The Hike

What follows is a true and probably partly embellished account of the time me and a bunch of mates from Church Took The Hobbits To Isengard.

Hopefully that video works. But honestly, if you haven't already seen it, I don't know what even. It was one of the viral videos that predate Youtube, I think. I mean, it's on Youtube now, but the first place I saw it was on a website that wasn't the monster video-playing website.

Anyway.

See what I mean with the partly embellished? Okay, it was a cheap joke. Let's move on.

The idea started back in perhaps August. I can't actually remember how far back, but it was a long time. And I committed to it back then. It was planned for early December - I would have finished Uni and NaNo by then, and wanted to do something to celebrate having finished my degree.

Even back then, I wasn't quite sure what I was getting in to. I'd never done a proper hike - I'd done a lot of bushwalking and a lot of camping before, but I'd never combined the two. My optimism went 'how hard can it be?' and plans were thusly made.

Things began slowly, and then built up momentum as we neared the date. Camping passes were purchased. Boots were procured. Bog roll was packed.

And the day before, I still hadn't got hiking socks or a bag. I visited Kathmandu that afternoon, conversing with the store attendant about going on a three day hike. She asked when it was, as I paid for my goods. Tomorrow, you say?

I am yet to experience a look of more condescending surprise from a shop attendant than the one I got from that lady. Fair go, it's a late stage in the game to be picking up essentials, but I wasn't even the greenest one in our group, so let's leave my noobish behaviour to that, okay?

Something also worth listing right here and now, as it was something that didn't occur to me as important much later, was that the bag I bought was for day hikes. And I was all like, 'yeah, how bad can it be? This one will do, it's the cheapest I can get. We're hiking during the day.'

If your bag cannot fit your sleeping bag, folks, you will have problems.

Just saying.

Okay, where to actually begin?

The hike was a section of the Coastal Track, a hiking trail covering most types of Australian terrain, and was about 26kms long. Early Tuesday morning, we saddled up and headed down to South Sydney, catching the ferry from Cronulla to Bundina, a tiny township consisting of holiday flats, an IGA, and a disproportionately large liquor store.

It was at this point in time, as we sat on the back of the ferry in the hot December sun, that I realised I'd probably made another two errors, aside from the lack of sleeping bag. My hat, which was the closest hat I could find when I was picked up, refused to stay on my head for the most part, and instead its wide brim would alternate between falling over my eyes, completely obscuring my vision, and trying to blow off or fly away. The other was pointed out by my fellow hikers, who all wondered why it was I'd chosen to wear long pants in summer.

They are my khaki pants, obtained for the guerrilla theme we had during our last week of high school, and matched my army-surplus shirt nicely.

But between the two I was covered from wrists to ankles. In December. In Australia. It was a little warm.

Despite this, I still rolled in sunscreen. Y'all do not understand just how sun-sensitive I am.

But for the most part, that kind of worked. Everyone else got burned at some stage during the hike.

GUESS WHO DIDN'T?

The albino. Yeah, that's right.

Anyway.

I'm realising that if I give a play-by-play, this post will take forever to write. And will never get written. Lemme tell you about some of the highlights and lowlights.

DAY 1:

Day one was about thirteen kilometres. It stretched, like the rest of the walk, along the coastline, but most of the hike actually went over the tops of the cliffs that skirt the southern end of Sydney. Highlights included me loosing my tube of sunscreen halfway through the day, everyone's scroggin bags splitting, and running into about half a million boy scouts.

Scroggin is home-made trail mix, for those unfamiliar with the word. Trail mix is a bunch of high-energy dry snacks; usually rendered as M&M's with obstacles. But. Don't diss the walnuts, okay?

The boy scouts must have been up on a different hike of sorts. We'd pass a [collective noun] of about twenty of them at a time, going back the other way, and since they had the larger party, we'd pull over and squash ourselves into the dry brush lining the gravel trail.

They kept asking if we were doing our Duke of Edinburgh, to which we'd reply 'nah. Doing it for fun', they'd give us a weird look, we'd get 200 metres up the trail, and have to bond with the shrubbery for the next group to pass us.

The fourth group or whatever was all like

"Gee there's a lot of you"

Our party was eight.

I responded

"I could say the same about you"

And then we continued, across hill and dale, until we got to the first beach.

It had nudists on it.

So I'll write about other stuff.

Late afternoon, we pulled up stumps at what I'm going to refer to as 'Rivendell'. It was a spot that our equivalent of Gandalf knew about and was far enough off the track that we could set up camp. Further along the path again, there was a tiny waterhole, complete with crystal clear water, wide, flat rocks for sitting on, and waterfall. Dinner was set up, eels nibbling on unsuspecting toes, and Psalms read in the half-light of citronella candles, the quiet of the tiny hollow interspersed with the waterfall and the roar of 747s as they occasionally flew overhead, reminding us that even though it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, we were still in South Sydney and in fact under the flight path marked out by the airport.

I seem to remember jokes about Tomorrow When the War began made at some stage that evening as well (I can't remember if I was Robyn or Ellie), but am happy to allow the rest of that evening to lapse into the stillness and the quiet enjoyed by eight people who'd walked to the point of fatigue and beyond. We turned in for the night, me hoping that my sleeping bag liner would be enough if I used my tarp as a blanket to stay warm.

It wasn't. Sleep that night was memorable, partly because I froze, partly because my knees seized up in the middle of the night, but mostly because I found a leech in my clothes.

MOVING ON.

The next day we set off at a leisurely pace, only having to cover a couple of clicks before we reached the beach and the man they call Jed.

The guys who knew Jed spoke well of him as we headed off on day one, and I think I tried to ask what he was like.

"He's like the Kennedy administration without the Marilyn scandal"

"He's everything good about the 60's, but with modern sensibilities"

"He's tops"

By this time my head was like the scene in Bleach when Chad, Ishida and Inoue are trying to figure out what their cat guide's best friend looks like.

(And if I had that clip, I'd show you. *shakes fists at Youtube*)

And then we arrived at this beach which had flushing toilets and shade and no running water and Jed was there with fresh cold water and bananas and muesli bars and Jed is a Champion of Men, that's what he is.

For an hour, or longer, we stayed at the beach, still exhausted from the day before along with the tiny walk it had been to get to where we were.

Jed is actually a mad surfer, so we got along great. It was kind of like talking to any of the lads back home, since my home area is a major surfing spot on the NSW coast. So we yabbered about breaks and boards, and that was when everyone else found out that I used to do comp surfing.

I wasn't very good, but it's always a good story to bring up.

After a while we realised that if we didn't leave soon, we'd be setting up for night two in the dark, so we headed off again, Jed coming with us for a little while.

I think at about this point we had Carl leave the group, since his ankle had gone beyond the point of mere pain and we were close enough to civilisation that he'd be able to get back to Sutherland okay.

But on we continued, and with gritted teeth, when the discovery that the shorter path for the track had been closed due to falling rocks. Thusly, our next challenge would be to go over the cliffs again instead of around the bottom, skirting the coastline alongside the sea.

Wait.

Was Eagle Rock on Day 2? I think it might have been.

I had Eagle Rock explained to me on Day one, by Josh, who'd lived on campus at the uni prior.

Apparently it's a college thing, that when Eagle Rock plays at a party, everyone drops their pants. Pants go back on afterwards, but for the duration of that piece of music, everyone at the party goes pantsless.

It was actually enough of a thing that the Red Frogs crew, an organisation of folks who bring food and the gospel to partied-out teens, had to figure out a course of action specifically for it. Because being in a room full of pantsless minors isn't a good thing.
Thusly, everyone in Red Frogs leaves the house for the duration of Eagle Rock, should it begin playing while they're at the party. I had explained to me.

The more you know.

This is relevant, as one of the rock formations we passed on the second day of the hike was called, funnily enough, Eagle Rock.

This is also where we got our group photo, and if photos ever surface, I may consider putting one up. I'm still not sure if the guy who explained Eagle Rock to us made the photo better or worse by opting to photo-bomb it.

Day two's afternoon progressed in a swirl of piggybacking flies, and the singing of old hymns. Until we got to the Stairs and then I kept singing out of stubbornness. Everyone else stopped because those were steeeeeeep stairs. My legs are hurting even thinking of those stairs.

Consider yourself, as an untrained couch potato, carrying a sixteen-kilo pack, in shoes you've barely broken in, climbing stairs higher than your knees, up a slope that continues at an incline close to vertical, for about 2-300 metres.

And yet in the middle of this incredible pain in hiking and the steady fight to keep my heart rate at something below 300, I found something excellent.

There was quiet in the middle of all of this.

I've probably talked about this zone before; this elusive zone I've stumbled across at 3 in the morning, when the noises in the mind dwindle, blinking out one by one. You feel a sense of magnificent purpose steal over your soul as the tiny cares that your mind is preoccupied with shut down. At that point, I was unable to care about whether I'd be back in time for the opening night of my art show. I was unable to worry about the state of things at home, or the way I was choosing to relate to everyone on this trip, or back in Newcastle. I was beyond the point of caring that I smelled like a horse, or was wheezing like an asthmatic.

There was only the path before me, and the effort required to take a step, shift the weight of my body and backpack onto one screaming leg, and then climb the stair. And then do it again. And again.

On we climbed, the sense of anything but the moment gone. The flies didn't matter. The wind didn't matter. There was silence in my mind, and it was glorious.

Eventually we crested the hill, and received a lesson in reading the surf from Wizard Jed, and then he turned and we parted ways; he heading back towards his car and we onwards to the site for our second night. As the trail flattened out and it became a little easier to breathe, I pulled out my ocarina and began, not for the first time, to play Concerning Hobbits. And then more Lord of the Rings music, and then Zelda themes, because that's really all I know how to play.

And somewhere along the line. Actually it was probably earlier, that Jim piped up, requesting that I play the Song of Storms. I said no, because even though you can put it down to superstition, we were out on a hike, and I was not going to play the freaking Song of Storms. So I continued on with whatever I was playing at the time, and inwardly frowned when he continued to whistle the requested piece of music.

This becomes important in a minute.

Finally, with the yellow light of afternoon giving way to the grey light of dusk, we descended from another hill and came upon our camping spot for the evening. Sitting was lovely, and dinner, which this evening was my job, was excellent also.

Portable Protein, it was called, since I had no name for boiled rice with curry, coconut, rehydrated shiitake mushrooms, chopped boiled egg and peanuts.

No name, but it was delicious, and it also managed to remove about two kilos from my pack. We washed the dinner things in seawater and spent part of the evening watching the stars, praying and singing again.

Dude, singing at night with a bunch of people is great. Singing Rock of Ages at night with a bunch of people is better, the sound of the ocean punctuated only by the regular beat given by slapping hands to knees, keeping time as we sung.

We turned in for the evening, thankful that the grass here was soft and would hopefully be more comfey than the night before. I remember taking a cursory glance outside the tent before zipping it up, absentmindedly wondering if Josh would want to bring his hiking boots inside his tent, since he'd left them out. I can understand why - we all smelled pretty ripe at this stage. Still, this was Australia, and there were usually bugs. I shrugged and closed the tent. Josh is grown man. If he wanted to leave his boots out, he could.

This is also important to note. Because that night

There was wind. That's what woke me and Cait first. Mostly because the poles in the dome tent kept being blown down and then fwapping back up, blustering about as a howling wind came screaming off the ocean. I was voted to go out and do something, and my half-asleep brain complied and pulled the tent poles down. They lay on top of everything in the tent, including us, but that would be okay because they weren't really that heavy and then the tent wouldn't break.

I went back to sleep.

And then the rain started.

The first thing that I noticed of it was the water dripping onto my leg. I tried to ignore it, rolling up in the tarp in the half sleep and hoping that it'd go away. And it got worse. I reached up for my phone to check what forsaken hour it was for the rain to be here, only to have my hand plop straight into a puddle.

Next to me, Cait rolled over, having discovered that her sleeping bag was likewise soaked through.

And out I went again, frantic brain and fingers trying to reassemble the tent so the poles could keep the water off, the wind whipping my hair and my half-whimpered mutterings reduced to discernible noise around the torch I had clamped in my teeth.

Which idiot was all on Storm's Song business? Yeah. Not me.

Finally, soaked, shivering, and cursing the boardshorts I'd chosen to sleep in, Morpheus visited and I slept, too tired to care about anything else. The tent had nearly blown down. We'd half-flooded. I was done.

The next morning was cold, but mercifully dry. Drier. The other tents had fared a little better in some ways, and a little worse in others. Liv and Bri's tent had the addition of a waterbed come morning light, but I think the guys had gotten on alright. Until Josh stumped over to our kitchen setup and looked mournfully at his boots before tipping out a solid inch-and-a-half of water.

The morning progressed faster than the previous one - we had eight or nine clicks to cover, and I wanted to be back in Sydney in the early arvo. Before leaving, as there was nowhere to dump rubbish, we did a quick pickup of our mess along with other stuff that previous campers had just left there. For a while, things looked as though they'd start sprinkling, and it was at that point, when we'd donned raincoats (or binliner coats, depending on your budget) that Sam the Wizard taught us some gnarly dance moves.

The rain ceased, and we headed off down the beach, which gave way to a seashack hamlet, which lead to overland hiking, and then some kind of weird rainforest, and then there were more stairs. I remember those stairs with more pain than the other set, since at this stage I had hit the don't stop phase of hiking.

I was simply at this point where I could no longer stop and enjoy the scenery properly. I was in a hurry, and i needed the others to be in a hurry too, and the longer I walked with this mindset, the more I realised that this was how I did a lot of things, or was heavily encouraged to do a lot of things.

Back in the land of home and reality, I'd just completed my Bachelor of Fine Arts. I was still waiting on results, but was fairly confident that things would be okay. And once I'd told my folks, they were immediately asking what would happen next.

"Can't I just enjoy having this thing done for a little?"

Regardless, that was how I hiked for the first half of the day. We made good time, in part because I was refusing to stop and look back to see what we'd already covered, in favour of looking and seeing how much more still needed to be done.

And then the rainforest began to give way to Australian scrub, and the most heart-bursting set of stairs you'll ever see, and I kept at them with roughly the same speed, because if I stopped, I would be unable to start again.

I didn't throw up when we got to the top, but it was close. Slowly, painfully, my heart rate slowed down, and the two guys who'd been keeping pace with me at the front of the group turned to head back and help the others.

Well, one made it.

Cait had caught up, and we were talking a little, until we heard a snap and an almighty yell of pain.

There are different yells, different shouts, that people are capable of. The one concerning pain is never heard often, but to hear it is never a good thing. I went to investigate.

And there was Jim, kankle in the stream - because that's what it was even at this stage - looking at me like 'this kind of hurts'

And I was looking at him like 'I am not surprised'.

"I was running to catch up and my ankle went snap-crackle-pop on the slope"

"Yeah. I can see that."

I can't remember the finer details of that conversation, but for some context, Jim is a RAAFie. I've written about him on the blog before, because we dated for a while. He was the one in the group who decided to take eight-ten litres of water instead of four, the one with a pack that was bigger than me, and the heaviest guy in the group. With a kankle that might have been broken.

I think there was a raised eyebrow and a sigh on my part somewhere, before heading back up to where the stuff was, to find the first aid kit, painkillers, and some food to help with the shock.

By the time this was taken care of, the rest of the crew had caught up. We stayed a bit longer, Jim had his ankle strapped up, and the rest of us divvied up the pack he now had zero chance of being able to carry. It was at this point that Sam gained his fourth or fifth nickname, due to the rubbish we were carrying.

Binjuice.

Binjuice is the worst. It is the scent of death and decay, its cloying smell enough to make even a hardened veteran gag. And it had spilled from the rubbish bag Sam had strapped to his pack, onto his pack, shirt, and the tent that had been strapped on there as well. It was not pleasant.

So down the hill we went, Jim's bung ankle setting the pace, my mind accepting that there were more important things to focus on than being at the art show as we made our way slowly through the leaf-littered floor of the forest.

I found myself carrying the binjuice-soaked tent with Liv, and we talked at length about the Realm of Eventide and the story I'd written for NaNo that took place in it - Skybound. We yabbered about the plot, and I got to share the history that had been written for the place, trying to figure out how to phrase things so that they made sense to other people and not just me.

We sung again, the highlight of which was Sam the Wizard bringing up the Songs of Angry Men or something. It's from Les Miserables, a movie which everyone raves about and I have not had time to see yet. But it was memorable, this rendition, given as Sam leapt atop a nearby boulder and sung with gusto, beating his chest in time with the words, to the laughter and invigoration of everyone.

And somehow, after much stumbling and half-steps, we clambered out of the brush, down some stairs and into a car park.

There was a sign and everything, noting the beginning of the Coastal Walk from the Otford end.

We'd made it.

We rested a while, and then began the trek back to civilisation, looking first for the train station we'd need to get back to where the cars were.

I think I got called a Sargent when we got to Otford by two young yahoos, which was confusing until I remembered that my kahki shirt had triple-chevron badges on the arms. And then, somehow, we managed to get to Sutherland.

Dude, you want something surreal?

Try going on a big hike, being all dirty and smelly and tired, and then somehow get yourself to a busy train station, full of workers, mums and school kids. On the one hand, my brain comprehended that we looked kind of homeless. On the other hand, my chocolate stash had melted and reformed around my lolly snakes, and although the result looked kind of gross, it tasted amazing.

Eventually, we got back to Cronulla, reshuffling our car crew for the leg home so that Jim wouldn't have to drive with a bung leg or something.

Successfully, Bri, Cait and myself, three ladies who'd never done much Sydney navigation, managed to get out in one piece, before driving back to Newie and getting Raj's. It was a pretty satisfying curry, if you ask me.

And then there was a shower, and then there was an inner spring mattress with pillows and a doona, and there was sleep.

And it was very good.

That kind of covers the hike. There was more, and there was less that happened. But I need to get back to Job Searching, so that's all you'll get for now.

Perhaps an update if/when photos happen. (Hey, Bri and Cait?)

The Sequel Machine (Part A)

So, I was all set to blog earlier this week, and then I ran out of time before the convention, and then was all set to blog right now, and remembered that I need a chip adapter to upload the progress photos from my phone, and I don't have that right now.

Basically, on Friday, the DNS server on the network timed out, so I went to fix it and somehow managed to hard reset the whole modem. So now the network needs setting up again and the owner of the modem is out for the weekend. I'm using the wireless that belongs to my church to write. And the whole time, I was like 'Huh. That's never happened before.'

My tech mishaps aside, and whatever repercussions remain, this weekend was a little hectic. The above information is only relevant because I am not at home, where the adapter-chip is, and therefore I cannot upload progress photos of the costume, and it's only the day after Animania, so I can't upload a whole lot of photos from the convention day either. But SOON. *appropriate delay* NOW.

And, I am coming to realise, I have a habit of starting a blog post with a completely unrelated story. I think it serves to break the ice or something. ANYWAY.

What am I giving again? Oh. A diagnostic on how the cosplay-making progress went, along with a review for Animania. With no real available photos. Hmm.

Oh. There's a video.

To my shame, I participated in a Harlem Shake video. Two actually. There was this one, and there was one in the auditorium near the end of the day. By then, I was hanging out with a group from Gurren Lagann, and all of us were a little too exhausted to be shaking anything vaguely Harlem-shaped. If that one arrives on youtube in the next couple of days though, I'll put it up anyway.

I'm on the far right for the initial bit, and then just right of centre after the break. And then behind the Skull Kid in the third cut, moving awkwardly to give the impression of dancing while trying to avoid poking other people in the head with my helmet.

Personally, I think the Harlem Shake is a little silly, but nevertheless, for reasons unfathomable, I participated in not one, but two. Maybe it was a 'hey, I don't have a face' moment.

Where to begin with everything else?

At the start of last week, I had a white lycra skivvy sewn up, and was prepared to use that in place of the black top I had for the character. And then I was like 'aw man, can't decide' and then was like 'hey, I'll make the white top anyway and see what it looks like'

Nek Minnut:

By Wednesday, I had the white top with black tattered sleeve sitting on a mannequin next to the already-existing black one, and realised that it would be the way to go. I didn't really want to admit it at that time, but that's kind of what happened. There was also just this sense of trying to fool myself out of it, because I knew how much work would be needed to get it done. I've never been one for holding to that kind of common sense, so I started on things anyway.

It began with detatching the bra from inside the black top and sewing a white cover onto it. The stitching was put in last time because I wanted a form-fitting top that wasn't going to migrate when I moved. Then stitched the white top on over that. Then, realising that the top still needed painting, I cracked open the dressmaker's mannequin that my parents gave me for Christmas. (It had stayed unopened for the time being, as I don't have enough space at home to justify having it out all the time.) Oh. By 'cracked open' I mean that the box was still taped up. I hadn't opened it yet.

So we opened it up and set the top on it. When it came to painting at 9pm on Friday night, it was wrapped with clingwrap so the paint couldn't leak through. Bec ended up painting the black on the front; I was preoccupied with attaching my toes. Then she crashed and I finished off the back. The next morning, I tried setting the mirror frames into it and away we went.

...

It's occurring to me now that I'm following narrative on the basis of separate articles in the costume. Would we rather follow by article or day on which these details were accomplished?

Really?

TOO BAD.

ahahahahahahahaaaaaaa *cackles*

I'll keep this way. Maybe rearrange it into something linear later.

So what else was accomplished this week?

Oh. The prosthetics!
These were started on last Saturday. I'd bought some liquid latex that was apparently okay for skin (Latex in its liquid form contains ammonia and there's types that will burn your skin in liquid state) about six months prior and began with that, some pantyhose and 3mm foam. The prosthetics for my hands were made by spreading a little latex over my finger, sticking a strip of pantyhose to it, and then waiting a little. Then I'd spread a little latex over the back of the foam piece that I'd cut, wait for it to get sticky, and then press it on. Really, the prosthetic business was a lot of waiting. Stick, wait, stick, press, hold, wait.

The shapes for the fingers started out as...what? Like a stretched pentagon. Like if you took the roof overhang away from a child's drawing of a house. Then I realised that this didn't actually gel very well with the shape of my hand or getting it to blend, so the I reshaped the foam pieces to look more like droplet shapes, and bevelled the edges. This is fiddly work, but it looked good. After that, it was a matter of waiting until the latex had dried, and then gritting teeth against the pain when trying to take the things off. Latex + hair on my fingers = worse than a bandaid. Because I'd done it to myself, and the stuff had bonded very well, and I couldn't just rip the suckers off, or the foam would come too.

The toes then were much easier. I was after a different kind of shaping, so a slight pitch was introduced into the shapes by scoring one side and hot-gluing the other, preferably without burning of fingers on the glue.
Then they were painted with acrylic, which, much to my sadness, did not mask the ballpoint pen I'd marked the individual pieces with.

Toes plus fingers plus nails.

So I had numbered toes. Brilliant. To credit though, I actually applied enough petroleum jelly to my toes to avoid all the skin being pulled off when the prosthetics came off.

Um, um, what else?

The mirrors!

I had these mirrors from last time; they're round shaving mirrors. They have a slight amount of magnification, and yeah. I just velcro-ed one onto my front last time, but wanted to step the game up a little this round. I built a 1-1.5cm rim around the edges with plaster bandage and then painted it black. Sticky back plastic (The stuff you use to cover books with that inevitably ripples or bubbles) stopped funk from getting on the mirrors during the process. And then I pierced a stack of holes around the back rim edge. Aside from bruising my fingers, this meant that I could sew the mirrors onto a webbing that went inside the top and supported the things.

Now, this webbing frame had a couple of problems. Most of them were listed under 'I can't get the edge of the top to meet up with the webbing'. I guess that's just something to fix later. Or much later down the track, when I inevitably give up on body paint forever and buy a morph suit for the flipping thing.

But that aside, it looked rather cool.

Now, morph suit. That I didn't have.

My problem with this costume last time was that I remembered to buy body paint for it, and then left that paint in Newcastle for reasons unfathomed (I forgot). That Saturday morning was thus spent combing the centre of Sydney for a costume supplies shop, where I paid $25 for five tiny tubes of paint.

This time, I remembered the paint. And ran into something else interesting.

See, water based paint lifts when you sweat. Or when it dries. Or when it comes into contact with anything, whichever comes first. So what happened was my back was painted up at 5:30am by Bec the Champion Housemate, and then I went on the train, and tried to attach the mirrors, and wore a jacket for a short period of time. By the time I got to the event, a lot of it had flaked off.

I mean, it was still cool looking. But there was definitely something within me that was sad. It should have been better! *Shakes fists in air*

Now. Next thing.

The helmet and the jaw.

These were still mostly intact from the last outing. The jaw, sadly, was slightly squashed on the way home last year though, so I had to try gluing it back into place. This was met with mild success.

The other thing that was discovered during this time though, was a texture paste in the Fibres room at uni. Magical stuff. I managed to smooth out some of the pitting and pockets on the mask that had happened as part of the creating process - removing traces of the plaster bandaging and paper mache. Then it was sanded, and repainted with a brand of spray enamel I will never buy again.

You buy $2.60 worth of spray paint, you get $2.60 worth of spray paint.

The black details on the mask were made with permanent marker and black acrylic. I actually liked the low sheen on the acrylic, in the end. I mean, I had a high-gloss finish on the mask last time, but I'd done the black entirely with permanent marker. Cheap permanent marker. It crackled and really just looked weird.
The current rendition is much better.

It was at this stage I found that there are actual differences between the character's appearance in the manga and the anime - I'd taken all my reference images from the manga initially, and then was watching the fight scene with this guy in it again.

And there it was. The back of the head was different.

This had zero effect on what I was doing, as I stuck with the manga adaption. But hey, fun fact.

Also, this round, I made a plague-mask-shaped-thing out of swimsuit lining, and glued it to the inside of the jaw. When the Hollow roars, you can't see anything beyond the white jaws. Just a black abyss.
Mine ended up being not-quite-black, due to buying white fabric and dyeing it.
But for a simple trick, it worked quite well.

Before dye

After dye. Boogying away to Basement Jaxx is the best way to pass the time with this method.

I ended up dyeing the thing twice; it came out blue the first time.

Concept.

Plague mask pattern

Brilliant Selfie material.

...

So, where to go from there?

I didn't get to fix up Zangetsu (the sword). There just wasn't time. TT.TT
So, all of this, and then getting up at 3:50am, missing the time for the first train and catching the second. Noticing double-takes even before the full regalia.
People asking for photos at Central Station.

This only comes into play when you realise that at this stage, I was not in full gear. I was, however, still partially dressed up. And the audience here were people going about everyday business. I had some fourteen-year-old-looking-kid come up and start asking what the helm was made from, and how long I'd worked on it.

"At least 60 hours,"

I think he responded with an expletive.

Anyway.

The thing was that I was not fully dressed by the time I arrived at the event. I spent an hour, cursing my non-prep, in the bathrooms, painting up and getting everything else where it needed to be. I'd not brushed my hair in two days and had to de-snarl it, and hadn't really worn in my lenses either.

That aside, they went remarkably well. I mean, my eyes are fine; I don't need any kind of eye correctives. So putting lenses in is a little weird. It's not hard to put them in - I've been watching Dad do it for as long as I can remember. But you can feel when they're in. And coloured lenses are more fun - in addition to the slight haze that I was now seeing through, there was this odd yellow ring around my vision when I was standing in low light. Of course, this is because the coloured iris that makes up a contact lens cannot dilate or constrict according to the light source. So in low light, I was able to see the lenses on my flipping eyes.

I know it should really just be treated as normal, but it still kind of weirds me out a little. But hey.

It was stressful getting everything together, but I did. Kind of. My spirit gum gave up on the 'hey, lets stick prosthetics on' and I used the latex instead. Which will stick to your skin so long as you are not sweating. hahaha. I gave up on the fake nails, as I couldn't get them to stick either. And kind of knew that if I put them on, I'd never be able to do anything else.

You know, as far as a diagnostic evaluation of this is going, it sounds like a lot of tears and stress and not much reward. But that's because I don't remember to blog about the feeling of epic when I turn around the mannequin and see the work Bec did on the black stripes on the front of the top, or see what it looks like to combine yellow contact lenses with black paint around my eyes.

It's usually easier for me to quantitatively measure negatives and qualitatively measure positives. That's why things like this are weird.

Oh. Fun fact about Brooke for the day? I found out that I actually do stress-eat. I bought two litres of custard on Friday and drank a bit over half of it in the space of an afternoon. That evening featured custard-flavoured feelings of regret.

So. Stress and the prejudging, and as soon as I stepped in the judging room I knew that I was incredibly outgunned. The people clearly part of the contest were so well dressed, added to the intimidation that usually occurs when you notice that two of them were part of Team Australia last year, and represented Australia at World freaking Cosplay Summit.

Somehow, I did not completely lose it then and there. The judges liked the helmet.

And then it was done and I exited the room, wandering off to find someone else to bug.

Ran into a couple of people I see at cons, and had conversations with others as well.

That's kind of one of the odd things about going to a con and con people. You'll have a lighthearted conversation, wander off, and then realise that you never actually swapped names. I guess that as cosplayers, you kind of already have something in common, and especially if you're cosplaying, you already have a name. And that's how you have a conversation with a complete stranger without being awkward. By dressing in the most ridiculous fashion possible and acting like it's normal.

Oh life, you so grand.

Things were bought, photos were taken. In fact, I didn't end up taking any photos. I'm kind of just hoping that the photos everyone else took will be enough, at least for that convention. Facebook has its uses, I'll concede. Admittedly, photos with anything that was larger than a phone would have been difficult for me, and my phone doesn't take high-quality photos. Ah well. There were a lot of people asking for photos, and I'll just trawl the interwebs until more of them pop up.

The train ride home was uneventful, but for catching it with another cosplayer. We yabbered over stuff and lamented glitter and the heat. Her costume required glitter and a jumper. And it was incredibly hot that day.

I also got to meet a crew from Gurren Lagann (as mentioned earlier), and swapped stories with them.

These kind of connections are good. They're weird, but they're good. We run into people at these kind of things, and share the latest projects and by turns get excited and think that the idea suggested is madness, but the right kind of madness.

I mean, I didn't get to see everyone I'm in contact with at Mini, but I'm planning on visiting Supanova, so maybe then. Not sure which costume is going to that one yet either.

And that's almost it.

So, how did the competition go? The one you poured blood and sweat and tears into?

I was entered in the 'Master Cosplayer' division, actually because 'Novice Cosplayer' is for people who haven't cosplayed before, and I had. Then there was a bunch of smaller awards in that section, which are only awarded if something is impressive enough.

I didn't win anything, but I only missed out on 'Master Crafter' by a couple of points. This meant that I went home without any awards, but that's okay. I was being measured against a bunch of people who were a league above me, and I only lost by a couple of points?

Most enthusiastic silver medalist ever. 

NaNoWriMo #3 - Things that help with the writing bit

NaNo on Gone Aerial Part 1
NaNo on Gone Aerial Part 2
NaNoWriMo website

Resolving to at least try and maintain some visible level of enthusiasm and punctuality, I decided to keep posting, once a week, about NaNo. I thought that maybe, it might help encourage people to get interested and get on board and try something big and different and exciting.

So I've been plugging away like there is no tomorrow. Sort of. About a month ago, I had so many big things coming up:

Animania
21st
End of Semester
NaNo
December (And visiting people in Victoria)

Now two of those things are down, and the end of Semester is beginning to register in my head. I have, like, four weeks of madness left, and an assessment due tomorrow, and have to remember how to write a catalogue essay for that. So, as an exercise to the fingers and the mind, was like yes, I should do the weekly NaNo post right now.

So, now you know where I am. And how I've already covered the basics of National Novel Writing Month, and how stories in general work a'la Joseph Campbell.

So this week, with my brain scrambling for a subject, I thought I'd share a few of the things that I did last year to make writing a fifty thousand word novel a little easier:

Start with a notebook.Last year, I grabbed a fresh notebook and started scribbling in it. I wrote most of Shift on the computer, but for days when I was out doing things and suddenly had an idea, that notebook was invaluable. I would jot down plot points, notes on names and some of the basic research that I would wiki when, for example, I realised that I had no idea how C4 actually worked. Sometimes I would feel the need to actually write old-timey style, so there's bits of the novel in there too. For those of us who do not carry Smart Phones or Tablets, a Notebook is fun. Plus, you can draw in it and stuff too. Feels good to work with your hands once in a while. Oh, this would bring us to the next bit:

Write down how the plot works before you start typing.

This can happen in your notebook, or your computer, or on your wall with lots of bits of paper and red thread everywhere. (I'm a spatial thinker, so that last suggestion doesn't seem nearly as far fetched as it sounds)
The point is, you don't start building a house by sticking bits of gyprock together before pouring a foundation. A human body can't function without bones to support the muscles, and in the same way, it's important to write down basic plot points before you get started. Things like these always begin with a basic idea, but creating a baseline plot allows you to create something that can function and be follow-able for reading later. You can be as specific or as vague as you like with those plot points, but the fine details are something that you get to fill in later. The fine details are your novel.
This is something designed to help you, the writer, first and foremost. It means you don't get lost, or hopelessly confused about the different roles of your characters. And speaking of characters:

Make sure you know who is who and what they all look like.

I'll go with Inception as a visual example for this.




(Trying to upload photos on dialup-speed internet is making me go insane. You can have photos later.)

The main character list goes something like,

Cobb
Arthur
Eames
Ariadne
Yusaf
Saito
Fisher
Mal

If you watched the film with the sound down, and had the list of characters in front of you along with basic descriptions of appearace, you'd probably get at least four of the characters mixed up.
So is that guy with dark hair and blue eyes Dom, Eames or Fisher? Wait, Dom and Arthur are cohorts. So that scene with the brainstorming and the chair-tipping, are those guys Dom and Arthur?

Adding the roles to the character names in the list makes things a little easier. In the context of the movie,

Dom Cobb - The Extractor
Arthur - The Point ManEames - The ForgerAriadne - The ArchitectYusaf - The ChemistSaito - The TouristFisher - The MarkMal - The ShadeSo, the characters immediately have a bit more definition. They have roles now; you know what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to behave. The person we've made watch the movie with the sound down has a little more information to work with.

Adding descriptions of the characters to their names and roles helps further that distinction between characters and how they function and interact. I draw, so drawing the characters helps for me.

Knowing that not everybody draws is something we as the MLs of NaNo for Newie have taken into account. We're sorting out a paper doll/avatar creating method currently, so you the writer can create visual aids/figure out what the character you are writing about looks like.

It's helpful because you don't end up accidentally creating a lot of characters that look the same.

Researching details, even a little, will make things kick butt better.

Do I know anything about firearms?
Not really. Most of my knowledge comes from pulling apart Nerf Guns and listening to people who know guns explain stuff. And Hollywood.

Hollywood has a bunch of things wrong about guns, but we'll leave that for later.

I got to write about guns last year. It was fun, but not really knowing model names or makes meant that I had to do a little research. I didn't do stacks, but I did do enough to be able to talk about them when I wrote. It adds a little extra to the novel on two different levels. The plebs can go 'oh, this person knows what they're talking about' and the pros can say likewise. Or at least, not throttle the writer for leaving out important things.

A few years back, I encountered a character in James Patterson's Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. They'd had Galapagos Tortoise DNA spliced into their own genes and claimed to be over a hundred years old with the appearance of someone less than forty-five.
Which is all very well.
Until you realise that this novel is set in the present day (2007, when it was published), and that Watson and Crick first found the chemical structure of DNA in 1953. (And that's just discovering it. Mapping the human genome took about ten years, and that was only finished in the early 2000s.)

I know it's not common knowledge, but for those of us who remember trivia, it's a little frustrating.
And that's probably the trick to it: You don't have to research the heck out of these things, but enough to cover the information given in the novel will help a lot. Jargon is impressive and fun to use, but needs to be grounded enough that the people who know what you are talking about won't facepalm to the stars above.

Am I getting pedantic? Apologies. Point 5:

Show, don't tell.

Mira climbed the water tower, set up the sniper rifle and waited.

______________________________________

Mira adjusted the weight of her weapon against her shoulders for the climb. She pulled her hood further over her face and huffed against the biting cold that came from being awake at this altitude and time. Carefully, she scaled the freezing tower, brushing off the ice on the steel rungs with her hands before putting her weight on them. She reached the top of the tower and slid her sniper rifle from her back, assembling it for active use while looking for the best vantage point. Selecting her position, she silently moved into place, double-checking the padded coat that she'd be lying on for the next few hours. The cold here could kill a person if they were careless or foolish. Mira was neither of those things. She settled down, put her eye to the scope and began her hunt.

When writing, I have the option of telling you what happens, or showing it to you. Telling condenses what is going on. It simplifies the situation and keeps details to a minimum. Showing allows the reader to experience what is going on; to share the happening with the character and understand what is going through their heads. It's a very basic example, but the first piece of writing had me tell you what was going on. The second piece showed you. It's more interactive and (this is important when you're aiming for a word count) takes up more words to say. So have fun with adjectives; plot specific action sequences before you write them and talk about how something works rather than just it working. So much more fun.

Which in part brings us to the next bit.

Don't be afraid to use big words.

The English Teacher I had for year 12 is a fan of Westerns, Ancient China, horrendously bad puns and big words. He would do the kind of announcements in assembly that would expand your vocabulary just by listening. And in spite of him making us study John Donne and Snow Falling on Cedars, I will still nod to the Mantle. He taught us the value of using bigger or alternate words in writing (both creatively and in essays). I mean, there is certainly a feeling of achievement at being able to pronounce tergiversation but there is also more to come from it when you are able to use it in a sentence.

And sometimes it's an odd combination of cheating at scrabble and just finding alternate words.
For example, said.
Said means 'someone has spoken. Has - therefore it's past tense'
But how many different ways can someone have said something?

I think Mum has a poster of that kind of thing up on her classroom wall. It has stuff like 'whispered', 'shouted', 'grated', 'yelled', 'whimpered', 'cried', 'laughed', 'giggled', 'roared', 'grunted', 'asked', 'mumbled', 'uttered' and half a dozen others.
Using any one of those immediately attaches emotion to whatever the person is saying. It adds an extra dimension and allows the reader to experience it more completely.

This can be added to more than just how someone speaks. You can describe how they walk, move and do things. Sometimes it's word padding, but it does add to the novel regardless. Using bigger words is exciting. Just make sure you know what they mean first. (So, Gambit sounds gnarly, but make sure it's in the right context or things get odd pretty quickly).

Have fun.

When I was small, I had dolls. I didn't have very many of them, and they all pretty much ended their lives in the same manner; covered in pen and dirt and food. I never had a doll house, although I did at one stage have a castle smothered in glitter (like every seven year old girl should). Point is, I wasn't really into tea parties or shoes or playing house. Adventures into caves and giant trees was more my thing, complete with actual trees, sand, and my mother yelling at me to get off the shed roof before it collapsed or I got tetanus or something.
Point?
Um.

Have fun when you write your novel. You're constructing a story; a whole world, with characters that you've made and scenarios that you get to enact. Immerse your mind in it and write about the feel of things rather than just the happenings. Get emotional. Ingest too much caffeine and write 5000 words in one day. Look over to the clock and be surprised at the time.

Because soon it will be November, and I will get to have adventures like the ones I had when I was seven. Minus the glitter.

Cheap Dessert and a general update

Hey.

Uni season has begun again, and things move from one end of the fun spectrum to the other as this week has gone by. But of most of the things that have happened this week, I think I would start with Saturday's activities.

On Sunday I travelled back to the big smoke. So, with Saturday being my last full day to go and do fun things, the Old Guard from my home church headed out to a waterhole that us and a handful of other people in the local area know about. It's a spot you need a four-wheel-drive car to get to, and judging by the small jungle that we had to push through to get to the parking area, it would seem that the last time the track was used was when we last went down there.

It's also been raining quite a bit since the start of the holidays, so our trek down was something of a giant mad-toboggan ride. We got out okay, but there was a lot of mud stuck to the back of the car at the end of it.

I have a couple photos from this outing. I've gone with the group twice before and both times forgot to grab clothes for swimming in. Which was an error. This time that fact got fixed, so I was spending more time in the water than taking photos of everyone jumping around and chasing a butterfly.

So, Documentational footage.

Podiatry-based puns aside, I think also half the reason why the photos were less this time was because I spent more time being dunked in freezing cold water and generally having fun; looking at the tiny details in the moss and rotting wood chilling up on the top of the waterfall with us, poking weird stuff, and laughing when the lads fed one of the tiny ponds of tadpoles sunkist.

It's the little things in life.

The little, glorious things. I really like this waterhole, freezingness aside.



The other, slightly important (well, it's important now) thing that happened when we were out there was that I fell over. It sounds short and concise and that's really what it is. Some of those bits of rock were really slippery. I walked on one of those slippery bits without traction control engaged and the hardest rock in the world hi-fived my body.



I was a bit busy trying not to let it hi-five my head on the way down, so I didn't have any idea on what happened to my big toe. Still don't have any idea at the moment, but I've got roughly the same stride length as my grandfather, and he only has one knee.

At the moment? Visited the doctor yesterday. She thinks it might be fractured. My toe, that is. Not Grandpa's knee. I have to go somewhere and let them do science to my foot to find out. I'll show you the results when I get back from it. Anyway, it hurts, and I tend to whinge a lot when I bust something. So there you are. My whinging. Moving on.

We spent the rest of the arvo chilling out, watching Zombieland, until finally darkness fell and the last bits of the plan were put into place. Steel Wool, it turns out, you can set on fire if you rub it with a battery. By putting together a simple rig, we made sparks and took photos of them.

Also, I'll probably include details for that in a pyro-related post. I've still got to tell you all about fireball. It will be fun, and also disclaimer-riddled. Comes with the job description.

Does it? hrm.


Okay. Fast-forward to at the moment. Uni is about to start, there is food in the fridge and I'm going to try and write a doujinshi this year. (A doujinshi is a fanfiction in manga format. Last time I checked.)
It's as much an exercise in drawing as it is in storytelling. And as a writer, I'm so hyper-aware of Mary Sue that staying away from them is something that happens all the time. I hope.

(Although, I did plan to write a send-up for the concept a while back. One day...)


So, the present. It's a bit scary, but I'm not too worried. Everything happens according to Someone Else's plan, and that Someone Else has my best interests at heart. Yours too.


What else should I yammer on about for ages?

Oh yeah. The other part of the title.

I've got a few more friends from home moving down to Newie this year. They're already here, and I've caught glimpses of one or two about campus.


That said, I kind-of decided to start posting recipes to cheaply-made, good unifood. So, the first one is:


Caramelised Apples.
(Stuff you, American Spellcheck! I'm going to spell it with an 'S' whether you like it or not!)

This is possibly the simplest dessert I've ever made, aside from Jelly. It got rolled into the food-book when part of the Old Guard went to Queensland to visit more of the Old Guard mid last year. You need.

~1 Apple per person. (Juicy is best, but whatever is in season is pretty good)
Sugar
Water
Something to fry in/with. A saucepan will do the trick, but a frying pan has more surface area. Bec and I don't have a cooktop, so we'd use a skillet instead.
Ice-cream. Uni Students tend to prefer Homebrand for some reason.

So. Slice the apples into six-eight pieces. Take the seeds and funk in the middle out.
Heat up the pan to a low-medium temperature.
Throw le apples in. Throw le sugar on top. Don't actually le throw literally otherwise you'll have a buttload of stuff to clean up later.
Add a little bit of water too.

Thing is, when you heat up the apples, the juice begins to heat up. Caramelises them, with the help of the sugar. So, if everything goes alright, the apples turn a slightly-mushy golden brown, and sit in their own juices and the melted sugar and water. Reduce the liquid in the pan.

Apply Ice-cream to bowls, then apply apples and caramelly goodness to the ice-cream. Get as much of the juice out of the pan as possible before it cools.

Side-effects:
Makes Kitchen smell like apple-themed awesome.
Melted Sugar requires really hot water to clean up once it hardens. So try and wash out the pan before it cools.

Also, sugar can be easy to burn if you use a temperature too hot. The water acts as a buffer, so it's a little bit harder to mess up, but if you begin to smell burning, get that food off the heat immediately. Hot sugar redefines what you understand as 'hot'. But it's good. Be liberal with your sugar application.

Cost:

I put this together for my Bible study group last year. It fed twelve people and cost me about eight bucks.

It's really rich and sugar laden. I was astonished when Babs went back for seconds.

Backlog: the things I wish I'd told you about

So, henceforth begins the mile-long absent note, or excuse, or list. Anyway. Many things happened last year. I think it was probably the most manic year I have lived yet. So much went down, and there was also a lot that I didn't blog.

So, here's the blog post shortlist of things that happened last year that I didn't post.

The rest of London.

My overseas trip at the start of last year was something insane and unforgettable. I wish I had blogged more of this because it was interesting, amusing. Sometimes slightly terrifying. Like the first couple of days I spent in the city when I kept getting lost. Or the debilitating effects of jet lag. Wait. I've told you about those.

Everything from the Metro in Paris that reeked of urine to the wooden box I bought in Portobello road and got through customs. There was a lot that I could have talked about.

hey, wait. picture = 1000 words. yes?

London in pictures.

Trafalgar Square. Wet on windy days.

Moot is in this picture of an anatomically incorrect lion.

Watch for long enough and you'll see Sora and company.

Globe.

Flipping enormous door at St. Pauls. Moot is in this picture also.

St. Pauls in all its Baroquian glory.

Graffiti hunt.

Me and Fat Watson at 221b Baker St. I wanted Jude Law.

My mate the Squirrel at Regents Park

Westminster Cloisters

A postcard I sent to a friend. I adjusted it.

Sightings of the TARDIS at Earles Court

Julian the photographer I met at Kyoto gardens. We took photos of the Peacocks.

Said Peafowl and Moot. Moot felt slightly stressed.

Beanbag stack at Camden

Portobello Road

It came after the Strawhenge and Stickhenge.

Bath at Bath

There was the stump of what I hoped was a lime tree in the front yard.

Dunster

Me and Will.

And this kinda gives away the photo of me and Will.

Stairs at Tooting Bec Underground station. I ran up these.

Peter at Kensington.

Best tree at Kensington.

Look! Muggles replaced the fake wall with another fake wall!

There was more to London. And there's more to the Backlog. I'll do what every other franchise in Hollywood is doing at the moment and create a couple more sequels, not because I am running out of ideas, but because shortly I am heading down to the archery range again and I have to go find my kit. Happy viewing.