Healthy Nerdism: FFXIV London Fanfest!

Hello dudes and dudettes!

I wanted to share with you the great experience I had at the first FFXIV London Fan Fest!
It was so wonderful, to see all these people who love the game enjoy so many great activities from the game... in real life! It makes my eyes tear a little, just thinking about it.

I had the wonderful opportunity to work at the cosplay registration and see all the wonderful cosplay entries we had for the competition!

Here's a short video I made of the 30 finalists at the registration room:

It's not perfect, but I'm sure they'll get better in the future ^^'

Here's a lovely gallery of most of them as well.(✪㉨✪)

I had great time registering everyone for the competition. After I was done doing this I changed into my yukata to join the cosplay fun! It was wonderful. I was cheering for the guys from front row. I was particularly impressed with this Vanya White Mage Mi'quote:

Her cat ears moved and her staff glowed in different colours, which was amazing! I love her outfit.

The winner of the competition was absolutely amazing as well. It was a lovely lady who originally created this costume for her daughter, who was adorable, running in the outfit all day long. Sadly, the competition is for 16+ only so she decided to enter it with her daughters costume. It's brilliant how it fits both of them and it's actually made out of their old cushions! There's lovely detail to it:

After the cosplay competition was over we had a small break in which I had some time to go around and see the whole venue with actual people inside. I only had the chance to do that early in the morning before everyone else was in. It was great to see people having so much fun! Then it was time for the awesome Primals concert!!! Soken really never disappoints. They had a lovely vocalist for the Shiva, Garuda and Ramuh themes as well, you can find her twitter here.

It was amazing, I've never really had the time to enjoy these songs as much as I did then, as most of the time when I'm listening to them I'm trying to concentrate on how not to die and what to do, so that the whole team doesn't die

After the concert I went backstage to take a picture with Pentland and I happened to carry a polaroid camera that we used in the cosplay registration with a few spare polaroids left in and I thought it would be cool to have a polaroid taken together. I had a small surprise waiting for me, when the photo finally developed:

We got Koji-bombed! It was hilarious. I'm in love with this picture now!

Everyone was extremely exhausted after the show. I hope they all had a well-deserved rest now. I hope everyone knows how hard the whole team is working to make everyone so happy! I'm glad to have been able to help everyone to ease up the amount of work (hopefully)

After the show I met up with other people from my server (Phoenix). We played some Cards against Humanity, it was loads of fun and then before we know it it was almost midnight and people had to go.

Fan Fest was truly amazing. I can't describe with words how happy it makes me to see all these people who love the same thing so much gather together and have a great time, while socialising in real life. It gives a whole new dimension to an online game. I wish I had this 5 years ago when I was playing MMOs. Back then, I never thought, even for a second that I'll one day meet these people in real life.