spoke

I went to Winnipeg for a celebration of life of a cousin of mine for what would have been her fiftieth birthday and had pretty good conversations with my father's side of the family who I don't see much of because they view coming to my city two hours away as going to the godforsaken boonies where they will be picked off by forest people and eaten in stew but always expected us to drive to them at six am on fucking christmas morni--ANYWAY BACK ON TOPIC. It was a lovely celebration of life at one of my favourite places (a plant zoo called The Leaf) and I did not expect to show up in so many of the photos they were playing on the display.

So my relationship with this cousin was very much a 'and then we were adults and got along' but the fuller context is that I am the oldest of my siblings and the oldest of my local cousins and sometimes this cousin would come to stay with us for a week and she was ten years older than me and it was the closest experience I ever had to having an older sister or someone who pulled age authority on me and let's just say I didn't exactly handle the situation with grace.

Anyway, I miss her! She was great. I dream of her all the time.

The other thing we did in Winnipeg was go to the anime convention Ai-Kon under the initial idea of seeing a favourite voice actor of mine, SungWon Cho/ProzD before I remembered I have next to no interest in speaking to celebrities (no offence to Cho, he seems very cool but I have no idea what I'd say without a stronger pretext) so what we did instead was wander around in artist alley and go broke!

It was great! I got lots of nice art and stickers and some fun little plush toys.

Mom was determined to get a gift for my brother and all she knew that he liked was One Piece but she didn't know what anyone in that show looked like so she only zero'd in on the words 'One Piece' so I twice had to deter her. Once from buying a statue that was just Nico Robin in a very tight towel (she hadn't looked anywhere but the words One Piece) and the other time a knockoff Labubu of Luffy 'I don't think my brother would like that', I said. She did get a cat Luffy sticker and a One Piece cookbook because I had surrendered by then.

What I DIDN'T like about Ai-Kon was I was minding my own business trying to escape before I spent more money and this person walked right up to me in a fucking Harry Potter costume and much to my horror I made an audible 'UGH' noise that they heard and they looked genuinely hurt.

I'm working through my guilt by reminding myself that they were off topic anyway, as a British Book/Live Action Movie isn't exactly a Japanese Cartoon and I was ambushed. AMBUSHED where I thought I was safe to only have to wrestle with 'is Arcane an Anime? Are these all Genshins?' and a general 'read the room, jesus christ' as one of the things I noticed about Winnipeg is I couldn't turn a corner without seeing pride flags.

Turned out we knew some people with a booth there too! Did some visiting, saw other people we knew, la la la my province has 10 people in it.

Did I mention the other day that in the same breath I complained about Americans sometimes frustrating me about being overconfidently wrong/underinformed about my country (IT WAS ON TOPIC) an American called them Providences at me?

Turns out I can't wither someone to death with my tone, but I can try.

A few months ago I was at the coffee shop to finish a rapidly approaching overdue story for a fic exchange and noticed a poster for an upcoming ZineFest in town! A bigger city's comic group wanted to trial balloon something in our much smaller city to see if it could work. It had no url on it! At all! But I photographed the name and used the internet and found their instagram and their email and contacted their email because I had no instagram and got the url to their just made website which changed a week later! Anyway after much trial and error including 2 days of their sign up form not working until I discovered it would on the third browser I tried, I signed up for it!

And then waited a month or so for a response.

I got in!

I made all my zines, made stickers, packed up my Ceramic Objects, made a sign and day of we got there in plenty of time, had no problems at set up (minus needing to borrow some tape from the front desk of the art gallery where it was being held) and it went great!

I actually sold stuff! People wanted to buy my writing and my art! I made back the cost of everything! And I talked to so many people and the only bad part is I am one of those people who has to deliberately make facial expressions and it had been so long since I worked in retail I had forgotten the facial movements for a customer service smile and my brain was relaying to me that the muscle movements I felt weren't 'friendly smile' they were 'death rictus'.

But everyone was very nice, no horror stories at all! And it feels so amazing people wanted creative stuff I'd done, you have no idea!

In other news, the latest 'episode' of the Star Trek game I run finished. It was a Beach Episode with lots of Section 31 bullshittery where the players rolled as horribly as possible at every juncture. It was kind of beautiful. However, they got in some AMAZING character moments they hadn't before I would call the whole thing a massive success. The person I'm running these games for primarily and I are now planning the next episode with some very interesting stuff I have to keep under my hat for now.

The Cthulhu/Catthulhu game is going well. I'm managing good player participation, the modifications of the game are going well, and I decided to do a pretty bold move this session that really deviated from the module but got a clue across to the cats that I could not have had them discover otherwise. They also really liked my latest npcs - Pasta and Devil the hippy and military dogs, and Lucille the mangled but healthy and wellspoken cat who keeps/protects the murderous npc Bogdan.

Previous NPC successes were Wiggle and Squeak, the guinea pigs who thought that now their owner was dead, they were going to inherit the house. They had renovation plans. And Fraulein Hoffman, who to her and everyone else's surprise is not a cat but an opossum and possibly having an affair with Burgocat Hans.

I've been having trouble making Pathfinder comics lately, or even HamsterBandit Industries comics lately. I have a lot of pencils and scripts but actually committing to finishing has been tough. I'll wait for a 3 am manic period I guess.