Drive and Burnout

For reasons unbeknownst, this post actually has nothing to do with cars. I mean, it could. I could begin to talk about how Sutto reckons I don't have 'GTi love' (He's one of the other Suzuki Swift drivers at church) and how I argue back that I do and it's different to his appreciation of the machines (it is). Or we could talk about how this really just proves that I am way too willing to rise to a goading.

"Sutto, You merely adopted the GTi love. I was born in it."

But this post isn't about cars.

This post is about Animania, an anime convention held in Sydney in March and September. It kind of relates to a couple of other blog posts that I've made before, so if you want to do some extra reading you can check out my post on Animania here, or the other themes of this post here, or the rest of my university work that's related to Bleach and the concept of the Hollow here. (And there. And everywhere.)

Now that I've just done a considerable amount of plugging for the blog, and you can see how much I've written about Bleach, I can assume that you'll be up to speed when I start talking.

Also, uni.

Directed Studies is taking up a lot of my mental space. I end up doing the headless chicken thing over it. The headless chicken thing is basically "oh man I have this much stuff to do in this amount of time and theresnotenoughtimetodoanythingwhattheheckamIsupposedtodoohcrapohcrapohcrap"
Part of that is my newest and biggest thing, which will be the topic of the next blog post, and part of this is trying to get Animania's costume done in time.

I mean, the one I'm taking down is Ichigo again. September's effort. But it was so well received  I kind of decided to see if I could enter it in the cosplay competition Animania runs, and March Animania is a bit smaller (and therefore the cosplay competition pool is smaller, right? *laughs nervously*). So, I have a costume to take. I'm just trying to tweak it; make it better and more streamlined. More scary?

I dunno. But I bought yellow contact lenses for it, and I'm wearing them now, and the whole world is a little hazy for it because my eyes are going what is this thing sitting on my eyeballs and every time I walk past a reflective surface my mind is going what in the blue hell is wrong with my eyes?

Friiiiick. I've lost the adapter for my phone memory card again. That thing is going to take ages to find again.

Wait. Here it is.

So I guess it's kind of working. How it will turn out when I add it to the face paint and mask/helmet I can't tell.

But at the moment, this is kind of taking up all of my mental space. And at the same time I'm remembering that hey, you have admin stuff to do for that, huh? And it's not fun.

But.

Animania is next Saturday. I'm putting in the entry form tonight, so I don't forget and miss out like I did last year. And hopefully everything will be together and I'll have one less thing to worry about.

So, my current dilemma is mostly this:

*Also, spoilers and stuff for the storyline of Bleach. Just a heads up.*

Ichigo, for those who don't follow Bleach, is a bloke.

The state in which I am cosplaying him has him in a berserker state. He's battle-damaged, and busy being not human. Busy being hollow and kerb-stomping the fourth Espada. By battle-damaged, I mean this:

Now, the casually observant person might note that giant pointy mask and hole-in-the-chest aside, he's not wearing anything on his chest. Generally, this is not a problem for guys.

I approached the problem and solved it thus:

And torn sleeve was extended to torn-bit-of-fabric-top-for-practicality-and-common-decency.

Now. This challenge that I'm rolling with at the moment stems from a couple things.

1. I want to cosplay it better/closer to accurate.
2. I'm going down by myself and not having to cover my own back in body paint would be handy.

This week I sat down and sewed a form-fitting, long sleeve top, with the hopes of getting that to stand in and do the white-skin and bare-chest business. I was just planning to kind of strap myself into it and away we'd go. But the top didn't quite work out as well as planned.

So now, I either have to do some extra tailoring to it, or do some more thinking.

I could do the same as before, with the top in white and some black stripes across it.
Or I could keep trying with the white all-in top.

But I don't have enough fabric to do both, or do one and then change if it doesn't work halfway.

Of course, I could go 'stuff all of this' and take the pre-existing top anyway.
But probably not.

I dunno. I really want to keep it looking accurate, but at the same time don't want to sacrifice how I look for that more than I have to. I mean, I'm not seven foot tall and built like a tank anyway. Even if I manage to get the top sorted, I'm still 163cm tall, with a slightly pudgy stomach and hips and waist that could never pass for male. So should I bother?

The other challenge I have to consider is making the hollow hole look more like a hole. I'm working on something with mirrors, and am pretty sure I can get that to work at least. It really just needs something rigid I can fix it to, and then I'll pop a short tube/lip thing over it and extend the amount of black space and hey presto! Hole!

I realise that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense reading like this, but my head is making a card house out of tesseracts at the moment and isn't fussed with trying to explain.

Oh yeah. You should totally check out what a tesseract is. Best wikipedia sidetrack I've had in a long time.

But I digress.

The top is my current situation. I've also got to repair the jaw (it got squashed a little on the way home in Spetember), make some alterations to the mouth, and try and get some spiny-knuckle-prosthetics. I have foam and latex, and I'm not afraid to use it.

And this time. THIS time, I will remember to bring the body paint I bought and not get twenty minutes on the train and remember I left it at home.

In conclusion?

I'm going to a convention next week. It's going to relate to Directed Studies, because culture and costumes and documentation and stuff. I've still got a lot of things to do. My brain has been operating at 150% and has started making the kind of warning sounds that say 'you should probably pull over and change the oil now.'
But hey. Sleep when you're dead, right?

If anyone wants to give me their opinion on how to finish the top on this costume, please do so. The blogs are set up to allow non-bloggers to comment. And even if you want to log in, you can do it with a google account, I believe.

Okay. One blog post down. Let's jump onto the next thing.

Hollow//Redux

In August, I went and posted an entry that I'd written way back at the start of the year. The post in question was ambiguous, and odd, and unfocused, but I thought that it might deserve a little bit of clarification/closure now that Animania has finished for this year. The post in question concerned the fictional monsters called Hollow from Manga and Anime series Bleach.


Because I've posted so many times about it, I don't see a need to explain the plot. Maybe a little bit about how the monsters work, but that's all.

The post I'd written was a reflection on how I had tried to cope with losing something valuable at the start of 2011 by giving up on trying to feel things. On having emotional responses and instead just doing things because instinct told me to.

This had upsides and downsides. It meant that I didn't really feel the fallout of the loss until a couple months after everything had gone down (which isn't to say it hurt less; it was only delaying the inevitable), and it meant that I was able to keep functioning at nearly the same level as before. Or at least, to a level where I wouldn't be a drag on other people.
The downside of not allowing yourself to think or feel, and instead to run on instinct, is that humans are inherently selfish and broken people. We're not perfect. We mess up and if I was to follow my instinct all of the time, it would have just spiraled into this out-of-control, self-serving mess and I would have hurt a lot of friends in the process.

So in short, allowing myself to be hollow for most of last year was something that was do-able, but ultimately wouldn't hold out. It was this big ball of lucid, angry emptiness and as enticing as it was, I'm kind of glad that I don't have to be there any more.

See? This is what happens when you put the wrong focus in your heart and it gets ripped out.
One big ol' hole and something you have to hide behind.

It's taken a while, but I'm getting better.

So, that's kind of a recap on that post. A little more focused, a little less ambiguous. I'm trying to leave it as ambiguous because when this blog got started, I didn't want it to turn into a 'Dear Diary' shermozzle. So it's a matter of figuring out what personal things are okay to talk about and which are not necessary, so you still get cool posts that have more than just cats in them.

Where are we going?

Oh yes. Animania is done, and now I'm trying to figure out how much it's okay to have my friends freak out over me dressing up as a monster on Saturday and having the photos turn up on social networking sites with my name attached to them.

Because my costume was kind of freaky. I did go as a Hollow.

Why?

Because it's how I face the things I get scared of. Infiltrate and disarm from the inside out. It's why I did Weeping Angels with my mates earlier in the year. Yes, those critters are hella scary. Yes, I have been scared of them. Yes, they still give me chills.

But I know what goes into them now. I don't have to be afraid of that anymore.

I suppose that this is where people would normally go "But Brooke, it's a fictional thing. You don't have to be afraid of it at all."

What, so you've never watched a scary movie and then left all the lights on in the house?

Most people get less scared of things by forgetting them. I'm not good at forgetting.

So when I've dressed as something scary, it's my way of coping. It's my way of disarming it. It's also how I remind myself that as a fallen being, I could actually become this if I don't watch myself. And not 'become' as in, dress up as one. I mean "put on a mask and be unable to take it off because you've assumed too many characteristics of the thing you're portraying".

And that can happen. It does happen. Maybe not with literally turning into a critter with big teeth, but socially? It's much easier to gossip when you are around other people who gossip. It's much easier to let your standards slip if you have mates who don't care about the occasional laspe.

Manifesting the scary into something that I can put on is one part of it. But being able to get to the end of the day and taking that mask off is probably the more important thing. You feel like a weight has been lifted.

(Both metaphorically and literally. Saturday's mask was heavy.)

So, my friends; to those who understand my cosplay and those who don't. Please don't freak out if or when you see me dressed up in the scariest mask you can think of. I'm just sabotaging the cool-looking things that I'm scared of.

Hollow.

January, 2012:

Hey guys. Did you miss me?

I missed you too. Unless that answer was a 'no' and then I'm not sure why exactly you're continuing reading. But carry on.

I could spend an outrageous amount of time explaining why it is I've been missing out on blogging, or we could save that for another time. It doesn't make very good material. Either way, I am now finding that my world has a little bit more time, so I'll try and blog more.

Pathetic excuses aside, I thought I might try and yak a little bit about something that immediately identifies my nerd-dom but will hopefully make decent blog material.

Have your seen/read/heard of Bleach before?

It's a manga series (there's an anime about it too) - so, a Japanese comic/cartoon/blah - about a schoolkid who can see ghosts.

Odds are, you've already heard me talk about if before if you've read the blog, or met me in person. Anyway.

The gist of the story is, the schoolkid acquires supernatural powers from the other main character - a female 'reaper', and then they and a bunch of other characters do what all the Reapers (I'm going to stick with the Japanese term for the job from now: Shinigami) do in a bunch of adventures. They send the ghosts of people to the afterlife and kill the bad spirits (called Hollows).

A Hollow is a ghost with no heart. They turn into monsters and eat other ghosts, people, Shinigami, blah blah blah. The point is that it's a Shonen manga so there's a truckload of fighting and drama and explosions and infrequent fanservice, which is frankly embarrassing even at the best of times.

But rather then spend my long preamble telling you about the Boob Lady, I kinda wanted to bring up the idea of the Hollow.

Hollows, or the theory of a Hollow, was something that I checked out earlier in the year, because I based a uni project around the idea of the mask, which relates to Hollows and the such.

Pictures explain better.

So, there is the hollow. It has a hole where the heart used to be and a mask that shields what is left of the ghost. What is left exactly? According to Kubo, the writer of the series, 'a heap of instincts'.

Hollows get to be more fun later in the series, because the main character, Ichigo, has some fairly close encounters with one particular one. I'm deliberately being vague.

What does this have to do with anything?

At the start of 2011, I had a bit of a 'life priority reshuffle'. It was needed, but it was hella painful, and for a while there, things got...interesting.

So, because the brain and the heart were playing up, I spent a lot of the year playing with and tinkering on the concept of instinct.


I did more things based on it. I allowed it to become a little more rampant, at the cost of a bit of sanity, and probably part of my reputation with my housemate. But then, housemates are spared the tediousness of interacting with the mask instead of what exactly is underneath it.

(You see what I did there?)

What I am saying is, there is no point to a mask with a housemate. Anyway, I'm drafting this when I ought to be in bed, so I hope that there's some quality still intact.

Rambling aside, this year got to be very different. And spending bits of it as a Hollow was...

...I want to and at the same time don't want to say worth it. Do you want to spend half your time running on instinct?

That's up to you.

What I found was that it was almost exactly like Ichigo's experience in dealing with...yeah. I mean, it's useful for getting out of tight spots, and berserkering is great, but a lot of the time got spent either trying to rein it in or trying to regain control.

And truth be told, there's no way that people are able to hide behind a mask for too long. The harder you try, the harder the repercussions are later. Things just...don't work.

But then, this world is fallen. Things don't ever work. And I know that choosing to live by instinct won't ever work well because eventually it just rolls around and turns into self-serving desire before biting you in the bum. Not productive.

Did I enjoy my year as a Hollow?

Some bits. The bits where I got to sit down and draw, and that was what was required for uni work, then instinct was great. Especially in an art school that pushes Abstract so much (I should put that in Comic Sans to make you understand how I feel about being told to stick to blobs all the time). You sit down, tell your brain to shut up about how much you suck, and get down to whatever it is you're working on. Good times.

Would I choose to keep living as a Hollow?

I don't think so. It's handy, but kinda messes up the psyche a lot.

Is this post one that needed a filter?

Probably.

I'm going to save this as a draft and show you tomorrow.

*Eight months later*

Gilligan-style cuts are amazing, no?

I came home for this weekend. Partly to see the folks, partly to rub my face on the owl some more, and partly to prep for Animania in September.

Anyway. I do a lot more driving by myself now. Was going to get people to come with, and then I left Newie before any of that could get organised. So I got to spend three hours yelling at myself and singing/yowling along with the Hume brothers and Florence Welch. Small cars are amazing.

I'm sorry, we'll get back on track shortly.

So, Animania. And I suddenly realised the Batman take I was having this year on making of costumes. Because earlier in the year I got to be a Weeping Angel with some mates. And in a month, have a guess at what I'm going to be?

Covered in white paint, that's what.

Tomorrow will be sit down and Handicrafts day, where I will sew my sister a trenchcoat, and she will cast a Hollow mask on my head. It will be grand.

But the concept of the Hollow, as I mentioned earlier/ages ago, is something I find intriguing. And more than a bit scary, for a variety of reasons. I think it's a reminder of what we could be if we didn't keep stuff in check.

Vague stuff FTW.

Batman? You know, dress as what frightens you. And what looks gnarly.

I've got a bit more to go before I can give a convincing Hollow scream though.