It's been quite a while since I last wrote in this journal. It's pretty much been a whole month. It was honestly too hard to try and come up with a moral or a lesson for everything that I did. Plus, I'm not really writing this to entertain anyone either, so I'm going to treat this blog like a journal.
So today was a really big day. I woke up at 9am and slowly got my stuff together to go to Animania at Brisbane. I actually stayed at Connie and Jeeno's house the night before in the Gold Coast. Connie and Jeeno were long time uni friends of mine and are helping me out with Gamer's Life Convention. At around 9:15 I woke the couple up and told them to start getting ready to head out. I had actually planned to leave the house at around 9:45 the latest, but quite evidently I didn't understand what it meant when a lady say "2 more minutes". So Connie and I left the house for Animania at 9:55, Jeeno didn't want to get out of bed so we left him at home. There was actually bit more of a reason why I wanted Connie to come to Animania today, in hindsight probably better to leave this for another post.
We picked up one of my friends, Blade on the trip down and got to Animania at around 11:30. We got in, picked up our wristbands and headed around the venue. We had a look at what was going on, then paid a visit to our friends at the video game area of Animania. We signed up for some game tournaments while we were there, then headed to the other areas to meet up with any other people that we knew.
After hanging out and chatting with Nathan and a couple of other guys we knew, we played a couple of rounds in the Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament. It was a pretty clean sweep with me, Connie, Blade and someone we didn't know in the finals. After a lot of playing and gang-up play Blade won with Connie as runner-up.
I also entered the Street FighterXTekken tournament and destroyed everyone, even though I'm not even a competent tournament player. Everyone else had literally not played the game before, I was able to get away with a whole match of doing nothing but shoryukens. Literally after the first round, everyone saw me as the pro that no one could beat. I made the best out of the situation and acted humble and coached some of the players in the game. I got into conversation with quite a couple of people there. I ended up winning the tournament, with a forfeiture in the finals. I didn't make any solid connections, but getting my face out there might have been valuable.
With that side of things sorted out, we started to get down to work. So as we discussed earlier, today was intended to be a community presence day. Just getting out there, meeting people and being a part of the community was the plan. So we hung out, met some friends of friends and started conversations with people. One of the greatest ice-breakers in these situations is "can I take a photo of your cosplay". It so easily leads onto a conversation, which if it goes well can lead into adding on facebook and tagging the picture.
As well as that, I also was scoping out the artist area and seeing what local talent there was. I started conversations with a couple of artists that showed potential. One that seemed particularly talented was a young lady named Tahlia. She was doing a really high quality drawing, so me and Connie starting chatting with her. We took some pictures, got her deviant art details and let her know what we were doing. I was pretty happy when she seemed to be really passionate about her art. It's hard to find people who have both a talent and passion for what they do. I'll be sure to keep in touch and seem how she progresses in her work. For any of you who are interested in see her work, her deviant profile is Kuri-Chan15. With some good progress made, we just had fun for the rest of the afternoon.
After Animania was over, we picked up my good friend Christian and headed down to Sunnybank for some dinner/lunch. We went to a restaurant in the back corner of Sunnybank called, Coffee Square. The place is one the best value Chinese restaurants I've ever been to. each dish is like $11 and the serving sizes are pretty big. Half of us couldn't finish what we ordered, it was that good. Plus you can split the bill, so no catch there. The only catch is 50c Credit Card Surcharge, pfft... whatever.
After a hugely satisfying meal, we drove all the way back down to the Gold Coast. we dropped Blade and Connie back home, said goodbye then headed to our friend Lachlan's place. It would be the first serious Gamer's Life Network meeting we would have together. We got to Lachie's place at 8pm and man I could not believe the amount of stuff that we got through. We worked so many things out, it was pretty amazing to see. Between Lachlan, Christian and I we have an extremely well-balanced and complimentary knowledge pool as well as have an excellent team dynamic. The meeting seemed like a constant flow of ideas and thoughts. By the time we decided to have a break it was 10pm. We headed to the bar for a couple of drinks and to chat.
At the bar with a couple of drinks down, we managed to throw some extra perspectives on the situation. Interestingly, these perspectives opened up a whole new set of pathways that we could proceed. The meeting was both constructive as well as destructive, questioning what we were planning and offering new ways of proceeding. Fundamentally the crossroads we were at, was whether we spend more time with a series of smaller events to build a community that would make our larger event a success. Or focus solely on that larger event earlier to get our names out there with other communities first. Did we want to possibly rush the GLC and use it as a stepping stone to open a potential of getting in connect with PAX Australia or did we want to focus on building our brand name at the potential cost of not working with PAX Australia from the start. I suppose this all comes from my guess that PAX Australia will probably 70% chance be in Melbourne and 30% chance be in Brisbane.
We decided to head back at this stage to write this down and set up some meeting plans. It was past midnight at this stage and it was a good idea to think about this and discuss it in future when we were more alert. Overall me and Christian came out of this meeting feeling pretty damn good, somewhat unsure about the future but good.
While driving back from the Gold Coast to Brisbane, me and Christian had plenty of time to talk. I told him that I honestly felt the least adequate while working with these two. Christian's graphic skills were top notch, and his design knowledge were vastly improved since 2 years ago. Whereas Lachlan is by far has one of the best set of IT skills I have ever seen. Compared to me, some guy with no official qualifications, no comprehensive knowledge in anything, working things out as he goes. Christian was surprised to hear this. Apparently Lachlan and Christian both felt the opposite. Apparently I was someone that could get things done, someone with the ability to organize and plan at the highest level and apparently someone who is able to see people's talents and bring them out in people. I was pretty taken back by the idea. I don't know what to say about this. I should probably make a note to think about this in future.
There were other things that me and Christian talked about in the car, but I'll probably focus on them in another blog post, this one is probably too long as it is. So after about an hour or so, I dropped Christian home, headed back to my place and crash after a long day.
