Please take a look at these:
http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/133_china/133_china.htmFrom :devgee-man:
"I'm sure some of you may have already seen the link at Applegeeks.com, but here it is anyway. It's a series of comics detailing true stories of the anguish, hardship, and tragedy of the May earthquake in China. I'm sure many have you have already heard of the earthquake in the news, but these comics provide a much more detailed and personal outlook. Warning though, it's some pretty heart-wrenching stuff, it'd have to be if it could make me cry.
But it's a beautiful number of comics and I think they're a prime example of how comics are more than just a facet for entertainment, but also a very powerful emotional outlet.
So please, take a little bit of time out of your day to read these comics and think about how lucky so many of us are in this world, and how precious life truly is. I couldn't have put it better myself.
Fanime Report! Part 1
May 23, Friday While some people had already headed off to enjoy Fanime, :devOMG5: productions could not, because of school and BECAUSE OUR COSTUMES WEREN'T DONE YET. So directly after school, I headed off towards :devvielara: 's house to work on our costumes/skit/do makeup tests. Everyone but Jeanine was there, and we frantically tried to finish costumes, mostly :devvielara: 's and my dumb pant-chap things.I had to have V lie down on the ground in order to paint some last minute details onto her armor, where she was in constant danger of being stepped on by Sam.
But before we started working on our costumes, we did makeup/hair tests on everyone, which meant trying out fake facial hair (spirit gum and crepe hair) for the first time!
(Top) From left to right, me(with camera), Sam, V-Notice how Sam's mustache/goatee is still grey and how he is missing one side ofhis mustache. (Bottom) Sam is bonding with his wig, Jeffery. XD V with my new Canon EOS 450, who I still have to name! Help me think of names, gaiz!
Sam and Tonya( :devspriteocarina: ) 
Got2be freezing blast spray and rubber cement is some powerful stuff- only a small dallop to get Nick's hair like that! At around 8 pm, we started to work on our skit. Originally our audio was us singing to karaoke, but due to technical difficulties (bad/weird itunes karaoke tracks and our not-so-stellar-singing abilities), we decided to just use the original Mulan audio tracks (and we figured the audience would recieve it better than our screeching, ahahaha) But before Nick (our techinical genius) did the audio, we rehearsed by singing out our lines and practicing in V's master bedroom. Jeanine showed up around this time to rehearse(was working on her costume at her own house, for reasons I do not comprehend), and left at 11pm, so she didn't get to join our wonderful sleepover. D:
Sam, Nick, and V We practiced/worked on costumes until 2 am, and then we played truth or dare until 3 am, which was a stupid but fun choice, ahaha. I was dared to hit on a random guy of their choice (at the con), and then Sam was to try and seduce the same guy afterwards... That's the only dare I remember I had to do, I was really tired at that point and was zoning out, haha.
May 24, Saturday First day of Fanime! We woke up around 6 am (yay 3 hours of sleep : P ) and while everyone else was up and running around putting on their costumes, I was still in a sleepy daze, until I had my Monster energy drink, lol. I helped with EVERYONE's hair and makeup before I could do mine, so I was the last one dressed, and my makeup was rushed lol (my fake eyelashes fell off before we even got to the convention center! TAT) Once we were all dressed, we had breakfast at around 8-9 am, and we were already behind schedule- we were supposed to leave at 8!)
(middle) we look like such children! ahaha, taken by V's mom So we left at 9:30 and we saw cosplayers on the road! I saw a girl in a nurse outfit and a pink wig drive past us, ahaha~
We arrived at the convention center at around 10 (supposed to get there at 8:30! TAT) and we were assaulted by photographers, lol.
Since no one else but me preregistered, they all had to stand in the MASSIVE line (i've never seen it get that long before! Usually its just a 10 minute wait, but usually we got there at 8:30, lololol) for 2 hours (!) while I wandered around the convention by myself. I met a bunch of cool people, like some Lolita Kisama models (I didn't know that they were L K models until a few days ago when I found more pictures of them, ahaha.
I found the one on the far right to be pretty attractive, so I let them look at my chakrams and I snapped a picture of them, ahaha. It was the only time I took pictures of attractive, non-cosplaying guys though- I was too chicken the rest of the time! TAT I really wish I took a picture of that one asian guy with the longish bleached hair... Kim, you know who I'm talking about! XD
I registered us in the Masquerade, and signed us up for 11 am craftsmanship judging, which was the only availiable slot left. However, the rest of the group got out of the line at like 10:50, they were held up for long periods of time by photographers, and our costumes were kind of falling apart. So we located the only outlet we could find, and spent a while repairing costumes, ahhaa. At this point, we met up with Jeanine and Casey, who had come from Casey's house, not with us. Casey isn't in our cosplay group, but she's a friend from school, and she did a surprise Dynasty Warriors cosplay with us! It was awesome, man!
Sam is guarding our bags and our weapons, ahahaha During our costume repair time, there were still alot of people who wanted our photographs, so I posed with Nick's sword instead of my chakrams, lololol. The awesome :devimari-chan: met up with me (as Dino from Katekyo Hitman Reborn!), but we unfortunately didn't have much time to talk, as we had to run to get our outfits judged. We have to meet up again sometime!
As we ran outside towards the fountains and the judging area, we ran into :devbehindinfinity: and :devmerkymerx: ! We were supposed to have a pizza lunch with them, but as it was already noon (we planned it to be at 11), and the bleach gathering for them was going to start soon and our craftsmanship judges were waiting, we had to cancel it. I'm so sorry it couldn't work out! I was looking forward to it too... TAT But we'll just meet up the next time you guys come over, right?
(Group drama warning!)So we ran into the judging room...only to find that only one out of five of the judges was still there. They had all gone out to lunch, and had JUST left. Someone acted quite rudely to the remaining judge, and we decided to go outside and discuss what we would do next. We were faced with dissappointment after dissapointment- the lost hours in the morning because of the registration line, our falling-apart-costumes, and the cancelled lunch, and so at this point, we weren't thinking very rationally becuase of our fatigue/stress, and someone suggested that we just drop our skit from the masquerade because the judges weren't here for craftsmanship judging, because our skit wasn't as well rehearsed as we would have liked it, masquerade would take too much time from our convention experience, ect ect. I was really upset by this, and as more and more members of our group decided to quit the skit, I felt my heart drop as all my work over the past year (I've put the most effort/time into the costumes- aside from Tonya and Jeanine's costumes, the rest and their props (Jeanine's and Tonya's first set of props included), the work was mostly done by me) go to (supposedly, if we really were to quit) waste. However, someone noticed my sadness, and convinced the rest of the group into still doing the skit. With our renewed second wind, we rushed back into the judging room (we were just standing outside in the hallway, where the judge could probably hear us, lol) and told him that we were still going to do the skit. He (super amazing nice judge!) called the rest of the judges to have them come back just to judge us! TAT I was and am still very grateful to them!
(/drama)
After judging was over, we went to get simple lunches- a soft pretzel for me, curry for Jeanine, and chips for Nick and Tonya. People still wanted our picture, and I was the only one still willing to pose (because my food was the most portable too, ahaha) and I took alot of angry pretzel-inmouth pictures. I can't find any photos online of it though! D: We sat in our hobo-corner in front of the doors to one of the ballrooms, but we were again attacked by photographers! (some photographers just came up to us while we were on the ground eating and just snapped photos, it was hella weird D: ) We didn't have any time to plan out our pose formations, unlike last year, where we had 3 different ones XD, so most of our pictures are just us standing in a boring line. Jin took a picture of us in our hobo corner at this time, but we didn't notice Jin taking pictures at all! Jin is a sneaky ninja espada, haaha. (we were up and posing though!) After lunch, we went downstairs for some photoshoots with Asianschoolboy and Eurobeat King. I had a photoshoot earlier in the day with Winterwish too~
INSERT OMG5 PICTUARS OK
After our photoshoots, we went to the masquerade building again, this time we had to remain there until after the masquerade event ended. (got in there around 5pm ish?) We practiced on stage once, and then spent the rest of the time practicing in the hallway. I think there was a wedding in the building connected, and a bunch of random people saw us practicing and wanted to take pictures with us. XD The juggling skit guy was in the hallway too, and he entertained us with his amazing juggling and ball skills. The girl's (with the beard and mustache) armor was made of
stainless steel! Back in the central altrium, I talked to the OH Smeck! group (they did the GAY BAR skit last year, and had a really good skit that brought tears to my eyes this year) and a Haruhi group. Everyone was really nice and it was really easy to talk to them~ : D When we had to be seated, we took (more like me, ahaha) camwhore pictuarz.
Their costumes and skit were amazing! 
Jeanine iz gonna raep me. ohes noes D: 
We went into the judging area again to drop off our props before the show, and we got to see everyone's amazing costumes up close! INCLUDING WOBBUFFET AND A LIGHT UP SWORD.
We watched the super cool preshow (loopkicks again!) and unfortunately the amazing MC Darryl Wong wasn't MCing this year-it was Ric Meyers instead (the biggest chinese weeaboo on the planet!) He made a bunch of references to Chinese film and stuff, which I think was lost on most of the audience, seeing how this was an anime convention. Me and the chinese-speaking members of Oh Smeck! (they were right in front of us) were talking about him/yellow insults to him in Chinese, ahaha. We didn't like him very much. XD Our skit was lucky number 7, which meant we were to perform quite early on. Jeanine and I were SUPER nervous since we didn't get enough rehearsal time and we were afraid of the audience's reactions. We ran back to the judging room right before our skit to get our props and to glue Nick into his costume, and waited behind stage until our skit. I got to see the amazing Trinity Blood costumes up close- they were really well crafted! (I sound like such a geek lol) We had some audio problems in the beginning- we totally forgot to give the MC narration, and the music started out REALLY quietly-we could barely hear it ourselves D:. But it was soon fixed, at least, more than loud enough for the audience to hear- we were afraid that their ears would be blasted out since ours were when it came on when we were on stage. Thankfully aside from that, there were no MAJOR mishaps- Jeanine's good wig stayed on, and we were more or less coordinated (I was about 1 second behind everyone else lololol, I'm sorry everyone! TAT). However, we expected the lights to fade out into darkness, which didn't happen so we just exitted awkwardly offstage, and V fell down when doing our duo fighting act thing (which I totally did not notice lol). We were happy that the audience seemed to enjoy our skit ( I could hear people singing along! : D) and we sat back down to enjoy the rest of the masquerade. Although the skits were more repetitous this year, and there were not as many SUPER EPIC skits, the overall quality of skits went waay up! The audience wasn't as good as last year though- by the end, only 1/3 of the audience was left! Last year, almost everyone stayed even for the awarding, but this year, there were like 10 non-cosplaying people left in the masquerade hall. It was like run on stage, get prize, run off stage. We got the Judge's award for Performance, which really surprised all of us, as we expected to get a craftsmanship award. We're still happy with what we have though! We went outside to the fountains to meet up with Jin and Miguel once again for dinner, but we kept on getting photos taken of us, so they went first to look for a restaurant for dinner. We ran after them, but we got pretty lost and by this time, most of the group was tired/cranky and didn't really want to do anything. So we met up quickly, but once again we had to cancel our meeting... TAT San Jose restaurants close too early! So OMG5 (Jeanine headed back to our hotel room and Sam left after the masquerade) headed back to the convention center, where we went to our hobo corner to lie down on the really gross floor (we didn't really care at this point) in an exhausted heap. I wandered around aimlessly the convention center until Tonya's parents (who had my luggage for the weekend in their car) came, and then i picked up my luggage and was driven back to the Fairmont. Went up to the hotel room (was really upset/tired by this time) and banged on the wrong door-it was Casey's mom's room TAT and she was already asleep because it was like 1 am. I ate poop much aka brown curry + vienna sausages, took a shower, and edited my day's photos until 3 am because I couldn't sleep even though i was super tired. And so, that concludes Saturday (Day 1) and Part 1 of my Fanimecon 2008 writeup!
Hikaru-jan! 
This girl. Is. Amazing. 
Imma gonna beat you up 
Gokuuuuuuuuuu 
