halcy.de v4 » Version four-point-oh and counting.Two weeks!

halcy.de - half a decade, and going strong.

I could probably say more, but I don’t feel like it. Feel free to have an internet-toast with me.

(Screenshot from original mail from registrar when I registered, hihi)

Today, I went to Frankfurt Book Fair! It’s a big (Really big) fair full of, unsuprisingly, books, of all types!

6:30AM: Got up. Amazingly, on time! Breakfasted, got dressed, and went off towards Frankfurt, which is only around 1:15h from here. I then managed to not find the parking lot for a while, but eventually managed to park. The first thing I saw when I got out was… cosplayers! There are loads and loads of cosplayers at FBM, I don’t even know.

10:00AM: After buying a ticket, I ran around in the “german books” halls a lot, just looking at what seemed interesting, and wrote a few books down. Sadly (Or, considering that I shouldn’t be throwing out money like mad), selling of books is only allowed on Sunday. I preordered a few, though! There was one comic that I especially liked but since I preordered it I didn’t bother writing down the ISBN, so I can’t find it anymore, which is annoying! Briefly ran into some people from Karlsruhe when passing by the manga/comic area, and saw a place selling fancy hats. Since I felt severely underdressed with all the cosplayers around, and since the hats were very fancy, I got one.

1:00PM: Went all the way to the other side of the messe area to the foreign exhibitors halls and looked around there. Also, halls, size, like whoa. It’s 5 huge halls, most of which have 2 or 3 floors! All filled with books, books and more books!

2:00PM: Checked out the comic area, where there were also a lot of manga-related things. Found out that there was a “Tips on making cosplay” workshop at 3:00PM, decided to go there.

3:00PM: Went to said workshop. It was interesting~ I really want to try doing cosplay more, because it sure is fun~ I never find the time to actually make a costume, though. orz

3:45PM: On the way back from the workshop, there were a few stands selling manga. I had a look at some, and figured I should buy some that I’ve never heard of, because there were so many cosplayers around with costumes of characters I couldn’t identify at all. Picked something that looked super gay and had “BL” listed as genre on the back. Haven’t read it yet, wonder if it is good. Bought a volume of HotD and Hokuto no Ken to compensate for this decision.

4:00PM: Ran around outside a lot and got some food.

4:15PM: Checked out a few more things I was interested in: Books on Demand, a company that will print your manuscript as a proper paperback with ISBN for as little as 39€, RoRoRo verlag, especially looking for Cory Doctorows Little Brother (I had kind of hoped the author would be there, but he wasn’t), and RosettaStone, a company that makes applications to help you learn a language - they gave me a free promotion thing to try their software for 24 hours~ <3

5:00PM: Walked around the area where a lot of manga-related things were some more, found a place that sold plushies, amongst other things. Bought a Len plushie, and a Reimu plushie for my brother, and a button~

5:30PM: Went to the area with scientific literature and educational materials, and found my unis stand, where there weren’t actually any people. Watched someone demo a smart board thing, which was pretty impressive, and looked around IEEEXplores and Springers things.

6:30PM: Messe closed, and I drove home.

Overall, it was a fun day, and I’d like to go again next year~ Maybe on sunday, then…~

On an entirely different note,

So, over the easter weekend, I went to Breakpoint, a demo party in the wonderful “Bingen am Rhein”. Since I like the invitation to that a lot, have a video of it to start off this post:

It was awesome, as always; Demos were released and enjoyed on the bigscreen, beer was consumed, people were drunkenly hugged, and a great time was had by all, as evidenced by my own pictures at flickr, and some more pictures over at slengpung.

Speaking of releases, here’s two: First, our [SVatGs] release for the 4 kilobyte intro competition, which placed 9th out of 18! (Upper half! Yeeeeeeeeeeah!) 4k intros are demos that have a size of only four kilobytes. For comparison, this tiny image, which I randomly picked out of my misc folder, is 10k big - more than twice that! [5dpl on pouet]

And then, there’s my favourite entry from the demo compo, because I like things what are colourful and blink a lot: United Force / Digital Dynamite - Wir sind Einstein. [on pouet]

Overally, it was a great weekend, and it’s impossible to thank the BP orga team enough for making it possible. I hope that some people will get together and pull off a party as awesome as this next easter, now that breakpoint is over with~

Until then, let’s remember the most important (most important possible) announcement, and see you at the next demoparty. :3