C81 guide

EDIT: the catalogue has been on the internet for a few days now. I'm not going to link it, but if you're having trouble finding it I'd suggest you google "CCC81 torrent".

Comiket 81 is less than a month away!  People with a lot more experience than I have written proper guides to Comiket, but I decided to write a brief one with a bit of info, mostly to jog my own memory before I go to C81 myself at the end of the month. I’ve only been to one Comiket before (C79) so I'm far from an expert, but there is some information I’d like to have known before I went last time that might be useful to others.

The basics:

Dates: 29-31 December
Times: 10am-4pm each day (corporate booths close at 5pm for the first two days)

Comiket is a three-day event happening twice a year. The upcoming Comiket (C81) is happening on the last three days of the year like all winter Comikets. Different days have different focuses, which can roughly be generalised as:

Day 1: Yaoi, shounen, other manga-related works. Also things based on video games.

Day 2: Touhou (doujin, music, games). Some misc anime stuff, gundam, more yaoi.

Day 3: Porn and lots of it. Also doujinsoft, Vocaloid, works based on VNs and anime. 

(This is a generalisation, see here [jp] for a comprehensive breakdown.)

This refers to the doujin circles, as each circle is only there for one of the three days; there are also company booths in a separate area which are open all three days and sell the same thing each day, or at least until they sell out.

Entry is free, but it’s very crowded. As in, VERY crowded. In fact, it redefined the word 'crowd' for me to the extent that I've found nothing to be truly 'crowded' since. This means it can be hard to get where you want to, and that you’ll have to wait in queues for anything remotely popular. If there are specific items that you're after, you can’t just rock up on the day and expect to get anywhere.

Doors open at 10am, but people start arriving from 5am (or even the previous night) to line up. Lining up is worth it if you’re after popular items, as it gives you the chance to get one or two things before the queues for circles get really big. Lining up from early morning gets you in at around 10:30am, while if you arrive at 10am you won’t get in until after 11am. If you arrive at or after noon there won’t be any queue to get in.

Each day ends at 4pm, so you’ve got a very limited window of time to work in. Considering you’ll be doing well to get in before 11am, and most things will be sold out by 3pm, and that queues can be huge, you really need to economise on your time usage.

MY LIFE also a bit about comiket but don't get your hopes up

I haven't been reading or commenting on blogs as much as I'd have liked to over the past week or two, sorry about that.  I was also going to do a non-shitpost, but I don't think that's going to happen either.

Next year, my uni course becomes more vocational rather than class-based, and I'll be based somewhere other than my university. There's a whole selection and preferencing system to choose where I'll be, and that's all going to be happening in a couple of weeks, which has gotten me a bit stressed out and unable to take it easy. The horrible part is that if my first preference has too many people going there (which it will), a chunk of them get shafted to wherever on their list still has spots open. Going by last year's numbers, the odds of that happening are about 30%. If I'm in that number? Best case I get a 2 hour commute to class and back every day, worst case I'm forcibly relocated to a town 800km up the coast, in shared living arrangements. For at least a year. That sounds like an awfully shitty way to spend a year, so I'm just hoping that I'm lucky enough to avoid that fate.

Think you can organise something for me, Remi?

But I'd feel bad if I just whinged about stuff for a whole blog post, so I'll talk about Wonderfes for a bit. There was a lot of stuff I like the look of, though I probably can't remember half of it. I don't mind the look of GSC's Madoka scale figures, though I'll still wait to see if any other companies (namely Alter) do anything with more interesting poses. The Love is War Miku has her base back, with slightly different paint, and there were a bunch more Mikus as well, some I liked, some I didn't. There was some more BRS and Saber stuff (including a Fate/Zero Saber on a bike) but I don't have an interest on collecting any more of those characters. There's also a zillion more nendos coming out, but at this stage it's stranger if a character doesn't get a nendo, so there's not much point going on about them.

Speaking of festivals and the like, Summer Comiket is coming up pretty soon too, although I haven't seen much discussion on it. It's a shame, because I don't use pixiv or anything that much, so I like to get an idea of what other people are looking forward to and take a look at what they recommend. I briefly skimmed the catalog for some of the names I'm interested in, and came across a few things, though only one thing that I would really like a physical copy of:

An artbook I was expecting, but a CD too? That's something I really want to buy, hopefully I'll be able to proxy it from Melonbooks or something afterwards.

I went through some of my photos from last year and found a couple from C79. Most of them were too blurry to salvage, but I at least got passable photos of the Milky Holmes cars. They were driving around Akiba a couple of days before Comiket too.

This was around noon on the first day, well after the initial crowds had died down.

I've got a few vaguely amusing Engrishy photos as well, which I might upload sometime if I can't think of any better content. 

And as a postscript: I finished MLA. I thought it was pretty damn good. If you have any interest in VNs and/or mechas, you should consider reading it.