Thanks to RyuHayabusa and a few others on the Fanime forums, and various places online. We got some good pictures this year.

Note: None of these photos were taken by me (would be interesting though, considering I’m in some of them). If you would like credit for your photos, or would like me to remove them, please contact me. I’ll put more up when I find them.

Now, there’s THIS:

You win, Windows 7. That was just waaaay too adorable. Or maybe I have a soft spot for cute little Asian girls that can’t read big words.

The three features I’m testing are the Friend Connect panel, the comment section, and the Event Calendar.

Friend Connect will let any visitor sign in and basically follow this site, and list other sites that you follow that have Friend Connect. You can add other visitors as friends and see what sites they follow, and you can send invites to people to see the site you’re at. Your icon is whatever icon you have set up with whichever service you choose, a popular one being Google itself, but you can use other things like “openID” to sign in.

The comment section can be to leave me a message that might not have anything to do with a post of mine. The message is public, though, so it can be seen by anyone. You can also link to a video from youtube.

The Event Calendar shows an event I plan to attend, where it’s located, and how many days till it comes. You can also put that you’re going to go, and even click to have it added to your Google Calendar.

While none of this is really NEW, I think it would be good to spread the word about it so that it gets more use.

Anyway, since we were talking about cosplaying characters from Bakemonogatari on the forums, I decided to see what came up in an image search. Of course, not much did, since it’s still relatively new and us westerners don’t exactly have the resources that those in Japan do. Cosplayer’s Cure, a predominately Japanese-user cosplay site, did have a decent collection, however. Here are my favorites.

Yeah, all the ones for Koyomi Araragi look like females. Girls just do guy cosplays better. I’m in love with all the Shinobu cosplayers at the bottom. Except the first one looks like she has impossibly small feet. Enough to make Reducto from Harvey Birdman quiver with pleasure.

This also goes to show you how seriously Japanese take cosplay, all of these pictures are nice. Vibrant, interesting colors, good make up, good lighting, props, poses. Not the hastily taken photo at a convention with horrible backgrounds. High standards, I know.

All of this is for a “manga-themed video” that will be shown at an exhibition in London.  I’m curious as to what “manga-themed” means…will it be shown in flashing panels like this scene from FLCL?

“It’s hard to be in manga form.  Takes time and it’s a lot of work.”

Good news: The year that I graduated high school has the best SAT scores in over a decade.

Bad news: The score has steadily been decreasing each passing year.

Good news: Looks like we just barely missed the new “Writing” part of the test.

Bad news: I was told there would be no math.

Good news: At least one group seems to not notice that they’re supposed to be failing like the rest of them.

Bad news: SATs are apparently “racist.” Or people just like living up to the stereotypes about themselves.

I, for one, welcome our new Asian Mathematician overlords.

I don’t know which is more embarrassing, the sign or having actually stolen from WALMART.

Why does shoplifting exist? It’s profitable, of course. A good amount of shoplifters actually do it for a living. They steal high-priced items and either sell them (ebay, craigslist, or to people in person), or return them and sell the store credit they get. A good shoplifter can make several thousand a month doing this. Of course, that won’t compare at all to the jail time they’ll recieve once they get caught, but they figure they’re too smart to get caught.

So, back to my story. Lately, because of the Back to School Season, we’ve stayed open additional hours in the night when no normal person shops for clothing. Though I’ve pointed out that this just attracts sleazy people and shoplifters, Corporate seems to think there’s money in staying open that extra hour.

About a week ago, I got seriously fed up with this when I had to deal with three habitual shoplifters in under an hour. As in, I’ve personally had to interact with them in the past, so I’m clueless as to why they think I would not remember them. To sum up their appearances: you could scrape more attractive things off the bottom of your shoe.

Enter: Toothless Hag. It’s not really accurate to say she’s toothless, it’s more like her teeth are rotted to a point where they’re just brown nubs in her mouth. She likes to hide them with her lips, though, so it’s hard to spot at first. I was warned about her from another coworker, who described her as, “short, Hispanic, dyed hair, missing teeth”.  While the first three describe about 70% of the people who shop here,  missing teeth is a pretty significant difference. She’s wearing a very badly-fitting, black and white speckled top that accentuates her rolls nicely, and she’s made a point to tuck in this spandex shirt into her jeans to make the bulges more noticeable. Her greasy, red-streaked hair is pulled tightly back into a small bun on the back of her head.

No, it’s not the good kind of Muffin Top. No one wants to see this.

She comes up to my counter with a dress in hand. Usually, legitimate returns are brought in a bag of some sort, so this is strike one against her. “I need to return this, it was a gift and it’s too big.”  I notice that the tag is ripped off, which is not uncommon for gifts. However, the plastic piece that attaches the tag to the garment is still there. Yeah, people who give gifts usually take those off, too. Shoplifters don’t bother, though. Strike two.

She also brings up two pairs of Levi’s jeans that she would like to buy in replacement of the dress she’s returning. She wants to know how much these jeans will cost so she knows how much the store credit will cover. As she sets them on the counter, I notice that one of the tags falls off. I also notice her trying to distract me as she shoves it back in place. I then notice that the tag isn’t even for the same brand of jean. Strike three. This is definitely a shoplifter. It’s about this time that I notice that this is the same woman I was warned about…I get a glimpse of those gorgeous brown chompers.

Because any other picture would have made you vomit, I’ll just say she looked a little like these sponge monkeys, minus the white teeth part.

I take the tag, throw it away in front of her, and begin typing in the UPC, which is printed on the inside of the jeans. Surprise, surprise, the two jeans suddenly cost over $50 together. “Oh, wow, looks like I’ll have to return my purse too, then, so I can get the jeans. Let me go to the car to get it,” she says.

The purse may as well have been this one.

Yeah, sure. And I’ll just pretend you’re not going directly to the purse department to steal a purse, rip off the tags, and bring it to me. I take this time to alert my manager, who basically says we can’t do anything but document it at the moment. Of course. Only Loss Prevention people can confront and apprehend these people, and ours isn’t in the building at the moment. I’m instead instructed to smile and act like I haven’t a clue what’s going on. That part is what infuriates me the most. I hate that these people might even get the impression that they’re outsmarting me.

So she comes back, with a purse with no tags in her hands. Not just any purse though, one of the most expensive brands we carry! More than enough to cover the amount of the jeans. Wish I had friends like that to give me $150 dollar purses. She gets her credit and buys her jeans, with quite a bit to spare on the store credit. I get a minor headache from mentally rolling my eyes the entire time.

Enter: Fatty Winehouse. Next comes my least favorite thieves. This couple are very obviously “professional” shoplifters.  They both stink of cigarettes and poverty, and they always bring their ADHD son with them on their illegal activities. I always feel sorry for the future of this child, as having idiotic parents has already begun to take a toll on him. When he speaks, he’s barely intelligible, despite being about 7 years old.

We seriously need this stuff in bulk.

This time I get to be annoyed by the wife. She looks like an obese Amy Winehouse without the beehive hairdo. She smells like she’s spent her day rolling around in a thousand ash trays, she’s wearing a spandex spaghetti strap black shirt, which is low cut enough to fully display her Double D’s. On those lovely lady lumps, a wide array of tattoos are displayed. One is the name of her lazy-eyed husband, Joel. I don’t take the time to look at the rest, because there’s no point in torturing myself.

I wasn’t sure about my comparison until I saw this picture. She looks exactly like this. She’s even wearing a similar shirt. It’s eerie.

She plops a big, dirty box of 10 pieces of stainless steel cookware on my counter, and says it was a gift and she wants “one of them te-…tefron…telefron ones instead.” If I would just wait a minute while she goes to grab one of them teafon cookware off the shelf so she can just exchange it. “Nope, sorry, you’ll have to do a return without a receipt. You can use the store credit toward a Teflon set if you want,” I tell her between gasping to the side for fresh air.

I foolishly decide to open this box in front of me to check if it actually contained said 10 piece cookware. What greets me are ten of the nastiest, most used pieces of cookware I’ve seen. They’ve obviously been used for a long time. I reach in, against my better judgment, and grab a piece to move it aside to count them, and my fingers actually slip off it because of all the grease and slime on them. At that point, I just give up and process the return.

Maybe she was just testing the limits of “stainless” steel.

‘Why would you do that?’ You might ask. I’ve brought questionable returns like this to the attention of managers in the past, and just about every single time, I’ve been told to return it and send it back to the vendor (which will most likely not give us any kind of credit for the disgusting things). “Yes we can” taken to the extreme. Also, I knew that this expensive of a return would undoubtedly give her the dreaded CORPORATE REFUND. Meaning Corporate would look into the return and decide if it really was fraudulent or not. They would also have a record of all the previous returns that this woman has done without a receipt, and hopefully realize she’s a freakin’ thief.

I get all of her information into the computer (yes, even knowing her name, address and phone number isn’t enough for me to stop her at this point), and give her the Corporate Refund receipt. She decides, however, that she has not done enough annoyance to me yet. She begins to ask me about what she can do about a “lost store credit” that she had.

This shirt might come in handy if she were actually literate.

I’m completely on to this scam that they’re trying to get away with, with “lost store credits.” I’ve tried explaining this to management, too. Essentially, they steal, get store credit, sell store credit to some moron, report that the card is lost and bring in the receipt where they got it in the first place, then ask us to void the old card and give them a new card, which they sell, say is lost, void, and the cycle repeats.  They continually make money from the selling of the cards, but the people who buy them end up with a useless card.

Since I’ve figured this much out, I tell her she’s out of luck and that the card should be treated like money and if they’re lost, it is not our liability to replace them. It says as much on the back of the card, but I don’t expect her to be able to read, so I repeat it to her. Apparently someone has done it for her before, so my answer isn’t what she wants to hear. She asks me the same question in five different ways before getting the point that I’m not going to budge, and then she finally leaves.

Imagine this, but…black.

Enter: Dirt Man. The next guy that comes in a minute later, I’ve seen at least twice before. He’s returning the exact same thing he did both times before, too. The only way to describe him is Dirt. He’s a very tall, 60ish-year-old man, covered in dirt. He’s wearing acid washed jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His fingernails are so encrusted with dirt, that it looks like someone took a permanent marker and drew along the outside of the entire nail. I don’t want to know how many years of non-bathing results in that look.

The real crime is the one against fashion, IMHO.

Anyway, he’s returning an expensive knife. A small, easy to steal, expensive knife. One that has all the sensor stickers ripped off of it. And like I said, this is the third time I’ve seen him do it. The first time he said it was a gift for his recent wedding, and he didn’t need it (this guy’s in his 60s and hardly looks like he just got married), this time he says his (fictional) wife bought it and he was mad with her for buying such an expensive knife.  I resist the urge to comment on his frequent bad luck with these knives, and do the return.

Oh knife, why do you plague this man so?

He’s shocked, shocked I say, that his $150 knife is only returning for $49.99.  I inform him of something he should already know…you don’t get the full price of the item when returning it without a receipt. You get the lowest selling price. He shrugs it off, and walks away with his store credit, because hey, it was free for him anyway. He can just steal more next time to make up for it. Normal people, if they’d paid three times more for an item and got back less, they’d be, you know, upset. Well, at least I can thank that nonchalance for giving me a break in that area.

So there you have it, that was just one eventful night in my adventures in retail. I commend you if you really did read all that. Geez, that really is like a novel after looking through it all again.

I have decided to make an effort to watch all SHAFT productions. I might just limit this to SHAFT/Shinbo collaborations, however, since I’m really just a fan of Akiyuki Shinbo. For those who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, SHAFT is a Japanese animation studio, and Shinbo is an artist who became a main director in SHAFT productions, giving them their signature look and running gag of cultural references hidden throughout the anime they produce. They have made some of my favorites, like the Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei series, Maria+Holic,  Pani Poni Dash, and recently Bakemonogatari.

Despairing teachers have left me in despair.
What other anime has a cast that consists of a suicidal teacher, a hikikomori, a girl who ignores everything negative, a verbally sadistic guidance councilor, a girl who is addicted to pulling animal tails, a yaoi fangirl, a lawsuit-obsessed American girl, an OCD girl, a balding invisible teenage boy, an illegal immigrant, a girl who sends abusive text messages, a stalker,  and normal Nami?

While Shinbo has his own following of fans, I somehow doubt that his work would be accepted by the average American viewer.  His style is fast-paced and extremely erratic at times. I think that many people would be annoyed that most of the series are involving majority dialogue and less action. The references would also be completely lost on this audience. So, as much of a shame as it is, I doubt these series will become popular here (other than our otaku fanbase). I just wish more people could see his work, because it really is something different.

And now I leave you with a wonderful SHAFT/Shinbo gem, which will make you hate me, because once heard, it will take an eternity to get out of your head. You can thank me later.

Why yes, those are Hwatu (or Hanafuda) cards in there.  Neko mimi modo desu~.

Moon Shoes

The product says it will let the kid jump as if they were in space in anti-gravity. Seriously? The thing actually prevents you from jumping higher than you would without the shoes strapped on. Not to mention that it makes any normal person look like a retard just walking in them.

Mr. Bucket

Putting all the double meanings to the commercial aside, why would anyone want to play a game that is essentially never-ending cleaning? For a parent or a child, I can only see this as extremely annoying to play.

Skip-It

Ok, I do have to admit that I did own this one. That has a lot more to do with all my friends having one than it does with the commercial. This thing was more of a fail-jump rope than anything else. The counter didn’t really work, and there’s really only so much time you can spend jumping over a thing attached to one leg before realizing it’s very awkward to do.

Sock’em Boppers

More fun than a pillow fight? Get beat in the face with some air-filled plastic? Sounds like a blast! What’s funny is that I remember this same commercial airing for years…they never bothered upgrading the video or the product.

Potty Training Kelly

aka Pedobear’s fantasy. There’s something disturbing about this commercial, more disturbing than the need to have a peeing doll. Maybe that they’re squeezing all the liquid out of poor little Kelly?

Better Blocks

What’s better than Legos? Why, glow in the dark Legos of course! That bend! I’ve seen this commercial so many times as a kid that I’d really be happy never to see it again. Who plays with blocks in the dark, anyway?

So that’s what I remember at the moment. So my question is, what absurd toys do kids play with now? It would be sad to leave this insanity in the 90s.

And here, I present to you my terrible pictures. I’m an enjoy-the-experience-not-photograph-it type of person, I guess. It was a great trip. Maybe I’ll upload some of Megan’s pictures (which are a lot lot better) so she doesn’t have to do it. There’s some video here, below, that I recorded. I’m only putting up the small clips I did around the con, but I have really long ones (~20 minutes or so) if anyone wants those. I’ll be adding more to the post as I get more videos uploaded.

It’s the scarecrow thing from Howl’s Moving Castle! Just an overall good job by the cosplayer. Despite it being one of my favorite animated films, I still needed help figuring out what this was, which thankfully Megan reminded me.

Part of the Haruhi Dance Contest. I came a bit late, so I don’t have the best spot. Because of that, I only had view of the two guys who had probably never seen the Haruhi dance in their lives. The girls to the right of them were very good, though.

I was so happy to catch this moment. They were playing “You Touch My Tralala” in the hall, and a Grell cosplayer was dancing and singing along. Very appropriate. Not to be upstaged, the Ciel crossdresser cosplayer (she’s a girl dressed as a boy who dressed as a girl in the anime) starts freaking Grell. Just great for the Kuroshitsuji fans.

This is Chan, Nathan and I driving past the front of the con. This is where I learn that the zoom feature is probably not meant for video The talking is about cosplayers, protesters and tipping. Nathan liked to tip people for even breathing in his direction, and I’m pretty sure he spent most of his money this way. Oh, and there’s that creepy guy who just walks by staaaaarrrriiinng the whole time.