Good Riddance 2019

Well folks, we're not only at the end of the year, but the end of the 2010's itself. It really has been a hell of a ride.

This year in particular had its ups and downs.

2019 came in a fog, and my first thought was "I sure hope this isn't some kind of omen." Oh, how wrong I was.

Well, first are the positives:

-Didn't die
-Still have my job
-Got back into writing fanfiction. It's still a work in progress, I'll let you all know when I finish it.
-Continued to blog
-Committed to #AuGHOST again
-Went to more cons
-Managed to see both Avengers: Endgame AND The Rise of Skywalker without being spoiled.
-Started to reconnect with extended family
-Played through Pokemon Sword

-Met Dr. Demento!

-Met Caroll Spinney

-Met Christopher Eccleston, one of the only living Doctors I still needed to meet (Jodie Whittaker still eludes me)

-Got to shake Farva's (from Super Troopers) hand!

-Got to sit front row at a Con panel!

It was a panel about Disney TV creators talking about how they pitched their shows (Big City Greens, Amphibia, The Owl House). I found that the front row was empty after I got up to shake Farva's hand, and nobody stopped me.

-Cosplayed for the first time (I'm on the right)

-Got to drive a cool car around.

-Got to meet Ed Asner!

-Commissioned two pieces of art at NYCC!

This DekuMina commission is from Steph Mided. Justin Briner (the voice of Deku) loved it.

While this Mina piece is by Kristen Gudsnuk. I've been going all in on My Hero Academia, and I really love how these two came out.

-Saw Weird Al in concert!

Second row, and he was backed by the Queens Symphony Orchestra! It was 90 degrees at night, but totally worth it.

-Also got Weird Al's autograph through my friend Danny!

-Watched the first episode of The Simpsons on the thirtieth anniversary of its airing!

-Bought a Simpsons script off of Ebay!

It's of Behind The Laughter. It wasn't a table read script, but rather one made later in the production cycle. It has directors notes, and still full of stuff cut out of the final version.

-Won $50 on a Christmas scratch-off ticket!

...Heh, I actually did a lot of good things this year. I guess I can't complain TOO badly about my year. But unfortunately, I do have to mention the negatives:

-I got into a car accident in July, hence having to drive the cool car around for a few weeks. Everyone involved was okay, and my car got fixed, but it was hell on my finances.

-A week before that, my uncle passed away suddenly. He was the last relative who lived in his house, so my parents have spent the past six months cleaning out his house, and they're in the process of trying to sell it. It's quite sad.

-Early this month, I lost one of my best friends.

His name was DJ, and for the past 13 years he was one of the best people I ever knew. Back in our college days, there was no social scene PERIOD without him. This picture was us at NYCC back in 2014, with Arthur Darvill and Alex Kingston from Doctor Who. He's dressed as Green Arrow. I had it framed not long after we took it and it's been hanging on my wall ever since.

He had Muscular dystrophy, which confined him to a wheelchair for most of his life, and for the past few years he wore a respirator and rarely left his bed. But that never stopped him from living a full life, nor being unable to live out the full college experience.

The guy almost died about half a dozen times in the years I've known him, and he managed to bounce back every time. But some time in mid November he was hospitalized with bilateral pneumonia and fought to the end.

In 13 years, I never missed a birthday. When I met Christopher Eccleston at NYCC, I got him to sign a pic for DJ (I did that with most of the Doctor Who cast I've met) and gave it to him the last time I saw him near the end of October. Folks, the way his face lit up when I showed him that picture is something that could chase any blues away. And now I won't get to talk to him any more about Doctor Who. Or the DC tv shows. Or Star Wars. Or the Marvel movies. Or Pokemon. Or Rick & Morty. Or video games.

I miss him.

Sorry to be such a downer, but after all that, I hope you could forgive me if my heart just wasn't in Christmas or most other things over the past month. I've been getting better, and I'm looking forward to starting over in 2020.

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New Shiny Pokemon!

Usually the November blog entry is devoted to what I'm thankful for this year.

I'm thankful for the usual things: My life, my family. that I still have a job and a roof over my head to live in. That hasn't changed.

Also I got to meet Justin Briner, the voice of Deku from My Hero Academia (along with the voice actors for Bakugo and Iida) dressed as The Crawler at Anime NYC. He even recognized my cosplay! My day was certainly made then. 

Now let's move on to the meat of the entry: I got the new Pokeymans game!

Sword, just like everyone else, it seems. And with a new Pokemon game comes new Pokemon! For some reason, half of the old Pokemon didn't make the transition to the Switch era, but that still leaves about 400 Pokemon, more than enough to keep people satisfied for a while.

And new Pokemon means new shiny Pokemon! 

This time around shinies have become slightly easier to get. Well, it's still the same longshot odds to get one, but there's a new method now. See, the game tracks how many times you battle a certain Pokemon, and if you battle at least 500, the odds shoot up dramatically.

That's how I got this one, a shiny Bunnelby. I was battling for a shiny Baltoy for about three hours (just because, really) when this one ran at me and turned out to be shiny. Yeah, I don't know how sunlight is able to be noticed at night, either.

Since he turned out to be naughty by nature (ha), it was only fitting that I named him Bugs.

And keeping with the rabbit theme I decided to try my luck to hatch a shiny Scorbunny using the Masuda Method. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's when you breed a mon with one from a foreign version of the game, usually Japanese and it's usually done with Ditto. So by dumb luck I was traded a Japanese Scorbunny and a Chinese Ditto over surprise trade (the function formerly known as Wonder Trade that traded a mon with a random player from anywhere around the world) and it took roughly a day and half and about 150 or so normal ones before a shiny hatched.

His evolutions look really spiffy, to boot.

I named him Hare, and if you understood that reference I love you forever.

The fun thing about Cinderace is that it's based off a soccer player, and it does a really funny pose whenever you bring it out into battle.

I chose Sobble as my starter (just like almost everyone else), but god damn did this make a good argument against making my choice.

And that leads to shiny number three. This time I decided to try to hatch a more basic choice and try for shiny Magikarp.

This one took a surprisingly short time, only about 30 eggs, which took about an hour before this guy showed up.

I named him Big Red for obvious reasons. Sometimes I wish I kept it as a Magikarp because I really like its shiny too, but I had to bring back the first shiny I ever caught way back in Silver.

So what's next on the horizon? Who the hell knows, but my current target is shiny Wooloo:

Gonna name him Tommy Boy. Because he's the Black Sheep. This is why I don't have much of a social life.

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I Wore Costumes!

It's Halloween, that means one thing!



Well, things other than Tim Curry. It means costumes!

For the eighth year in a row, I went to New York Comic Con and once again found some amazing cosplayers! Fat Thor was probably THE costume of the convention, I saw him everywhere. Pictured above was my favorite variant: Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America as The Dude, The Jesus, and Walter from The Big Lebowski. For those of you trying to squint, the "Black Widow" is written on that coffee can.

Here are some other highlights I got over the four days:

The most impressive one I saw was probably this one:

The picture doesn't really do it justice, but that Iron Giant was MASSIVE. There's even a little Hogarth on the shoulder for scale. It was piloted by a girl on stilts.

And that brings us to the main subject of this post: I scratched off another entry on my bucket list and cosplayed for the first time this year!

On Saturday I dressed as Koichi aka The Crawler from My Hero Academia: Vigilantes.

Pretty decent facsimile, isn't it? For those not in the know, My Hero Academia is an anime & manga about a world where everyone has some kind of superpower called a Quirk, and "Superhero" is just a job. A job that requires going to special schools for, as licensed Heroes are the only people who can legally use their quirks in public.

That brings us to the spinoff manga, Vigilantes. In a world of quirks, vigilantes are mostly unlicensed heroes, and their existence is quite frowned upon. The story follows a group of young-ish people who try to save the day any way they know how (but a little bit more than what the law would allow). The Crawler is the main character, and he can slide around the ground as fast as a ten speed bike when he makes three points of contact.

My Hero Academia has been hitting its peak in popularity here in the states, and cosplays of most of the main characters are really common because most of them are easy to pull off.

I chose to cosplay this guy because his look is pretty much an All Might cosplay with some cycling gear. I think the entire costume (jacket, pants, pads, gloves, face mask) all came around ninety dollars? And that was for something simple!

But not many people are aware of the spinoff, and thus cosplays are quite rare, even for this guy. I think I saw at least one or two every day, EXCEPT the one day I dressed as him. Hell, not a lot of people recognized who I was, but the ones that did were really excited to see me. I gotta admit, it's a pretty great feeling.

It really wouldn't be "me" unless I dressed as a deep cut. And the entire experience gave me a newfound respect for cosplayers. I was lucky that I happened to dress up on the coldest day of the year so I was perfectly fine wearing a hoodie, gloves, and pants in a crowded convention center in New York City. I could only imagine what it's like for the people who dress in fur, or in full armor when it's hotter. I was already sweating up a storm at 9:30 in the morning even with the cooler temperatures, I thought anything else would be hell! And those kneepads turned out to be a blessing in disguise as walking around that place all day gives a hell of a workout on the legs. But they were perfectly fine at the end of the day, and I considered that a win.

There's gonna be an anime convention also in the Javits next month, and I'll be wearing it there, too. Hopefully the weather cooperates and I'll be comfy again.

And that brings us to today: Halloween. It was a usual boring work day, where no one's able to dress up because I work in a supermarket. But this time I found a way around it.

It's just me with a beard, right? Wrong!

I went as the Mirror, Mirror version of myself, Spock style! I grew a beard out of laziness like I usually do, but this time I finally got the iron to strike. For years I'd been wanting to pull this off, but was never able to because I always tended to shave just before Halloween. I may have mentioned it on here before (I've been doing this for 11 years, it's pretty likely).

Unfortunately unlike The Crawler, no one noticed that I was in a costume today. Their loss, I suppose.

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