Time to finish this months overdue trilogy of trouble. Why has it taken so long? Well friends, you see, I have zero time management skills and even less motivation!
To recap: this heinously outdated write-up concerns the Odlaw costume I revisited last New Year for a Where’s Wally? themed party.
Spats (or spatterdashes) are a type of footwear which is not unpopular in the steampunk scene, but otherwise went out of fashion in the early 20th century for reasons which are currently beyond me, I mean, they serve a practical purpose, y’know? Keeps the mud off your shoes. Not that I go outside frequently enough to get muddy shoes in the first place but I think we can all agree that it’s fun to accessorise regardless.
All us overdressed villains, that is!
Despite developing shingles on top of my regularly scheduled December meltdown, my barely functional ass sat itself down having decided it was as good a time as any to make a real actual attempt at learning to crochet properly despite all previous yarn-craft efforts being catastrophic failures.
The previous failure being crocheted directly into the next as some kind of fucked up hat-based Ouroboros.
What goes off, my dudes?
The blog and the comic were both down for at least 4 days a couple weeks back, it may have been longer but I was out of town and not really paying attention. The short end of it is that the servers decided they wanted to fight WordPress. Then, once the sites were back up, I still couldn’t access them for administrative purposes because the servers decided that they also wanted to fight me.
We’ve since made amends and things are more or less back in order for now.
All blog entries have been updated, so links and images should be back in proper functioning order. Please let me know if you encounter any issues.
Other recent updates include removal of delayed image loading from both the blog and comic as it was being temperamental. Image loading times just weren’t enough of an issue to warrant arguing with it.
Happy (slightly belated) New year.
Weirdly, upon arrival home on January 1st 2017 everything was still more or less the same as it had been prior to leaving on December 31st 2016. Aside from the cat vomit on the carpet that is, pretty sure that wasn’t there when we’d left. Not that I’m any stranger to cleaning cat vomit out of the carpet at 2am of course. That’s just something you gotta deal with when keeping felines inside your home, regardless of what time of the year it is. So…
Why did this seem like a good opening tangent?
You know whose trousers were finished in time for a photo shoot at the beginning of the year?
Oberon’s.
Though Oberon himself hasn’t been out in full even now, some… almost a year later. The Goat was the one who debuted his trousers, for the aforementioned photo shoot, in January, which was discussed here, during April (your feeble human concepts of linear time mean nothing to me).
Ignoring the specifics, it really has been a year. Oberon was last year’s New Year costume and I’m only typing this entry halfway through constructing this year’s project.
But more on that hot mess later. And by “later” I may or may not mean “this time next year” (assuming I live that long).
Can you believe there was a time when I’d write down everything every single day? That was 10 years ago. Motivation? Never heard of it.
Now, in December, it might actually be time to explain the construction of that whole Oberon mess in a little more detail.
Late one evening I sat at my parents’ dinner table. The sun had set hours ago. Across from me sat my father, his face tired. Pained, even.
“Why?” He uttered quietly, pleading.
He’d already voiced regrets toward installing the Facebook messenger app on his phone, now there was a .PDF of Snowqueens Icedragons’ Master of the Universe in there waiting patiently for him to confirm these regrets.
My mother was laughing. She knows about my fixation on bad fanfiction (to be fair, my father does too, he simply does his best to ignore it). She also happens to be a writer, so perhaps some part of me validated sending the offending document to my parents under the pretence that it might be, in some way, “useful”.
But probably not.
Right now I can’t remember what sort of discussion led up to that point.* What I do remember is that it took me about an hour to figure out how to send a .PDF by phone. In my defence, I have never been comfortable with telephones.
That was… several months ago now. 10pm on August 1st to be precise. Ah, the wonders of time stamps!
More recently MaEmon contacted me via the very same FB Messenger app my father regretted installing with yet another chapter of the infamous Saucy Fanfic! This one was haphazardly scrawled in a school diary (or “study planner”). They were supposed to be used for tracking homework and assignment progress but… that was rarely (if ever) the case.
You know the drill…
Warning:
The Saucy Fanfiction was something MaEmon and I conceived during highschool.
Being the work of over-caffeinated sleep-deprived teenage pieces of weeb trash, rest assured this is at best going to be juvenile and poorly written, and at worst downright offensive.
Possible triggers (for this chapter) include but are not limited to:
Dubious consent, graphic descriptions of anthropomorphism, and technosexuality. Not necessarily in that order.
This work is only to be viewed by persons over 18 years of age.
Viewer discretion is strongly advised.
Let me prepare for the summer… by throwing up everywhere.
Tech Support suggests I should maybe just stop eating things that are visibly rancid, but he vastly overestimates my sense of self-preservation while equally underestimating the complicated relationship I have with food.
Besides, it isn’t as though my appetite for mouldy strawberries is at all diminished during the winter months, so do forgive me if I’m unwilling to lay blame solely on diet.
Point is, it’s been kind of a bad time recently.
So a few weeks ago, when a friendo messaged with a link to a GDC talk by John Romero regarding the history of id Software, that was exactly what I needed. Classic id Soft feels never don’t bring me joy. Heck, my first VR experience was playing Doom with my brother in the mid 90’s on what I’m fairly certain was a Forte VFX1. Though the memories are hazy at best (Where were we? Who did it belong to?), I distinctly remember the handheld “Cyberpuck” controller, thought that shit was the wildest mouse I’d ever seen. Blew my heckin’ mind. Wish I could show 7yr old me a Cintiq, the concept of a stylus would probably put that kid in cardiac arrest.
But that’s neither here nor there.
What a delight, when the popularity of the Commander Keen series is mentioned around the 6-minute mark, to see a handful of cosplayers pop up in the accompanying slideshow, and find my own emo trashpanda face amongst them.
It’s these selfies I took before PAXAUS’13.
Tears of Real Emotion™ just about pooled in my cold dead eyes. Okay, maybe not quite that far, but I was rather chuffed.
In any case, if you’re down for some PC gaming history I highly recommend giving it a watch:
Apparently, October the 11th is National Coming Out Day.