Found this at the grocery store. I, um, guess that answers the question of what coffee to serve with Death By Chocolate cake.
🤷♂️
Category: Entertainment
Cloud City Princess Leia Hairstyle
May the Fourth Be With You!
Easiest #princessleiahair by a long shot. Now with full ‘bound outfit (even if I’m not bound anywhere today)!
Cosplaying WonderCon 2019: Paper, Spider, Trelawney
For this year’s WonderCon, Katie refined her Professor Trelawney costume from Long Beach. The biggest change: extending the skirt instead of using actual layers, because it was warm in Anaheim. Just for the weekend – it jumped about 10°F just before and was expected to drop 10°F afterward. She remarked, only half-jokingly, that if she’d tried to do Whitney Frost, the makeup would have melted.
The great thing about Trelawney: Not only is she instantly recognizable to almost anyone (though she did get mistaken for Dr. Olivia Octavius at one point), but there were a lot of Harry Potter cosplayers at the con! Every time she ran into an Umbridge, she’d pretend to hide.
For Sunday, she reassembled her Yomiko Readman (a.k.a. The Paper from Read or Die) costume from a few years back. Weirdly enough, more people seemed to recognize her than used to when she wore it in San Diego!
The kiddo wanted to wear the Minecraft Spider Jockey costume again, and it was just as big a hit this year as last time. And even though the straps left his shoulders sore (Katie plans to redo them with actual backpack straps), he wanted to keep it for the second day. Unfortunately that was a bit too much, and we ended up leaving early Sunday afternoon.
For more photos of all three costumes, and a bunch of other cosplayers we ran into at the con, check out the full gallery on Flickr.
Going Mirrorless: WonderCon 2019 Cosplay Photography
Last fall, I conceded that phones have caught up to casual cameras and I’d have to get a nicer one to get better image quality. Well, I finally bought a mirrorless camera. The kiddo found my old SLR, and we’ve split a few rolls of film (re)discovering how to shoot with it. Then he started asking about a modern digital equivalent. Since it was going to be two of us using it, not just me, I felt like I could justify the expense.
I read a bunch of reviews and asked around for advice, finally settling on a Sony Alpha a6000. It’s a few generations back in their advanced amateur line, making it a bit more affordable.
We brought the new camera to WonderCon, and I made some discoveries:
- It actually handles the light level inside the convention center!
- I’ve gotten waaaay too used to just capturing costumes when shooting cosplayers, instead of composing interesting shots. Most of the photos I took on Saturday had good image quality, but were ultimately just snapshots.
- Because of #1 and #2, I ended up with a lot of busy backgrounds. I tried to cut down on the distraction by adding vignetting to some of the photos afterward.
Originally we planned totrade off who had the good camera, but he ended up wearing his giant Minecraft Spider Jockey costume the entire time, so he didn’t have much opportunity to take photos. In the end, he only took one all weekend…but it was the best-composed shot of the entire day!
I took the lesson from that, and while most of my pictures on Sunday were still utilitarian snaps, I did manage to take a few that I think worked out better, like these three:
My full cosplay gallery is on Flickr, including these four photos and all those snapshots.
I made my final post on Google+ yesterday
“Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations. There would never be another. It changed the future … and it changed us. It taught us that we have to create the future … or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another, because if we don’t, who will? And that true strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely places. Mostly, though, I think it gave us hope … that there can always be new beginnings … even for people like us.”
— General Ivanova in Babylon 5: “Sleeping in Light”
It seemed fitting.
While Google+ was never a shining beacon in cyberspace, it spanned the period from when social media was still new(ish) and exciting and hopeful, to when we started realizing that the big tech silos — Google, Facebook and Twitter especially — have been creating the future for us, one recommendation algorithm at a time…and it’s a train wreck.
We need to create our own online future.
We need to care about the people at the other end of the connection.
We can find our strengths, and build up others’.
And there can still be new beginnings.