Whew… would you believe I’ve been so busy that this is the earliest I could get around to doing this was now…?

Anyway, the second day of Wai-Con was really interesting too. A lot more panels were being held on Sunday, and I think for this reason, the place seemed slightly more crowded than before. I spent most of the morning keeping watch in the game room, venturing out every now and then to just wander around and see what was happening.

Come the afternoon, it was time for the Japanese 101 panel. @jetha, @deathwombat, and myself had volunteered to be the panelists with @sonictail hosting it. The point of the panel was to introduce some facets of studying Japanese as well as some points of Japan itself, and answering any questions. Overall, I think the panel was a resounding success. We were going head-to-head with the Eminence panel so I was reeally expecting the room to be empty. But that was not the case, with a very impressive turnout. Overall reaction to the panel seemed quite positive with a few people coming up afterwards and telling us what they thought.

To follow up on the panel for anyone who still had questions or for people who missed it, I also created this continuation thread on the Wai-Con forums:
http://www.panic-wa.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3803

Finally, at the end of the day, as we were all packing up, I was pretty sad to see all of it go hehe. I caught the last few minutes of the closing ceremony and it was really cool to see all of the main committee members get recognition for all of their hard work.

After everything was finished, all of the volunteers and committee members went and had dinner together. It was all a great deal of fun, and I was even lucky to get a photo together with Yasunori Mitsuda from the Eminence table. He was a really cool guy and he said he was loving Perth very much.

So overall, Wai-Con was great fun. It takes a ridiculous amount of passion and dedication to pull off an event this huge and it was definitely cool to help out in some small way.
In the aftermath, I made a few new friends on Facebook, a few new friends on Twitter and have been having fun hanging out on the Wai-Con forums.

Can’t wait until next time.

Whew! Just got home 30 minutes ago… really tired, but I thought I’d try and crank out a blog.

So for the unfamiliar ones, Wai-Con is Perth’s premiere anime themed convention that’s usually held in January each year. Aside from a host of stalls selling all kinds of anime/manga/Japanese merch, there are also a lot of cool events such as drawing panels and such, a dedicated video games room and a freakin huge cosplay competition.
For the past few years, I’ve usually just picked a panel or two I liked the look of, just went to them, and then nicked off after… not this time.

I got a message from a friend who is one of the co-ordinators last week, saying that there is a slight shortage of volunteers and asked if I’d like to help out. I was already considering volunteering from before, but after hearing there was a shortage, I knew I had to jump in.
So, this year around, I was an official volunteer for Wai-Con, mainly helping out in the games room, but also a few odds and ends elsewhere too. And I must say, it was a pretty awesome experience.

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As it stands, since I spent nearly the whole weekend playing it, I figured I’d do at least one thing constructive and write a blog post on this game.

So, the official open beta for Star Trek Online came out last week. I tried and failed to pick up a beta key from several sources, and so originally didn’t really pay much attention to it.

But then, as the week progressed, as a lot of friends online had picked it up (through beta keys or just by pre-ordering), I started to hear a lot of good things about it.
After several chat sessions on IM and forums, I figured what the heck, and on Friday, pre-ordered it. I figured at the very least, even if I hated it, I’d be helping to continue currying some interest in the Star Trek games franchise. Since my little games group and I have been responsible for one of the only other Trek-based roleplaying experiences around, I was going in with a very stern view on the entire thing.

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Okay so here we go. Aside from the regular personal stuff I do like go to LAN parties and eating Japanese food way too much, I’m going to start writing some more useful stuff in here too.

For starters, I figured I should cover how my mobile phone coverage while I was in Japan went.
I have an iPhone 3G on the Optus Yes $39 plan… something which I adore very much hehe. So before going to Japan, I did some research on how to set up my phone to work while I was over in Japan. Another blog I read really helped me on this… and if I remember it, I’ll post the address here. XP

Anyway, getting an Optus phone globally enabled isn’t hard. You simply call up customer service and request to have it enabled. At this point, if there are any hardware concerns that may arise (technology compatibilities etc), the operator will probably tell you about this. They’ll also probably put the spill on you to get your phone travel insured. I’m still not sure if this was a good idea or not, but I’ve signed up. XP

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Hello again! I’m already 2 days into my holidays and enjoying it very much! It’s been pretty busy so far, so I thought I’d post a bit of an update on what’s going on.

Last weekend was RFLan #24. As far as RFLans have gone, I think this was quite possibly the best one yet. Thankfully, we toned it down a bit since last time, and only roughly 230 people came instead of over 300! We thoroughly planned to power and networking systems this time, and as a result, we had absolutely no issues whatsoever. Because of this, I was luckily able to get a lot of quality game time down! I played mostly Left 4 Dead and TF2, as well as made a few new Steam buddies.

Next up, I’ve spent a bit more time working on my main shot for Cosmos. It’s taken a day or so of work, but it’s definitely taking shape now! Since my last update, I’ve refined the animation much better, remodeled some bits of the patrol ship, changed some of the colours, as well as added some more visual effects. It shouldn’t be too much longer before I can lock this in for a final render!

If I get time after this, I’ll see about writing up a bit of a brief of how I’m doing all of it.

Finally, I figured I probably should announce this on my blog now, it’s one of the main reasons I made it hehe.

I’m going back to Japan again!!

It’s all my father’s crazy planning, he wants to go check out the town I worked in last year since he loved the photos I have of it. So we’re going back for 2 weeks, one of them being a ski trip, and the other being a week of playing around the country… mainly Tokyo. I’m very happy about this since it’s already been more than a year since I last went to Japan.
I’m also trying to see how feasible/expensive it would be to travel down to Osaka from Tokyo so I might be able to catch up with all of the friends I have down there.

In any case, when I go, I intend to ramp up the number of blog posts I do here to document everything I do over here hehe.

Should be good. Gotta start packing!