stunt_muppet

To sum up my Fire Emblem Three Houses experience thus far: not only is it possible to plan your combat strategies based on which two characters you think should kiss, in the beginning of the game you are in fact encouraged to do so.

( *throws gifts at people* do you love me yet )

The other thing that's been taking up my time (aside from work and holiday prep) is making this year's MAGFest costume! I've going as Cassie Cage from Mortal Kombat 11, which may not be the most immediately recognizable costume but does match Fiance who's going as Raiden. He made the hat out of foam and pleather with a balsa wood skeleton! He's very proud.

Where last year's costume involved a lot of painting and shaping foam this year's is much heavier on the sewing; Cassie's outfit is similar to a flight suit, and my options for getting something premade was either to spend a lot of money for something from military surplus (which would still have to be adjusted) or spend a moderate amount of money for an itchy-looking polyester costume flight suit that I couldn't try on. So in my hubris I was like, hey, Simplicity makes patterns for a jumpsuit, I'll just make my own and then I'll know it fits! And then I remembered that denim (the material called for) is famously difficult to sew and the pattern pieces for a jumpsuit have to be huge for everything to be in one piece. I haven't even started the real sewing and I'm already feeling kind of done.

I never learned how to sew as a kid, despite my mother's efforts to the contrary, so I'm grateful to be getting the experience now. Maybe after this I'll be able to hem and patch my own jeans!

Still trying to figure out how to squeeze in Christmas shopping and wedding prep between all the fun stuff I actually want to do, but I do think it was valuable, spending time on these fun things. One thing at a time, I guess.

I am sick.

Fiance gets colds more frequently then I do and I generally manage, through fastidious hand-washing and withholding smooches until he's stopped coughing, to dodge whatever it is he brings home. I did not manage it this time. I am now on Day 5 of being full of goop and sounding like Tom Waits and right when I keep thinking I'm beating it it rolls back on in.

Worst part was I wasn't sick enough to skip work on Thursday and Friday (though I wasn't especially productive either), but I was sick enough to miss out on an outing I had planned today.

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Fiance and I did go back to our local Renaissance Fair on Saturday, which was one of the two things I was supposed to do this weekend and which probably did not make my sinuses any better given how dusty it was. I've already been a couple of times this year and the part that I like best about Renn Faires are the artists and craftspeople selling things, so I've more or less seen everything new and made most of the purchases I can afford/have room for. Fiance is more into the dressing-up aspect of it, and I am as well, but my "costume" is a bit cobbled together and I've been hesitant to make the investment to make it more complete.

Plus, I went in costume for the opening weekend this year and that was the weekend I thought I'd lost my engagement ring and spent an hour bawling on my friends' shoulder while a crowd of other people looked for it, and I was so ashamed at being emotional and not helping to look that now I'm nervous to bring my costume back out in case anyone recognizes that I was The Crying One.

(We did eventually find the ring - someone found it in the same place we lost it and contacted the Fair lost and found and we got it back the next weekend - which of course made me even more embarrassed about having a meltdown about it. I've been drinking less at Fair after that weekend.)

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As a way to mitigate my own stress about environmental news, I've been looking at more vegetarian or low-meat recipes, and as a birthday gift my brother got me Jose Andres' Vegetables Unleashed cookbook to aid in my ventures. It's a fantastic book, full of stories and scrumptious-looking photographs, but there's the small hiccup that the average recipe in the book requires a) a grill, which I don't have, or b) two to three hours of prep time, which I rarely have. There are some that could be doable on a weekend that I'd like to try, though. And for all its elaborately-prepared recipes the book also showed me how to cook corn on the cob in the microwave, so that was a timesaver on its own.

I've also been using bok choy more in stir-fries and as a side dish (since the grocery store near me has it in stock now) and while I greatly enjoy its flavor I do not enjoy that cleaning and slicing it takes approximately a year. Am I being finicky and over-trimming it? Is that what's going on?

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I have been good about keeping hydrated and eating easy to digest things but if my throat is still gross by the end of today it may be hot toddy time.

And then I remember if I'm trying to wean myself off tumblr I have to start doing low-content shitposts here instead because that's mostly what I've got.

anyway.

So now that I've successfully cosplayed once I've got the bug but I can't decide who else I want to dress up as. The kind of costume I'd be most excited to try is a monster cosplay, like that one Silent Hill costume that did the rounds on the internet. Dressing up as a monster would make sure that my costume was unique, and plus I love the idea of taking something outlandish and not physically real and recreating it in 3d materials.

The problem with that is that monsters in games tend to be tall, which I am not. to get the most imposing and creepy look for something like the Dark Souls/Bloodborne bosses, I'd need to learn to walk on stilts and that's slightly more effort than I want to go to. So I was trying to think of monster costumes I could do that would still look okay worn on a short person.

And then I had a thought.

I've been pretty obsessed with Darkest Dungeon lately, and while its most recognizable monsters still obey the "monsters are tall" rule, you know who's instantly recognizable that I could dress up as?

This little asshole.

Who as a bonus everyone who's played the game would know immediately because of his assholery.

I'm pretty sure I even have a hat like that.

As always MAGFest was a ton of fun, and my first year cosplaying seriously went really well! I was in costume Friday and Saturday until about 5pm each day and we parked nearby so we could change into regular clothes and shop/game/go to panels in the evenings. Didn't do a ton of panels, and I sadly didn't get in line soon enough for the Austin Creed panel, but I never do all that many panels anyway.

I didn't have the foresight to take photos of myself in costume, but a lot of people asked for my picture, so I've been checking Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr, and I'll post if I can find a good one! 

Where the other part of the title bar comes from: I did take a few selfies that I posted to IG, mainly because there were other cosplayers in some of them and I wanted to give them credit, and that's where most of them were. However, my IG is tied to my real-life ID, since I mostly set it up so I could see photos of Mom's dog that she didn't put on Facebook. I've been keeping my real life and my fannish life pretty strictly separate for about fifteen years now, for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons weren't great ones (internalized shame about my nerdy interests, old-internet paranoia about people on the internets knowing where I live), but it's been a habit anyway and one I wanted to keep up.

...and now I've tagged a bunch of people on IG in cosplay photos, and some of them are following me, and so if I post any photos to my Tumblr that'll tie my two online identities together and if I do any more cosplay it'll be this one nerdy hobby that's gated off from all my other nerdy hobbies, so that's even more separate social media to maintain, and I wasn't thinking about any of this until I realized that I can't post my MAGFest vendor hall haul on IG because a good third of it is smutty doujinshi that I don't want to explain to my mother.

(I'll put up a haul post here, though, once I've got pictures.)

So yeah. Going to try to be a bit better about responding/commenting now that I'm not spending every waking moment prepping my costume! I'll have plenty of time to do it, too, because I'm among the furloughed. *sigh* I'm fortunately okay as far as money goes for the moment; I can afford two months before I have to start dipping into savings, but I am absolutely still pissed. Glad I at least had the con to take my mind of it for a few days.