What's happening with Neko Nation? - October 2014

So after the last post and all the questions I'm being asked and some of the rumours I've heard, I think it's good for me to put out some official information on the future of Neko Nation.  I'll be honest that it's a lot of intentions at this stage rather than anything reliable at this stage but no solid information or plans are going to be coming out for a while.

So let's have a look at where Neko Nation is currently at, Neko Nation Sydney is coming up, that's going to be an epic an awesome show, really excited for it as Sydney always is but it's going to be a very special one since the next Sydney show isn't going to be for a while since there definitely isn't one in the works currently planned in the near future.

Perth was the last one announced before I decided to go on a "booking hiatus", meaning that all the announced shows are continuing till December 2014 but usually there's always been a booking plan or another show a bit further down the line that hasn't been announced.  Pretty much at the moment, there is no shows coming up, originally there were a number of shows penciled in for up to April 2015 but I decided not to go ahead with any of those due to my personal life which I wrote about in another post.

So the TL:DR of my personal life is I'm incredibly busy with big changes happening in my personal life and when my schedule allows me to fully dedicate myself back to Neko I will start booking new events again.  I'd rather not give a date which I'll end up kicking myself over in the future but it is likely I'll be aiming to announce something early next year, hopefully sooner but things are pretty full on and unpredictable right now for me to rush an announcement sooner.

I've had one or two people ask me if Neko Nation is going to be shutting down in the future and I'm can assure you it won't be closing any time soon.  My schedule is likely to be less stressful in the future and even if it doesn't, I've been trying to slowly step back and do less and less with my role at Neko Nation and despite being the so called "Supreme Neko Overlord", these events are running awesomely thanks to an epic team helping take over in more aspects these days.

I've also been asked that if I finally graduate then why don't you just run Neko Nation as a career?  It would mean you make money doing what you love and we get more events, it's win/win right?  First of all, it isn't really possible to make a career out of it and I'm honestly not motivated to make a career out of it if I could, looking at the biggest anime events in Australia, conventions, you would honestly struggle to find many people who make a living from them, if any.  I'm not motivated by money to run Neko Nation, it doesn't make a terrible amount of money and I waste a lot of time on it.

The reason I say waste a lot of time, is that it's not just the amount of time I spend getting the event running and making it happen but there's a lot of time spent on researching and experimenting all sorts of crazy concepts, live acts, decor, unique ideas and just making event with a different feel and mixing things up, plus pretty much all the money gets re-invested back into shows.  I'd feel that to make it more of a proper business or living I'd need to start being incredibly efficient with focusing only on what's required to make the event work and that honestly doesn't motivate me, besides I work at ANZ where it's much easier and less stressful for me to make money.

So yeah, I may have rambled a bit there on the whole juggling act of just ditching everything for Neko which won't happen.  Despite everything slowing down it's a temporary solution and I aim to have things running back to normal if anything probably bigger and better than ever.  One of the more interesting things to note is that a lot of my personal life is focused on a new career, now that I won't be a poor uni student, I'm hoping to re-invest some of my personal money into the show on top of the money that the shows make.

So with that said, I've got some pretty exciting and interesting intentions and plans, we've got a whole bunch of cool ideas that are slowly being implemented and making it's way into future shows, I'm looking at a pretty awesome international for next year possibly which I'm so excited for and so can't wait to announce more details soon.  The 2015 shows are going to be absolutely epic and on another level.

Light Speed Ahead

This is a massively long overdue update, to say things have been flat out here have been an absolute understatement.  Busy as usual, oh boy, it's made the rest of the year look like a walk in the park in comparison.

I had the last Neko Nation shows in August, two really awesome and successful shows in both Perth and Brisbane.  Sydney was pretty much organised just after the last Sydney show, and as for the final show of the year, Perth was going to win it out there, it's probably the easiest show to work with on my end, not really a huge surprise considering the lack of travel and interstate logistics.  Brisbane and Adelaide I decided to put on hold once things quietened down and well it's not going too for a while.

I started uni not too long after I finished the Perth show and well uni has always been there while I've been studying but this semester was an insane amount of work for my final semester in comparison to previous semesters.

There's been a fair few group issues but the reality is, most of it is due to the lack of exams, I've only got one this year and even that one is a simple open book one in my best subject.  The others, they don't want to give out exams based on what you're going to cram a few months of info for a few hours, they want to give massive assignments based on everything you've learnt.  I'm personally big on exams which is frustrating on my end, for those who've never been in uni, I find exams very much like tackling a boss monster in a video game, a tough challenge that can prove daunting at first but once you figure it out you're pretty much set, the whole levelling up and consistent dull grinding parts of a game is where I put assignments in, it's slow, tedious and while I can see its use, it's taking up so much of my time.

To make things even more extreme, it's not just about grades, work experience is a bit factor to finding a job outside of uni, while unfortunately it's an area I've struggled in the past, I got it sorted this time and ended up doing social media work for Dine for Life, great organisation and event that raised a lot of funds for charity that does awesome work for children and woman's rights in Australia and around the world.  Was an interesting experience, ended up switching from a social media role to a tech role which was always a good challenge.

The big game changer was qualifying for the graduate program, there's a big competition for all final year marketing students with only the top 16 being able to get a chance to visit all the major agencies and get training sorted out there.  Was massive surprised I ended up qualifying for this program which was really awesome, I've met up with all the agencies and it's been interesting so far but still a bit nerve wracking in terms of how I'll go.  Hopefully I'm finding work afterwards but we'll see, I've got a bit of a bizarre background and unique skills set, so it's a case of me fitting in rather than proving I'm better than others.

I've also moved house recently, me and Sandy have finally moved in together, the weekend of moving was an absolute nightmare, doing Tough Mudder the day before and completely wrecking my shoulder and having to lift heavy things with the move wasn't fun.  I've been here for around 3 weeks now, and I'm slowly getting somewhat settled in, if it wasn't for the mountains of uni work, I'd have everything all pretty much great here.

There's barely been much of a moment to really take a break here, Sydney is coming up and as for the future of Neko, will cover that in the next post.