rallamajoop

Well shit, I went and let another three months go past without posting a damn thing. Better make some excuses.

( Adventures in writing for Teen Wolf and the perils of research )

( Adventures in cosplay, cons and iron-on vinyl )


There's been assorted RL stuff too, of course, but nothing too dramatic. Might get around to posting about it later.

Been having a bit of a month over here.

Sydney Animania: Was great! Numbers were a bit on the meh side, but I spent more money on shiny new merch than at any other con in ages, and as always half the fun was just getting to catch up with all our friends from over east, and for that alone the trip was awesome.

Akemi Okamura (a.k.a. the voice of Nami, a.k.a. the Guest of Honour): Seemed very happy to see a Nami cosplayer around (there were only two of us at the whole con! Two!), and autographed the back of my handkerchief for me. :3

My Clima Tact: Blew bubbles (with red or blue lights for heat/cool ball effects), did lightning effects and separated into three parts, not including the semi-detachable lightning globe on an extendable chain for swing-arm possibilities, and one me Master Weapon Engineer on Sunday. \o/ Finally got it working, like, the day before we left.

The World Cosplay Summit Australian Finals: Congrats to K and Aly! You were great, and it is absolutely your turn already.

Why I did not post about the con in the week after we got back: Because I came home to find myself with an epic case of con and/or travel blarg, and spent most of the week in bed. :/ (Honestly, I have been sick so little this year that it felt like it was surely my turn, so it was not really so bad.)

Why I did not post about the con in the week after that either: Because I may have spent part of my downtime getting myself shamelessly addicted to this show called Teen Wolf and I have been very distracted okay? (Oh my god, you guys this show!!!)

Full con report, cosplay photos and shameless new fandom squee all coming soon.

I'm planning on ordering in some new cosplay contacts in the next couple of days from Cosplaylab, if anyone would like to join in and split the shipping costs. (Yeah, I know, there are cheaper places locally, but I'm kinda attached to the Color Max series. Terribly pretty, and I'm used to them.)

This is less of a post than an apology for the lack of posts here lately. I have so much stuff I'd like to be posting about it is ridiculous: comics commentary, Cable/Deadpool fic - even the inevitable Homestuck fic ideas. But I have had exactly zero time to do anything about any of that because the Madman finals were fast approaching and over the course of the last two weeks, several crucial tasks inevitably spun out into monsters requiring three times longer than had been budgeted - to the point that even this post is being written from my hotel room over in Brisbane, and it has taken more than twenty four hours for me to find the time for that.

Anyhow, the event in full is being livestreamed over the Madman website 1:30 PM local time, but for those reading this from Brisbane who may be joining us at Brisbane Supanova over the weekend, grab us and say hi if you see us around! We're entering the comp as Waka and Amaterasu of Okami, and we should be wandering around in the same costumes again on Sunday too. Our skit shall involve scale-model puppets, glowing weaponry, hand-painted backdrops and as much crazy sword twirling as we could cram into three minutes. It's gonna be a blast. And that's without even getting into all the other unbelievable stuff the rest of the awesome cosplayers have been making for this thing.

Now I really need to get some sleep. I still have to reprogram my lightsabre in the morning.

As usually happens when it comes to me and con reports I am already more than a month late in posting about this year's Supanova, so I'll cut right to the chase regarding how the Saturday went this year: we went and won the Perth heat of the Madman Cosplay Championships.

We were not expecting to win. Short of WCS, the Madman comp is the biggest cosplay competition run anywhere in Australia, and to illustrate just how high the standard can be here is a picture of the contestant who came third in the final last year. Meanwhile, there's us, entering with the same Birth By Sleep costumes we wore to Wai-con on a whim based largely on a cracked-out skit idea conceived in the car late one night on our way home from a lot of karaoke.

Fig 1: As you can see, this was a very serious skit performed by very serious people.

Turned out the judges loved it. What can I say, it was immensely flattering to hear our names called out as the winners.

( Full skit video and more photos under the cut )

Still to come: Sunday cosplay report

We're a couple of months past the pre-Wai-con craziness now and the next chapter of the HS AU is finally up to beta-reading stage (\o/) so this would be a good time to get moving seriously talk about the next cosplay project I was thinking of tackling for Supanova this year: Teen Cable.



Because it's the only way someone of my height will ever get away with cosplaying either of the characters who made me fall in love with Cable & Deadpool. Because there were at least four Deadpool cosplayers at Supanova last year but not a single Cable (not all that remarkable when you consider that you don't really get a lot of giant, 40-something guys in the cosplay scene, but even so). And because someone should totally do it, and I don't really know any other cosplayers I could talk into it. Plus, he gets to wear that badass longcoat.

I'm still hashing out the details of how to make it work at this stage though, so what the hell, why not do so in public and see if anyone else would like to weigh in on the subject.

( Plans, reference pictures and overly detailed dissections of Cable's sartorial choices to follow. )

It's going to take a couple of posts to get through everything during/post Wai-con this year. To start with I wanted to talk about that pretty damn epic Avatar group that won us the Best Group Skit Award on Saturday. Our secret weapon? Glowy twirly things on strings!

The lighting on stage was less than ideal, especially for capturing video footage, but that aside we're pretty pleased with the quality of this particular youtube vid, which captured the whole skit.

Inevitably, some lines get lost under the audience cheering, but velithya has already posted a full transcript which you can find here.

( Cutting here as this is about to get looooong. Click for more videos, photos and a whole lot of other behind-the-scenes nonsense )

pinneagig, velithya, drayke_ and myself (plus a bunch of other friends without LJ accounts) have been planning an Avatar group for Wai-con for most of a year now, but as I guess tends to happen when you try to get organised that far in advance, not everything is going to plan. We've already had to find replacements for our original Katara and Mai cosplayers, but now it turns out :devyiji: who was supposed to join us as Toph probably isn't going to be able to make it either. And since we've got the whole rest of the main cast covered, plus Azula and minions and possibly even a Suki, it's going to be a real shame not to have a Toph to finish the set. :/

We realise it's short notice but we've not nothing to lose by asking, so if any of our friends reading this would like to join us as Toph at Wai-con, now would be a really awesome time to let us know! It's going to be for the Saturday, and we have some Rather Epic Skit Plans in mind, though we only have a few lines in mind for Toph (did I mention it's going to be a BIG group?), and with nothing actually recorded yet we're happy to shuffle details around if it'll help.

It just dawned on me I haven't actually gotten around to mentioning that pinneagig and I are going to this year's Manifest in about a week and a half. This is a slightly bigger deal than most of the cons we go to, since it's interstate and one of few chances we get to meet up with all the people we know who've moved out to that side of the country in the last few years. We'll be running a stall on the Friday and the Sunday along with a couple of interstate-PenCafe member friends of ours. No new costumes made, but I'll be bringing along Syaoran and Overture Ky for the weekend, and goth-loli Joshua for the ball.

Speaking of Ky, that made this con a good excuse to get around to finishing a couple of extra details that I didn't have done for Wai-con.

( One in-progress pic, cut for size. Anyone who can actually pick *what* detail this is wins ten points. )

There's a line in my userinfo (in fact, it's pretty much my whole userinfo) that reads "So, occasionally, and I mean very occasionally, I actually get around to doing things." I have to-do lists that go back years. Mostly not filled with stuff that is, y'know, important in the RL sense, but still. Years.

I mention this by way of explaining why it feels like so much of an achievement that I have finally signed up for a cosplay.com account. Actually, that's not the achievement - the achievement is the part where I'm doing something with it, like finally getting around to sorting through the last 4-5 years worth of con photos and photoshoots and deciding what's worth uploading. A lot of those events had already been halfway-sorted for various livejournal posts (or by my sister, who is a lot more organised about updating her deviantart and flickr accounts) - but you can probably imagine why I've had so much trouble even making myself think about the job without doing the mental equivalent of curling up in a foetal position on the floor somewhere. Well, no longer!

So far, I've got as far as doing FFVII Yuffie (two cons, two photoshoots), KH2/AC Yuffie (four cons), River (three costume balls, one con), Hiei (two cons), and most of Millia (two cons, one epic trip to Japan, and two photoshoots which I'm still in the middle of sorting through). Still to go: the Balldress!Millia, Joshua, Goth-loli!Joshua, Syaoran, and both Kys. So, plenty left to go yet, but to be hovering somewhere around the halfway point doesn't feel half bad.

In the hope that this is the start of some kind of trend, I present below a shortlist of some other items that I really seriously honestly hopefully intend to get around to doing sometime in the near future. And if I don't, well, you are all completely within your rights to nag me about them. (Not to mention probably half a dozen other things I haven't even remembered just at the moment.)

( Other websites needing updating, and a couple of old pieces of CLAMP and Guilty Gear fic that are still getting written, I *swear*! )

*cracks knuckles*