Hyper Japan 2016

This Sunday Matt and I headed up to Hyper Japan. We attended the Christmas one and also the summer one back in 2014. Matt is a  huge fan of Japanese culture and Anime and Manga so I thought it would be a great day out for both of us.

We got Sunday tickets and headed up to London for about 10am stopped for a huge breakfast on the way there. The trains were absolutely manic on the way up there and the weather was really warm too so we were a little frazzled by the time we got there. However we got in there quickly and it was nice and quiet inside.

I picked my little green foxy dress from Hell Bunny and paired it with a green cardigan I picked up from New Look. 

We got to have a really good look around all the stalls before it started to get crazy busy. There were a lot more stalls and art stalls than previous years and I really enjoyed looking around those. I picked up some really cute Firefly badges and Matt was the one this time round that got some POP! Funkos and a Gundam figure.

We mostly spent the day wondering about and attended a talk by Kihara Hirokatsu, who showed us some original sketches from Studio Ghibli films. They were awesome and I really enjoyed that. Mostly we did shopping and I demanded Matt take lots of photos which I shall share! 

Matt and I, I demanded a selfie. 

DOMO

My favorite candy ever.

The clawwwww

Domo dancing was pretty awesome

We always spend too much money on Japanese candy 

At the end of the day we also attended IA 1st Live Concert in Japan -PARTY A GO-GO and that was really fun to watch too. 

I really did have a fab day out, Matt and I haven't had much to the last few months so I was super excited for this. The weather was absolutely amazing which also made a nice change as here in the UK the summer so far has literally been a wash out.

Like all conventions I go to the atmosphere was great and I really do wish there were more out that as this is my favorite way to spend my free time.... although it also seems to be my favourite way to spend my money too so my purse probably thanks the lord that it isn't an every week thing.

I also have found a whole new obsession that has sprung to life very quickly. I found an Illustration Collection art book for the Anime Jyunjo Romantica. I didn't know what it was but Matt had watched World's greatest first love which is by the same author.... and it just reminded me so much of how I picture Charles and Eric when I read my Cherik fics so I bought it and started watching the Anime as soon as I got in and I am now 100% hooked. Oops... 

My little fan girl heart is beaming right now and I just want to stay at home curled up on the sofa watching these back to back. BUT ALAS, I have to get up and do adult things. Luckily I have a whole week off next week so I will be over indulging it then.

ALSO Star Trek is next week too, I am going to watch it at the BFI IMAX which I am sooo excited for... 

I hope you have a lovely week ahead and can concentrate more than I can at the moment! 

Em Con!

So this was my first ever convention outside of London/The South (we attended Brighton last year), but is defiantly the first ever convention where I have traveled a fair distance to get to. I was talking with my best friend about coming up and seeing her, and I looked up conventions and saw that Em Con was on just after her birthday and had a great line up of guests including a group photoshoot with some Stargate Atlantis cast members. I was sold so made arrangements and booked tickets and as it fell over a bank holiday weekend it meant we got to spend 3/4 days with Laura and Sammi rather than the usually 2ish...

So Saturday rolled around and we got up early to try and get to the arena for between 9:30 and 10am. A you may well know with LFCC you are best to get there at least 1-2 hours before the doors open to get a good spot in the queue. However it really wasn't necessary this time and I am actually glad we ended up being a bit late as even the 10 minutes just standing outside was freezing. Sammi and Laura very kindly dropped us off, they had some things to do that day and didn't fancy the convention. So Matt and I headed inside.

It was quite an odd set up, because it was an arena there were stalls around the outside walk ways which you had to pass to get into the main arena area. Once down there we started to do some shopping and look around the stalls.

They had a few really cool exhibits too including the Tardis, Iron Man costumes and a StarBug Prop. What I really liked about all of these and a lot of the the convention in general is it was all based on charity donations.

I then decided to buy a photoshoot ticket with Walter Koenig as well. As I am meeting as many of the Star Trek crew as I can in October, I thought it would be good to meet Walter on the day and have less to do at DST! I checked the schedule and we had the Q&A talk with the Stargate crew at 1pm, Walter Photo at 3pm and Stargate group photo at 3:45pm. So we headed across the road to get a some lunch. 

When we returned we queued up for the talk and around 1pm we were lead upstairs to a little conference room full of chairs. The guys came out and it was one of my favourite talks to date. It was really intimate and the actors were lovely and down to earth. They told some fab stories of what happened on set and I really enjoyed it. 

At the end Paul auctioned off some scripts from Stargate for charity and he also had 'A Dog's Breakfast' one too. I am a huge fan of that film and had a chat a few years ago with David Hewlett about it so I decided to bid on it. I stopped around £35 but Matt kept going for me and won it. I was so excited and all the money goes to charity too so I was happy to pay for it!

It also meant that I could get it signed for free by the Stargate cast so I was really excited about that too! I went to Paul's table first and he also as a thank you signed a promo print from the film for me too which filled me with joy. I later got Alexis to sign it and picked up a copy of his new graphic novel which he also signed and then David signed it later on in the day too. It is something I will treasure forever!

I had my photo shoot with Walter Koenig and he was lovely! He asked me how I was and shook my hand as I left. Not long after that I also had my group photoshoot with the Stargate cast and that was great. David introduced everyone and Paul said we had already meet which was nice he remembered me.

I had to collect my photos a little later on as they don't print out straight away like the LFCC (it is like back in the day when I first started going!) but I was SUPER happy with the photos! 

Of course I also managed to pick up some Pop funkos too and a lovely Walking Dead inspired necklace from an awesome stall where you custom make your own fandom jewelry. We also added another art book from Matt Dixon to our collection because his work is just stunning. 

I have ventured in to the world of YouTube with my first haul video if you would like to see a close up of the bits that I picked up over the weekend!

Overall I had a fantastic day. The atmosphere is much quieter and more peaceful than the London ones. I wish I had attended the Sunday too so I could of gone to the other talks as they were so intimate and enjoyable. I would highly recommend Em Con especially if you want a more low key quieter day than the manic (fun) mess that the London ones tend to be!

I can't wait for the rest of the 2016 conventions we have planned!

Destination Star Trek here we come!

I have some super exciting news, Matt and I are heading to Birmingham to attend the 50th anniversary destination Star Trek. I have for some reason put off attending the previous ones in London and I have always been meet with extreme regret. This year it was announced it would be on my actual birthday and William Shatner and Jonathan Frakes won me over and we booked tickets. 

I am so excited we have booked a hotel for the 7th and the 8th October so we will travel up the on the 7th and attend the con on the 8th! 

I can't wait to have a nice weekend away with Matt and meeting Mr Shatner on my birthday is pretty flipping epic! I am also debating if I would like to cosplay this year, or at least get myself a Star Fleet uniform? I'm not sure I guess I might have a think nearer the time. 

On the subject of conventions EM Con is fast approaching and EM Con have announced another Stargate Atlantis guest who has been added to the group photoshoot, which I AM super excited for. I really adore David Nykl's character Dr. Radek Zelenka so I was realy excited to see this announcement. 

This is my first time traveling for conventions. I usually stick to London and I did go down to Brighton last year, but 2016 sees us travel to Nottingham and Birmingham. 

My favourite London Film and Comic Con, so far hasn't hooked me in with any guests but we still we have lots of time before I need to worry as that one is in July. There is also another one in Brighton which I think I will attend regardless as who can say no to an excuse to go to Brighton on a summer days in June, seaside and geekery? Huh? Crazy people thats who!

Is anyone looking forward to any cons this year or planning on attending any? 

Any cosplay plans then let me know I love seeing where people go and what they dress up as!!

1 Month into a different life!

WOWZA. It has been a whole 4 weeks since we moved in and exactly 1 month yesterday.

It was Saturday the 13^th and yesterday was Monday the 13^th; it was 4 weeks the Saturday just gone. So yeah that month went quickly, I’m not even sure where the heck it went! Comic is now a matter of days away and I am already planning for the autumn! Well kind of!

So I have scrapped my plan for 2015 to have a holiday. I know really I won’t have the money to save up for a holiday abroad comfortably in the next few months I am fed up of saving every penny I have and now I really don’t have to. I put all this effort into saving and being unhappy and now I achieved what I wanted and it was well worth it!

 However now I want to be able to spend my money (all be it sensibly) so I am going to book a week off for my birthday and have that as a holiday. I want to visit the Harry Potter studio tour again so I will book tickets for that and then I guess we

can just see where the week takes us. We did think of going away for a week, but it’s around £300 and the weather at that time of the year is really temperamental! Instead we will just see what the weather is like and play it day by day! Hopefully there will be some sunshine and a few trips to the beach and shopping.

The flat is really starting to feel like home now. I am starting to sleep well (I didn’t sleep great at first used to wake up very early), which on the downside means it is harder to get out of bed each morning! When I first moved I was happy to clean, I was cleaning up after myself straight away all the time that is slowly lacking haha! I thought it might, but I still enjoy tidying and cleaning to an extent as I feel very house proud which I haven’t had before! We had Matt’s Dad and Julie over on Wednesday and I cooked a big dinner for us all. The spaghetti went a little wrong, I cooked too much and also over cooked it slightly buy hey ho it tasted ok! That was nice, they were the first people to properly come over and visit over than my Mum and Dad. 

I am now counting down the days until Saturday and comic con time where I will get to meet SUCH A LEGEND and a bit of a hero to me Richard Dean Anderson!

I picked out this outfit!:

(Hell Bunny fox dress)

I got this dress back in October, it was on my birthday and me and Matt went shopping and Matt bought it for me! Alas as it was October it was far too summery a dress to wear in October so it has just sat in my wardrobe but will get its first outing this weekend!

I have already started planning the day!

• 6-6:15am get up!
• 6:50am – Leave the house and go get breakfast and McDonalds
• 7:18am – get train to London
• 8am – Arrive and join queue!

Then there is the Doctor who talk that is free I would like to attend, Richard Dean Anderson talk, Game of Throne talk and then Richard Dean Anderson photo!

I am really excited now… this year has been tough; we have had very few days out so this will be great fun! It’s the one big event I wait for every year!

Do you know what is really bad though! I am actually feeling autumn already…. The summer kind of breaks through here and then quickly vanishes even though 2 weeks ago was one of the hottest days on record. As much as I now enjoy the summer, autumn is my favourite month and I can’t wait for candles, coffees, Halloween, Christmas and jumpers. I can’t wait to experience this all in my flat, especially as we aren’t holidaying now! HOWEVER maybe if we could have a few months of warm dry weather first that would be lovely! Haha!

Well I hope the rest of the week goes quickly and I will report once Comic Con has been and gone and Con blues have set in!

Hyper Japan 2014

This weekend has indeed been a busy one! I will start briefly with a friend of mine Jenna and her fiancé Mike. They opened up their own comic book shop and we went down at on Saturday. It is a really beautiful shop and it was rammed in there! I really hope they do amazing! They had some guest there too and I got my photo with a Dalek!

Then on Sunday we had tickets for Hyper Japan. We’ve never been before and talked about going last year but didn’t. This year however Matt has really gotten in to Japanese stuff and Manga and Anime, so we went. It was only £24 for 2 day tickets which I thought was pretty cheap. For all the other conventions I go to, I know to get there as early as possible as the queues can wrap around the building so we planned to get there for 8:30ish and the doors opened at 9:30.

I got up at 6am!! Which is a crazy time for a Sunday morning and got ready. We didn’t actually have to leave until 7:15 at the latest but I ended up being ready by about 6:30am oops. After being late for comic con I took no chances but I was ill then so I think they had a big part to play in my lateness.

We stopped of course at Clapham for our pretzel and got to the venue for 8:30am. The queue however was tiny!! I think next time we can get up a little later and get there for about 9:30-10am!

We got in pretty much bang on 9:30, they had a much better system than LFCC and it was much smoother. The hall was fab there were many stalls but there was tones of room to walk in-between them. The first thing I spotted upon entering was TOTORO! So I ran over like an excited school girl and got my photo taken with him!

We then ended up going to 3 talks in a row. The first was a little strange and was a Secret Ninja, the next was a pretty cool robot talk and then the third was a software called Vocaloid which meant they could make music with human voices with humans! They mixed this with a traditional puppet performance and previewed an exclusive 30minute film using it. I will admit I did not know what was going on but it was really cool!

We then literally ran for food as we were so hungry! We had NO IDEA what we were ordering and joined a queue that were selling noodles as we knew what noodles were! We picked noodles that came with dough ball things and prawns. I have to admit that the price was pretty steep for the amount you got £14 for two. Then it didn’t help that we did not like the noodles very much at all, but we were so hungry we ate it all!

Next we just went round and had a look at all the stalls. I have to say I was a little disappointed (although don’t take that as it made the day any less enjoyable!) there weren’t as many stalls as I thought and not that may manga stalls for Matt. I thought it would be a little more like comic con stalls. They had lots of individual sellers too but the stuff was very ‘cute’ and pink and a little too cute for my taste!

However I did have a great time, and the atmosphere was great and we stayed from 9:30 till 5pm and the time flew by!  I also got some pictures with other cute characters! No for a picture spam!!

Domo came out to say hi! and had a photo opportunity which of course I got excited over

This Panda was sooo cute and I wanted to take him home. 

You can see how excited I was by him haha!

I wore my space dress (it actually fits perfectly now) 

I got Matt to snap a picture of it!

Me and Matt waiting for the talks to start!

I had a great day out and I think will go again next year. I think MCM is going to be the bigger one for us this autumn for Matt to get his Manga stuff, but I would say it is definitely worth going to Hyper Japan! There were a lot of traditional culture bits than I thought and I really enjoyed that too! There were also some BEAUTIFUL cosplayers… less than I thought but there were some amazing dresses and wigs!

We were home by 6pm and got a Dominos on the way home which was a bargain (any size £6.99) and that was just delicious! Now much to my dismay it’s Monday and now I have a quiet August

Nothing much now until September/October!

27^th September is Euro Gamer 29^th September off to France 18^th October is LFCC Winter and 25^th October is MCM! So that is a busy month to look forward to!

Hope this week goes quickly so I can sleep all weekend as today I am KNACKERED!