figurines in the bag! I have a whole set, YAY! There was also a lanyard, glowstick, and some plastic bag from a japanese tour... I looked at their stuff, and they didn't really have any good magazines that I wanted, but they DID have the PLC photobook they put out last year, where they're all dressed in the whole 'bad boys, be ambitious' look. And Lida is RIPPED LIKE JESUS. Pictures of seek without makeup or piercings in. Nurse Aya (heheh). I would've liked the photobook, but they were only taking orders for it, and it was $48... I did get the rest of the pins that I didn't have - the chibified Frontiers ones. I already had Lida and seek, so I got the other 3, and I got a tour shirt. They have different colors for each member - blue for Daishi, yellow for Yura-sama, orange for Lida, pink for Aya, and dark green for seek. So big surprise that I get the seek one, right? Favorite member + favorite color = yay. But it's cool, because each shirt has the band name written over the kanji for the Momotaro (Yume Kazaguruma) costumes for each character. They were also cheaper than the tour shirts at Akon by $6. So, after that, dealer room wandering occurred!

Evan found that there was a Homestar Runner booth there when me and Fraggle were out in the lobby eating because we forgot to have breakfast. The cool part? It was being manned by the parents of the brothers Chaps! They were giving out free keychains and coasters! AND THE MERCHANDISE WAS REALLY DAMN CHEAP. I got the decal stickers set and a set of all 5 patches, even though I only really wanted the 'Raised by a cup of coffee' one, but for $10, I'll take all 5. And by then, Cassie and her group of people had shown up, so we hung out with them for a little bit... Eventually headed back over to the Jpophouse booth because they were going to be doing the photos and autograph... and this is where shit starts to piss me off.

I left my CD in the hotel room that morning, and didn't notice until 1 and the photos started at 2, so I figured, hey, I can go run and hop on a shuttle and get back to the hotel, grab it and be back before they get to where we were in line. So I go and wait. And wait. For half an hour. And ask a woman who was with the convention center staff, and she tells me and another woman that the shuttle is picking people up at the other side of the convention center. So we hike our asses all the fuck across the center only to find that the dumb bitch I asked apparently is a moron, because even though I said 'hotel shuttle' she sent us to the PARKING LOT SHUTTLE. Even better? I MISSED THE FUCKING HOTEL SHUTTLE WHILE EXPLORING THE FUCKING ORANGE COUNTY CONVENTION CENTER. And by this time? 10 minutes to 2. You have no IDEA how very pissed off I was that I was not going to get a chance to get an autograph and will probably never have the chance again, unless you were within a 10 foot radius of me in the line to hear me bitching.

So anyway. We go in and get our pictures and stuff. I was really amused because my Chouji costume got a reaction that is kind of hard to describe - sort of like at least 2 of the band members made a 'ooh!' of recognition. And seek has this big old grin on his face in my pic and Lida's doing his whole 'I'm Mr. Cool' sort of smirky-thing. So I got my pic and thanked them in japanese and all, and then we did more dealer room wandering. I was fairly disappointed with the dealer room because 50% at least was comics. WAY more comics than I remember when I went in 2002. Not a whole lot of good selection of general scifi stuff or anime stuff, but I did find a booth that had a One Piece Zoro pin! I was so damn happy. I went all of Akon looking for Zoro stuff and couldn't hardly find anything - I did manage to get one booth's last Zoro plushie there, though. I ended up getting him and Chopper since they didn't have an Usopp. And of course, nobody had any Rock Lee plushies. >_<

So, we left to go back to the hotel after a while. And now, here's where I get REALLY pissed. Have I mentioned yet that Megacon did virtually NO promoting or advertising for Psycho le Cemu? In the con book, there is a blurb that is literally 1 1/2 lines long at the bottom of a page that says something about the concert. And. That's. It. So, of course, we didn't know there was a Q&A session until later that night. I'm also somewhat pissed that Jpophouse didn't list anything about the Q&A on their website for Megacon, and that they didn't put signs up for it until they had started taking pictures. I ACTUALLY HAD QUESTIONS FOR THE FUCKING BAND THIS TIME, GODDAMMIT. Although one of them did get answered by someone else - Yura-sama does make up all the para-paras, confirming my suspicion.

Psy and her friend Stasia got in a little while after we got back to the hotel room, and Fraggle and Evan went out to eat and to get some last minute costume stuff. I ended up in the lobby, knitting and hoping to see something interesting. There was a costume contest and a rave, but I didn't go to either because, meh. Neither is exactly my style. I was found by some other fans and spent time talking with them about various Jrock stuff, and Psy and Stasia came back after they had done some food shopping and whatnot, and it wasn't til 2 AM that I got back to the hotel room.

I woke up at 4:30AM. That's right, a whole 2 hours of sleep! So I tried to you know, get some more so I would be semi-functional for Sunday since it was The Big Day, but no go. I ended up laying around and stimming like a madman because I was getting nervous and excited and that certainly wasn't being helpful at all on the sleep front (Oh, and this will help explain the barely controlled meltdown and little mini-shutdown I had after the concert, but I'll get to that in a bit). So I gave up around 6 and started getting food and then, at 7 or so, getting ready for my Frontiers seek costume. I had to shellack my damn hair to my skull with hair gel and then wait for it to dry before doing anything else.

We all eventually get into our costumes (seek, Daishi, and Yura-sama) and head on over (in the friggin rain, I'm glad it didn't mess up the makeup) and before we even got out of the hotel, one guy who wasn't there for the convention have his wife take a picture of me and him because he said that 'nobody would believe him if he didn't have proof' in regards to the costume, and then the shuttle driver took a pic with his camera phone... oh yeah, I got some good reactions. Over the course of the 2 hours we were in the convention center in costume, at least 100 people took pics. I was really disturbed by all the people who wanted to hug me, though. Actually, not so much disturbed by the ones who asked for a hug (although why they'd want to hug a stranger), but by the ones who didn't even bother to ASK. BAD TOUCHING BAD TOUCHING. We got Evan a blonde wig for the costume from one of the booths which made the costume look better, more pictures taken, and just ended up hanging around the Jpophouse booth. They were playing various PLC videos and lives and, um, yeah. I tried to parapara in the costume and it's really really really really difficult with those feet and hands. But that didn't really deter me. Oooh, and right before we left, we ran into this girl who was doing Lida's Frontiers costume, so we got pics. If only we'd had an Aya, it would've been perfect.

Also ran into a Japanese fan who really liked our costumes, but she didn't speak like any English and I was so nervous that I could barely speak in Japanese, but I did talk to her. She came all the way from Japan for the live (obviously) and said that our costumes were great. I apologised for not being able to speak it very well but she was like 'iie, jouzu' but I know that's one of those politeness things. Anyway, I told her to have fun at the concert and all.

We went back around 12:30 because as much as I would've liked to go to the concert in costume, there was no way. Too hot, too cumbersome, too constricting (couldn't turn my head), too much makeup for me to want to wear it in there. So I got a shower, put on my shirt from Akon and glow-sticked up. Evan and Fraggle basically wore most of the Yura-sama and Daishi costumes, though. We got there about 15 minutes before they started letting VIP people in, and FRONT ROW SEATS, BAYBEE. Because they did a seating chart by who ordered (apparently, I bought my ticket like, 3rd or 4th, so I was just to the right of center), we weren't sitting together, but I was able to just trade with the girl who was sitting next to them, so it worked out fine. Also, that put me on the aisle, which was even better til the last couple of minutes. So, we were less than 5 feet from the edge of the stage.

So, we're all excited. The rest of the audience gets in, the band comes out and does their skit first, which was really amusing. Or, rather, it WOULD have been, if I could hear the parts I missed over the little teenybopper shithead fucktard fangirls who had to SCREAM AFTER ANYONE SAID A DAMN SENTENCE (especially if it was Aya talking). I have a huge rant about this, I do. Right now I'm going to say that I was severely disappointed with a huge portion of the audience at Megacon. And this huge portion was mostly comprised of idiotic girls between the ages of 12 and 16 who pretty obviously mostly liked the band because Aya looks pretty in drag and people in the general seating who had absolutely no fucking enthusiasm whatsoever. According to Cassie and someone else I talked to, almost nobody was standing up, let alone doing parapara, and some people were leaving a few songs in. >_<

So anyway, the skit was amusing - oh, and they were wearing the Momotaro costumes, of course. There were some funny mess-ups, like they kept messing up the timing for the barrier sound effect, and the anger ball didn't hit seek like it was supposed to. Also, seek swearing? Funny shit. But that's mostly because I really appreciate swearing. And I'm really impressed because the recording of all the dialogue (in English) was done by the members. seek's English pronunciation is really good. Aya sounds like he still has that perpetual headcold in English, too, and he was the most difficult to understand. I'm sure everyone's read Katsucon reports so they know the whole plot - seek's an evil devil who wants to take over the world and make everyone have the same haircut as him because he has no friends and the rest of the band are the heros trying to stop him and they all make friends at the end. The whole Yura-sama fighting seek with a banana thing was great, though.

Then they went into the songs - Yume Kazaguruma first. I'm so happy I remembered as much of the parapara for it that I did (and of course, it always helps when you have the band member standing right there in front of you doing it). Aya was on our side for the first half of the song, then he switched spots with Yura-sama. They (hell, all the band members) were really really happy when they saw people doing the parapara along with them to the point that if they saw you doing it they would just grin like fools and be pointing at people in the audience - I know I got pointed at at least twice by Yura-sama... >_> heh. I swear, when he sees people following along correctly, he sparkles like Armstrong from FMA. The man is so damn genki that it's great. The only part that I really couldn't do correctly was where it picks up tempo right before the chorus.

After that? Area. OH MY FUCKING GOD. Yura-sama has gotten so much better at singing since they recorded the song a while back. It was AWESOME. He and Daishi do this really complex parapara that looked SO DAMN AWESOME THAT THERE IS NO MORE AWESOMER AN ADJECTIVE TO DESCRIBE IT. And Daishi doing that much parapara was great, too. Oooh. They need to play that one live more often.

After that, Neo, the first track off Beautiful World, which was very cool. The set list starts getting fuzzy for me after this, and I didn't stop at the booth afterwards (so I forgot to get a Kronos thing or a setlist thing OR a survey to fill out T_T So I couldn't put my usual 'PLAY MEGATRON DAMMIT' comment down). I do remember Ichioku no Parichuzan, Michi no Sora, Feel on the Dark, Last Emotion, Scream, Murder-Death-Kill, Mind Core and I think they did Moonlight Dance? I'm not sure. But they kept coming right up to the lip of the stage, so close that if you wanted to (and were disrespectful enough to try) you could prolly reach out and touch them. seek spent a lot of time right up near our section, and Lida came over a few times (he was on the far right, where Aya usually is for concerts) and Aya was running around everywhere. Daishi was all over the place, too. The last song they played before encores (yes, plural) was Universe, and Daishi's voice gave out on him during it o_O. So he only ended up singing half the song, I felt so bad for him. He was trying so hard and he looked so pissed off that he couldn't get the rest of it. Then they went off stage (not that I could blame them - poor Daishi). Cries for the encore, of course, yay! And then they came out... AND GEKIAI MERRY-GO-ROUND AND YAY I REMEMBERED ALL THE PARAPARA AND DIDN'T MESS UP ALMOST ANY OF IT. I definitely remember being pointed at by Yura-sama for this one cause he was on our side of the stage for most of the song, and he kept doing these utterly insane jumps during the chorus (for those of you who know what the parapara looks like, during the first part of the chorus where it looks like you're shooting a gun). Oh, it was great.

They also did Ai no Uta, and I forgot to mention this before, but a lot of the songs off the new album don't have parapara, or they just didn't do any leading for them (like, how many people other than me were doing the parapara for Mind Core? Not a whole lot unless Daishi was leading it at the moment). I remember this now, because Aya didn't do a whole lot of leading for Ai no Uta like he did at Akon with so many of the songs. Of course, he did for Murderer-Death-Kill, because the parapara for that is kick-ass and one of my favorites. Hee. Speaking of which? The japanese fans who had come to the convention are insane. I looked over towards where they were (pretty much front and almost dead center) and they basically planted their hands on the seat in front of them, leaned over, and headbanged like a bunch of psychos for some of the songs. They also had the whole 80-billion glowsticks going on, too.

Anyway, they played a 3rd song, which one it was is slipping my memory at the moment, and went back of stage. I wasn't expecting a second encore, but the lights hadn't come back up and I was tired as fuck so I was just content to collapse back into my seat for a while. Well, we got another encore. This is where my whole experience gets sour. The Megacon security staff for the concert SUCKED. All these little bints had come up out of their seats and were crowding the goddamn aisles and wouldn't move back to their seats and the damn Megacon people weren't making them clear the aisles. And one of them... oh, you have no idea how pissed I am. Some girl in a final fantasy cosplay was shrieking - not screaming, but shrieking - so goddamn loud right next to my right ear that something popped and I was deaf in it until this morning. I'm not kidding. Little stupid cuntdropling bitch - and I don't use the word cunt lightly, so you can get an idea of how much this pissed me off - you do not scream into the ear of a woman who is probably 8 years older, half a foot taller, and one hundred and fifty pounds bigger than you. It is not a very good idea. Especially when they are a big surly bitch like ME. I don't even remember what the second encore song was because of this goddamn cunt. Oh, and you know of course, she was shrieking 'AYA! I LOVE YOU!' and all that stupid shit. (Speaking of which, there were of course all the little 'oh, he's pretty because he's in a dress' Aya fangirls screaming his name every 3 seconds (and a couple of those for Yura-sama, too), but I'm glad many of them got drowned out. There were chunks of the audience that started chants for seek and Daishi, too, which was actually cool. I was yelling for Lida cause poor Lida never gets any love and because he deserves love for being really damn cool and a pervert to boot.)

The show ends, the band goes off stage, and Harry from Jpophouse comes out and does his 'Go away they're done!' thing. Here's where I turn into a vengeful bitch. Already pissed off because I can't hear out of my right ear - and knowing it's because of shrieky cunt, not because of the loud music because I can hear fine out of my other ear - we start our way up the aisles to leave the auditorium. There's a girl. With a camera phone. Who had taken pictures of seek during the live. Now, there's this rule, which is probably there for a good reason - no cameras during the live. Don't take pics of the band while they're playing. I have no problem with this rule, and I'm sure many other of the fans don't. So I see this dumb fuck showing it off to a bunch of other girls - oh, and you just know that she's one of the 12-16 year old dips without me telling you that, right? Good - so what do I do? I march my ass over to the stage where one of the staff guys (I think he was one of the roadies) was and tell him that they were taking pictures. Well, it takes me 3 minutes to realise that he was Japanese and didn't speak English before I go 'OH! Dur, Japanese' and tell him 'member no shashin o toteimashita' (they were taking pictures of the band, basically) and point in the direction of the girls who had taken the pictures. He was like 'when, now?' and I told him that no, it was when they were playing. Not only did I tell him, but I went over to the Jpophouse booth in the dealer room and told one of the girls working there. She said basically that there's not a whole lot they could do, but thanks for telling them. I told her that she might wanna pass that info onto Harry (for those who don't know, he's the guy who runs Jpophouse and is responsible for getting the band to come over for the Akon/PMX thing last summer as well as this spring) because, quite basically, if you're gonna do shit that's gonna fuck it up for me and everyone else, I'm not gonna let you get away with it.

After this point, I hit meltdown.

Now let me stop and do some explaining. People with Asperger's occasionally have what are referred to as 'meltdowns' - basically, an uber temper tantrum. As in, break shit, hit people, scream, etc etc lots of unpleasantness. It's a pretty common trait, and I've had them in the past before before I knew what they were (like the time in 03 with the whole Angela Siplin electric fiasco - that was going on, and then the straw that broke the camel's back was the lazy fridge dying, which resulted in me going apeshit on it with my fists and somehow accidentally fixing it by beating the bejesus out of it). Given that I'd had 2 hours of sleep, had been in a somewhat uncomfortable costume earlier that day, had been hugged by strangers (and I have a huge personal bubble - I don't even hug FRIENDS, let alone strangers), had just been at a concert at a convention which is just generally sensory overload city, and had my ear shrieked in until it didn't work no more, I was already teetering. The girl with the phone was the last straw, and boom, meltdown. Actually, I managed to keep from going meltdown - by going shutdown for a little while. And a shutdown is like a computer crash for your brain. I pretty much fleed from the dealer room, found a bench, sat and stared off into space while trying to get my shit under some semblance of control and making the 'must stab now' urge go away. Yeah. So. Obviously, given that many Aspies are pretty hermit-like to begin with, not many go to things like conventions. I can usually tolerate pretty well at conventions, but I always get vicious to or about someone at some point at pretty much every con I've been to and come home hating all of humanity and then hide in my apartment for a few days. And given that I had already been spending the weekend walking around quoting ATHF lines like 'I will KILL a bitch' and 'Ya open fer business? Ya lookin to expand ya business?' and 'SHUT THE FUCK UP STEVE YOU'RE SCARING THEM!' ... yeah.

anyway. I get my control back and decide to go try to hawk my buttons at some jrock fans, so I head back towards the escalators that were near the auditorium for the concert. I see one of the girls who I'd been talking before last night, and I apparently missed seeing seek and Aya going out for a cigarette by about 2 minutes. But that's okay, because 1/2 hr later, someone looks outside and sees a guy wearing a STAFF shirt standing with another guy who was wearing a hat and goes, 'Do I see orange hair?'

And yes, it was Lida! YAY! Out for a smoke as well, or something, and they came back in and walked right passed us, and I couldn't help myself, and said 'LIDA! LIVE WA SUGOI, ARIGATOU!' and got a smile and thumbs up for my trouble, heee. I think they really do appreciate it when the fans make an attempt to communicate with them in their language, and I think it's only fair, given that they do try to speak some english with us.

I hung around a little while longer, but they closed up the convention hall around 6, so I caught a shuttle around 7 to the hotel and got me some food and whatnot. Psy and Stasia came back after a while and I did some bonding with Stasia over the fact that we both knit, and then we watched some various videos and I got to see some of her LJ icons and stuff before going to bed around 1.

So, Monday morning, up and out of the hotel by 9:30, back in tallahassee before 1:30, which means I somehow managed to borrow Barb's time-warp abilities after all and shave probably 45 minutes off the trip home. And then Fraggle went back to her house, I unpacked my crap after getting mauled by The Mango, and now I go crash. Digital camera means I have pics, as well as a lovely movie file of Chicken/Monkey porn.

As you can tell, both good and bad. The concert was awesome, performance-wise and could've only been made more awesome if I'd caught a pick (no luck this time, though T_T). The audience for the concert was disappointing. The reactions to our Frontiers costumes (and to a lesser extent, the costumes on Saturday) were generally great. The dealer room, not so great. The Homestar booth was cool, too, especially since it was there parents running it. So you've got these elderly men and women running the booth! They must be so proud of their kids for turning a silly little flash video website into such a huge thing. Being most ridiculously sore after the concert? Not cool. Seriously. My arms hurt. My legs hurt. My neck hurts. My head hurts. It hurts if I laugh or cough. This is the result of having to crouch down constantly every time someone wanted a picture followed by enthusiastic parapara and some headbanging.

OH! They were shooting footage again, so I'm assuming they're planning on sticking it on another DVD. Since we were front row, if they use the Megacon footage, we'll probably be on it. It would also be cool if they got our cosplay, since apparently the Frontiers costumes are seek's favorite (someone asked at the Q&A and told me he said 'Fluffy white thing' in English, hee) and we didn't get to see the band while in full costume. As it is, I'm considering writing a letter or email (in Japanese) and sending a picture with that has a note that says something along the lines of 'We didn't get to wear our costumes on Saturday, so we didn't get to show them to you'.

Oh, also, I forgot to mention Daishi's nipple pride. Heh. During one of the encores, he came over to our side of the stage and opens up his jacket and it was just like 'NIPPLES! LOOK AT EM! ONE TWO I GOT TWO NNNNNNNNNNIPPLES!' Well, I mean, that's probably not what he was thinking, but given that I think men's nipples are really funny... yeah. But he had this huge old grin on, which is great. Lida's big old fuzzy orange pimp boots are even more funny seeing them in person, btw. Now that I've had a little rest, he really did walk around on stage a lot more than I've seen him do before, because normally he just stays in one spot and stares out at the audience, cause he has to be all like 'I'm Mr. Cool. See my sunglasses? Yeah, I'm cool' and stuff.

NOW! On to the pictures!

Costumes at the ready!

View from the room.

You can tell this is a fancy hotel. Look at them thar towels!

More of the fancy room, before we destroyed it.

I need to photoshop this so it reads 'please do not perform back-alley abortions with a coathanger in room'.

Evan has lovely breasts.

They're hard to see, but these are the people in the pool who kept entertaining us by dancing.

Fraggle as Ed.

And this is what happens when you call Ed short.

... That is the most retarded expression, Evan.

MONKEY D LUFFY!

Stormtroopers. You can't have Megacon without Stormtroopers.

Tenten! Yay!

Me as Chouji. Very much in character, mmm food.

The 'I will kill any bitch who steals the last chip' look.

An awesome Yura-sama.

... c'mon, we had to.

Aya!

Dir en grey Ain't Afraid to Die cosplayers.

I have no idea what this guy was supposed to be, but the costume had all these flashing lights and looked really damn cool.

I found a Shikamaru!

More Naruto cosplay.

An Ed with automail.

Friendly neighborhood Spiderman!

Tsunade-sama!

Frontiers Aya... too bad we weren't wearing our Frontiers costumes til Sunday!

Dread Pirate Roberts.

Sasuke (augh, it turned out slightly blurry!)

Buddy Jesus loves you.

Zabusa, and the back of an Orochimaru cosplayer.

AND there were more Sound nins!

CHOPPER! Awesome cosplay, I love Chopper!

"Camelot!" "Camelot!" "It's only a model!"

Jiraiya and a really cool way to do Gamabunta!

Yume Kazaguruma Aya - the ninja monkey.

The lovely Dr. Girlfriend.

A Japanese fan doing Aya.

I think this was the only Lida cosplay I saw before the concert, but she did an awesome job.

Space Pirate Daishi!

L'Arc~en~Ciel cosplayers.

A very good Omoide Aruki seek.

This one's for Barb: Boba Fett and some dude from Halo (I don't play, so I don't know what he's called >->).

I take sneak pictures of the Sand nins.

Psy shows her Daishi appreciation, heh.

HEY! I found someone taller than me at the convention! Yes, that's my seek costume.

Fraggle, me, and Evan.

Kung-fu yeticorn.

We kidnapped the Lida for some pictures.

And I wave goodbye.

CONSWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAG.

And finally, a video of what we did in the lobby on Saturday night: Chicken/Monkey porn. My pic with the band (please ignore me looking like a mental case):