Armaggeddon Expo

So on Friday night I went to Sci FI Soc's Pub Quiz night. It was a quiz based on several subjects in several sections (General Info, General Sci Fi and Fantasy, Film, Quotes, Music, Alcohol) answered by teams. My team ended up winning, due largely (I say without a touch of modesty) to my own enormous intelligence (although another member of my team, a guy named Richie, also contributed quite a few answers. It was really fun and when Sci Fi Soc does it again I'm gonna enthusiatically join in.

Afterwards the hosts cleaned up, and I helped out a bit, and then we watched Flash Gordon (in honor of the fact that one of the guests of honor at the Anime/comic/scifi convention that started the next day, Armaggeddon Expo, was Sam Jones, the guy who played Flash in the movie). I was surprised that only one other guy stuck around for that. Because we started at 11:30, by the end of the movie I was asleep. What parts I did see I liked. It's a very campy, weird movie, but it's a lot of fun.

Saturday I went to the Christchurch Convention Center for Armaggeddon Expo. I spent the first hour browsing around the various stalls and vendors selling stuff. Madman, an Australian company that basically is the distributor for all of the anime and manga that gets to Australia and NZ, had a huge booth with really cheap manga (NZ$10 a piece, which works out to be about US$5), so I ended up buying quite a lot. I also bought a special edition of issue #1 of Transmetropolitan, which I got signed by the artist, Darick Robertson, who was another guest.

I spent the rest of the day seeing Hulk vs Thor (a surprisingly entertaining film, altho I found it amusing when a Valkyrie, rallying the Asgardian warriors against the destructive force of the Hulk, declares that their place in Valhalla was guaranteed...which is great, except by the very nature of the fact that they were even there meant that they were already IN Valhalla...I know, mythology geek) , and going to the comic panel (by Darick Robertson) and the manga panel (by Queenie Chan, an Australian manga artist of Chinese extraction), which were both pretty cool (I shall make an effort to check out their respective works). I also saw some anime and an AMV (anime music video) contest--some of which were really cool, some of which weren;t that good--I'm looking at you, generic Linkin Park/Naruto AMV. After that I left, and walked back to the bus stop with a fellow UC student, with whom I discussed anime, until we reached Cathedral Square, where we separated, where there was this concert for Earth Hour (8:30-9:30 Saturday), which I wanted to see. I was surprised that the musician in question was Hera, someone I'd actually heard of and liked. I stuck around until the end of her set, bought her CD, and had her sign it, then got a picture of me and her together. It was quite cool

The second day I made sure to get there early enough to see the Wonder Woman animated movie, which I had heard was good. I found it was as well, especially as it didn't let Diana et al get away with their whole Amazonian philosophy of "men suck." Also, the bookworm character got to be badass! I also liked the reaction of the President of the US's female aide to the events of the story : "We seem to have been saved by...armored supermodels?" All in all, it was pretty cool. I saw more anime, looked around the vendors again, saw a talk by Peter Davison (who was the Fifth Doctor on "Doctor Who"), saw a really awesome anime movie called "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" (which I had bought the manga for the previous day), and took lots of pictures of the Cosplay contest, which had some people in really cool costumes. The second to last event I participated in was the Pillow Fight, which was divided by age into "under 10," "10-14," and "everyone else." Some of the pillows that hit me felt like they had bricks in them! It was not as fun as I was imagining. The last thing I did at Armageddon Expo was see "Tokyo Zombie," a really weird Japanese zombie comedy, about 2 jujistu loving fire extinguisher factory workers who try to fend off the zombie apocalypse. It was weird and somewhat uncomfortable, but in the end I wasn't sorry that I had seen it. After that I made my way back to the bush station, and except for some momentary delays with my driver's scanner thing breaking, I got home as per usual.

So I also finished reading the Bromeliad trilogy, and so I'll try to say what I thought of it. Any other cool events of course I'll also write about.