The First Cosplay Post of 2010!

Yay!

This marks the first time I've ever felt a "crunch time" when it comes to cosplay and conventions. For some reason I felt the need to take a class during each half of my summer, so now it's down to the wire for both my costumes and my essay for Business Ethics. Thankfully, I'm almost done with both.

My mom has been especially invaluable this year, helping me finish up my Quistis battle outfit costume (thankfully the SeeD one is done!) while I work on my 6 page essay. She's super duper.

Well, that's all I've got for now. More after the con!

-Kitty

My Newfound Respect For...

...Lady Gaga.

I'm currently watching SNL and Lady Gaga is tonight's performer. I'm not really sure if this episode is a rerun or not, but I'm pretty sure that it's new. Let me first start off by saying that I've always been a fan of Lady Gaga's style and music, but tonight's SNL just upped it. Anywho, I watched her first performance, of Paparazzi, and that was really good (plus I thoroughly enjoy that song), but her second performance was awesome, she did like a medley of a bunch of songs, including some really nifty piano riffs. She also added some commentary about living in New York in her medley thing too. What really blew me away was that she was an active participant in a couple of sketches (something not too many performers do, it's really more of the hosts that do), and she was actually pretty funny. Oh, and not to mention all her costumes kicked some major ass, and she didn't have like the typical skinny stick backup dancer/singers, she had two real-looking women (you know what I'm talking about) and one fabulous guy dancer.

So, in summary, kudos to Lady Gaga!

-Kitty

Twas the night before school...

...and all through our room,
-the air conditioner is messed up and the cover thing keeps falling off
-it's fucking hot in here now
-all my shit isn't put away yet
-our school's website takes forever to load, provided that you can actually get on it...
-we have no HBO, so I missed the season finale of True Blood
-which would have been ok, except I can't get the website that I was counting on to watch it to load for me
-i have an 8:00am class that I have to catch a 7:15am bus for
-and now I'm tired, so I'm going to bed

**More tomorrow most likely...

-Kitty

Frustration...

So I definitely just realized that it's been quite some time since I've blogged. Which is surprising considering that I usually have a lot of stuff that I need to vent in the form of internet blogs.

Anywho. Tonight's rant is about my recent endeavors in fan fiction writing. I've recently taken my interest in Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels to a new level: fan fiction. I have two stories up, also under the pen name of chiisai-kitty. Everything thing was smooth sailing on the good ship lollipop up until about 10 this morning. Yes, I've been building frustration on this particular topic for over 12 hours now. Back to the story. At 10am, I toodled up to my laptop, switched it on, got online, and all that jazz. I pull up my document manager on fanfiction.net and start to edit my latest chapter of my story 'Stiletto' because I'm still full of the warm fuzzies that one gets when receiving a butt-load of praise off of one 3,000-word chapter. So I get it all set up, and press send. This is when I received the message that would become the bane of my existence for the entire 12 hour period. "Sorry, but we were unable to convert your file." Or something to that effect. It also advised me to try again. Which I did, like 5 times. So then I think that there might be something wrong with my Works Word Processor document, so I copy and pasted it into another one, then tried that. No go. I copy and pasted it into my Microsoft Word program. Tried it...No go. I even resorted to trying NotePad...still no go. So I keep trying all of these methods multiple times, over the course of 2 hours or so. All while working on upcoming chapters of 'Stiletto'. Needless to say, by the time I gave up trying, I had completed chapter 3.

I moved on to working on other stuff for the rest of my day, but the thought of not having my story up like I wanted to kept bugging me. So I get back on to try again around 4:30pm-ish. I repeated the same process as outlined above...still nothing. I then went to dinner, Target, and Blockbuster.

I got back home, and I decided to try again, propelled by some more warm fuzzies from people who read my stories. Only this time, I emailed it to myself and tried to post it off my desktop PC...still nothing. Around 11pm, I got the idea to reformat one of the chapters I had already published and put Stiletto Chapter 2 in its place. Thank God that worked. Except I had to copy and paste it a little at a time and reformat along the way. I think I was propelled this time by the fact that last week's episode of True Blood happened to be on at the same time I was fighting the formatting monster. So, in the end, my chapter is posted, and hopefully the glitch or whatever it was will be fixed. Or, at least now I know an easier solution. I'm not writing any of this because I'm mad at the site or anything...it was just hella frustrating.

Since I unloaded that rant, I'll keep my issues with last week's episode of True Blood to myself...for now.

Packing for AFO...

Right now, I'm pretty impressed I fit all of my crap for this weekend into my one biggest suitcase. Go me!

I managed to fit, comfortably I might add, 3 pairs of pants, 3 t-shirts, the necessary undergarments (including those needed for my costumes), a pair of socks (in case I want them), a hairbrush, a pair of flip flops, the boots for my costume for Saturday, Saturday's costume (minus the gianormous tail thats riding with me), PJ's, and an extra headband.

The only thing that I didn't have room for are my toiletries, which will be making the journey in my mom's bag (another reason my mom is good to have with us...lol).

Why did I have to limit myself to one suitcase, you ask? Because I'm dumb enough to offer a ride to two of the people in my group, and we have a freakishly small car (it's a Nissan Versa).

Hopefully, this will all work out.

The Rude People of CosplayLand

First, let me start off by dedicating this blog to the rude people of CosplayLand. Thank you for sucking so much that it inspired me to write a blog about you.

With AFO being so close and all, I've resorted to getting my cosplay fix by frequenting the cosplay blogs on such websites as cosplay.com and gaiaonline.com, seeing all the wonderfulness that the cosplay community is currently up to.

Or, in the case of the latter, just how mean some people can be to their fellow cosplayers.

Whilst on Gaia, after picking through the infinite "Who should I cosplay as?" threads (which annoy me equally as much, but more on that another time perhaps), I stumbled on this gem:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/cosplay-and-conventions/i-was-told-never-to-cosplay-again-because-i-m-white/t.42565019/

A thread entitled, "I was told never to cosplay because I'm white."

This thread is now deceased (thank god), but my experience with it continues...

When I originally stumbled upon this thread, sometime last year I believe, I clicked, read the girl's story and offered my words of encouragement and went on my merry way, thinking that would be the end of it.

Nope.

Some a-hole decided to use this thread as his soapbox to promote his rather racist views of who should and shouldn't cosplay.

Which basically boiled down to: asians should, everyone else "ruins it" and shouldn't.

Through several incarnations of himself, this guy proceeded on a good 7 pages of dialogue with the other, presumably non-asian, participants of this thread. In this exchange, he basically said that asians created anime and therefore own it entirely, only asians can represent anime and its affiliates, and no non-asians have ever made any valuable contribution to anime and its affiliates.

First off, I wasn't aware that there was a correlation between skin color and sewing ability.
Second, this guy was later revealed to be Indonesian, a country that I'm pretty sure has no claim to anime fame.
And third, this guy was not a cosplayer himself.

Overall, the presumable non-asian faction outwitted him enough that the thread was allowed to die. But this guy still really pissed me off. I mean, I knew that people like him existed, but I didn't really think that such an elitist point of view could be applied to cosplay, a hobby that is supposed to be fun.

--

My second example of bigotry, cosplay-style, is a thread that my friend showed me. I don't have a link however, so my explaination will hopefully convey the retardation of this particular thread.

Original post: Some girl (who regretably is a Florida cosplayer...) felt the need to share some clearly photoshopped images of cosplayers, which she dubbed cosplay perfection. Now, nothing against the people in said cosplay photos, as the costumes were really well made and their overall presentation of their character was really impressive. That being said, with these pictures, something was just...off. Their skin was just a little too flawless and the lighting was just a little bit...unnatural.

However, this wasn't even the part of the OP that got me. A little bit further down on the OP, she started to bash what she called "plus-size" cosplayers. What it basically boiled down to is that she said that anyone above a size zero shouldn't cosplay. She then cited such examples as Sailor Bubba, Man Faye, and a Jessie from Pokemon crossplayer (all obviously jokes) as the representation of bad/bigger cosplays.

Once again, I had no clue that there was a correlation between size and sewing ability either.

It should also be noted that once again, the good people of CosplayLand banded together to defeat this evil thread, pointing out that larger people can indeed cosplay and that the above-mentioned cosplays were indeed jokes and intended to be funny.

Now, I am mostly just pissed that I have to witness this chick's idea of good cosplay at AFO as she will be there, in costume. Yay me.

--

My third example of cosplay meanness is a little closer to home (although I didn't think it could get closer than the girl that happens to frequent the same cons as I do). This example comes from within my own cosplay group.

*shock* *dismay*
Yeah, I know, me too.

This is the same friend who was mentioned in the previous blog about cosplay.

We had another cosplay meeting this week where finally everyone was in attendance. While we were working on my Kagome, who was the most behind on her costume, this other friend (the one who doesn't sew) made a comment to her.

The dialogue apparently went something like this (I learned of it later):
Kagome: I really hope I don't mess this up (about her green collar part)...
Other girl: Well, if you do, it's your costume anyway...

Upon learning of this, I was furious to say the least. Not only does the Kagome sew (while the other girl doesn't), she was freaking helping her with the costume that she was working on, while working on her Kagome costume. I mean, how freaking rude can you be. I'm actually really glad I didn't hear this when it happened, because then the shit really would've hit the fan.

Grr...well I'm sure I'll have more things to blog about once we actually go to the convention, so more on that later...

-Kitty

Tick Slayers

So, literally like a second ago, Lacy found a tick on my couch. For reasons unknown, we decided to catch it on a papertowel. Lacy brought it to the sink (the only smart idea in this plan), where I attempted to kill it. How do you kill a tick? For those of you that don't know, you have it burn them. So, while on the papertowel, I attempted to burn it to death. We succeeded, only after setting the papertowel on fire. So we put the fire out (thank god it was in the sink), and now it smells like burnt papertowel in my house...At least I still have a house...

Oh, the things that happen at cosplay meetings...

-Kitty