I've just came back from visiting Hobbycon 2009 this morning! :DI've heard of Hobbycon in 2007 when they were first held and organized by the peoples of the clickstartplay forums over at Kompleks Asia City. Hobbycon's a convention for leisure hobbies which includes animes, mangas and doujins, and the convention were held every year since then. I had never actually visited any of the previous Hobbycons as I hadn't had the chance. This year, I finally succeeded in making myself to attend the event.The event venue itself, City Mall, is said to be notorious for having not enough carparks at times so visitors were asked to carpool with others. In fact, no public transport (i.e. busses or taxi) actually pass by that shopping complex so it is normal for the organizers to be worried. We're able to easily find a place to park our car as we went there early at around 11am. It was a bit... too early. A few of the booths weren't up yet and there were very few people. The event area was a little... small. I was expecting more booths, or at least more places where I can walk to look around. It only took me around a few minutes to finish browsing through all the booths. I did what most otakus would do on a pilgrimage to the holy land (i.e. a convention): bought some of their merchandises, asked for some autographs from the doujin artists, and took several photos of the cosplayers. Nothing else to do, really. :DI bought a pack of their, erm, so called, limited edition "Hobbycon collectibles" which consists of a badge, a bookmark, stickers and a calendar, all for RM10. Looking at the "Pinsa" plastic bags which contained the items made me realise that, oh yeah, they could have been ordered from that souvenir shop, lol. I had to hold onto the "collectibles" that I've bought because they have not prepared any plastic bags or paper bags for the customers! (if this were during the Prefect Board's bazaar I'd call this "weak management" and blasted the leaders during the General Meeting!) The "Mascot Design" Competition. I like the bottom left one the most. Figurines. Wow. And their prices are like "wow" too. >_>;;Next, I went over to the booth of "Team Daydreamers", a local doujin group which consists of around, I don't know, five members maybe? Anyway they're a really cool bunch of people. They didn't hesitate to give me their autographs at the back of a doujin I bought from them. *hehe, that's mine*At that time there were quite a lot of people asking for their autographs so it got a bit messy. In my opinion they should set aside different booths where in one they'll sell their stuff and at the other one let the artists give away their autographs. Like this it would be more systematic, nay? Anyway it's my opinion. :DHere are the Cosplayers!Trap. Help. >_>;; (Actually I couldn't help but laugh when I took this photo! XD)Sailor Mercury and, erm... Rukia? (These two girls are from Tshung Tsin too, they looked familiar.) Freya of Chobits! (Not Chii, mind you.) There were not many cosplayers as, like I said before, we came a bit too early. Some were not ready and some can be seen dressing up. I was told by dad that according to the schedule, the cosplay competition would only start at 2pm. I told myself that I'm not going to go home empty handed, so I just took photos of the cosplayers who were around... yeah.At the venue I saw a few... notable things: I saw the owner of the drink stall of our school canteen with one of his workers who's a member of Team Daydreamers doujin team. He was carrying around his camera which I could only describe as "big", taking photos and mingling around with people.I saw Jimmy faithfully standing outside his Ogawa shop trying to sell some massage chairs. XDI remember seeing Class Monitor Irene a.k.a Syaoron too, if I'm not wrong.I also saw shopping trolleys coming in and out of the venue, and no, they're not used for carting otaku stuffs unlike in Comiket. XD (What can you expect if the venue's in a shopping mall?)The one thing which made me felt that the trip I had made was worth it was Team Daydreamer's doujin "The School Dairy".... ...and their autographs. :D
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