Besides being a programmer I'm also a fan of anime and in lesser extent the Japanese culture. However I never actually visited one of the animeconferences in the Netherlands. There are atleast two big ones; Animecon and Abunai. So I decided (about a year beforehand) that I wanted to go to one, but I didn't want to go without cosplaying something. So me and my mother who is pretty good with so called needle and thread set out to make ourselves a costume. We spent several weekends over the course of a year to make the military costume of "Zechs Marquise" of the series "Mobile Suit: Gundam Wing".

So me and a friend of mine went to animecon 2014 in The Hague. We drove there with one of the stewards who help setup and run the event. This resulted in being set to work as soon as we arrived at the venue. We had to screw together some stanchions for the crowd control lines that had to be setup. But this off-course is but a fraction of the work that these stewards put in during the weekend. Besides because we helped we were allowed to cut in line and enter the venue as one of the first people. Which cuts the time spend in the ticket-line considerately.

With my friend as a guide we planned where we wanted to go during the event. We visited most of the cosplay competitions, some of the Japanese culture workshops. We also spent considerable time in the dealer and game room. The game-room was filled with wacky games and wacky controllers for games. On of the wackier controllers was a giant Nes controller, and by giant image a meter wide Nes controller large. Another was a space hopper controller for "Katamari Damacy" and if you don't know what that is Google it you'll understand. On the wacky game side there was a "Taiko" game, A guitar hero-esque drum game with traditional Japanse drums.

There were also some interesting Q&A panels, one of which was a cosplay armor making panel by "Kamui Cosplay". She showed us how she makes her armor cosplays and answered all of our questions with a nice approach to try. I was especially interested because my cosplay missed a sort of mask/helmet hybrid and I wanted to make it myself. It also introduced me to a new cosplay armor making material called worbla and I'm interested to start using it.

All-in-all I had a fun weekend with lots of lovely cosplay and events. I even bought a souvenir model kit of the mech my cosplay piloted in the series. I will probably post the finished model but that will take my some time.