The post-30th Birthday Blog

Well then, 30 years of being on this planet.

For those not in the know, June 14th was my 30th birthday. And honestly I don't really have much to write about it. By this point, birthdays mostly just "happen" with little fanfare. These years I typically save Christmas as the big "go all out with gifts and etc" moment since I don't have conventions around that point that get the lion's share of my wallet. Of course my birthday still gives me an excuse to take the day off, go out to local arcades to spend a few hours playing games, and enjoy some homemade cake. And sometimes that's all I need to make me say "You know what, I had a good day today."

While I was deep into making this blogpost, there was something that alluded me last Spring: This year marks the 15th anniversary of Super Justin: the Blog. Yeah, surprising right? I originally started this blog in March 2009 at the age of 14, and since then the blog has changed and evolved so much, pivoting to longer and more professionally-written post about my projects, experiences with conventions, and other things I enjoy. And of course there will be many more things to come in the future as I work on digging myself out of this creative slump that I found myself in following a particular worldwide event from 2020 and move forwards with several particular ventures I've been eyeing up for some time now. As for what's next for this blog, I plan to start on the entry dedicated to sharing my experiences with Cradle Con and Brooklyn Comic Con before it becomes far too late and I have to head out for another two events in August. And if you're not into the convention scene around here, don't worry! There will be other posts to check out, provided I don't get too distracted with other pastimes while writing them...

And so, a new decade of Super Justin: the Blog starts.

The Conventions of 2024: Part 1: EMCon and Castle Point Anime Convention

Yes, this blogpost came out quite a bit later than I would have liked for a variety of reasons but I figured I better start typing it out before I head off to another big event later this week.

Last year, I dedicated a separate blogpost to each of the six “major events” I attended. This time, with the promotion of what was the “side events” to main event status to give each event a proper day in the limelight no matter their size, the structure had to change somewhat. And thus, today I will be writing on the first two events I appeared at in April of this year: EMcon, and Castle Point Anime Convention.

To begin, I’ll introduce you to EMcon, a small but sweet event at the East Meadow Public Library that’s only a short drive out from my place. While not the earliest event in the area that takes place, it’s the first one I attend after a lengthy break that starts from November the year prior and I like it precisely because it comes at the right place and the right time. It’s a very casual general geek culture event that has a few artist booths lined up in the front of the library, and being a free event at the library for all to attend, it also features a slew of activities for younger children. The artists present are a few local indie comic artists I’ve befriended over the years, including some that I’ve known from my first few years of attending conventions, and I always enjoy catching up with everyone after months of not seeing each other.

Even with the size of the event, there was still a good, if small, selection of cosplays and panels to experience on the event’s two days. One of the comic artists even got an entire panel to himself to show off and discuss his work process. There was a video gaming section but it was only for fighting game setups (there were tournaments for Tekken 8, Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Dragon Ball FighterZ) and it was packed away in a room to the side, distant from the rest of the event and the various vendors and artists that crowded around the library’s main entrance. Surprisingly, I was able to walk away from the event with three commissions, including one from a longtime friend I had met at Castle Point Anime Convention 2016, the very first convention I ever attended eight years prior.

And that was pretty much EMcon, one that I would love to go into more detail on but when we’re dealing with the smallest event of the year, there’s only so much detail I can get into without stretching things too far. If you’re wondering why I didn’t take any pictures of the interior, the large number of children in the building (in addition to wearing myself out the night prior playing Splatoon for four hours straight) made me reluctant to snap too many general pics of the venue. Maybe next year I’ll try to get some out but don’t hold your breath. Until then, time to move on to…

…Castle Point Anime Expo 2024. If EMcon was the warmup event, then Castle Point was the first true big event of the year. Unlike 2023, the event got to experience actual sunlight in the day, allowing for the outdoor cosplay and general atmosphere shots that I severely missed taking at and around the Medowlands Expo Center. It all felt very familiar, as familiar as my first time attending the event following the pandemic two years ago. Parking was thankfully a non-issue, making return trips to the car easy, short, and convenient. Stepping inside, all I had to do was present a QR code and I immediately received my badge, allowing me to explore the rest of the event. The inside of the convention center stayed pretty close to its layout from 2023 with one very crucial and well-appreciated change: The sound stage was not only much lower in volume overall, but it was now concealed in black tarp on all angles which allowed the stage to have light effects on for the entire day. Of course I still ended up losing my voice partway through trying to talk through my mask due to the crowds pouring into artist alley, but at least I was still able to cleanly chat with and likewise hear the artists in the artist alley.

Speaking of the artist’s alley, in past years Castle Point would typically have a line leading into the vendors’ hall and artists’ alley. It’s something they’ve done for years as a safety measure to avoid causing a big fire hazard but for reasons unknown, or perhaps since they saw the line as unnecessary following the move to a new venue, this was their first event in years to not feature the lines I associated with the event’s storefront areas. All I can say in response is a blunt “thank god” since every other event I’ve attended has never had to contend with lines into vendor halls and artist alleys (but getting into panels and even the events themselves is their own story). As for the Artist Alley itself, I was mostly unfamiliar with but still got along well with everyone that I chatted with. Getting commissions was something of a struggle at first but I was thankfully able to score the usual amount I get from CPAC, give or take maybe one or two images, and you can see the entire set of pics over on my Aozora’s Adventure blog.

Across from the artist’s alley was the video gaming section, and if you’re familiar with the gaming areas in anime conventions, you know what to expect: there were lots of fighting and non-fighting games on consoles, Japanese arcade and rhythm game cabinets, and stations to play board games. The fighting games were mainly the usuals: Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, and Smash Bros. Ultimate, and all of the aforementioned titles held tournaments as part of “King of Castle Point” through both days of the event. Since fighting games were not the central focus of the convention, I didn’t really stay around to spectate the fights. Dragon Ball FighterZ and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 were available to play, though neither game ran any sort of tournament. Of course I had to preserve the cute doodle of Ken Masters that accompanies the signup paper which to my knowledge was drawn by DrowZs, the artist of the webcomic One Time Taxes that was receiving funding through the tournament. (If I'm wrong, please correct me!)

I did attend a single panel held in the mid-afternoon, one that I ensure I don’t miss each CPAC: The Dad Panel. What is the Dad Panel, you might be asking? Well, it’s a big comedy routine featuring a collective of four dads with their audience playing the role of their theoretical, collective children. The “children” ask the dads questions and they react accordingly, and the amount of humor that was able to be blasted out in an hour thanks to the heavy audience participation element of the panel and a half was astronomical. If it was available anywhere online for viewing, I would have strongly recommended you check it out--but since it's not, I suppose you'll have to catch it when it returns next year!

Unlike last year, the entire set of console games went dark as soon as the vendors and artists closed up, and there were no late-night free play setups or tournaments held even if it’d be the perfect time to play some Mario Kart or go bash some skulls in a few rounds of Good-Ass-Tekken. Only the arcade games (in a dimly-lit gaming area), a few late night panels, and two music and dancing performances were held past 7PM including the event’s signature “CPAC: the Dance”. Thankfully, the event was still very much active—the arcade machines still had lines lining up to play the various rhythm games, the Initial D machine remained alive through the night, and a four-player Gundam arcade title with a spectator monitor got quite a bit of spotlight through the event. Many people also hung out across the venue even with the lights over most of the event shut off, chatting with friends and watching the last set of performances at the music stage before returning to their hotel rooms and calling it a night.

And that was Castle Point Anime Convention 2024. How was it overall? Well, a month past its original date, I still am looking back on it pretty fondly, being just the right size for my first big event after the end of my winter break. If there was anything I’d say could use work, the only thing that would really come to mind is everything in the game room shutting off after 7PM. The vendor’s hall was also somewhat not to my liking, but considering I do not attend conventions for the vendors for reasons I stated before, I am in no position to say how it could be made better, especially with the limited space the vendors could occupy compared to other anime shows like AnimeNext and especially AnimeNYC. The one saving grace this event had over 2023 was the weather being bright and sunny.

At this point, you all may be familiar with how I usually end these anime convention overviews: a look back at the “trends” of the convention via its cosplays and the arts and other merch sold in the Artist’s Alley. I’m just going to go out and say that Genshin/Honkai, Jojo, One Piece, and to a lesser extent Demon Slayer were the biggest winners when it came to cosplays. With the artist’s alley I couldn’t really tell what series would have “won” as there was quite a wide range of representation even with the obvious biases twoards the newest and most popular media franchises. And because I’m something of a fighting game guy and have friends in the FGC, I’m happy to conform that quite a bit of Guilty Gear representation was at the event via cosplays and a few artist booths. The same cannot be said for Street Fighter 6 or Tekken 8 despite the tournaments the two games had in the gaming section. If you’re wondering how big the cosplay photo gallery got, I was able to get 100 shots total. Not close to my current record but by this point I think chasing down cosplays is much more cardio than my body can take, considering 120 is my average for Castle Point Anime Convention anyways. Now that that's taken care of, you can see the complete cosplay shoot gallery here. The full commission haul for both Castle Point and EMcon can be found here.

That's all for now! See you next month for an overview on Cradle Con and Brooklyn Comic Con, which will also be... the month of my 30th birthday?!

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Anniversary Bash 26: The Recap

(Pardon the low-res Spaz, it was 2 in the morning when I made this and I couldn’t bother to go find a higher-resolution image)

For the previous two years I’ve been doing blog writeups on the Anniversary Bash, a yearly event held by the community of Epic Games’ Jazz Jackrabbit 2 to celebrate the anniversary of said game’s original (shareware) release. For this year, my drive to participate has been the same as all the Bashes I joined since 2022: to give a community that doesn’t get a lot of attention the recognition it deserves.

The Anniversary Bash was the most active between 8PM and 12AM CET, which translated to 2PM and 6PM in my timezone (EST). Friday and Saturday ended up being the most active days of the Bash and the days where I was present for the entire length with a few breaks here and there. Normally these two days would be considered the “standard” days of the event—Day 1 is Battle, Day 2 is Capture the Flag (commonly shortened to just “Capture” in the JJ2 community). For this year, the hosts decided to try a different format: For each time the level rotation for Battle looped twice, the game mode would swap to CTF and after two full loops on the CTF levels, the inverse would happen.

For all four days, the server was run alongside mod files known as “mutators” that altered parts of the game. As a Jazz player, one particular mutator would give the game’s titular star a buff to his super jump uppercut, now coming out instantly with zero delay and making it more useful to reach higher platforms and serve as a useful, albeit situational, getaway option. The other of the Jackrabbit Bros., Spaz, was played by roughly 90% of the Bash’s player base thanks to just how good his double jump is as both a traversal tool and to help him get some much-needed height while in combat. As with 2022 and 2023, I swore with Jazz for the entire event as I’ve become too used to the helicopter ears and high-jump technique, but I would briefly swap to Spaz and third playable character Lori with another mutator that let players change characters on the fly without having to back out to the main menu. Despite being a really useful idea (and a great QoL feature in general) on paper, the mutator was shut off after only a few rounds of being active as players could simply switch mid game whenever they wanted a different set of abilities and what character the player picked did not carry over from level to level, reverting back to their default pick once the current match was over.

One mutator that was able to stick around was True Fur, a mod that I indirectly contributed to (or inspired, I’m not sure). It implements a form of extended custom character colors in a manner similar to Sonic Robo Blast 2 that works on all three of the main playable characters. Having released late last year, this was the first Bash to implement True Fur, and I pretty much used it for every day after the first to play as a dark blue Jazz Jackrabbit. The remaining mutators mostly served to enable the alternate game modes that became more common on the last two days of the event, but a few did sneak into the first half as teasers to liven up the experience. The roster of game mode mutators included the likes of a randomizer (spawn with a random weapon that you must use, or have a chance of transforming into a bird/frog on each life), Multiflag (players can carry more than one flag), Last Rabbit Standing (each player gets only one life per game), Pestilence (aka the Zombies mode), Free Bird (a mode in which dead players become birds and must be “de-birded” to return to the game), “SWAT” (All players spawn with 1 hit point), and Treasure Hunt (Players gain gems from defeating enemies and must cash them out back at their base).

Not every community-made game mode made the cut for this year's Bash: A mode where players pick a team leader and then hunt the opposing team’s leader was nowhere in sight. Another particular game mode that I greatly anticipated and associated with the finale days of the Bash, Ground Force, in which players use weapons to demolish the stage and ring-out other players, failed to make a presence this year. It’s unfortunate that not every mode was able to come back, but considering the dip in players as the event went into its second half, the drive to play these modes was not strong enough to warrant playing them considering they best work with bigger player counts in mind.

The final hour of the Bash would feature a few games of the "SWAT" mode I mentioned above, and it made me realize that it may be one of if not my strongest mode in all of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 as you no longer had to time your shots around other players' post-hit invulnerability and could just go wild with what weapons you collected till you gained enough points to win. Afterwards, a joke level with nothing but a horde of Jazz raining down from the screen to the castle level background was all that was left before everyone was disconnected from the server. Overall, even with a few setbacks and technical issues that arose, the event was a blast and I applaud the organizers for working their hardest to gather the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 community together for another special weekend. Although in the end it does make me wish for more, as typical for many of the annual events I attend each year.

So what else do I have to mention about the Bash? Well... not much in all honesty. As it’s been well over a month since the Bash came to an end after the first weekend of April, I was running well behind my personal schedule going into April and even May due to preparing for a more active lifestyle (mostly because of all the conventions in my area, more on that in my next blogpost maybe). The only other thing I could discuss regards to the Bash that I didn’t already is the input lag, though that’s on me for playing the game from across the Atlantic Ocean and by now I’ve gotten used to playing with the handicap anyways. And considering the age of the game, it wouldn’t be fair to expect a huge net code update to make server responses near-seamless.

In conclusion, I would like to give my sincere thanks to the the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 multiplayer community for organizing another great Bash. As for myself, I’ll be catching up on blogposts for this blog since I’ve been falling behind this season after a rather slow and busy April.

Super MAYhem 17: Mario Doom Patch Release 2

Yup, it's time to DOOM with Mario and the gang once more. I'm going to keep this one briefer than last time since I already gave you the full run-down back in August last year (and I have a lot of projects/blogposts I need to get back to), but to recap:

This is the Super MAYhem 17 Super Mario Doom patch, a custom build of Valigarmander's Super Mario Doom mod from 2012 designed specifically for use with the the Super MAYhem 17 megawad. Since both mods were Mario themed (one for levels, the other for everything else), the natural instinct was to combine the two together in such a way that it works in various different source ports (for context, the original Super Mario Doom only works in Zandronum and [G]ZDoom). The result is a patch inspired by doomkid's "vanilla conversion" of Super Mario Doom, converting all sprites to use MAYhem 17's a custom palette to give them slightly more color options, removing any assets that would conflict with those of MAYhem 17's, and making small presentation improvements.

When I originally released the patch back in August of last year, it wasn't perfect and I had plans to update it sometime down the line. Later that year and even into this year, I started working on a newer version of the Super MAYhem 17 Mario Doom patch that adds several new changes and fixes. The focus was to polish up the Super Mario Doom content and make it feel better intertwined with Super MAYhem 17. And while there is still plenty left that could be done, including fixing a crash bug when closing out of the game on GZDoom and allowing the game to work in maybe one or two more source ports, this is a good state to call the patch "finished, for now" as I want to shift focus to other, bigger projects. If you’re curious, the attached readme goes into more detail on what has been added and some ideas for what I’m planning for a theoretical Release 3.

You can grab release 2 of the Super MAYhem 17 Mario Doom patch here.

As usual, you'll need a copy of Doom II to serve as the base for this mod/patch. If you don't own Doom II, you can also use Freedoom: Phase 2 as the base.

As with before, the patch is designed to work alongside Super MAYhem 2017 and must be loaded after Mayhem 17's wad file (and its own “update1” patch) to add in the Mario enemies, weapons, and sounds. Super Mayhem 17 is not included with the download and can be found here. If you’re new to playing Doom mods, I recommend the Doom Launcher to make organizing and launching into Doom mods (especially multiple mods at once) easier.

Mangchi The HammerBoy (PC) Audio Rip

Since times have still been a bit slow and light in productivity for my liking lately and I've just begun to warm back up into doing bigger projects, how about another soundtrack rip to pass the time? This one came by rather sudden, as it's a very obscure little gem that even I, someone who knows way too much about obscure games, completely passed on back then until a streamer I started following since last year did a surprise longplay of it live on their Twitch channel back in March.

That's right, we're traveling to Korea to experience the one and only Mangchi the HammerBoy.

Released in the year 2004 as a loose adaptation/licensed title for the similarly-titled "Hammerboy" anime film based on the manhwa of the same name, Mangchi the HammerBoy is a simple 3D platformer exclusive to Windows PC. Owing to its obscurity, it has very little documentation online, and what documentation exists in English is extremely brief. What's most notable from this research is Mangchi's complete redesign into something closer to Kingdome Hearts' Sora, including changing the weapon from a real-life hammer with a rope on it to a giant cartoon mallet. All the characters from the original story that do appear were able to keep their names at the least, including the game's central villain and final boss Moonk. The game is also pretty short, having only 5 stages total, but I will admit that the first level, an abandoned and flooded city, is not a common trope for the setting of a 3D platformer.

The game's audio comes entirely in the form of wav files, which made assembling the soundtrack as easy as "convert to mp3 and tag the files appropriately". I also included the theme used in the opening FMV sequence but, for understandable reasons, didn't do the same with the rest of the in-game cutscenes that are full of sound effects and voice lines. If there is interest in listening to those as well, I will gladly convert those and bundle them with the full rip as extras since I would also like to update the track of Stage 4's boss with the boss' actual name if I ever come across it in the future.

With that all covered, here's the audio rip for your listening pleasure.

Conventions of 2024: A Mission's Briefing

 

It's nearing the end of March and with that, local pop culture conventions are once again getting on my mind as I prep for another year of attending big events in person and bribing the artists in Artist's Alley to draw my immense and ever-growing selection of OC's as I tend to do.

...Okay that's not all there is to these events, but considering all the commission dumps I post on my other blog, I wouldn't be surprised if "commissions" were engraved into my brain whenever I attend an anime or comic convention. I suppose that happens when you have a giant roster of original characters and want to see them drawn in the art style of other artists. Anyways, it's March, and with this being the time I post my big lineup of conventions I'll be attending throughout the year, I had to get it done before April rolled around and I start attending events live once again. This time I abolished the Major/Minor event format of last year since it didn't feel fair, deciding the best way to portray the events was to do so on all equal footing.

The presence of conventions I'm attending for the first time, as well as events that I have not gone to in more than a year was a part of that reasoning for every event falling under the same amount of attention. A good friend of mine in the convention scene motivated me to grab tickets to Brooklyn Comic Con after the cancelation of what would have been AnimeNext 2024. Meanwhile, AnimeNYC's move to August has allowed me to fill the rest of Fall with two events. DepycCon and AnimeNJ++. The former I only attended once in 2016 until I was forced to shelf attending further years of the event as it occurred in too close of a proximity to AnimeNYC. The latter will be having its second year and since now there's no other events in the area competing with its timeslot I can easily attend it and see how it works as an anime convention. Based on what I heard so far, both events look good as wind-down events as the winter season approaches, and if everything goes as planned, the Festival of Games will return once more after skipping 2023 to cap off the year.

I'll hold off until the end of the year before I talk about plans for 2025 and beyond, as it's still far too early to discuss potential schedule changes just incase another event pops up that I can attend or if AnimeNext resurrects itself. For now, expect the usual from these events: lots of photos, lots of cosplays, and lots of commissions.

The Tale of a Graffiti Artist Sticker

Since I haven't given myself the chance to talk about my personal life outside of content creation and convention trips in a long while, I thought I'd expand out a bit and try writing about something that I found in a town that's just south of my home, and well, something that spans several years of mystery.

Years ago, along a road close to my home in the middle of a big expansion, there was an old, condemned building with white paint that was a popular target for graffiti artists to express themselves. At one point, a particular piece of graffiti would decorate the front of this small building: a bust of cartoon character in a flashy suit with large eyes and an afro. It would be soon painted over and before you know it, the building would be demolished. Even with the building gone, I would proceed to see the graffiti one, maybe two other time(s) in the local area, all before it would seemingly vanish from my eyes for the next few years.

That was, until that same graffiti popped up once more, this time as a two-tone black and yellow sticker on the back of a sign on the sidewalk. The graffiti I had seen all these years ago was now joined by a figure in a suit of some kind, sporting a smooth, clean-cut black afro reclining on a chair with a yellow suit of sorts. Unable to resist the urge, I snapped the sticker with a camera to replicate the exact definitions of the original image, though as someone that prefers to keep something of a low profile when it comes to public sightings and occurrences like these, I do not wish to post the sticker on this blog nor investigate it (and the graffiti itself) further, especially in the chance the image spreads out even further than the scopes of this blog.

So with that said, you may be wondering, what drove me to make this blog post in the first place? Well, as an artist, I've always had some form of appreciation towards graffiti, even if I would never stoop to doing it as a form of vandalization. Plus, I've always been pretty big into Jet Set Radio (along with its spiritual successor Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, despite not having purchased it yet as of this writing) for its artstyle, attitude, and the creative gameplay and spectacle featured within, and similarly latched onto The World Ends with You dualogy, which also heavily freatures graffiti. It's just, no other piece of graffiti has ever captured my attention to such an extent by featuring an recurring character of sorts, and then attaching said character to an otherwise unknown person. It's something I'd love to research and find more detail on, but again, I want to keep myself and everyone else safe, especially as someone that enjoys graffiti as an art form and a sign of expressing one's creativity, but not as an act of vandalism.

And that 's all I got for now, I wanted to get this out before the month ends as it's the first time this blog has received an article on Leap Day... To think these only happen every four years, and I'll admit, I was caught off guard earlier this morning when the day first came to be. As for what will be next for the blog, things should slowly begin to get more productive around here, now that March is here and I spent too much time this Winter R&R'ing instead of furthering my own projects. Who knows, maybe I'll follow my own promises and goals from last year and go create something?

Naughty Ones (Commodore Amiga) Soundtrack

Well I couldn't figure out something to post last month so to kick off February I'm posting another game soundtrack that, to my knowledge, has not received a modern rip: A little-known Commodore Amiga game that goes by the name "Naughty Ones".

Released on both the Amiga and it's console counterpart, the Amiga CD32, Naughty Ones is what happens when a group of people decide to make an elimination platformer that bucks some of the trends of the subgenre birthed by the runaway success of Taito's Bubble Bobble. You move John (and Jim in two player mode) from room to room, chucking destructive rubber balls at whatever enemies came up in the minds of the developers in order to escape the surreal reality the heroes have been trapped in.

(...Can conform, rubber balls are really destructive)

You all probably recognize the game from the Angry Video Game Nerd's episode on the Amiga CD32, which was how I myself came across the title years ago. It drove me to break out the Amiga emulator and try the game for myself. It manages to dodge the "europlatformer" trope common in Amiga games where they pad out the gameplay with collectathon elements since the worst it gets is having to find a single key to reach the end instead of dropping you inside a huge maze and tasking you with grabbing every single last thing in the level.

While based on existing soundtrack rips, said rips either combine all the songs into one video (i.e. Youtube uploads) or are simply the raw audio files extracted from the game, including the level intros in the same audio files as their parent level. This rip takes the audio files, separates the intros into their own audio tracks, and converts everything into more universal mp3 files. For the audio tracks that were already separate, they were simply copied over and converted with no further alterations. Thus, I cannot claim full credit for this rip, just the part of making it easier to listen to individual tracks in the soundtrack. 

You can download the full set of songs here. I am uncertain on if and when I'll decide to create another soundtrack rip, but the next one that gets posted here will (hopefully) have more effort put behind it on my part aside from just "throw into foobar2000 and press convert". As for what else is in store, that is on my terms to figure out.

The (hopefully not) belated “Welcome 2024” post.

Greetings everyone. With the holiday season pretty much over aside from New Year's and having already dedicated all of my last blog entry to conventions, I thought I’d make this the big post to help ring in the new year and give some insight on what I have plotted.

For one, 2023 was still a rather slow year productivity-wise. In spite of attempts to break back into drawing art, various complications including my hardware setups not exactly working out pushed back a lot of plans- from the out-of-nowhere overheating of my drawing tablet (that somehow doesn’t have any form of venting) to the sudden failure of my refurbished Mac’s hard drive (…again) and the laptop I received for productivity (namely, game development) not exactly working as such for anything except for the smallest and most minor of projects. With all of these inconveniences piling up, a lot of my interior drive and motivation stalled or stopped completely as summer dragged on, summer became autumn, and before you know it I was time to prep for two big conventions that season. And while I still managed to get by with smaller projects and even finish a few, most of the bigger things I had planned (sketches, illustrations, fanart, etc) just didn’t happen. Doubly so when my mother would end up hospitalized again in June due to a fracture in her foot, which was mis-diagnosed and mis-treated as an infection at first, and she wouldn’t fully recover from the fracture until the tail end of November, directly before the holiday season would truly begin.

With my inner morale still not being at its greatest, I spent 2023 treading along with smaller, less stressful projects and plotting ahead for the future, taking notes and writing documents on the current state of my Aozora’s Adventure project of original characters and the many character and game concepts I’ve written for it over the years. Reaching the point where I likely have enough characters and game concepts to create a full series, I’ve been more selective and picky on what gets into the project lately, especially with the character roster’s sixth and final arc still in active development and some holes from earlier arcs that began in the 2010's being slowly patched up. As for the games, well, that’s still up in the air, as none of them have begun any form of active development apart from the concepts and I feel stingy on doing them out of order for reasons too lengthy to list here. While I still would like to give Aozora and his friends their own series of video games, the state of my morale puts me in no position to go learn gamedev at this time, and a part of me wants to grind out fleshing out and/or finishing up the concepts so when the time does indeed come, I’ll have a much better understanding on what I plan on doing, where to cut back, and etc.

For most of 2023, my source of online entertainment came in the form of video game streams on Twitch, and as the year came to a close I began to brainstorm picking up a headset and getting into live-streaming games on a set schedule. It’d be a way I could share the kind of games I enjoy the most, bringing to the limelight obscure, forgotten titles, while still exposing myself to newer games and getting a chance to meet and interact with a wide audience. Of course, the schedule would change over time as I get more comfortable with streaming and the audience grows. I do want to try out some test streams later into the year to try out the streaming equipment I’ve been gathering since 2022 (no joke) and I’ll be sure to keep everyone in the loop on when they’ll happen. As for other social medias, I’ve still been using the same lot of sites despite intends to break away from social media late last year under fears of it being too distracting for my work force. After much thought, I stopped considering it at the root of my problems, since it’s more everything else that’s been stopping me in my tracks (though I’d argue watching Twitch streams all the time is just as guilty of bring a distraction for me as social media is).

The future venture into game streaming will likely get its own blogpost in the next few months as I wanted to keep this particular blog entry focused on multiple subjects and there’s still quite a but if research and asking around I need to do on the side. And speaking of game streaming, I had also considered, quite numerous times in fact, getting into creating Youtube videos featuring me talking about particular subjects in the video gaming space that I feel could use a second opinion, or in cases when a game stream wouldn’t do it justice to show off or talk about a game, category, or franchise and needs a more focused, in-depth look. Quite a few topic ideas came about during these periods of brainstorming, including comparisons between two games and unbiased thoughts on each of them, as well as overviews of a set of games in a particular series or themed collection. Whenever these will actually happen is still up in the air, and there may still be some pieces of video equipment I may need to acquire and/or familiarize myself with, especially in regards to voice work and gathering footage of the topics I want to cover.

Another big focus for 2024 I want to lean on is not so much for productivity but more-so for my own personal gain. While I put it on the wayside for a bit due to the poor weather conditions in December (and I mean really poor, just count all the days rain or thick fog enveloped the northeast this month) and the holidays being just around the corner, I want to return to improving my own physical health in my times away from the computer. Go on walks, touch grass, tour some shopping malls, and work towards strengthening my legs for another big and eventful year of conventions. And hey, some classic arcades opened last year, so I want more of an excuse to take these trips and be able to survive standing up for lengthy amounts of time... or sitting in comically small stools.

With that all said, there are still a few small leftover projects hanging loose, some from the 2022 season that I originally carried over into 2023. Thankfully there aren’t many, but it’ll likely be a bit of time before I get to deciding to work on these projects again— I got sick with a sinus infection the week before Christmas this year and ended up quite run down that weekend, but thankfully I recovered enough to enjoy Christmas and seeing the extended family once more. I’ll likely give myself a few weeks into 2024 to warm back up, as the Christmas burnout is well, not a figment of your imagination, especially when you’re still recovering from the aftermath of being very sick and not being able to do much aside from prep for the holidays.

So how will 2024 fare? Will it be the big comeback year I’ve been aiming for since the start of the 2020’s? Will I finally get comfortable with drawing art again? What about the impending streaming career? Or even the future of this very blog? Well, we’ll see.

Conventions of 2023: AnimeNYC + Yearly Convention Wrap-Up

Aka “Superjustinbros Goes to New York City: Part 2”.

After only five weeks since the conclusion of New York Comic Con, the Javits Center in Manhattan would once again fill up with crowds of people as the sixth ever AnimeNYC would commence for the entire weekend, from Friday to Sunday. It was an event that I was highly anticipating since around the end of AnimeNext five months prior, and when the time came to attend it, it was an event that satisfied me with a great selection of artists, cosplays, and panels to check out, but at the same time it also left me with conflicting thoughts, and now that I’ve had the time to recover from the event I think I’m in a good place to discuss how AnimeNYC 2023 went as a whole and how it compares to both prior iterations of the event, as well as other conventions I’ve attended this year.

Before the first day of the event, AnimeNYC’s social media accounts announced some big changes that would go into the event effective the next year: The event would be ditching its mid-November timeslot that it’s held onto since 2017 in favor of moving the event to August, allowing it to use the entirety of the event space like New York Conic Con does. As an event that has only grown and become bigger over time, I’d say it needs the increased amount of space, and one look at my thoughts of this year’s event may clue you in as to why. That said, while I am confident that the shift in schedule will result in bigger and better things for AnimeNYC, this means the event lands in the middle of an already packed month (or perhaps, an already packed season) when it comes to conventions, including Otakon and the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, compared to its former home of November where it could stand out on its own as one of the last conventions of the fall season in a time where not many of them occur with the approaching holidays and such.

Anyways, the event.

If you’ve attended AnimeNYC in 2022, then the layout should be very familiar: The vendors and artists all combined into one exhibition hall, panel rooms down in the lowest floors, and hangout/dining areas all in the central lobby. The weather was rather cloudy at first as a rainstorm had passed through very early in the morning, but as the con went on, the sun would slowly emerge before finally setting in the afternoon. After 10am, the lobby was filled with attendees and cosplayers flooding in from a waiting queue outside, and the place was filled very quickly. The resulting crowds were thankfully manageable and I could walk around without worry of bumping into too many people, but the Artist’s Alley ended up with a few big crowds during the time I spent in there. Thankfully, it never got to the level of NYCC 2022 unbearable, but it still made trying to navigate through the artist’s alley to find artists a hassle, and by the end I spent more time in there than I was willing to admit from having to brave crowds, chat with artists, and acquire some swag from their booths. By the point 6:00 pm rolled around, right as the big crowds through Artist’s Alley faded, I was finished with the section, said my goodbyes, and left, without even bothering to hold further chats with certain artists I had known for years since my first foray into attending conventions. Still, I had a great time meeting and supporting everyone in the Artist’s Alley and I exited the event with a nice haul of commissions, even if some had to be saved till after the event as they couldn’t be done on time.

The Vendors’ Hall was, in direct contrast, another story. Unlike last year, there weren’t really much in the way of giant set pieces save for a few booths in the front, with most of them instead at NYCC the past month to grace that event’s vendors. No big inflatable Goku or Luffy, no giant set of Bandai Namco shops, no IntI Creates store, and no dedicated space for Gundam. Instead we got… a booth for the US military(?)… and GFuel…(???) …Yeah, I’ll kindly decline. Even miHoYo, which had a booth for Genshin Impact last year and currently has their IP’s all over artist alleys thanks to their loving fan base didn’t return this year with a booth to promote Honkai: Star Rail. Then again I’m not one to gush over gacha games, and thus the Fate and NIKKI booths, which were featured pretty prominently in announcements, completely passed me by. The former was doing their annual live shows in front of the entrance gate and the latter had a shootout attraction with plastic replica guns. Viz Media and a few streaming services had booths to advertise and sell their products and I did manage to get some… rather silly pics at the Jojo World booth and a photo-op for Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun a floor higher. Other than that, there’s not much else to say about the vendors; it’s realistically as good as a vendor’s hall could get at an anime convention without going overboard on the budget like at New York Comic Con, but when you compare it to other anime conventions, it’s probably one of, if not the best vendor’s hall of the anime conventions I attend each year (although that feels unfair for Castle Point Anime Convention, given its limited event space in comparison).

Panels and cosplays, a trademark of every good convention, were also a big part of this event. You’ll have to take the words of others on how good the panels were, as I got too preoccupied with touring the event space (especially the artist’s alley) to go and attend one. I did eye up the Gurren Lagann + Kill la Kill Anniversary Event, especially the news that Gurren Lagann would be coming to theaters in the US early next year for a limited time. There was also a very big Undead Unluck panel, but it was one of the year’s panels that required a reservation to attend so I didn’t exactly consider it. And then there was the cosplays. Just… wow; the cosplayers here COOKED with their cosplays of choice and I couldn’t have been any happier. Seeing the likes of Jet Set Radio and Guilty Gear in the sea of miHoYo cosplays and the continued popularity of One Piece and Jojo characters being represented in cosplay form was a pleasant delight. It was perhaps the best part of the event next to the artist’s alley and what made me end up pulling off a 17k walking marathon through the Javits center. I’m glad I was able to snap so many and that the artist’s alley didn’t have AnimeNext’s super-strict policies against photos in the artist’s alley, but I think going forward for future anime cons there won’t be as large of a gallery of cosplay photos as there ended up being this time, considering that by the closure of the vendors and artists I was just snapping away at whatever cosplays I could. I wouldn’t call it my number 1 focus of the event, but I guess after my last set of cosplay photos from five months ago, I was hungry to see more, especially in an area as large as New York City.

Anyways, the trends:

• I didn’t seem to notice as many Genshin Impact cosplays as I did in 2022, with most of the franchise’s representation being in Artist Alley. It still had a strong showing in representation in cosplays, but I think with so many conventions with it as the “top dog” across last year and earlier this year, I noticed a small drop-off in Genshin cosplayers. The franchise still had an iron grip on the Artist’s Alley
• Bleach continued to rise steadily in cosplay representation, certainly thanks to the return of the anime to finally adapt the Thousand Year Blood War Arc.
• The rest of the big names in cosplay came from other Shonen Jump properties, with One Piece and My Hero Academia still being very prominent amongst the cosplays. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure was also everywhere— I saw several DIO on the show floor and a few Jolene’s
• Speaking of Shonen Jump, Demon Slayer, Chainsaw Man, and Jujutsu Kaisen were not too far off, and even Naruto got a few solid cosplays out on the show floor. Even One Punch Man got a couple.
• I of course mentioned the group of Jet Set Radio cosplayers in the previous paragraph, but there were also some Guilty Gear cosplayers I ran into in the Artist’s Alley. Being able to see fighting games in an environment where they once weren’t commonplace, especially when one of them was a Potemkin cosplay. It’s not so much of a trend as it is an honorable mention. There were even a few artist booths dedicated to, or otherwise mostly featuring, fighting games.
• Another honorable mention was Fairy Tail, with a few Natsus and Erzas. Of course pink hair is very hard to pull off so the cosplayers stuck with magenta/burgundy hair.
• While I pointed it out when I covered AnimeNext, the biggest surprise of the event’s cosplays was Trigun rising out from the ashes. There were multiple cosplays of Vash the Stampede plus some of its other major characters; and in the Artist’s Alley there were enough artists with merchandise of the series that they had a Trigun stamp rally.

After getting home and going through my gallery of cosplay snaps, followed by signaling out all the duplicates I took in order to pick the best choices, the final tally was 199 cosplay photos. The number caught me by surprise since it was the same exact number of photos I had accumulated at last year’s AnimeNYC. Will the number ever be topped? Honestly I’m not sure—as much as I love cosplays at anime conventions I’d rather not let them consume my entire trip there, since I attend anime conventions for the artist’s alleys, the social experiences, and (occasionally) the panels, alongside the cosplays. Plus, the anime conventions have always given me the kinds of cosplay selections I enjoy since I started snapping cosplay pics at AnimeNext 2016, so it’s hard to ignore them.

Aside from the quintessential convention features; there was also an arcade in the back left corner of the vendors. Being an anime convention, it was loaded with the common selections of rhythm arcade games you expect at other anime-themed events, but thanks to the support of Psychic Drive, there were a healthy selection of non-rhythm games housed in candy cabinets to pick from as well, with fighting games and head-to-head puzzle games serving as their lineup. And incase you’re curious; there were no console games present, and much like AnimeNext, the game room closed along.

After nine hours, the vendors and artists closed, and after sticking around for an extra hour and a half to grab some last minute cosplays, I returned to my car and left, pondering about how the journey went and reflecting on the past several months of conventions since all the way back in Spring as I drove home. There was a lot that came on the mind but I’ll start with my final versify of AnimeNYC. In short, while I still think AnimeNYC 2019 and 2022 were my favorite years of the event (in spite of 2019 also having severe congestion in the artist’s alley, possibly mores than this year), this came very close to how 2022 went, with my only real regret for the event being the inability to tour the entire artist’s alley at a quicker pace while still finding time for other things at the event. Aside from that, it was a fun time, and I look forward to seeing how the event changes next year now that it’ll have access to more of the Javits Center to fit in everything in a convention that steadily gets bigger and bigger each year.

And that concludes my coverage on AnimeNYC, and by extension, the 2023 season of conventions. The convention commissions for AnimeNYC will be a bit late, but you can check out the cosplay gallery I’ve assembled at this link. And since this is the last event for a good while, I wanted to spend some extra time and chat about how the year went as an attendee for various conventions of different categories. To keep a long story short, this was honestly a very strong year and all the events have had their share of strengths and weaknesses. Of course, not all of them were big winners in the enjoyment factor but I came out of every event I attended this year with something to appreciate. Unfortunately, the fourth and final side event I had planned to attend, the Festival of Games, was dropped by the organizers for this year, though I heard there are plans to have a smaller swap meet until they try to have the event again in full for December 2024.

And for this year, I thought it’d be fun to rank each of the events I made a presence at, both on how I feel each event was handled given their scale and what I feel they could improve on, and how much I enjoyed them on a personal level. And so, without further hesitation, here’s where I stand on the con rankings of the main lineup based on their quality relative to the scale and budget they were given to work, and what they had to offer for that scale:

1. New York Comic Con 2023
2. AnimeNYC 2023
3. Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2023
4. Castle Point Anime Convention 2023
5. EternalCon 2023
6. AnimeNext 2023

And here is where I would rate each event based on my own enjoyment factor and how much they kept me wanting for more:

1. Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2023
2. AnimeNYC 2023
3. Castle Point Anime Convention 2023
4. New York Comic Con 2023
5. AnimeNext 2023
6. EternalCon 2023

I should point out that all of the entires on this list are very close to one another in terms of quality/enjoyment; and you may be surprised at how AnimeNext made the bottom of the list for the con rankings. While most of the conventions have had smaller issues and accidents, the move to a new venue really did a toll on AnimeNext and the decision to split the event into two separate venues only interconnected through a shuttle bus did not do it any favors. And while I loved going to EternalCon and it perhaps had the least hectic artist’s alley of all the main events, it suffered the most from having no seating opportunities unless you went out of your way and it’s something I want to see make stronger use of the venue it’s given, especially with the vendors’ hall. When it came to the side events, CradleCon, having access to a bigger venue, was the essential side event of the three that were able to take place in my home turf of Long Island. That’s not to say that EMCon and LITropicCon weren’t enjoyable; EMCon was still the perfect warmup event before Castle Point Anime Convention, and LITropicCon was a great way to socialize and catch up with several artists in the Artist’s Alley as there would be no other notable events on Long Island to attend due to the cancelation of Festival of Games.

So where do we go from here? Well, there’s a honest chance that 2024 will be more of the same, but with the schedule shift AnimeNYC will be going through starting next year, I may introduce some new events into my schedule, provided they can fit in and I’m able to withstand being on my feet for a few hours that day.

The first and most obvious choice is DerpyCon. I attended the event once in 2016 to a rather mixed result, and since then I’ve contemplated attending the event again but found it difficult to do so with two big mammoth conventions (NYCC and AnimeNYC) sandwiching it. Now with AnimeNYC moved up to August, it would be much easier to slot in Derpy Con as a new side event for the convention journey before the holidays start. On that merit, Cradle Con would likely get promoted to main event, since it had as much to do for a comic and art fan as LI Retro did for retro game fans, combined with its size and scale and how many commissions I were able to haul up from that event, with a total tally very close to the other, bigger comic and anime conventions I attend.

In terms of other comic and general pop culture events, Thy Geekdom Con and Brooklyn Comic Con come to mind, as I tried attending the former in 2022 following the cancelation of that year’s AnimeNext only to wind up not opting into the event at all, and since then it’s been on the mind whenever the beginning of the year drops. The latter only entered my mind after a friend of mine that I saw for the first time in years at AnimeNYC this year in the Artist’s Alley mentioned they were applying to be part of that event’s alley. However, both of them are very close to other events I already attend— Thy Geekdom is the week after Cradle Con, and Brooklyn Comic Con will likely end up the week before AnimeNext, if the dates of previous AnimeNext’s is any indication. There’s also Wintercon, though its stronger adult theming (including being set in a casino) and being much further disconnected from anime than NYCC draws me further away from possibly attending the event. If either of these events become a possibility, I would likely not stay for the full duration of a single day at each event since I do want to be able to rest and take a breather (and give my wallet a chance to recover).

I’ll wait till early next year before I come up with a concrete schedule on what I plan to attend (spoilers, it’ll mostly be a repeat of this year’s events). In the meantime, I’ll get up and on outta here since this blogpost has gone long enough. Thank you all for sticking with the convention coverages this year—the one convention per post format has really let me go all out on describing the events that bring me immense joy each year. I have a lot of things in the planning for 2024, since this year did not work out with all the leftover projects still hanging. Understandably, many of them will bleed into 2024, and once I’m all reeled back from the holiday prep, my goal will be to power through most of these leftover projects and venture out of the comfort zone for a change of scenery. While I’ve dropped hints of my plans in the past and on social media, I think I’ll leave it mostly up in the air from here on out.

I’ll likely have one more blogpost to close out the year, but until then, See You, Space Cowboys.