#yay casual arting instead of comic work

[purplebehittindifferent]

Krisp…

[tumblunni]

I JUST REALIZED WHO THIS GUY’S JAPANESE VOICE REMINDS ME OF

Friggin Muchigoro from the sixth One Piece movie! The random half fish half plant probably some human in there somewhere dude who has a pet giant death goldfish and is generally the cutest man on earth

AND THEN THAT MOVIE INCREDIBLY TRAUMATIZED ME

Seriously i still cannot believe this movie even EXISTS, its such a bizarre form of..like..trolling you into accidentally watching a really good movie??? Posters and preproduction material and the art style and the actual name of the thing = “oh its a cute adventure about everyone playing goofy carnival games on carnival island im sure this villain Baron Carnival will absolutely not jumpscare me with something such as for example a sympathetic comic relief goldfish friend remembering that he’s already dead and reliving the process of drowning again while on dry land and you the viewer have to watch every second of it”

SERIOUSLY FUCKIN HELL I STILL MOURN YOU, MUCHIGORO

This film actually turned out to be a FUCKIN AMAZING lovecraftian horror thing where the Fun And Innocent Carnival Games slowly manipulate our heroes into bickering amoungst each other and pick them off one by one with just the excuse of ‘oh he totally abandoned you he wasnt really your friend after all’ (MEANWHILE THE ADORABLE REINDEER MASCOT IS GASPING FOR AIR AS HE’S PINCUSHIONED BY ARROWS IN THE BACKGROUND)

And then fuckin.. super fancy cute mr baron carnival man is actually sacrificing everyone who loses his carnival games to a fuckin terrifying evil spirit of the forest who’s fused to the flesh of his shoulder and whispering dark thoughts into his very bloodstream. And you get to see a fucked up abomination of twisted human flesh fused into a plant stem while our cute happy-go-lucky protagonist cries out that he has no reason to live now his friends are dead and its like WHAT THE ACTUAL JESUS FUCK IS HAPPENING

Oh and at the same time its SURPRISINGLY DEEP and evil carnival dude has a really sympathetic reason behind it all. You see, EVERYONE ELSE ON THE ISLAND IS DEAD! once upon a time he really was just a goofy cute carnival themed pirate dude with a big ol family of funny buddies. And then they all DIED HORRIBLY and this forbidden hellbeast made a pact with him to ressurect them if he murdered other people in return. Yes, everyone having adorable lil flowers and leafs on their head was DARK FORESHADOWING ALL ALONG

So that gets us back around to this super memorable goddamn character! Poor muchigoro!! he’s just a funny doofus who loves his pet fishie and also apparantly his boss. Like he’s really loyal and hero-worshippy to baron festival mc evilplanman, and baron festival mc evilplanman looks so goddamn GENUINELY FORLORN every damn second theyre together. There’s so many foreshadows where this dude is like ‘ha ha isnt every day wonderful when we’re together, im so happy you all enjoy these funny carnival games i made for you to all never be sad ever again’. *looks like he’s fuckin dying inside* jesus christ seriously are we really doing a plot about a suicidal man who lost everyone he ever loved and now he locks himself up with these fake illusions of what they used to be like, struggling with the fact he knows its wrong to kill others to sustain their life but he loves them so much he just cant stop himself AND WHO SAW THIS COMING FROM GODDAMN GOLDFISH HUGS BEANMAN

So yeah GOLDFISH HUGS BEANMAN is your first mega scarring moment hinting at the dark plot. He almost accidentally tells the heroes about whats going on, since he doesnt actually know he’s dead and ends up stumbling into a gap in his memory. And then the Ominous Forest Sentience just fuckin.. revokes his life permissions. Dude drops dead for getting too close to knowing the truth. Incredibly graphically. And then even worse is that he just reappears again later on, back in comic relief mode and apparantly unable to remember anything. He’s all “haha boss thats so weird i fell asleep on the job! I’m totally fine now tho!” and boss dude is like *bittersweet look* “i’m so glad i cant bear to see you without a smile on your face” *casually glances over the fact he just fuckin fed a guy’s soul to the dessicated corpse of his best friend and he just got back up”

And theres loads of equally depressing stuff with all the other equally adorable buddies!! There’s the ring toss attraction with a trio of adorable tiny elderly folks in funny frog costumes, this weird ice hockey/cooking competition combo game with a big scary buff dude who has a soft spot for bunny hair clips, and A LITERAL TEN YEAR OLD CHILD WHO WAS ALSO AMOUNGST THE DEAD

Oh goddd, Gappa is the one that traumatized me second much next to Muchigoro. He’s a cute kid in a goofy DJ costume but also he seems to be the one whose sense of self has most been eroded by becoming a soul-eating hellbeast? He’s introduced adorably trying to steal the hat of one of the protagonists cos he wants to be all cool fashion, and then suddenly out of nowhere his eyes go red and he murders the dude for saying no. And this wasnt even under orders from the boss dude or anything, boss dude just turns up to find the poor kid still staring off into space like he doesnt know what happened. He fuckin ate a dude’s soul and crushed the skull of his friend who tried to avenge him, and was pincushioned by a bunch of swords and just casually pulled them out of his ribcage. So he’s just sitting there disassociating the fuck out! “What did i just do, why did i do that, why did he cut me and i dont bleed?” And boss guy holds him and comforts him and tells him obvious lies about how he’s..just a very strong kid. He’s just such a great fighter that he totally must have dodged all that guy’s attacks. Don’t worry. And its such a brief scene but you get the sense that this must have happened a million times, the kid keeps accidentally ‘breaking’ people and getting close to realizing he’s a walking corpse and because of his father figure trying to shield him from the realization its just fucking up his mental state even more and he’s become the perfect host for the fuckin EVIL NIGHTMARE FOREST GOD THING

Anyway eventually we get to the final confrontation involving every one of our heroes being soul-nommed except one, and he’s barely able to drag his arrow-riddled body across the battlefield to keep on fighting. And the last you see of all the comic relief corpse dudes is them being confused why they feel so sleepy, and dropping to the floor one by one. You get the sense this whole thing is really fuckin desperate, the boss dude must have been running out of people to feed to the horrifying corpse machine and he’s had to deal with his friends slowly dying around him. And there’s this really messed up moment where all the heroes getting soul-nabbed is presented as a HAPPY MOMENT for the cute comic relief guys. You see them all come back to life and be like ‘yay another perfect day at perfect carnival island with all our very non dead friends!’ And then when the hero finally wins and saves everyone, its punctuated by a depressing note of all the funny dudes simultaneously vanishing into dust forever. leaving behind nothing but a bunch of plants growing out of a pile of empty clothes. Like the scariest damn part is how its left ambiguous whether the creepy ass forest god was even really capable of ressurecting the dead or if it was just puppeting a bunch of dolls and imitating what this man remembers of his dead friends. though the fact they were able to act on their own free will and almost mess up the plan sometimes would imply there’s at least some level of the original person still left there. but still theres also the whole freaky scene of Murder Child Does Not Remember Murdering All These People so..yeah. Horrifying ambiguity.

And then it just ends with poor boss carnival dude looking at his bloodstained hands desperately trying to hold together the dead corpse of this god that promised to keep his friends alive. He fuckin HOLDS INTESTINES IN HIS HANDS WHILE SOBBING! And what super extra sucks is that they dont give him any sort of resolution of getting to move on and atone now he’s free of that thing’s control. He just desperately tries to backstab the hero at the last moment cos he’s just so lost in grief for his friends, and thus ends up dying. And the last you see of him is him floating in the void while he hears the sound of the shipwreck that killed his friends so long ago, and fuckin CUTE VOICE OF FUNNYMAN MUCHIGORO welcomes him to the goddamn afterlife. While crying that he wishes his boss was able to move on without him and live a little longer instead.

END

CUE HAPPY CREDITS MUSIC

CUE EVERYONE IN THE AUDIENCE CRYING FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS

i am sobbing into my keyboard just remembering this, seriously i dont even fuckin LIKE One Piece yet im somehow a giant fan of this one singular filler arc written by some other author. WHERE IS MY ENTIRE DAMN HUNDRED EPISODE ANIME ABOUT THIS PLOTLINE?? it has fuckin NOTHING to do with One Piece either, you coulda replaced the protagonists with the protagonists of any other anime and it woulda worked just as well. Its just like fuckin... Happy Anime Dudes Take A Brief Vacation To An Entirely Different Story About Horror Murder. like i know One Piece does have its own sad and deep stories sometimes but not EXISTENTIAL HORROR OF GOLDFISH FRIENDO

I NEVER EXPECTED TO BE TRAUMATIZED BY THIS ADORABLE BEAN BOY

rip muchigoro

...anyway i suppose i might be subconciously drawn to characters who have anything in common with him cos of the sheer PLEASE UNDO THE HELL YOU INFLICTED UPON THIS FUNNYMANS factor.

also I guess Mr Movien is kinda like his character design upside down. big head mode vs tiny head mode: FIGHT!!!

in conclusion i wish i had not remembered the tears of this

[babybluebanshee]

What the Mercs read

Lord help me, I’m back on my bullshit again. Yeah, in case you guys didn’t notice, I watched a bunch of SFM videos last weekend and now I’m back on a TF2 kick. So you get some headcanons! Yay~

Scout: Mostly comics and sports magazines. He doesn’t really have the attention span to read anything longer. If you try to suggest a book to him, he’ll be like, “Um, excuse you, that thing has 200 pages and, like, no pictures and you expect me to read that?” Spy did manage to get him to read a couple Hardy Boys mysteries once, but he’ll never openly admit to enjoying them.

Soldier: Despite what most people think, he can read. It’s just that he generally doesn’t look that deeply into it. He’s obviously read The Art of War (something a dude from the Midwestern US wouldn’t casually stumble across), but grossly misinterpreted it. He mostly reads war stories and westerns, and only because they are relevant to his interests. Start throwing around “literature” and “sci-fi” near him and he’s suddenly illiterate. That being said, Spy once got him a copy of Starship Troopers and he begrudgingly enjoyed it (and spent the next week shooting his rocket launcher at every bug he came across).

Pyro: Doesn’t like reading so much as being read to, which they frequently ask of the Engineer when he’s not busy. Their favorites are fairy tales and fables. Spy has made a habit of tracking down various volumes of different fairy tales from around the world for them, and Pyro is absolutely ecstatic whenever they get a new one.

Demo: Really likes folklore and history, much to the shock of everyone who knows him. Although he’s far more interested in the oral side of storytelling, he’ll flip his way through a volume of legends from around the world or Scottish history when he’s not in a yarn-spinning mood. Scout also introduced him to horror comics, and he loves a good monster story. After that, Spy let him borrow his copies of Dracula and Frankenstein multiple times.

Heavy: Dude has a PhD in Russian literature, so naturally, that’s what he loves. He mostly reads what a lot of my college professors call “art fiction”, about real people in the real world doing real things and having real feelings. He tries not to be, but he can occasionally be a bit snobby about it, because how can you read silly comics or adventure stories when the art of Tolstoy exists. Spy understands this and finds him Russian-translated works of other popular literary fiction. Heavy has no idea how Spy accomplishes this, but he does love the Russian copy of Revolutionary Road Spy gave him for Christmas one year.

Engineer: Engie has been addicted to science fiction ever since he was a little kid. From Weird Science comics to Asimov and Wells, he devoured tales of men pushing the boundaries of human understanding. Of course, while most boys were content to just lose themselves in the adventure and forget about it as they grew, Engie has turned the stories he loved into blueprints. He kept his battered copies of I, Robot, The Time Machine, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in his desk to pull out on slow evenings, to work on that real-life Nautilus or time machine he’s always tinkered with. When these eventually fell apart, Spy bought him leather bound copies of The Foundation trilogy and the complete works of H.G. Wells.

Medic: Most of the time, Medic doesn’t care for fiction, instead preferring medical journals or something similar. But there’s one genre he’ll always come back to, and that’s horror. It’s not even really that he finds the stories all that scary. In fact, he reads them as bedtime stories for the most part, to unwind after a long, grueling day on the field. He does this by sitting there and basically riffing on them. He read Psycho and Scout swore he heard him mutter, “Well that’s just inefficient body disposal” at one point while he was reading it. Spy has taken to buying him box loads of trashy paperbacks, usually picking them based on which ones have the most grotesque covers.

Sniper: Obviously, Sniper loves a good adventure. He’s happiest when his stories involve daring-do, man vs. nature type stuff, and maybe more than a little swashbuckling. Read loads of it is his tree hideout when he wasn’t throwing rocks at people who wanted to beat him up as a kid. His heroes were Allan Quartermaine, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, and Tarzan. Spy finds similarly pulpy dimestore adventures for him, although he tries to sneak in some actually literature from time to time. He hit real success when he gave Sniper a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, with Sniper devouring the rest of the series as soon as he learned there was more.

Spy: If you couldn’t tell by the fact he appears in every one of these, Spy loves books. Having grown up in as difficult a situation as he did (I’ve mentioned in other posts that Spy was a human trafficking victim, starting very young), reading was an escape for him. He taught himself to read, and whenever he had a moment of reprieve, he’d fish out the books he hid under the floorboards and lose himself in them. He kept up the habit well into his adult years, and reading provides him with a sense of calm, something not even a cigarette can replicate. He loves all sorts of stories, but finds himself drawn most to fantasy and mysteries. All of his books are well-thumbed, and are in English and French. It’s his go-to gift for people he really likes. If he needs to get a close friend a present of any kind, it is guaranteed to be a book, after he has carefully thought out exactly what they’d enjoy. If Spy gives you a book, you should feel flattered. It’s the biggest compliment he gives.

[nongravity]

DECAF July 2017 Post Mortem

(Clearing out my draft folder at the end of the year. Posting my July Post Mortem on December 31st!) I’m the event organizer of DECAF, so even though I sold some books at the show, things were so fast paced that I could only really mentally absorb the organizer aspect and I left the particulars of the table in the capable hands of Elida and Debbie. So this post mortem will be more about event organizing than table sales.

This is my 10th post mortem convention write up! You can find the rest on the Events page on my website or the post mortem tag here on my tumblr.

First the numbers! Not itemized though since I love transparency but don't want to force it on anyone else. 

Budget for the event: €550-ish

Venue +VAT

Website

Poster Art

Poster/Postcard Printing

Decorations/Supplies

Patreon, Donations and Exhibitor Incoming: €496

10 Patrons over 2 months - €65

1 kind anonymous donation - €60

33 Exhibitors w/€16 Full Tables & €8 Half Tables - €371

For a total budget shortfall of: €54

After losing money on the last DECAF, one of my goals for the second DECAF was to not lose money! But then I lost money again! 

The shortfall was down to two reasons, both of which were my fault for not anticipating (I’m learning!)

+VAT - WHAT A DOPE, I forgot VAT for the venue cost! So my math calculating the table costs for exhibitors was off from the very start!

Dropouts! - Out of 40 table applications: 7 dropped out. Had they paid I would have broken-even even with my VAT mistake.

I’m still learning about VAT here in Ireland, it’s never really on my mind. But it will be from now on! We had dropouts the first show as well, but since we didn’t have any space for them anyway in the last venue it worked out. This time I set my table prices for 40 exhibitors, so 33 couldn’t cut it. Moving forward I’m going to anticipate a 20% dropout rate.

My total outgoing costs for the convention in order of leaving my house to the start of the show: €10

Fuel driving into Dublin - €10

So busy I forgot to eat lunch! - €0

What I brought with me:

Loads of We Can’t Afford This

My last few copies of Hats that aren’t trapped in storage

Plenty of Odd Reels and Strong

What I sold:

0 Copy of Hats for €7

1 Copies of Strong €5

1 Copies of Odd Reels €3

8 Copies of We Can’t Afford This €4

For a total incoming of: €30-40-ish?

The show was so hectic that I left the Stray Lines tables to Elida and Debbie most of the day and in the end they paid me out but I forgot to get the numbers of what I sold! I really was overwhelmed. But in the end, if you count my sales I only lost about €20 on the show. 

More We Can’t Afford This

The more shows I do, the more I’m getting the message that I should get working on the sequels to We Can’t Afford This. I’ve got two planned from our experiences in the year following We Can’t Afford This. Someone even said they were working on a housing crisis anthology!

Our Table(s) and Us

Stray Lines had two tables at the show! Elida bought one for herself and spread our books across her table as well. I decided to triangulate our tables around the room, with the two Stray Lines tables on opposite sides of the room so we could keep an eye on everything. It probably would have been smarter to put both tables together because we were kind of short on Stray Lines members to watch the tables! It just meant I couldn’t roam around as much as I wanted to, though I did manage to get away enough to take some photos. 

What we brought for the group:

30-ish different books by 6 different artists!

What the group sold:

65 books!

My numbers are such a mess this time! But sales were good! Slight improvement on the sales numbers from the first DECAF.

Dublin Eight Comic Arts Festival

As is probably clear by now, the summer DECAF was three times as big as the spring DECAF. 

The Dublin Food Co-op is such a wonderful venue. People complained about the heat, but it’s hard to fault a rare sunny summer’s day in Ireland. The Thursday Cafe provides a great reason for people to stick around after they’ve walked around the comic hall. One of my big mistakes of the day was not taking five minutes to sit down in the cafe and have lunch. I was running on pure anxiety and adrenaline all day!

The space looked exactly how I wanted a small press show to look, very casual, very informal, and lots of people! 

We were short on chairs at the start of the day but the Co-op team steered me in the direction of their chair storage. It made for a funny morning, moving chairs around instead of introducing myself to exhibitors as they walked in. It means I didn’t really meet some people until the end of the day.

There was also table shuffling to be done, one exhibitor was a no-show due to another event conflict and another exhibitor left partway through the day. I mishandled the no-show exhibitor, I left the table empty until I heard from her which was more than halfway through the day at that point. I should have shuffled someone in within the first hour. As a result I was more on top of things when the other exhibitor left early, I was able to move someone in to fill the space.

Something I did this time that I didn’t do the first time was make a point to stop and say hi to all the exhibitors before the end of the day. I’m terrible with names but hopefully if I can do this at every show I’ll get better at introducing myself to people and not panic-blanking when they say their name back to me. From what I gathered, almost all the exhibitors made back their table costs (a big part of me doing all these post mortems is that I think that’s a part of comic shows that often slips through the cracks). The possible exception is the exhibitor who left early and an artists who’s book wasn’t ready in time for the show so he was without inventory. 

Sophomore Slump

That was the big question hanging over the day. Was the success of the spring DECAF a fluke? Was scaling up x3 a terrible idea? Would we drown in the massive Food Co-op space? 

Really happy and relieved that we scaled up successfully. I don’t imagine we’ll grow larger than the Food Co-op for some time. 

Cloud

Something that hung over the event for me was knowing that our fantastic hosts, the Dublin Food Co-op, won’t survive the planned renovation of Newmarket Square. 

That really sucks, because there are very little venues in Dublin for a show with a budget like ours. I put on this show for between €5-600 because that’s all I’ve got and that’s all I can reasonably ask people to pitch in for! 

While it’s possible DECAF might grow in the future, it has to happen organically. If venues in our price range disappear, DECAF disappears. 

Unfortunately, I’m still learning how things work in Ireland and I missed the official window to lodge my objection to the current Newmarket proposal with the city. 

Highlights

Debbie did a fantastic job with her monster communal comic. I know she has years of experience doing this but I was still surprised that she managed to get total participation without having to be a carnival barker with a megaphone all day long convincing people to join-in.

Karen did the Herculean task of organizing and hosting a panel. The Co-op is a great venue for a lot of things but it’s not a super venue for acoustics. The panel really was just for the 40ish people sitting around the stage and not for the entire exhibition hall. On one side, that’s good, less disruption! But on the other side, I thought the sound would carry far enough that the exhibitors could listen if they wanted. 

The DECAF miracle of the day was that I successfully recorded the panel to share on Patreon! Of all the things on my to-do list, figure out how to be an audio engineer was way down at the bottom. Thankfully the Co-op’s microphone set-up is fool-proof and there was just a simple line-out from their speaker/microphone receiver to my computer and then a simple press-record in Quicktime and wallah! Magic! I remembered the audio for my Patreon but I entirely forgot to distribute blank postcards to my exhibitors and ask them to make a sketch for the €10 postcard-tier of my Patreon. This was supposed to be my chance to stockpile art rewards for Patreon. Next time!

Our swap table was even bigger this time (everything scaled up!) and we raised €76 for the Simon Community. We still need to sort out what to do with the leftover swapsies at the end of the day, both DECAF’s we’ve been left carrying home massive IKEA bags full of comics. None of us really have the storage space for that sort of thing. This time we made an end-of-the-day swaps-over-take-what-you-want announcement and made the table a freebie table and even that didn’t clear it entirely. 

Tara O’Brien did a fantastic poster! There was a brief plan to try to make prints of Tara’s poster to sell but I didn’t have the time to organize it. Ultimately I’d like to start selling prints of all the DECAF posters because they're so so good! Seems a shame to use them for one quarterly event and then discard them!

Conclusion

Get out of the red, dummy! 

That’s really all there is left to do. 

For October I’m raising the table/half table prices from €16/8 to €20/10. That should cover the VAT and the potential 20% drop-out rate. 

I also think I need to increase my publicity budget a little. I burned through the posters and postcards pretty quickly this time and there’s still huge swaths of the city left unplastered. Choosing the Food Co-op as a venue did a lot to bring in a new audience who didn’t even know there was a comic event on, but knew that the Food Co-op always hosts something. I want to keep finding new people outside the Dublin comic scene and expanding our publicity reach would help. 

Epilogue

The fall Decaf will be on a bank holiday, Monday, October 30th, at the Dublin Food Co-op again. Moving to a Monday and a three-day-weekend will bring it’s own challenges but hopefully we can maintain the level of participation we had in July.

Our amazing October poster is by Helene Pertl! Yay! 

[bitchdoeseurope]

Concrete jungle, wet dream, tomatoeeee

(Title is a misheard Alicia keys lyric. Just in case anyone was wondering)

Day three started a bit more fabulous. I felt below average but better than the zombie like state I've been in. I got a donut and hot choc for breakfast (because I'm super healthy and everything here seems to be on the go for breakfast) and headed on to MoMa. The museum of modern art. Now I didn't have long here so I smashed it out.

The top floor was an exhibition "is fashion modern?" And surprisingly I found it really cool, the main gist of it was that everything in fashion comes from something from past fashion or another culture and is recycled to create a "new" piece. It discussed ideas like how the little black dress changed the colour black from only being about mourning to also being a sign of elegance, how a white t shirt can be casual or smart depending how you dress around it and how clothes generally are a canvas of expression for most people. It was a really cool concept.

The next level had some classic art works. I'm a bugger though because I'm not very good with stopping to read the descriptions of pieces, I tend to think that art shouldn't have to be explained - you either get it or you don't. The highlight here was van goghs starry night 👌🏻

The next two floors focused on Louise bourgeois who did a lot of sketches, print work, fabric work and sculpture work. She was apparently quite fascinated with arachnids (spiders) and compared them to her mother (in a loving way. Kind of odd). The coolest part of all this was the big ass spider and cage sculpture that sat in the middle of a room. Inside the cage was tapestries from Louise's own collection and little trinkets hung down as well. It was just a funny looking piece and I enjoyed it.

Headed down to the sculpture garden and of course my favourite piece here was the big ass fuck off rose. It was huge. 👌🏻

By this point I had really raced through the museum but I was also somehow at the exit and really could not be bothered with the mass crowd that was lining up to go upstairs again. So I went for a stroll instead. I walked past the flat iron building as well as the public library and Maddison square park. Why did you walk all this way alison ? Well fam, I was going to get another tattoo. (Soz not soz dad).

I eventually (let's not say how long it took) got to the studio and met my artist, Miko. Miko is a fucking godddddd at scriptwork and this is why I had chosen her. Now, before I reveal the tatt (is only little I promise) I need to explain its significance because if not it just looks "white girl". So, as many of you may know... I'm a philosophy major ✌🏻. In my third year of uni I did a unit on stoic and epicurean (Ancient Greek) philosophy. Basically the epicureans had this concept of "ataraxia" as the idea of what one should strive for in order to live a happy life. And by happy the didn't mean like all smiles and excitement but a sense of peace and calm within oneself. Ataraxia is freedom from physical pain and mental anxiety. This Greek word translates roughly to "tranquility". Now, I'm not saying I'm a calm or peaceful person but I think it's a pretty fucking good thing to aim for.

Post tattoo I got an uber to the American museum of natural history !! I was so excited for this and then I got real fucking pissed off. So I prepaid for my ticket. Turns out the fucking Ross geller archeologist of the year awards were on so half the Shit was closed, and entry was fucking free. Was pissed me off the most was the main entrance that you see in "night at the museum" WAS OFF FUCKING LIMITS. IM SO MAD ABOUT IT. I JUST WANTED TO SEE REXY GOD DAMN IT. needless to say I'll try to find time (god fucking knows when) to go back and abuse them into letting me in. Anyway, I had gotten a ticket to see "dark universe" in the dome thingy they have there. If you ever want to feel motion sick whilst also having an existential crisis then this is the place for you !! It's fascinating to hear about how large the *observable* universe is and that less than 5 % of shit is actual matter, then rest being dark matter and dark energy but it is equally terrifying to consider how microscopically small we are in comparison. Yay?

After this I wandered around - where I could - problem was I wasn't given a map, there was none on the walls and I couldn't connect to wifi to download their stupid fucking app. So aimlessly I went from room to room. And I'll admit there was some cool (creepy) animals and some interesting looking world culture stuff, and I did find the exhibit that Ross and Rachel boinked in!!!! But I was still a little (a lot) heart broken at the management of it all. I was starting to cough and splutter again and could feel myself burning up something terrible. So I sat down in front of a mineral display and mum called me. So for about 40 minutes I looked at rocks. If that doesn't describe my state of 0-energy I don't know what does.

Uber again to go to the theatre! By this stage my cheeks were on fire 🔥 I stopped to get some food and ordered way too fucking much - didn't realise a"side" of broccoli was going to be an entire head of the stuff!!! And then I trundled off the Anastasia.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Everyone needs to see this show. It was fucking glorious. The costumes were BEAUTIFUL. The set design and technical elements were ducking flawless. And the story itself was so magical !! The stage play is adapted from the Disney movie and another movie version and it was just so bloody wonderful I can't put it into words. It wasn't the kind of thing that makes you want to get up and dance every song but it takes you on a journey from Russia to Paris on the most gorgeous ways 😍😍 there was comic relief, there was a villain who learns to not be a dick, there was love and loss and just go see it okay ?!

So again I walked back to the hotel and made my way to bed. Deciding to spend this morning right here while I try to mend myself a little bit. Wish me luck !!