At the ToyCon 2014


We went to the mall in the middle of the day, not really expecting the number of people pressed along an extremely long line going from the venue entrance to the mall stairwell about fifty feet away. Having given up on the ridiculous queue, we wandered around to where, like pockets of colorful, geographically-misplaced surprises, some individuals were displaying their cosplay costumes.  According to the event site, the Philippine ToyCon "is Asia's biggest and longest running convention for collectibles, toys, anime, comics, cosplay, gaming and anything and everything related to hobbies and collections."  It seems that anime costumes at a toy convention makes some sort of sense, to the convention-starved middle classes of the Philippines. The lower classes are just starving, and the upper classes hold toy conventions.  I did not have time to pursue this line of speculation, however, since I was busy trying to imagine myself in a Sephiroth costume.  I had to content myself with the site saying, and I type this verbatim, "and off course, TOYCON would not be complete without the biggest exhibitor floor of all pop culture merchandise."

The line going from the other end of the venue entrance was tremendously shorter, though, so in it we fell gladly, all thought of potentially impotent social commentary and/or looking for hot cosplayers driven out of my mind.

We marveled at the sheer numbers of people, toys, people who tried to look like toys, and people who are selling toys (who sometimes looked like the toys).  There were dioramas with displays so intricate in their mech-ness I almost cannot figure them out -


- and there were those that prevented me from taking pictures, being squished between experiencing the entire thing and experiencing the press of bodies trying to experience it with me.  I did, however, manage to photograph my most favorite part of the convention - the Rurouni Kenshin exhibit.





I did not know whether or not these where the real clothes worn on set of Kyoto Inferno, though I was too happy to care, so happy I almost turned into an octopus.  There were also exhibits celebrating Star Wars and Batman, among others.

































I wanted to buy a body suit that when worn would make you resemble a cow (among the displays were dragons, cats, and other hapless animals), when I remembered which part of the country I was currently living in.  Pasco, though, was able to buy a Green Lantern doll action figure.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mental disorders: Thoughts on a whatever something or other

I suppose I could start in plainer English discussing who I am as a layman not trained in psychoanalytic language, and if so will revert to the language that I do use when discussing anything worth discussing: half academic and half wit (indistinguishable at times from being a halfwit). As a layman I chose to major in philosophy, for better or worse, which is a fast track to being witty, or being a halfwit, and other things besides. Or I could start with a bombardment of links mostly pertaining to The Diagnostic Statistical Manual   IV and V  and increasingly technical accounts of co-morbidity and dual diagnoses involving bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder until we both drown in jargon I will not be able to understand, much less simplify. For DSM-IV diagnostic criteria regarding bipolar disorders types I and II, look at  this  if you want a full jargon drowning, or  this instead  if only for its simplicity and overall pleasant color sche...
Read more

Of finding something again

Image
I just sleep. I sleep to rest, to be away from the world that has given me so much and that I am not a part of anyway, to reset, to die. If only for a while.  I wake up and look at my phone, as all of us do now. The world painfully worlds, with no pauses and preambles: it elbows you in the face with all its glory, its vapid bitches, and all the iterations of the Andrew Tates of humankind. In everything we have a choice, save for one: this world. It is the ultimate given, the ultimate, ungentle, fact, and that we are in it. It doesn't stop. It can't; it doesn't have to. Immediately upon waking I close my eyes and dive deep into the recesses of whatever that was young that's left of me to desperately hunt for reserves of a desire to get up from bed, to work, to be . Two days ago I joked with my lover that I had been tired since 1984, and I think I mean it.  If not for him and another friend that gave me the time of the day in the MMORPG that I returned to, I would have ro...
Read more

Memory

Image
I heard somewhere that were it not for entropy, time would not be linear for us. It being linear is the only reason why we can anticipate or remember, and why those words even mean anything to begin with, and why those words are the same words only facing opposite ends. However, the linearity of time is nothing compared to what the human brain does. It processes things as they happen, but it is only in retention and protention that it can understand what it processes. In short, our minds are never in the right time. There is no right time. There is no now. There is only anticipation or dread of a time that will end, and there is only memory of a time that has ended. The paradox in the entire thing, of course, is that without the now, neither of those states would be. And that is why time hurts. We are in it, things happen the order they do because of it, and it is merciless to the last second, especially when one has to leave. It is more merciless because of things that wi...
Read more