Please take a look at these: http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/133_china/133_china.htm
From :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!

Weekend of Euphoria May 17-18

Dang, the last four weeks have been hella busy, but I'll do my best to record the events throughly!
Hollywood Bowl Korean Music Festival
May 16 - Friday -
We (me, Jeanine, and Casey) started our Korean Music Festal adventure by driving down to Los Angeles from San Francisco directly after school on friday. We watched Pan's Labrinth, 101 Dalmations, the Rising Sun Dong Bang Shin Gi concert, and they watched Narnia (I was drawing/listening to music).

We arrived in LA around 8ish and ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant that Jeanine always went to.

We would call the chefs over to order our dishes and they cooked the food right in front of us. The food was hella good; we had fried chicken butt, chicken heart, and lots of meat on skewers.
We went to the our hotel, the Pasadena Hilton, afterwards.
May 17 -Saturday-
On saturday morning, we went to Starbuck's for breakfast, and then went to USC to view the campus. It was SUPER hot (low nineties in the morning!) and there wasn't enough shade/trees on the campus for us Northern Californians. Fa Cai (prosperity in chinese; Jeanine's dog) got exhausted and had to be carried around the campus. XD We saw the famous Spartan statue with its veeeery short skirt-thing.

We went to LA Japantown (little Tokyo?) afterwards for lunch and shopping. We ate lunch at another good japanese restaurant-sushi this time.

We then went to a japanese supermarket to shop for our dinner, which we would bring to the concert to eat. There were HUGE mochis-I've never seen ones this before!
We went shopping at the Jungle/Cure anime/j-rock store too- but didn't buy anything because everything was too pricey XD;;
We arrived at the Hollywood Bowl venue at around 2, and collected freebies (korean air pens, t-mobile bags and beaters, goji berry bars, facial lotion, and a bunch of really useless stuff) watched X2 perform at the smaller stage by the booths(I heard someone call them that, so I'm assuming that's their name), and just talked about life/guys/cosplay until 6 pm. XD There were two men who was trying out the facial masks that were given to them by the sponsor (I think they were promoting it too lol) who looked supar sexy in their whitening masks.
We got to our seats (garden box!) and waited for a looong time for the concert to start and just watched the older korean adults eat their fancy food with their fancy wine and fancy glass cups while we had our own awesome super market dinner.
The concert finally started at around 7, and there was a gospel group to sing the American anthem, while XIAH from Dong Bang Shin Gi (DBSK) came out to sing the Korean anthem.
Super Junior was the opening act, and Heechul captured my heart immediately lololol~

With our loverly friend who shared a box with us~

I got tired of holding up my glowsticks, so I just attached them to my head. (I took them off almost immediately afterwards though-it was cutting off concentration to my head)

This guy was like 70 but he had an electric guitar and was rockinnnnnn! He performed like 6 songs (people had performed 2-3 up until him) and I got a nosebleed from watching his sexy 70 year old self (actually probably from them glowsticks on my head lol)

3 seksi bebebbes, but ignore the wilderbeast on the lower right!

I r cosplaying a gundam with my flashy lights on mah head. (I kept these in until the end)

Oh god, he was AMAZING~ His dance moves were craaaaazy, and he ripped off his shirt to reveal his verrrrry nice body at the end! I wasn't able to get pictures of it though. D:
And then... FLY TO THE SKY~

SG Wannabe~

Annd...I forget this guy's name, but aside from DBSK and SJ T, he was my favorite act! He had great crowd control (had everyone stand up and start dancing! ALL 20,000!) and it was really fun. : D

And then....THE GODS OF KPOP CAME. TVXQ. DBSK. DONG BANG SHIN GI.

I was taking pictures nonstop with my camera, and so I didn't get to view them as well as I would have like to. TAT But they were 1000x sexier in person, and their outfits were AMAZING. They opened with Rising Sun, and then with a ballad I can't remember ahaha, Purple Line (I totally called that one), and then Hug. I was disappointed afterwards that they didn't do O, but it was still great! I rushed down to the front of the garden boxes during the ballad to take pictures (I didn't care about getting in trouble at that point, haaha, they were the closing act anyways!) and i got pushed back by a security guard after a few minutes. XD
Fireworks after, and then we and 20,000 others had to leave Hollywood Bowl. Traffic in Los Angeles is really bad, but it was HELLA bad that night. It took Jeanine's parents an hour and a half to pick us up, and it took about half an hour for us to just cross the street. @_@ We got back to the hotel around 1 am-ish and all fell asleep immediately, ahah.
Woke up quite early, left our hotel around 8 am, and searched around Los Angeles for an Ihop that didn't have an half hour wait time, but apparantly, Ihop is the popular restaurant down there, and every single one we found was already full and had people waiting. We decided to just go to a Denny's in the middle of nowhere, where there were really big beetles on the ground that were ewwwwww. Apparantly, the Denny's we went to was a distinguished Denny's, as it had a wall FULL of awards.
This was my wonderful breakfast, which tasted 3x better than it probably was because of my hunger, haha. Those eggs were the rawest eggs I've ever had, and I was afraid I was going to get salmonella or something. XD
After breakfast, we drove for 5 and a half hours back up to the bay area, where I went home to rest a bit before heading off towards the Miyavi concert in San Francisco!
No cameras were allowed at the venue, so I'll just have to use all words, lol. So, I had prepared a bunch of gifts for Miyavi-a tryptich (it had won an award too!) and alot of trident gum- but my mom made me not take the trident gum because she was afraid he would just throw it away because it was food. So, in shorts and a t shirt, we drove to San Francisco, where it was FREEZING. There was a heat wave that week and I was in LA too, so I assumed that SF would be warmer too. I was very very wrong, haha. The line at Slim's (nightclub venue lol) was super long- it wrapped around the building and onto another block! The neighborhood was pretty sketchy; I saw a bunch of homeless and high guys, and a really scary looking drag queen. Talked to a girl who I thought was as old as I was, but turned out she was 23! She was nice though, and I lent her a glowstick I had got at Hollywood Bowl, and we both vowed to get to the front . We got in, and squeezed ourselves to the left side of the stage, and waited for about half an hour for the show to start. There was this hella weird screen with radioactive butterflies and flowers as a filler. The Hi no......(super long title, geez) PV finally came on (first time I've seen it in high resolution!) and the crowd was going craaaaaazy by then, ahaha. And then...HE came on, in his purple fur-lined kimono thing, with a fan covering his face and an umbrella. Snapped the fan closed, with an intense facial expression (it was sexy, ahaha) and I died of happiness alittle bit, ahaha. The night was a wonderful blur- but a bunch of specific events really stood out to me, mostly contact with Miyavi! So I had a glowstick, the only one in the entire audience (besides the one I gave to the girl), and I was pretty close up to the stage in the beginning-about 5 people back?- so Saro (the tap dancer who was on the left side) made alot of eye contact with me and waved towards me alot, haaha. I did my eye makeup like Miyavi's, so when he came over to our side, he made eye contact with me and made a touch the eyelid motion to me (did he like my choice of makeup? hahaa), and sang while looking at me. Later, when he said "this was his last song", I extended my drawings to him (they were made of cardstock, and i had plastic wrapped them for protection against sweaty fangirls), and he extended his hand towards me, smiliing at me all the while, while there was a sea of hands reaching around me trying to grab his hand, but he grabbed my pictures, kissed them, and took them offstage. He came back with a different outfit, and made alot more eyecontact, and mimicked me sometimes! With my glowstick I would wave it around my face, and he would do the same with the guitar, ahaha. He also held my hand for like 10 seconds! The concert ended in a shorrrt 2-3 hours, but I was slightly happy that it had ended because of the HORRIBLE body odor, the really fat fangirls who kept on beating me up when I was holding his hand, the extreme heat and lack of water, and my fatigue from hollywod bowl catching up to me. I went home (and this was a SUNDAY night, school the next day lol) at around midnight, and fell asleep immediately lol. I was like =_______= the entire day monday, ahaha. So, that sums up my "weekend of europhoria!"

5.4.08 Today, me, Jeanine, Victoria, Nick, Tonya and Miguel (http://merkymerx.deviantart.com/) (Basically everyone in OMG5 except for Sam and plus Miguel) all went to see Forbidden Kingdom and had lunch in Japantown.
So this is my experience of the trip, lol.
Woke up, got dressed, and called Jeanine at 9:30 am. Turns out that she had overslept and that I had woken her up...XD I arrived at the train station just as my train was leaving, so I waited with no one else on the platform for about 15 minutes for the next train, met up with Jeanine at her station, sketched on the train while Jeanine played tetris, and then we arrived at the first destination-West Field Mall in San Francisco. The meetup place was Borders, but since it was our first time at the mall, we consulted the handy ELECTRIC TOUCH SCREEN MALL MAP TO FIND BORDERS. But in the end, we still had to ask the mall concierge for directions... We were the first to arrive in Borders and met up with Miguel and the rest of OMG5 shortly afterwards, and we all headed upstairs to see Forbidden Kingdom. Not a faaaaantastic movie, but pretty entertaining with Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and the girl from Condor Heros (YAAAAAAAAN GOOOOOOR). I spent most of the movie laughing at the bad wigs (especially the long silver one!), admiring the costumes, and wishing that I had learned kung fu when I was little. XD After the movie, we followed Migurl, who knew how to get around on public transport in SF better than we did, to the bus to japantown. It was the first time many of us have ridden buses, so we looked like inexperienced suburb noobs on the bus. XD
Arrived at Japantown, and I ran off to see if I was on the Japanvideo Cherry Blossom Festival billboard- I was, but I was closing my eyes, much to my embarrassment...
I also took my ceremonial "make my deranged samurai face" picture in one of the many japantown insert-facers-things, and my head got a bit stuck. XD

We had lunch at a restaurantwhichIforgetthenameofnowbutithassushiandoyakodon, and we had sushi or oyakodon. I washed my hands when everyone went in first, and they went afterwards because we took public transport and all. I was bored and was taking pictures of myself when Victoria snuck up on me and scared me into screaming.



Miguel impressed most of OMG5 with his wasabi-eating powers, but he was no match for my peanut-butter consistency wasabi/soysauce mixture and pure wasabi eating powers. (My nose hurt afterwards though)
Nick seemed to find it very funny... We talked about cosplay and convention experiences for the rest of the lunch-time, like Jeanine's wonderful Death-note movie experience at Anime Expo, and our hotel-cooking-hairspray+ricecooker near-death experience and just spazzed about Fanime the rest of the time. After lunch, we did purikura! (My favorite part of the day, lol.) We were joking around that purikura turned normal people/guys into BEAUTIFUL KAWAII JAPANEZ WOMANZ, but IT ACTUALLY WORKED

See my deviantART journal : http://bubydub.deviantart.com/journal/17740342/#comments for the purikura pictures. : D

We crammed everyone in the tiny photo-editing booth, and spent a looooong time decorating the pictures, spazzing about the timer running out (it froze at 35 lol), and spent a long time cutting them into individual photos (4 sheets worth!). There were a bunch of duplicates of the sperm and OMG5 lawl, and not enough concubines to go around, so I didn't get one. ;__; Sadly, Victoria, Nick, and Tonya had to leave early, so me, Jeanine, and Miguel sent them to the bus stop and just hung out and had dessert (dream cake for those two, creme broule for me) until Jeanine's parents mysteriously appeared in Japantown early, and we had to part ways. It was a really fun day, and I can't wait to see everyone at Fanime!