apt-get's journal

More than 8 months have passed since the last entry. This journal has been in the back of my mind for the past three months, but ended up being postponed to the next day ad nauseam. Quite a lot has happened since then.

---

I went to Japan Expo last July, as I had planned. All in all, it really was a lot of fun, especially since it was the first time I'd participated in a con or other similar event. There's a little something about being surrounded by tens of thousands of people indulging in the same subculture as you, although it's usually hard for otaku culture fans past their honeymoon to recognize they're closer to the average anime fan than they'd like to admit.

Of course, the very first thing that catches your eye is the absolutely gigantic amount of merchandise stands, ranging from the official Good Smile Company booth to the shameless bootleg goodies shops ([un]affectionately referred to as Hong Kong stands, or HK). About a third of the venue was dedicated to these, but I'd say it takes at least half a day to go through all of the interesting ones, and unless you've already planned your purchases or something really catches your eye, it's better not to spend too much money here.

The most interesting section, in my opinion, is the amateur one. Here, young artists showcase their works: artbooks, fanzines, keychains, wall scrolls, and even visual novels (fan-translated or original).

The rest of the venue was split between overpriced restaurants and gaming booths, which didn't really interest me (apart from the Touhou one, which organized Soku and PoFV tourneys -- it was really fun, even though I lost in the second round!). Packing your own lunch is essential if you don't want to blow half of your budget on meme food like 20€ onigiri and the likes.

The holy grail of my trip was probably the Kawa-Soft booth that, along with promoting Katawa Shoujo and World End Economica, which they both translated, sold imported ero doujins (NSFW!).

All in all, it was a really nice experience. I'll probably come back again, though not alone this time.

---

While the dream diary hasn't been updated in a while, that doesn't mean I haven't been keeping it up offline. I've retroactively added entries after July, though some of them are overall less detailed due to being in bullet point form.

---

The doujin album collection in the Files section is gone. It's been a while since the thread that I built it up for died, and I figured anyone who was interested in downloading them would have done so by now. The file index now hosts some of my stream recordings that were requested afterwards.