bright lights

The lights on Sloane Square were beautiful today. I thought I’d become jaded towards London after nearly two months, but as I turned a corner on King’s Road this evening, Christmas shopping bags in hand and feeling completely exhausted from what has been a very, very tiring week at work (plus an all-nighter looming tomorrow - don’t think I’ll leave before 11pm), this ethereal, otherworldly blue mist of lights suddenly unfolded before me. I felt the old enchantment rushing back, I found myself putting everything down and whipping out my camera like a tourist all over again.

London still has its magical pockets, after all.

2 | +1?

the folly of youth

World Cosplay Summit Australia preliminaries: finalists
L-R: Misa-Misa and Rem from Death Note, Touya and Yukito from Tsubasa, Al (grownup human form) from FMA, Ryuk from Death Note, and the One Piece ship!

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My siblings and I dragged ourselves out of the house at 9 am today to attend Animania ‘08, Australia’s biggest and bestest anime and manga convention, and upon arriving we were presented with a little guidebook that had something called the Animania Passport Tour at the back. It involved checking in with six different info desks, doing tasks at each of them to collect stamps, and then collecting a special limited edition freebie! (with exclamation mark!) after all six stamps had been acquired.

So feeling unusually gung-ho (and egged on by having spied a table labelled “PRIZES” with rows of very lovely and expensive dolls on them), we embarked on a quest for stamps that grew, over the next couple of hours, progressively more horrifying; we started from deceptively tame tasks like drawing pictures and striking anime poses to walking round and round the ginormous hall twice over to count the number of sunglasses hanging about, to singing Naruto and Doraemon theme songs in front of a crowd, and finally to the pinnacle of humiliating super-special last tasks, wearing chocobo suits on the dance floor (I kid you not; no, there are no pictures, thank goodness).

The karaoke bit was particularly annoying - there was a list of 10 songs and they’d randomly assign you one, and among them, coincidence of coincidences, was “Ikenai Taiyou”! Which my sister and I were really hoping to get (my brother had been assigned Naruto’s GO!! earlier), but we got a song from Suzumiya Haruhi which we both didn’t know… and in the end, thanks to time constraints, we were chucked in together with a group doing, of all songs, Doraemon. After we’d practised the Suzumiya Haruhi song to perfection too. Pffft.

So after all that effort, we received… a limited edition yellow Animania 2008 wristband, of which there are only 100! In the world!

et voila - I apologise for crappy webcam quality

(Apparently the dolls were for the other competitions. Go figure.)

“And now,” said the guy who gave us our wristbands, obviously dying of laughter at our dumbfounded horrorstruck faces, “you have to ask yourself: was it worth it? Say yes! Say yes!”

It was a massive facepalm moment. Yet thinking back, I have to say, this harebrained Passport game was what turned your everyday run-of-the-mill convention - where I’d normally just stroll round, watch the Karaoke (but not sing), watch the dancing (but not dance) and watch the art desk (but not draw) - into something really special for my brother, my sister and me… and we’re probably never going to let each other forget it. (”Remember when we all wore chocobo suits? Most embarrassing moment of our lives!”)

I’m still wearing this lousy yellow wristband as I type. It’s not even very nice, but it has been one hell of a memorable day.

6 | +1?

using ideas as my maps

Spiffing new domain, spiffing new layout, and you will not believe what went into coding this… I don’t even really want to think about it now that it’s done. I’m particularly proud of having successfully negotiated both horizontal and vertical centering and then relatively-positioning a text block within that div layer. I’ve also cleaned up a whole lot of old code by doing this up from scratch instead of appropriating and adapting an older layout, which is kind of the digital equivalent of cleaning out the dusty cupboard. And and and, the comment layouts have been revamped! (But you’ll have to leave a comment to see that.) /geek

It’s kind of empty right now though because I have literally spent near on eight hours just working on this layout, wrangling PHP and CSS, tweaking colours, tweaking code, doing things with block elements that I’ve never done before, &c and I am too braindead to think of how to fill up my etc. section. I was going to upload some music, but I’m afraid you all will have to wait to hear the dulcet tones of The Byrds (whose cover of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” inspired this layout).

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I was stumped for something to write to make this a noteworthy first post for my shiny new (hopefully permanent) space, and then I remembered I had yet to post about the Matchbox Twenty concert.

L to R: kyle, rob ♥, brian, paul

As you can see from this photo, Jia Min, Jenny and I were in the unfortunate position of being stuck in the upper circle with many people’s heads and a lot of space between us and the stage. Sadly they’d decided to make the stalls standing room only, and as much as I love MB20 I wasn’t about to gladly sacrifice my feet for them.

But distance aside, the concert was wonderful. They did so many of their old songs - “Hang”, “3 AM”, “Long Day” all way back from their first album - and nearly all of my favourites - “Real World”, “Disease”, “Push”, “Downfall”, “Bright Lights”, “Unwell”, “Hand Me Down” - all songs that I’ve listened to over and over again, so so many times, songs that are so in my system that I could sing along to them in my sleep. Rob played piano on “Bright Lights” and I have such a weakness for my favourite musicians on the piano - so that was good. Undoubtedly (for me, at least) the high point of their performances for the night was “Bent”, which is probably fitting as it’s the title most people would name if you asked them to name an MB20 song off the top of their head. “Real World” and “Downfall” lacked a teensy bit of oomph - perhaps it was just that their live backing music was different from the CD backing tracks and I’m too used to the latter - but “Bent” was explosively powerful. I’m not actually such a big fan of the newer songs, I think the music isn’t as catchy as the Mad Season/More Than You Think You Are era and the lyrics aren’t as simple and honest either, but as always with a good band, hearing the songs live made me like them more.

The best thing about the show, as Rob himself said, was how many people were just so into it; he said the thing about being in the UK was that reporters always asked them what it’s like being here because they’re a band that’s so much bigger in the States, but then they do shows like this and they’re blown away by the realisation that there are so many people in the UK who’ll pay to come see them (the Manchester Apollo’s not a small venue at all, and it was absolutely packed). And it’s just… so true. I remember back in first year when my seminar group were having drinks at a pub and Beth and I were discussing the sex god that is Rob Thomas, and everyone else had never heard of him, and I’d always thought I’d never get to see them here because they just aren’t that famous in the UK. But everyone at the concert were clearly fans, everyone was singing along, so loudly that you could hear the audience as a collective voice singing their hearts out along with Rob. The girl sitting in front of me couldn’t have been more than 10. She was wearing an MB20 T-shirt, and she and her mom were clearly having a ball of a time, and her mom knew every word to every song.

rob at the piano

in all fairness, MB20 isn’t the best live act I’ve seen in my concert experience (that would be Michael Buble). But for some reason, some inexplicable reason that I can’t put my finger on, they’re a band that mean a lot to me; I remember the heartbreak I felt when Adam Gaynor left and it came back fleetingly, wrenchingly, when the band took to the stage and there was only 4 of them and not 5, I remember singing out loud in my room to Mad Season late at night when it was just me and my CD player and a last-minute assignment, I remember all these individual songs that spoke to me at different periods of my life - “Bent” and “The Burn” in secondary school, “Bright Lights” and “Unwell” in JC, “Mad Season” and “Real World” in university - so many times, I’ve just been listening casually to my iPod and suddenly the lyrics of an MB20 song would hit me with that yes yes yes feeling. I feel like if there’s any band I can say I grew up with, it would be them, they’re the one band from my teenage days that I haven’t grown out of and who’ve followed me all this way here to York. And seeing them live was such a big thing for me… I almost feel that I’ve come, in an odd way, full circle.

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