Goodbye 2022!

 2023 is right around the corner, it's almost here!

 

What's better is that 2023 is the year of the Rabbit, which is what I was born under! 1987 Baby right here. Don't remind me what age I turn next year.

As far as years go, I'd rank 2022 as "not the worst." I'm still here, some people aren't, I'd call this year a draw. I had stress, and I made a few changes in my life.

I (mostly) changed my diet, got a new(ish) car, got a new suit, got my feet checked out, my new entertainment center was set up. Overall, an improvement over last year.

This time last year we said goodbye to Betty White. In the past few days alone, we lost:

Pele

Barbara Walters

Former Pope Benedict XVI

And Don West.

I never saw TNA Impact Wrestling, but I knew that guy was familiar. He's the guy that hawked Beanie Babies on the Shop At Home Channel back in the 90s! 

I never bought from that. I was too young and I knew those prices were a ripoff, but I couldn't get enough of those.

Let's see what I got for Christmas, shall we?

First off, this shiny new laptop, direct from Black Friday! It's much, much faster than the old one, and it makes posting these entries much less of a headache.

It'd been slowing down for ages, but back around Halloween the desktop screen started restarting itself and I couldn't fix it. So, it was time for an upgrade. The computer starts up under ten seconds! It's wild.

That was mostly my Christmas gift for the year. But I DID get some goodies on the day itself. I got a new bottle of my bbq sauce again, I was really hyped for that. And you know you're in your thirties when you're excited to get socks and toothpaste. The leather thing is a little garbage pouch for my car.

Then came my annual pile of scratch-off tickets that I scratch off on Christmas Day. I won ten bucks.

And there were quite a few "gifts to myself" this year. I got some new portfolio books, new shoes and some new pants. But this was the highlight. Not only is this "The Illustrated Al," the big graphic novel of comic adaptations of Weird Al Yankovic songs, it's the variant cover they only gave out to comic shops for Comic Shop Day! I managed to snag the last copy at my LCS. Can't wait to dig in to this one.

I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year. Do you have any resolutions?

Me? Make it to 2023, for one.

Be more punctual. I can hustle myself to make a 7am train, but not to leave my house before 8am to go to work. I need to work on that.

Write more. I actually got a fanfic off the ground! You can read it here, if you're into Steven Universe/My Hero Academia crossovers.

Be kinder. I feel like I already am, but I could always improve on that.

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Being Thankful

 Thanksgiving has come and gone once again.

What am I thankful for this year? Well, the usual: I'm still alive, my parents are still with me, I've got a job, and a roof over my head. Can't ask for more than that.

But in the span of a week, I and fellow 90s kids lost two of our childhood heroes:

Kevin Conroy, the long time voice of Batman (taken at NYCC in 2014)

and Jason David Frank, the Green Ranger from the OG Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. (taken at Big Apple Con in 2021)

Losing Kevin Conroy to cancer was bad enough, but JDF was a suicide that came out of nowhere. It still feels unreal that it happened. 

I was at Anime NYC at the time, and everyone was refreshing the feeds because there was nothing official for hours, the only indication that the news might've been true was that Johnny Yong Bosch (Adam the black ranger on MMPR) was at that con and abruptly canceled his appearance on that Sunday.

I was on line for Cherami Leigh (probably best known for voicing Lucy on Fairy Tail), and she told me herself that it was official.

But I've had time to ruminate and grieve. Let's look at some other stuff I saw that weekend!

I was several yards away from Adam Savage!

Do you like Spy x Family? It was one of the big anime this year! You could barely walk without tripping over something from this one, be it artwork, merch, photo ops, and especially cosplayers. There were so many cosplayers from this, especially Yor and Anya. I've been reading the manga, it's really good.

And one of the other big hits of the year: Chainsaw Man! The cosplay was easier to pull off. Dress shirt, tie, dress pants, little red devil horns. Done.

From what I've gathered from what little I've seen from this one, it's a show directed at people that want to be stepped on.

And there were quite a few people there who were offering to make that dream a reality.

See?

Yeah, no shortage of horny at this convention.

Just as I was about to leave for the night, I found a girl holding this sign for people to write their hot anime takes on.

Of course I had to add my contribution. I stand by that, I tell you what.

If you want to see the rest of the pictures, here's the album for Saturday, and Sunday.

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Halloweenie

It’s Halloween once again, time to play the official anthem of the holiday!

Never fails to get you in the mood.

We were actually swarmed with kids today! That hasn’t happened in forever.

This is all that’s left after ten bags of candy and a bag of pretzels. And it’s all mine!

So of course I ate it all by now. Worth it.

But onto the main event. It’s October, so you know what that means:

The McRib came back!!

With all the talk about adult happy meals and the return of the McBoo Halloween pails, the return of the McRib flew under everyone’s radar!

And if the marketing is correct, apparently it’s on a farewell tour?! Or at least until pork prices stabilize again. We’ve gone years between appearances, I know we’ll be seeing each other again someday.

In any case, it’s still as nommy and gooey as it’s always been. But hurry, each McRib could be our last! But that was always the case before, too.

But I digress. For the first time since 2019, I went back to NY Comic Con!

All in all, I had a really good time! It’s the most chaotic four days of the year, and I’m glad it’s pretty much back to normal now.

I gotta show you some of the people I met!

First and foremost, horror host Svengoolie, who just recently celebrated 40 years on the job! He’s rarely out of Chicago and I jumped at the chance to finally meet him. He was great.

And later I met Sventoonie, the other horror host of MeTV. He’s a persona of Toony The Tuna from Toon in With Me, the channel’s great weekday morning cartoon block.

I ended up meeting him and host Bill Leff on Sunday. They loved the Ecto Cooler pin on my lanyard out of everything I got to chat with them about.

And here’s Bryan O’Halleran, Dante from the Clerks movies! He was just chilling at a booth in a far corner of the show floor. How it was meant to be, really. I told him that Clerks III made me cry: (Not gonna spoil it, but Kevin Smith knows how to tug on the heartstrings when he wants to).

And here’s someone I was dying to see, Harvey Guillén aka Guillermo from What We Do in The Shadows. It’s a great show and he was a wonderfully nice guy.

Here’s some artwork people ahead of me in line gave to him. That sketch was drawn while we were all waiting for him. You know, the schedule said that he would start signing at 11am, but it turns out that he was in a panel until 11:30 and didn’t show up until noon. No one was told about this.

And here’s me with Rodger Bumpass, the guy who voiced Squidward. His line was way, way shorter than Tom Kenny’s.

I was gonna get an Invader Zim picture to sign, but I couldn’t pass up this one the moment I saw it.

And here’s Tyler Hoechlin, Superman from Superman & Lois. He’s the second oSuperman I’ve met (the other being Brandon Routh), and he’s definitely someone worthy of playing the part.

And people I got photo ops with:

Brendan Fraser!

Danhausen!

And Steve from Blue’s Clues! They all loved my shirt.

And that’s not even everyone! Those are just the ones I got pictures with. I also managed to meet Sonny Strait, Ian Sinclair, Josh Keaton, Tara Sands, Christina Vee, and Trina Nishimura.

This is also the part where I’d show off all the cool cosplay that I saw, but since there were a ton of good ones this year and it’s getting late, I’m just gonna link to a photo album with all of them in it.

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When September Ends

 Hey, September ended and you guys forgot to wake me up!

I hate it when that happens.

It's been quite the September for me. Like, the week after Labor Day I somehow threw out my back while my parents were away on vacation.

Lemme tell you, it wasn't fun feeling like an overturned turtle for half a week, laying on a heating pad for days waiting for your back to stop spasming. And there's nobody home. It sucked.

But as of right now, I'm better! In the time since then, I've been playing Splatoon 3.

It's just as fun and wild as the previous two games, but I have come to a conclusion: I am very rusty at this. I usually tap out after an hour or two, and I'm competing against people who never stopped playing since Splatoon 2 was released five years ago.

This was a match I had last weekend. The other team learned a lesson about inking their base the hard way. If they did, they woulda won. It's a dull part of the game, but someone's gotta do it. And it's usually me, the Aerospray main who's too obsessed with covering all the turf with ink.

And my team won the first Splatfest! But geez, 58% went to Team Gear? No wonder why we kept getting mirror battles. I hope the next Splatfests will be a bit more balanced. But the rule of thumb seems to be if you want to win, you pick Shiver's team. Her team won the demo Splatfest, and this one, so she's 2-0. Big Man will get his chance eventually.

...Oh right, the Queen of England finally died. You know, I was watching the newsfeed like a hawk all day, and ten minutes after I went back to work after a lunch break, I miss the announcement. But it was pretty surreal to see the internet collectively shitpost about it. I honestly hadn't seen Twitter that unified in celebrating over something since that weekend Trump got covid and we all thought he was going to die.

and NY Comic Con is next week, and for the first time since 2019, I'll be there! Pictured above are my badges from the past TEN conventions I'd been to! Well, I skipped last year, and they didn't have one in 2020. But I still managed to snag a set of badges for the cancelled 2020 con. It was the last year Walking Dead was on the badges, and there was much rejoicing. Crunchyroll in all its union busting chicanery is the big sponsor this year, with anime on all the badges! 

I got a 4 day again, and this one's Rise of The Shield Hero. I know that Thursday is Attack on Titan, Friday is Chainsaw Man, Saturday is Spy x Family, Sunday & Sunday Kids has Deku from MHA, Press has 20 years of Naruto/Boruto, and Pro has Mob Psycho 100. They all look so much better than mine.

I fill you all in on the details in next month's post. God willing.

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Behold...Corn!

 Seems that corn is all the rage these past few days. That's fine by me!

But seriously, corn is great. And I had some good corn over the weekend.

The Famous Food Festival was back at the Deer Park Tanger outlets and I ate more good food! And roast corn was no exception. I reiterate my belief that no fair or festival is any good unless there's a booth selling roast corn. This place had at least four booths selling it, but only one was serving it Street Style.

That's a whole lotta dust and gunk on the corn, but trust me it tasted great. I would've went back for more but I had other things I wanted to eat.

Like this spicy tonkatsu ramen from a place that was voted #1 in America by Thrillist. And I can believe it, this one tasted amazing.

It was from this place. The only knock I could give to it was for $13 you'd think they'd give you more than one slice of pork. It was so tender and cooked perfectly, I wish I had more.

And that brings us to the last thing I had: fried chicken parm lasagna. The audacity called out to me, but while it LOOKED good, the taste was another story. It was a bit dry for my liking. But I guess that's what happens when you deep fry pasta and leave it under a heat lamp. It was pretty disappointing, especially considering how much I paid for it.

That's the thing about these food festivals. It's not a buffet, and all these stalls need to make money. Barely anything is cheap and it all adds up, be it your wallet or your stomach.

Now if you'll excuse me, all this corn talk has made me hungry for more corn.

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