Friday

We arrived at Amecon kind of super early, so the nearby people who were somewhat involved with running the convention told us to go to Asda. We went there and then bought snacks, and I took this picture of Toothball whilst pretending to test my camera or something. It's really blurry because I didn't really care and was just performing basic camera checks. In any case Toothball is normally a bit blurry.

After returning from Asda, Toothball and I walked ahead. I snapped a pic of the rest of the slow walking people and of the general convention grounds which were very nice. The pic still came out a bit blurry because I was walking when I took it.

The main hall with VR1 and the bar and some stuff. I didn't really have anything to take pictures of because it was still really early at this point. We went to eat snacks in the park area around the back.

The sky was really nice at this point so I took a reference pic. A bit later it started raining like crazy, so I have no idea where it came from.

Toothball and I played 'Dong Dong' on Warioware on the Gameboy advance which was later turned in to a comic which won a prize in the comic competition. It's very remarkable that someone should want to make a page comic about us playing with our dongs.

First sighting of Hunter! Toothball caught up with him but I saw him before he saw me. I snuck round the back of some bushes to snipe a shot of him. Excellent work.

Here he is again, this time from a nearby building. I'm getting good at sniping pictures.

Okay, I think he noticed me this time.

Hooray, I met Mangamad again! Unfortunately this pic is blurry. I don't like using flash because it makes the lighting in a picture look very bad (the background becomes very gloomy) so I try to avoid flash unless it's absolutely necessary. This means I have to have a steady hand a lot of the time, and I sometimes am not very careful.

It's Tiger Tiger who flew down from Scotland with us. He is in cosplay here as that dude from Eva, I think. Another blurry pic because my hand is about as steady as a paint shaker. I think I took a picture of him because he didn't want his picture taken. Anyway, at this point the convention is starting to pick up and plenty of people are arriving.

As far as I know, this is the person who drew the comic of the earlier donging. I used flash and it looks pretty depressing and dingy, sorry about that.

Another cosplayer. At this point I was just sort of taking random pictures of cosplayers. The costume is good but I don't recognise the character. I think it might be Final Fantasy though. The guy at the left looks really worried about something. I hope it worked out for him.

Toothball thrusts his fist in to the air in a victory pose. I have no idea what was happening at this point.

Hooray, we snuck in to the dealer's room when they were setting it up. Actually we went in sort of by accident and before anyone kicked us out, we sat down at this excellent puzzle table hosted by a guy we only know as puzzle guy. It was really interesting and had plenty to do, I must have spent about 4 or 5 hours there all weekend. Unfortunately I think I was the only regular as his table seemed quite empty most of the time. Puzzle guy already looks tired and terrified, as he doesn't normally do anime conventions. Tiger Tiger is here playing the robots game.

Danj and I met up then pushed to the front of the queue for the opening ceremony. It didn't really help us get good seats because they filled up seats from the back first, but I got a good picture of the hustle and bustle.

The dealer's room opened! I'd already been there, but this time I of course decided to go in the legit way. I queued with Mangamad and Danj and I got bored enough to take a movie. You can watch it if you have the divx codec installed, but it isn't really worth it.

After taking the movie I noticed this guy with his cool... costume thing. He also had a bloody shirt but he wasn't wearing it there. He also turned out to be a guy called Roomproject, if I'm not mistaken, who entered the quiz with us and helped us win and did pretty well in the manga competition too.

Inside the dealers room I had no money, so instead I took a picture of this FLCL cosplayer of Amaro. He wore the costume all weekend and was cool.

And then the priest guy from Hellsing (Anderson or something like that?)

A bit dark, but it's a picture of the dealer's room. If you look carefully at the centre right, you can see Puzzle Guy looking stressed out.

Ginji and Ban from GetBackers. It was the dub. I got to see it before it was out on DVD, I think. How special am I?! Well, I've already seen the whole series using the power of piracy anyway.

There was some karaoke, so I went and listened to a couple. Generally people were quite good. This girl has a fairly strong voice, but more surprisingly the song she is singing is just completely whacked out. I don't know the title of the song, unfortunately. You need divx to watch this, by the way.

After the silliness that ensued, I went to the fandub competition and the fandub panel. The competition was very makeshift as they really had no idea what to do, and basically ended up with teams of people coming up and shouting lines over Pretty Cure. I had a team of me, Toothball and a guy whose name was something like PLUNK (exactly what escapes me right now). We made fools of ourselves of course, and it was a good laugh. The fandubbing panel was about amateur voice acting, something I'd actually be interested in investigating.

I'm walking behind Monica Rial in a corridor after the hilarious fandub contest and informative panel! THAT MEANS I'M FAMOUS!

This guy's holding a pint in front of his BADGE! Great! Now I can't remember what his name is, but it began with 'M' and I could probably get it off the cache off the old Ikaruga scoreboard. This guy recognised by badge name off the Ikaruga scoreboard (which by the way has been down for the best part of a year at least). He seemed to be a big fan of shooting/arcade games in general, which made him much cool in my books.

And finally the last picture of the day. I met a Kurapica cosplayer! Hooray! Not only was the costume absolutely fantastic, but she was really delighted to be recognised. Apparently she'd been walking around for a while already and nobody had recognised the costume which if you ask me is a bit unfair. If she'd been dressed as the gay avenger Sasuke from Naruto then probably a load of people would have noticed, but despite the fact that Naruto is really mediocre and Hunter X Hunter is really excellent and Sasuke is a big ripoff of Kurapica... uh... well, whatever. It was an excellent costume and I had to ask for a game of Rock Paper Scissors. I lost.

Just a little detail because I never got a picture of this. She had modelled Kurapica's chain device really well. It was done quite cleverly too and looked exactly like the anime one.

After all that excitement I went to bed. Not much happened on the first day other than that I learned how to take pictures a bit, and I went to the fandub panel which was a good laugh but there's no point in writing about it because it was largely based on situational and improvisational comedy.

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