Tag: costumes

On the Michigan Renaissance Festival

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

… okay, that picture doesn’t have anything to do with the Ren Faire, but … holy cow, y’all, Duolingo gets me all the sudden. I really want to use this as a cover pic somewhere, but it’s completely the wrong aspect ratio for everything and that’s very disappointing.

So the Ren Faire (Ren, autocorrect, you bastard, not red! Ren!!!) was an absolute blast even though I almost died, and the only question is whether we’re going to make this an annual event or something we do every couple of years. We are definitely going to pick a weekend where the weather is better, and if I had any influence over the organizers I would be screaming at them that they need to make this a September-October event and not an August-September event.

After making a huge deal about my outfit here and elsewhere for several days, I ended up going with the kilt, hose, sporran, and … that’s it. Why? I spent four seconds outside in that shirt and discovered that it didn’t breathe at all and if I wore it I was going to die. I ended up just throwing on a regular cotton t-shirt, and … it was fine. One way Ren Faires are different from cons is that nobody’s really making a big deal about taking pictures of each other, or at least they aren’t at this one, possibly because there were thirty thousand fucking people there. I posted this picture already, but look at all the nerds:

Everyone in this picture looks comfortably dressed and there are only a couple of people right up near the camera who are clearly in garb (and I’m not sure the woman in the grey dress, dead center, counts) but there were people walking around this thing in full suits of metal armor. People dressed like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, wearing armor and fur clothing designed for winter. Ren Faire people are a different fucking breed, y’all. These motherfuckers are warriors. They are also crazy, and I cannot believe that I didn’t see a single person passed out from heat exhaustion all day. I couldn’t handle a shirt and there were people walking around in plate armor.

The Michigan festival is particularly cool because it is a permanent installment. I’m not sure how many of these things are fly-by-night operations and how many have permanent buildings like this, but we were there for about five hours and I’m certain we didn’t see everything. There was a mermaid apparently? No idea where she was. We watched a magician and a few jugglers and I kinda wanted the boy to try his hand at throwing spears at things but he declined, and the horses for the joust were probably the largest I’ve ever seen (did we watch the joust? We did not. Too many damn people too close together and no shade.) and the shops were amazing if perhaps crazily overpriced in certain ways and other than the nearly dying and the half-mile walk on a mud path through overgrown foliage from the parking lot, we all had a hell of a lot of fun.

And, oh, Christ, did I spend a lot of money, to the point where I’m not even going to tell you what this fuckawesome quarterstaff and this fuckamazing war hammer cost:

Let me put it this way: I first had my eye on something they were calling a Dwarven Axe, until I discovered they wanted two thousand five hundred dollars for it.

I did not spend two thousand five hundred dollars. I spent a larger fraction of that than I probably should have, though.

The staff is 6′ tall and the war hammer is 36″ or so and … I dunno, maybe twelve-fifteen pounds? Which is a lot more than it might sound, especially if, when you buy it, they wrap it up in cardboard and bubble wrap, making it hard to carry, and you are a mile from your car, and you don’t know that you’re going to buy a quarterstaff at a different booth in a few minutes. That fucking thing will cave in skulls. It’s a murder weapon. It’s functional art! And I had to carry both of them back to the car in million-degree heat and the next time I go back I’m buying daggers!

(I have my next several weapon purchases planned out.)

Go ahead, ask me what I’m gonna do with those. No fucking idea. But I’m really hoping someone breaks into my house soon.

So yeah. We had a great time, I nearly died, and I don’t know that I’m going to make a big deal about dressing up for the next one, or at least not dressing up for this one again, just because I didn’t feel like it made a difference in the way, say, a carefully-constructed cosplay might. If you show up at C2E2 in a full suit of armor people are going to be asking you for pictures all day. I saw some amazing costumes, easily the equal of anything I’ve seen at a con (or close, at least) and … they were just kinda being ignored by everyone. Like, I wasn’t expecting my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination to attract that kind of attention, but I also wasn’t expecting the best costumes to be attracting the same amount of attention as my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination, either. If I do dress up for another Ren Faire, it’s going to be something more … wizardy, I think. Although I do need to find an excuse to wear the kilt somewhere else. I have been resisting being a Kilt Guy for a while now, and I gotta admit, the things are damn comfortable. I’m thinking of showing up in mine for Picture Day this year just to see what happens.

Any other Midwesterners want to recommend any other nearby festivals?

Calling all cosplayers

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

This has been a surprisingly productive Sunday– I need to do some lesson planning, but all of my grading and tomorrow’s lesson are set, we went outside and finished off the rest of the huge pile of sticks from a couple of weeks ago, and I’m writing a blog post right now, so I don’t really have much to do other than play video games and read for the rest of the night, which I figure is the right way to end a Sunday night.

We went out and got the boy’s Halloween costume yesterday, as I said. He’s dressing as a giant chicken, for some reason. The costume is hilarious but I would never have guessed that he’d have picked it. As I’ve said, I traditionally dress up and pass out candy in the driveway, because we’ve always had either escape-adjacent or doorbell-hating pets, and frankly I can do without hearing the Goddamn thing all night myself. I have a go-to costume, but I wanted to do something different this year.

And thinking about my son’s inflatable chicken costume got me thinking that an adult Oogie Boogie costume was probably something that existed out there in the world. And then I looked for one, and discovered that they do exist, but they’re either crappy or expensive, and it is also somehow possible that a costume of a dude who is literally a burlap sack filled with worms might not fit me.

Then I thought that it might be fun to wear my Santa suit while passing out Halloween candy, only that idea got shot down because there is a good chance as young as our Trick-or-Treaters get that some of them will want to hug me, and I’m not down with hugging strangers right now, nor am I interested in putting parents in the position of explaining to their kids why they aren’t allowed to hug Santa.

So now I’m all like … burlap’s cheap. It’s not like the pattern is going to be complicated. The trickiest part’s the mask, and that can’t be that hard. Use black wool for the stitches, and they can be wide as hell and sloppy and it’ll still look just fine. He’s literally a burlap bag. There are just not that many ways you can fuck that up!

Somebody talk me out of this, please. There’s less than a week until Halloween so all I have to do is go a few days without ordering the burlap and inertia will take care of the rest.

KOKOMO-CON 2018: The Cosplay

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, PhotographyLeave a comment

So tired.

Had a really good time.

But SO tired.

Have cosplay.

Hall of Heroes Con, Day 1

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography3 Comments

That … went well.  I have already paid for my booth and then some, so tomorrow is going to be all profit, and since tomorrow doesn’t feature a home Notre Dame game at 3:30 (at which point traffic conspicuously dried up) I have high hopes that it could be even better a day than today was.  That would be quite nice.

Also interesting: every con I’ve ever attended has had celebrity guests of some stripe or another, but other than Timothy Zahn coming to the booth next to me I’ve never really interacted with any of them.  Seth Gilliam, Katrina Law, Kevin Sussman and John Schneider all walked past my booth several times, and it’s possible that William Katt did a few times too but I don’t actually know who he is so I didn’t recognize him.

(Seth Gilliam, in particular, is a ghost.  The first couple of times he walked past I was the only one who realized who he was.  I almost called him over to the booth the first time, thinking he was just a regular con-goer, and only stopped myself at the last second.)

Not as many cosplay pictures as I usually take, mostly because the one real disadvantage of my booth is that it’s not in a great place to ask people to stop for a picture.  Every time I tried it led to a traffic jam, so I stopped doing it after a while.  That said: enjoy, and remember you can click on the pictures to get a larger version!

 

KOKOMO-CON: The Cosplay

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography1 Comment

I will be back at this con next year.  I had a blast, sold an entire box of books, and the cosplay was magnificent.  I’ll be annotating some of these tomorrow (a few of them won’t make a ton of sense out of context) but for now here’s the cosplayer pictures I took:

WELL OKAY ONE STORY: I use free Oreos at my booth as a way to catch people’s attention, right?  Toward the end of the con, the guy dressed as Negan waltzed over to me, looked me straight in the eye, and said “You have Oreos.  I’m taking half.”

And then he actually did it.

I laughed my ass off.  This may be my single favorite con moment so far.

Anyway, the pictures:

On Wonder Woman

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek5 Comments

I have no idea how widespread or old these pictures are, but: this, DC.xyt2zf5kabczkm8agxglwd5rwly4dyhe0lwcosln

#Halloween costume test, stage one

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Parenting6 Comments

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Here’s my plan for Halloween this year:  my son is insanely excited about the holiday, so I’m dressing up too, for the first time since, I think, 1999.  Halloween used to be my favorite holiday.  It has not been, for many years, but the boy’s enthusiasm has been infectious and there seems to finally be a backlash happening against the onslaught of obnoxious “sexy XXX” costumes that have been plaguing the holiday for the last too many years.

The idea is this:  Walk around with the boy and my wife a bit, and then stay outside my own house to pass out candy.  We have two large and excitable dogs, so past practice has been to keep the candy outside so that we don’t have lots of doorbell-ringing and door-opening and there’s no chance of one of the animals getting past us and getting someone hurt.  We generally have a bowl full of the traditional stuff and I buy a dozen or so actual candy bars for kids with exceptionally good costumes.

Things I still need:  black sweat pants (I’m sure I have a pair, I just need to find them), black shoes (don’t even need to find those), zipties.  You can’t see it, but the second set of chains-n-hooks is being worn as a belt– I’m going to ziptie them together so that I don’t have to try and tie plastic chains.  The first set is actually threaded through the sleeves of the outer robe so that they dangle by my hands, which I think is a pretty neat trick.

Unfortunately, I probably need a new mask, too.  While I like the idea of the mirror mask, and it’s suitably creepy, I’m actually still kind of having a panic attack from trying to breathe in the thing and while I’m planning to wear contact lenses while I’ve got it on, visibility is still a real problem.  Plus, if you look closely at the picture, you can still see big chunks of my neck and what I’ll try to pretend aren’t extra chins, and that’s not the look I’m going for.  I found a decent old man mask at Target that was basically mask for the upper half of the face and a lot of beard for the lower half, and I feel like that ought to do the job just as well, or I could always go with some sort of monster look.  There’s no way I make it two hours in the mirrored one, cool as it looks.

In which my kid is weird as hell

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting21 Comments

1379633287_5Netflix recently made Curious George: A Halloween Boo Fest available for streaming, and it has quickly become the show du jour around here.

I’m going to compress the plot into a couple sentences, because it’s not like it will make more sense if I go into more detail: there is a haunted, or maybe a ghost, scarecrow.  He lacks a head (that’s him in the background there) and he is therefore known as No-Noggin.

No-Noggin dislikes hats.

If you walk past No-Noggin’s tree on Halloween (because No-Noggin’s not there, or you can’t see him, or something) and you are wearing a hat, he will kick your hat off.  And then steal it.

My son has insisted on us putting a scarecrow in the front yard, and his favorite game now is to go outside and stand under the tree next to where we put the scarecrow.  My wife and I are supposed to walk past him, at which point he kicks our hats off.  Note that we have never actually been wearing hats when we do this, and I don’t know what he would actually do if I was wearing a hat while he was being No-Noggin and kicking hats.

He has been able to turn every conversation into a talk about kicking hats, and whether one should kick hats, and whether one is kicking hats or not, for at least a week.  Today at day care, when I picked him up, I was told that he’d hit another kid.  I’m pretty sure that what he actually did was kicked him.

He wants to be No-Noggin for Halloween, which means the wife and I get to find a way to jury-rig a costume.

Th’boy’s too young for cosplay, methinks.

Whee.