Fan-gasm Friday: She-Ra Cosplay!

I miss New York Comic Con so much already! But, hey, it's less than a year until the next one!

This year I made my costume, and it was a little more complex than donning a tie and a mustache for last year's Commissioner Gordon outfit.

I took on She-Ra Princess of Power complete with headgear, and through this process I learned that cosplay isn't truly cosplay unless you've got something on your head.

Ta-Da! All the embellishments (cuffs, chest thingie, headpiece, chocker) are yellow foam cut into individual pieces and then glued together. All painted bronze. The jewel is from a toy ring. The belt is a belt I hacked. Dress is from American Apparel. Cape, which doesn't show in this photo, is from a Supergirl costume I already had. And my favorite detail is that I ran out of time to get a Sword of Protection, so, yes, that is a lightsaber, because who doesn't already have a lightsaber lying around?

She-Ra cosplay. NYCC 2013

Aaaand in case you're interested, here's that Commissioner Gordon outfit from NYCC 2012.

Yup. Very few people got it.

So few people got my Commissioner get up that I was forced to wear a second costume on the following day.

Shockingly enough, even less people got Cheryl Tunt from Archer. Also 2012.

Oddly, there were a TON of Archer cosplayers this year. I saw maybe three in the whole weekend last year, but this year they were everywhere. Gotta say, even though there were some good Cheryls this year, none of them had my "You're not my supervisor!!" speech bubble. :)

Thirsty Thursday: Pangalactic Gargleblaster

I think the Pangalactic Gargleblaster from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is arguably the most famous nerdy beverage.

Invented by Zaphod Beeblebrox, it's recommended one never drink more than two of what the Guide considers the best drink in the galaxy. Ford Prefect once had three, and I recall that he was a hot mess afterwards.

Some kind soul has shared an Earth version recipe over on All Recipes.

Bottoms up!

Vampire Vednesday!

I recently attended a panel at New York Comic Con on monsters in contemporary fiction. The fact that this panel existed is a fine example of why Comic Cons are pretty much the greatest things ever.

Much of the conversation was about zombies, since zombies are terrifying and have been very "in" for the past decade. The authors on the panel seemed fairly certain that zombies were going to stay "in" for the foreseeable future, but posited that vampires were passé.

Mindless, soulless zombies create more mindless, soulless zombies (much like members of the Tea Party), so their complete takeover of any world in which they exist feels inescapable. They surround hope and crawl and gnaw and moan it away. They lack humanity, so it's nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which one would be okay with actually turning into a zombie.

I think this keeps them perpetually terrifying.

Sidenote: this is a game!

It was suggested at this panel that vampires don't really have any of that going for them. Yes, vampires can create more vampires, but they don't have to. Vampires usually just kill, so unlike zombies, they are not constantly growing as a species.

But vampires also keep a piece of themselves. They are capable of thought and speech. They can form bonds with one another and with people. They take pleasure in things. All in all, if you had to be turned into a vampire, it could suck (awful pun intended), but it doesn't have to. You live forever. You probably have more sex. Winona Ryder will be there. And you don't have to give up your friends, hobbies, and ability to not be rotting all the time.

So what's so scary? Yes, they can kill you, but so can too much sunshine, a bathtub, a flight of stairs, or fried eggs. I mean, every day you don't die, you've sort of battled death and won, right? Facing death is a lot less scary than facing the loss of your humanity, right? I mean, if you become a zombie, you might unknowingly eat/zombify everyone you ever loved. Plus your guts would leak and you'd smell really bad all the time.

So my question is, are vampires still scary? And if not, is it because 

1. They were never scary to begin with
2. We have scarier monsters (like zombies)
3. Twilight ruined everything?

Tumblr Tuesday

This isn't my Tumblr, but it might as well be.

What Shall We Call Playwrights pretty much is all my feels and all my brains all the time.

And, in case you didn't know it, yes, I am a playwright in addition to being the Dorktress. I wear many caps and look kind of dumb and tweeny in all of them.

Mugshot Monday: The Servant Girl Annihilator

First off, can we talk about how this is the best name for a murderer EVER?? (oh, hi. It's been over a year since the last post!) And the origin of this name is pretty sweet, too, as the Servant Girl Annihilator was never called such a thing by the press, but by O. Henry himself in a series of letters and a bitchy essay about how boring Austin, Texas was (apart from the occasional gruesome slaughter of a maid here and there). O. Henry, what would you have cattily named me? Le sigh.

Anyway, if you were living in Austin, Texas in the mid-1880's, like O. was, you had an 8 in 17,000 chance of being awakened in the middle of the night, dragged from your bed, severely mutilated and murdered outdoors. Fun!!

The Servant Girl Annihilator killed six women (well, 5 women and 1 little girl) and two men in such a manner and injured several other folks who got in his way. Apparently all the women had "a sharp object" inserted into their ears. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest they also had tiny paper letters shoved under their fingernails. But even if the fingernail bit isn't true, the victims were all slashed, seemingly with an axe at times, but always with a knife as well.

While the killer was never brought to justice, it is widely suspected (I mean, widely-ish. Have you ever heard of this before just now? Where is this movie??) that a Malay cook who went by the name of Maurice (crazy old Maurice) was the killer.

Maurice was in Austin working as a cook at a hotel called Pearl House, conveniently located within a few blocks of all the murders, who arrived in Austin just before the murders began and departed a couple of weeks after the final two murders. The last two took place on Christmas Eve 1885, because YAY CHRISTMAS!

Why do we care? Maurice frequently worked on ships and traveled around the world from job to job. He was in Austin at the time of these icky slaughters, and then he moved to Whitechapel in 1888. Sounding familiar yet? No?

DUDE IS TOTALLY JACK THE RIPPER, Y'ALL!!!!!!!!!

'sall I'm sayin'.