Goodbye 2021

Well, another year will finally be behind us, and after today, Sealab 2021 will have officially taken place in the past.

Everyone going crazy after a year of isolation? Talk about predicting the future.

I had this whole post thought out about what I've done this year, and show off what I got for Christmas, then I saw the terrible news.

Betty White passing just 17 days before her 100th birthday was just an extra twist of the knife. She was America's Grandma! She couldn't go now! I'm glad that the Betty White Renaissance was a decade ago and we all got to tell her how much we all loved her since then. She didn't need a People Magazine spread to tell her that.

In her 90(!!) years in showbiz, she was in everything and knew everybody! She would've been a legend for just her role in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but she was also one of the best parts of The Golden Girls, Hot in Cleveland, and, well, just everything she did!

I don't need to tell you she was on The Simpsons.

This all reminds me of the great June Foray, who also died incredibly close to her 100th birthday. In both cases, I'm gonna call it "close enough." They made it to 100 in our hearts.

That's on top of losing the great John Madden earlier in the week.

If there was anyone that embodied "football," it was John Madden. Playing it, coaching it, inspiring video games about it, being a commentator on it, he did it all.

What I'll miss most is Frank Caliendo's amazing impression of him.

And with that out of the way, the monthly listicle can begin!

Christmas gifts! Not seen: Lots of gift cards, plus the Smokin Al's barbeque sauce I get every year. The big gifts were the blu ray player and the new Pokemon game. I played Pearl when gen 4 first came around fourteen years ago (it's been that long?!), so I've been itching to jump into Diamond. I haven't been able to play much of it so far, you can thank work for that, but I've been liking it so far.

I also finally entered the 21st century with a blu ray player! Just in time for physical media to die out! Now I need to get some blu rays, they're pretty cheap these days.

And you know you're celebrating Christmas in your thirties when you're excited to get socks. I really needed those socks. They're comfy.

Something else I did this month: I played some pinball! A few months back, a pinball arcade opened up in the local mall, and I finally got around to spending an hour in there.

There were some pretty old cabinets in there, and this was the oldest one I got to play. They were pretty unforgiving in terms of difficulty, but they gave you five balls per shot as opposed to the three you usually get these days.

What got me in the door in the first place was their Simpsons arcade machine! I remember playing it back in the day, but again, pretty unforgiving. It's full of elements that make no sense now, like how most of the villains were pretty generic and SMITHERS of all people was the main bad guy who had to fight to rescue Maggie.

I played as Marge, with her...trademark vacuum cleaner. But she was the long reacher of the four characters, much like Donatello on his own machines.

I was wondering how this place could stay in business...

...until I found out it wasn't. Today was the last day, and I found out too late that these great machines were going off to parts unknown. That space is gonna be pretty big for the store that's replacing it, so I hope that most of these machines find good homes if they don't stay behind.

I don't want to end this post, and this year on a bummer, so here's a picture of my cat!

Ain't she cute?

And here she is looking at the tree. We've got some good ornaments up this year.

Thanks to a bidding war on eBay, I finally have a Snow Miser ornament to go with the Heat Miser. I paid a little...too much for it, but it was worth it for a picture like this.

Happy New Year everyone! Let's make 2022 better than what came before!

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Thankful for...Anime?

 November tends to mean Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving means...giving thanks.

Well, this November I got to go back to Anime NYC, my first big con since, well, the last one in 2019.

It was good to be home. Just hundreds of weebs out weebing it up.

And before I go any further, yes, someone going here tested positive for the new Omicron variant of Covid. I got myself tested, and I was negative. Frankly, it's been almost two weeks, if I was gonna get sick, I would've been already.

It was hard for me to GET sick, thanks to bringing back my cosplay of The Crawler from My Hero Academia: Vigilantes. Think about it: almost every surface of my body was covered, I almost never took off my mask, I stay away from people as much as possible, sanitized and washed my hands whenever I touched anything, the whole nine. I was most likely one of the safest people at that con.

It helps that there was a LOT more open space this time. Mostly. Artist's Alley was still stacked together, and I'm not even talking about the lines to get in to anything. I wasn't there for the horror show that was the line situation on Friday, but it was still pretty cramped at times. It's a miracle that there was only ONE public covid case out of this, and not several.

With that out of the way, here's some highlights!

There were a LOT of people cosplaying as Hawks from My Hero Academia this year, especially since his English voice actor Zeno Robinson was there. You could find most of them in his line. I counted no less than six on line at once on Saturday.

This pic was taken on Sunday while I was standing on said line. With several people cosplaying the same thing (ESPECIALLY if it was from Demon Slayer), the "Spider-Man pointing at each other" pose was inevitable, and I was able to snap this one with four of them doing it at once.

Since he's also the voice of Hunter (aka the Golden Guard) on The Owl House, I HAD to get something from that signed by him. He's a really cool guy.

The same goes for people cosplaying Mirko (also from My Hero Academia). She was a much easier cosplay to pull off than Hawks, and there was no shortage of those cosplayers. I met all of these on line for her English voice actor, Anaris Quinones.

Of course I had to get something signed by her, too. And she was also a lovely person to meet.

I got that print from Artists Alley, and the guy that made THIS awesome Boondocks/MHA crossover:

Was there, too, and I had to pick those up. You can find his work here.

I also got to meet one of my all time favorite voice actors, Richard Epcar. If you watched Fox Kids in the 90s, you most likely heard his voice. He voiced a ton of monsters on the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series, most notably my favorite one Shellshock:

I've talked about him before, but how awesome is this dude? Turtle with a traffic like sticking out of its back.

I also had to mention that he voiced one of my favorite anime characters, the lead in a lesser known one called Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. I could post a pic of that, but why don't I just show you a clip?

I would say that it makes as much sense in context, but I don't think there ever was context in that show. In any case, he was more than happy to do a few lines in that voice, which really made my day.

He was there with the rest of the Lupin III dub cast (from L to R: Lex Lang, Tony Oliver, Michelle Ruff, Doug Erholtz, and Richard Epcar), and I managed to meet all of them, too. All of them were great and aside from Michelle Ruff (since she has several notable roles aside from Fujiko), none of them had any lines so you could hold actual conversations with them. Well, all of the other celebs liked to talk, too, and that's why their lines were so long.

I also got to meet up with Meatgirl, who'd been taking Simpsons Twitter by storm through her great artwork. She came to the con dressed as "Skinner, but a hot anime girl."

She called them Steamed Hams but they were obviously dog toys. These pictures are some of my favorites I've ever taken at a con and she was nothing but nice. I even got this great print:

True story, I kept getting lost trying to track her down that day, so the first thing I told her was "Well, I made it, despite your directions." We had a good laugh over it.

I'm honestly not a fan of all the booths selling mystery boxes at cons, but I finally caved and had to see what was inside this one.

I got this figure of Shinobu from Demon Slayer, plus a sweet Nezuko charm.

I definitely overpaid for what I got, but I honestly could've done worse than Shinobu. I knew exactly what I was going into this.

It, uh, really wouldn't be an anime con if there wasn't at least one booth selling awkward facemasks. The weird part was that the masks sold out by the time I got back to that booth at the end of the day.

I got to ring the bell. This was a fun booth.

And now some highlights of other stuff I saw that weekend:

Anime might be a mistake, but it's a fun mistake. And an expensive one.

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