The last lesson my car taught me

Um, this is kind of weird to start writing about, but it's also important, and yeah. I'll start where I can and stop where I will.

This is one of the posts about my first car, and it was the last lesson that the Suzuki taught me.

I say 'last' because back in June, I broke it. Badly broke it. Like, it's not coming back, broke it.

And it was my fault.

I guess this means different levels of thing to different people. But we'd had that car since Hannam Vale (So, at least 2001), and Dad had looked after it. She went alright, and even when Dad bought a different car, he didn't sell the Suzy. It was lent to a couple of different people, and each driver added their own level of attachment to the vehicle. It was unregistered for a while, and Dad had people asking more than once, if he was planning to sell it, seeing as it had sat in our front yard, untouched, for a couple years. But he never did.

I first started regularly driving the Suzuki at the end of 2010, when I got a job that meant I needed to be driving a car that wasn't Mum's while she was at work. She was a tetchy thing to get used to driving, but we got on alright. The Suzuki was a 1989 Swift GTi model; built as a sports car. Highly strung; usually pretty difficult to drive if you weren't used to it. It'd be difficult to start in cold mornings, or on any morning, really.

Back at the start of uni, I took the Suzy to Newcastle. This was back when my housemate still lived in the house, and before she was able to drive, so I did driving for both of us frequently. Nothing bonds people and a car like losing it and thinking it was stolen in a car park.

And from there I gradually just got more and more attached to the car. She was difficult sometimes, because she was an old car, but Dad loved it and I loved it, and it was something of a family heirloom.

And then I did something stupid.

This was like a squire riding their father's warhorse out for the day and breaking its leg. It was like if Batman, still in his early days of being batman, through some fool maneuver, got Alfred killed.

I still have no idea whether or not I checked at the give way sign, but I was on a minor road of a T-intersection on a rainy day in Newcastle back in June, and I hit someone else.

Y'all can calm down a little; I didn't hurt anyone, and I emerged shell-shocked, but unscathed.

Shock erased anything I could remember of the event to prove that I had looked before entering the give way section, and the fallout of that was that I was in the wrong of the accident.

I had broken the car that was Dad's pretty, and my pretty, and Sam's pretty (Sam was one of the lads who'd driven the car in the interim years). I'd been told to look after it, and

and evidently I haven't gotten over all of this yet. Guilt takes time. The fault is still mine though, and I have a bit of a hangup over it.

So.

There was a lesson learned. Let me tell you it.

Grace.

Or rather, I began to appreciate grace a whole lot more.

See, I've known of and understood grace for a while. To a degree.

My Mum and Dad are both Christians, and they raised me and my siblings to understand the wonder that comes with having a personal relationship with the creator of the universe. But even from a young age, they taught me the value of grace. They're both like sixth-generation Salvation Army kids (Okay so Dad's only three generations, not sure about Mum). Well, they came from Salvation Army stock.

And I'm not up for debating a whole bunch of things right now, but when we left the Salvation Army, Mum made sure that I understood grace properly. That I understood that it's not the things we do that make us right; that following the laws wouldn't be enough to repair a broken relationship with God. We needed Jesus, and we needed to understand that he offered a way to get into a right relationship with God, without doing stuff.

That it was a gift.

That it was a grace.

And I'd known this for a long time. Been taught it for a long time.

But it wasn't until I was dealing with a written-off car, and being in the wrong, and trying to figure out whether my demerit points will carry over when I get my full license, that I realised the value of grace.

I think you can appreciate the value of something in one of two different ways.

You can understand how important it is when you come from not having it and then having it,
and you can understand how important it is when you have it and then it is taken away, or you have to deal with something without its aid.

That's not to say that I didn't want the law to be nullified - certainly not. If the law was nullified, then there'd be no justice. A world with no justice is a scary thought for me. We need justice. Without justice, things that go wrong get unpunished, victims are left to their broken lives and society, without stability, caves in.

Justice is important.

So I understood with incredible clarity why it was I was in the wrong over my accident. And why it was that someone had to be at fault. It's pretty rare that cars go and crash themselves.

It's just that I didn't want to be the one at fault. I wanted grace. I didn't want the law to be broken for my sake, but I also didn't want to be the one to have to deal with being in the wrong.

It was actually an incredible paradox, and at the same time a perfectly clear truth. Perfectly clear lesson. Painfully illustrated in screeching brakes and deformed metal, laid to rest clad in TARDIS blue.

...

It was painful to learn, and beautiful at the same time. And I hope that I never take the lesson of grace so for granted again that I have to learn this one over.

Grace abounded more when Dad found my new car; a Festiva. It's a gelding compared to the stallion that was the Swift, but I'm incredibly thankful for it. Not having wheels is something you can get around if you live in the middle of Newcastle, or if you have housemates with cars, but when you have neither of these things, even getting the groceries is a challenge.

Meet the incredibly tidy Daiko Bubbles. I'll be sure to post about it in the future. And about the Swift too.

But I think that's about as much talking as I can manage about the cars for now. I'll go back to aimlessly surfing the web in the art gallery, and listening to Explosions in the Sky.

Seriously. Go look them up if you like post-rock, or like forty minutes of absolutely radical instrumental music.

Updates: Final Semester, Glutton for Punishment, Future Cosplays and Life Lessons

So.

Somehow it's now the last day of July. And I've had my first day off for this week.

Uni started back on Monday, and with it came the challenge of waking up on time, and remembering to do things in the correct order to maintain sanity and other general things.

I've started my last semester - I finish studies in November, and hopefully the University will give me the funny hat early next year. With this then, is a slight bittersweet feeling. I mean, I've really loved uni, but at the same time, there's a bunch of things that I'll be glad to have done and dusted when I leave the realms of tertiary education.

And hopefully, I'll be able to get a job at the end of it. And move into a house that's a little warmer in the winter.

I've got a couple of blog posts in the works; these are kind of things that I've been mulling over the last month or so. There's two that are about my first car, and one that's about communication. I'm still trying to figure out how to say everything that I want to say in those, which is why they're not up yet.

Also, NaNo is coming up again in November. Which is still a little bit away, but I'm beginning to plan story stuff now, because then you can just write during the allocated time. I'm ML-ing for Newcastle along with another mate again this year, so it should be fun. If I can figure out how to navigate time properly, I'll also try and finish last year's novel before we get to November. I got to fifty thousand on it, but it's probably closer to an eighty or hundred-thousand word novel. I haven't even written the scene with the granting of the superpowers yet.

*sigh*

Anyway, most of the plot of this year's novel is already planned. The characters don't have names yet. The story is about apathy, I guess. The main character is really apathetic because -*statement redacted*

More on it soon. The story doesn't have a name yet. But it's about fate and apathy and the future and a bunch of other things. Redemption?

And a gypsy curse, unless I can think of a better way to phrase that bit. Carnies with superpowers or something.

So, what else is going down?

Today, I woke up late, courtesy of playing Princess Uno with friends last night until I'd punched into the 'confused zombie' phase of overtired.

Yesterday, I started on my sister's 18th birthday present. It's her birthday tomorrow. Not sure if it'll be done in time. :/

I also attended my first Alchemy class for the semester, and made a big piece of chalk art at the church hub/office.

Yeah, that's right. Alchemy.

It's funny, because when Bec the Housemate and I were looking at the Fine Art Program Handbook back in first year, we both saw Alchemy listed and laughed our heads off because 'what? Like the lead-into-gold business? I knew Fine Arts was going to be a bit out there, but they seriously teach Alchemy?'

Yeah, they do. Sorry to ruin it, but it's a photography subject. You learn to print photographs with technology that was used back in the 1840's. One of the first exercises that we're going to do is make a pseudo-daguerreotype. I'm going to henceforth refer to that word as 'D-type' because I can't spell it without aid of a spell-checker. D-type photographs were the first type of photograph made, and the process happened when you coated a silver plate with a bunch of chemicals, exposed it to light, and then exposed it to a bunch more chemicals. Including mercury gases. I think we might be skipping the mercury bit of the process.

First.

But D-types were insanely cool on a number of different levels. Firstly, they produced only a single positive from the process - unlike film photography, which creates a negative that can be printed from - so the end product was a complete one-off. Second, these photos were incredibly detailed, due to the nature of the light-sensitised metal; the surface was slow-reacting to the light, and could be compared with modern tech as having an ISO of less than ten.

(For my friends who aren't waist-deep in photography madness, ISO is light sensitivity. The higher the number, the more light sensitive. The trade off with having high ISO images is the grainy effect you usually see on cheap cameras)

So yeah. Alchemy looks like it'll be fun.

And I've got a substitute for Fibres this semester, but I've had her teach me before, and I actually get along with her better than my standard tutor, so this semester I'll actually want to do really well with Fibres. Which is good.

My theory course looks like a mix of philosophy and art, which should be interesting.

And I've got another photography elective on Friday.

So that's uni so far. I'm planning to make lace at some stage this semester, and I don't even know what else.

Wait.

Let me tell you about today's finding.

Animania is one of the conventions that I frequent. Case in point.
The big one is coming up in September, and I was of two minds about going, until I got an update about the event this morning.

The special guest is the Japanese voice actress for Kuchiki Rukia, of Bleach.

And you're all like 'blimey, not Bleach again'

At that point, something in me sighed, and something in me went nuts. Because I then should totally go, and get a signature or something, and dress as Rukia, but not her standard attire, because that's too simple and there'll be fifty million of them at the convention.

Truth be told, I already had a Rukia cosplay planned for some time in the future. I was actually planning to do it at a point in time where I wouldn't have long hair though, because wigs are getting more and more difficult for me. Something about having hair down to my butt.

Anyway. We'll work that out when we get there.

A week later...

Crap.

Okay, that's it. I've got gallery duty and I'm going to be here for the next five hours; posting will be done.

Also, I realised that all that post got incredibly detailed in a short amount of time. I apologise. If not careful, it's pretty easy to get stuck on the small details. A flaw of mine.

What was this week then?

I got very sick on Monday night. No idea why. Guts just decided to hit the 'purge' button and things got less and less fun after that. It's only today that my appetite has actually returned somewhat. Isotonic drinks in the meantime are the best.

I've also started patternmaking the outfit for Animania; I was supposed to get the fabric today, but for my amazing organisational skills. (Woo!)
Tomorrow.

I think there's a couple things I'm on edge about with the cosplay, and a couple of things I'm really, really happy about.

I dunno if I ever blogged about it before, but battle damaged characters are boss to cosplay.

I probably said something a while back about this too.

Why?

No hems. You can have something that's flowing and majestic and tattered as buckleys, and you don't have to sew hems on it. In fact, it actually looks better if you irregularly hack into the fabric with a pair of scissors. Authentic battle damage; stuff like that. Hems on giant flowing things are pretty nasty, so no hems make life better.

The outfit also looks really simple. I finished patternmaking it last night; the seams and stuff are all nice and neat.

Except for the collar.

Look at that thing.

LOOK AT IT.

It's like whoever designed this thing didn't even understand how clothes work. It was just 'oh, hey. This would look cool. Let's chuck this on here, and that on there, and whatever.'

*Throws chair*

It'll be done. Fortunately, Dark Rukia has been cosplayed before; so I can look at what other people have done in the past and figure out what I'm working on from there, but in the meantime it's a bit tricky.

Now, to away from this clunky update, and try and write something a little more coherent. I've got five hours left at the gallery. Plenty of time.

Supanova and the return of Texas

So. Let's see how I go typing up a blog post with a bruised hand. Reverse snap is never kind to play, and more so if you happen to be a fine artist and you're playing aggressively against eight other people.

First, I want to apologise to everyone who's been regularly tuning in. I should have gotten this done earlier. The middle two weeks of June were the definition of madness for me, and I needed some time off to recover and rest. I may talk about a couple of those things later on, but that's really a blog post for another time.

Also, I tried typing up a post for Nova earlier, and it quickly turned into a play-by-play. Which is not incredibly interesting for everyone. I'll try my best not to dilly-dally.

OKAY. SUPANOVA EVERYONE.

I'd never been to a Supanova before. I'd done Main Animania twice before though, and basically assumed it would be the same, but a bit bigger and encapsulate a wider range of fandoms.

Now, let me tell you about what was right in that statement and what was insanely underestimated about that statement.

Have you been to Paddy's Markets before?

If you have, imagine what it would look like if you went to Paddy's and gave every fourth person a costume, and every second person a camera.

If you haven't been to Paddy's before, a music festival or any kind of crowd that after half an hour you feel over will suffice in the above situation.

Supanova had many many people. Too many people.

I guess that that part of my thinking considering that the first day I was at Nova, I was in the armour and therefore took up more physical space that a lot of other people didn't seem to think existed. Wait. That's a little confusing...

Brooke, how did the armour go in the long-awaited competition? Did you win?

Well.

The short answer is 'no'. The long answer goes something along the lines of 'I slept in and arrived after the prejudging check-in time closed'. Which goes to show that you should not try functioning on three hours of sleep and then expect that the next night you can get away with anything less than twelve hours sleep.

This was a little disappointing. I had planned everything for Supanova with the intent of entering Tex in the competition, and arrived late, dripping black ink everywhere and with my shoes already leaking.

That's something I didn't mention earlier. It rained pretty much all weekend at 'Nova, and I had to walk a kilometre from the place I was staying to the train station in the rain both ways.

And the ink I used to paint the armour, which I believe had 'waterproof' printed on the bottle, was not waterproof by any stretch of the imagination. I left little black puddles wherever I stopped on my way there and back.

But there were photos asked for. The first two were on the train, and those kind of mean a little more than photos taken at the convention. I mean, there's a much larger amount of people that go to conventions with their cameras, but the people on the train or wherever have no idea as per the occasion. They're just minding their own business, and you've popped into their world, oddly dressed and acting normal. They might not understand what you're doing, but they get to appreciate it nevertheless.

And let's not forget the rat-tailed 10-year-olds who waved to me and called me 'Master Chief' on the train. I waved back, because that's what you do when kids who understand at least part of what you're trying to be talk to you. I didn't have my helmet on, so there was no need to do the character business.

And thusly we arrived, soggy and putting black ink on everything, with one of my shoes already broken, at supanova. Don't assemble shoes with hot glue - you need stuff that bends.

The costume was well-received by everyone else, and I had a lot of people ask for photos. About 80% of those people kept calling me 'Master Chief' though. There was a great level of temptation to at one stage do the "My name is TEXAS" yell (Think that line from The Matrix) but, you know, my voice was kind of muffled by the helm, so there wouldn't have been much of a point. Would have fogged up the visor, and that would have been about it.

It was kind of cool that I had to actually tell people that I'd made the armour. There was black ink rubbing off here and there, so you could start to see green foam showing, but it was still rather cool that it was of high-enough workmanship to be mistaken at times for a store-bought Spartan.

There was a store-bought spartan there though - I saw a woman dressed in mjiolnir armour complete with battle damage and the correct shade of green. It was interesting seeing it up close, as I got to have a gander at the look and the feel of the licensed product. I didn't encounter her on the Saturday though, so we didn't get photos together.

Oh yeah, the photo business...

Let's go out on a limb here and I'll tell you what it means when you have a complete stranger ask you for your photo.

It means that your outfit impacted them enough to break the social convention of talking to a stranger, enough to ask to take a photographic record of your effort, alongside themselves, or taking a pose.

It is often a confirmation of the 'breaking down the fourth wall' business that I spent the last semester yabbering about, more so if they interact with you in a manner appropriate for your character.

I was only asked for one photo of me 'killing' someone else though. I put the lad in a headlock and then all was well again. But yeah. I got asked for a lot of photos. I'd be in the middle of having a conversation with someone, and someone else would tentatively approach me for a photo. I'd chuck on the helmet, pose, and get hit by five other requests. And then get about ten minutes to take the helm off for fresh air before the next photo.

So this was part of my Saturday. Something else that does happen with the photos is that social media lets a bunch of strangers put up photos that they've taken in a place where everyone else can see said photos too. So if your outfit's good enough, you might not need a camera for a convention - you just trawl facebook for the week after the convention and the photos that everyone else took of you show up.

I've done this before and been met with limited success. Considering that 1) I didn't have any pockets and 2) my point and shoot camera has vanished off the face of the planet, I was kind of relying on con photos for documentation of the suit and general reception.

Let me now post up the entirity of the photos I've found of Tex that were taken by other people.

Yep. That's all of them.

Oh, wait. I saved the best feedback for last.

Remember how I said 80% of people thought I was Master Chief?

This was kind of the highlight in terms of feedback I got from other people on Tex.

This tweet was sent by one of the guys manning the stall at 'Nova that sold Roosterteeth merch. Keep in mind that it's RT that created the Red vs Blue series. The guy at the stall recognised the character, and tweeted the photo he took to Kathleen Zuelch, the woman who voices Tex.

And the image was re-tweeted by the lady who voices Tex.

While there wasn't verbal feedback, getting a shout out from the voice actor of the character is about the coolest kind of feedback you can get.

The guy couldn't remember my Twitter handle, but it wasn't hard to find later on.

The rest of my day was spent taping the bits of armour back on, and being incredibly thankful for the hydration pack that I'd been able to borrow before heading out. I don't know how immediately obvious it is to the average joe, but a wetsuit gets pretty hot pretty quickly. Hydrate or get real dizzy real quickly. And yes, that happened.

What else would be worth mentioning about the day? There were many people, and many people I was trying to find that I now know because of conventions. I didn't find all of them, but also got pretty peopled out pretty quickly.

Oh. I bought a grifball!

It's a plushie tank mine.

The costumes were pretty incredible at Supanova, but I also think it was to a degree a wider range of the spectrum that I see at every other convention - there are always brilliant ones, and midrange ones, and ones that will get better in time. There were like fifty million Eleventh Doctors though.

Lots of TARDIS dresses, lots of Doctors. I get it, it's a cool outfit, and it's okay for you to love the series. But the only outfit I saw more than Matt Smith's Tweed-and-Fez was the Pikachu Onesie.

So many Pikachu onesies.

There should not be that many at a convention. My goodness gracious.

*shakes head, tries to not bump bruised finger*
I really hope this isn't broken. Silly paranoia.

OKAY, WHAT ELSE?

I stayed for the cosplay comp on Saturday, to see what the competition would have looked like.

It was pretty varied. Some were absolutely incredible. I would have been hard-pressed to match the best stuff, but not by much.
Next year, I guess. Animania is for anime; I can't enter Tex in the prejudging. Next year, with a gun and armour that doesn't fall apart or have ink pouring off it because of the ruddy weather. Or I'll just take the next planned thing.

It's probably my biggest problem with cosplay in general. I have this neverending list of things that I should be making at any given point in time. And the point in time when this list gets longer is usually when I'm in the middle to end stages of another costume.

So next year's big costume is probably going to have a shotgun that folds out into a scythe/sniper rifle combo.

Glutton for punishment.

Back to nova:
Sunday was a little more laid back. I took some edo-period clothing in and got to browse the stalls a little better. And remembered an umbrella. They make a big difference when you've got to walk a kilometre in the kind of rain that says 'I am not letting up, no matter how much you wish it'.

There was a stall for Weta workshop, which is better explained as the SFX group that made the costumes and paraphernalia for the Lord of the Rings movies, the Narnia movies, the Hobbit trilogy, King Kong, Avatar, District 9, and half a bajillion other things.

And when it was noticed that they had a panel that you could attend to see what they did and what they  were up to, I was like 'yes.'

And then I was like 'what does it take to get a job as a costume designer with Weta?'

And the guy at the stall was like 'send us a portfolio'

I think it would be equal parts exciting and freaky to get to work with Weta. On the one hand, it's a dream job for someone like me. On the other hand, they're based in NZ and I still get homesick if I don't go home at least once a term at the moment.

Mad industries that I want to work with, why you all outside of Australia?

Keep going, keep looking. Keep making.

So I guess that with looking at Supanova as a whole, I was a bit underwhelmed. Although I can kind of put those down to several factors:
The company I kept had me on edge the entire time
I'd not been ready for the kind of crowd
I took a huge cosplay while not being ready for the kind of crowd
Said cosplay had some major failures and I wasn't able to enter it in a competition I'd been winding up for the entire month prior
My shoes leaked on the Saturday and Sunday
I was overtired from finishing uni

Not sure if I'll go next year. I mean, I'm not ruling it out. I just wasn't prepared for what was going to be there.

Never underestimate how miserable wet feet can make you.

I guess these kind of feel like a little bit of a downer. There were some positives I guess. The tweet from Kathleen was one of those. Seeing an incredible amount of costumes was another. Weta was a third.

I had a lot of people ask about the armour, which was great. And I got to tell a few people about the blog too. Next time I should try for contact cards or something.

So yeah.

Next thing?

The Return of Texas

As mentioned earlier, the ink ran on the armour in the rain, which was a bit disappointing.
I also had some structural failures occur as well, some of which can be fixed, others of which I will just Improve so they don't break in the same way again.

Yesterday I took the armour out on the front lawn of my parents place and hosed as much of the ink that would come off as I could. And then wiped the helm down with a chux instead because it has batteries and lights inside it.

The idea at the moment with fixing the armour is to repair the foam that failed structurally, repaint the armour so it's uniform and won't get black everywhere when it gets wet, sew the velcro onto the wetsuit properly and fix up the vent holes and pretty much redo the entire shoe, because those suckers fell apart disappointingly fast.

And a gun. I want a gun. Although that is probably something I'll work on when I get back to Newie, since all said foam is in Newcastle and I'm not buying more unless I absolutely have to. There's three and a half full sheets in Newie. Enough to make half of the armour over again. At the moment I'm tossing up between building the assault rifle or the sniper rifle.

I think there's more things I can write on, but at the moment my decrease in typing speed is sufficiently getting to me. I'll leave you with the link for Weta's project list so you can see how cool they are,

a picture of Nathan Fillion holding a sniper rifle for no explainable reason

and the first trailer of the RWBY series, because it has my next planned big cosplayable character in it. It's a bit violent though, so do consider yourself warned.

Another note on dreaming

Okay, consider this the unrefined ramblings of someone with a thought and an argument. The post is not about speculation-dreams, but rather, that thing your brain does to pass time when you log off for a bit.

I don't remember my dreams very often, but when I do they're rarely everyday things. The last two NaNo novels I've written were based off dreams I'd had - for whatever reason being in the middle of some really weird scene, and then waking up and going

"what the actual heck"

Usually they're insanely vivid, and I can remember every detail. Or enough to write about them.

Last year's novel was about a character who gets inflicted with a virus, and nearly kills someone else because of it, and is only able to save them by giving them the virus as well.

Man that sounds weird when you phrase it like that. But that's the summary of that dream, and that scene was the fastest 2000 words I've ever written.

Come back to the present.

This morning was pleasant. It was just nice, and nice for a few different reasons. And then I woke up and had to deal with a reality where none of the things that made that scenario nice were present. It really just meant I had an odd taste in my mouth for the duration of the day, as well as one particular Anchor & Braille song stuck in my head.

It provoked thought. Would we be more satisfied with life if we didn't dream? I mean, my biggest problem with dreams is trying to deal with these two completely different worlds and how they're supposed to relate when I know one of them is just my brain having a spack so it's not real but it felt real at the time.

I guess that this is what happens when you spend too much of your waking hours reading and writing fiction. You start to live it, and get disappointed when it doesn't turn out that way.

Or whatever. I can deal with it not being real in the same way that I can deal with Aes Sedai, Shinigami and birdkids not being real. Draw the heck out of it and start making costumes.

It's the part where you have to master the two worlds and not act like the way you relate to that person or this person is different in any way from what it was like before the dream. I can deal with waking up and not being able to walk through walls - I do that all the time.

It's the people thing that gets me. Do I behave differently because of this spack-attack my brain had? Because the other party is going to get mighty confused if so. They've missed out on a whole chapter of 'what's going on at the moment' because my brain decided to fill that bit in.

Stupid brain.

Oh hey, let me tell you how else my brain is stupid.

Let's talk about memory.

My memory is weird. It's amazing at remembering things like the difference between Iceland and Greenland, why it is you shouldn't be selling lye water commercially, the extra language in the Wheel of Time series, and which Grammy awards ceremony the Gorillaz performed at.

2006. And oh-my-goodness-gracious-Murdoc-and-Madonna, you can stop watching halfway through.

And yet somehow I still manage to forget people's names. I'm useful for winning trivia nights, but pretty useless for everything else. My head records everything useless about my day, and stores it all.

Which is why I had difficulty particularly the last week, trying to remember crucial details about an event when I've had shock pretty much obliterate said details. Not being able to remember is my problem.

Although, that ends up being a paradox sometimes, since I've of late been desperately trying to remember the important things, and trying to cash in my useless memory ability. There's things that happen, and I get trapped inside my own head, trying to figure them out, when it feels like it'd be easier to forget everything and move on. Forget the useless details and remember the ones that matter.

Yeah, good luck.

So, sometimes when something is uuber important for me to remember, I'll write it down. But it's rare that I'll record everything. I hate recording everything. You tell me to write a journal and I'll immediately have my hackles up, because it's...it's...

Imagine this scene.

A library, vast and extensive, and a desk in the middle of it. The desk is completely covered in paper, stacked high in great piles. Paper stacks crowd around the desk, each like a small child wanting to be picked up by their mother next. There's no-one at the desk.
You begin to search the shelves, tentatively, for the person you seek. They're not at the desk. Your eye catches onto an odd sight nearby - a clerk's desk sitting next to the end of a shelf. There's a pen standing upright on an open, blank book. It's scribbling furiously in a script that is halfway between a cursive and a print, its writer absent. You read what it's scrawling out, and catch words like 'cold' and 'grey'.
"Odd place for you to be,"
You hear a voice, and caught off guard, spin around.
There's a girl. She's shorter than you, but it doesn't seem to register. Her hair, the colour of sunlight, hangs loose, long and wild. Her boots are scuffed but cared for, poking from the turnups of her faded blue jeans. Her top has some print on it, but you don't register the joke it's making because she's speaking again.
"Can I help you?"
You shiver and straighten your grey coat, suddenly registering what the book had been recording when you began observing the pen. You swallow, then stand up straight. You are here to offer Advice. It will be Beneficial and bring Order to this library which is in dire need of such help.
"Can I interest you in-"
The girl has already snatched the sheet of paper from your hand. She gives it a cursory glance, before turning and placing it carefully on the tallest pile of the desk in the centre of the room. She tilts her head, shakes it and returns to where you stand.
"Why do I need to provide an inventory of my library?" she asks, frowning.
You feel taken aback. This wasn't the answer you were expecting.
"Because...because it will help you stay organised?" you manage.
The girl turns, takes in the library in its entirity - the two-storey-high shelves, complete with sliding ladders. The stacks of loose books as tall as a man and four times that height in width.
The ink-stains, frayed rugs and overwhelming smell of old paper.
And then the girl turns back to you. You didn't see how or when it happened, but her attire has changed. Her hair is now bound back, and she is wearing a faded blue bomber jacket. Something in her face has changed too - more reserved, and a little sad.
"What makes you think my library needs organising? The book piles? The paper? The absence of any prior-installed regiment?"
You think carefully about what to say, but she begins to speak again.
"Have you tried to pin down memories before?"
You nod, hoping to inform the girl of the usefulness of said pinning.
"I don't like to do it more than I have to," she says quietly, "it's like taking a camera everywhere."
You stop nodding, puzzled.
"The problem with taking a camera everywhere," says the girl, "is that you can very quickly become obsessed with documenting the moment instead of just enjoying it. It becomes more important to have some tangible proof of your experience than to have that experience in the first place. And that's kind of sad.
My books, they all decay. Some do it faster than others, but the ink bleeds sometimes, or the paper gets crumpled. They're alive, see, and they all have a limited lifespan. I could try and inventory them, but that wouldn't make them any better or worse. The time I'd spend writing down the information on the outside of the book is time I could be spending inside the book, or I'd be so focused on documenting the book that I'd forget to spend time with it and it'd fall apart in my hands. My library might look disheveled, sir, but let me assure you, I know it. It is my library. Very little happens in it that I do not know of."
Behind her, you notice the paper piled on top of the desk. It is moving of its own accord, floating towards the girl. There is a rustling sound as the paper rearranges itself, although you can't discern what the rearrangement is until two great angel wings unfold from behind the girl.
"This is my world," the girl says again, "I know it well enough."
And then the floor of the library ceases to exist and you fall into the sky.

...

...

...

Okay. I got carried away with that last part. But anyway. You get creative writing out of me as well.

I got stuff to do.

*paper rustles*

Brooke out.

Retrospective: Breaking Down The Fourth Wall

Did I use that word correctly?
*googles*
...Okay. Yes. Good.

Now, with Mumford and Sons in my ears, and the rap from The Fresh Prince of Belair stuck in my head, lemme tell you about how my world got flipped, turned upside down...

Gah. Get a life, Will Smith.

This is kind of the wrap-up post for Directed Studies. It's due tomorrow, so there's that. There's probably going to be a post-script for the unit next week, because this weekend is Supanova and I think I should review how that goes for various reasons.

Okay.

At the beginning of semsester, when I kind of started wrapping my head around what Directed Studies was going to look like, I basically went "I would like to make costumes"

Subsequently, I planned out this sweeping grandeur of outfits, and had in my head that I was going to get four high-caliber costume out, in spite of the fact that on average I only have enough time and sanity and money to create on average one per year. And I was going to do all of this in a semester, plus some work experience.

Never let it be said that I don't have ambition at the start of a project.

Now, the thing that I didn't check or understand fully at the start of the project was the concept of time. See, I finished the first costume in good time, and then I had some delays getting the pattern sorted for the Halo armour. And the website that I was consulting about all of this had mentioned that it would take me about 300 hours to complete, but that didn't register in my head as a comprehensible amount of time when I first read it. I kind of just looked at it, and broke 300 hours down as 'two and a half weeks, working every day for eight hours'

You can't understand what kind of time that takes until you are in the middle of it. To my folly. The armour took so much longer than initially expected, that it effectively swallowed up my other two projects, and about fifty percent of the time I would have spent on another course. Probably more.

But. It's finished, and at least ready for marking tomorrow. I finished it yesterday morning, and immediately went out and got photos. Props to Micah for that. They look Spectacular.

I feel a little odd about it, because...well, because every time I go to make a cosplay, I hop on DeviantArt and check out what other people have done. They end up posting these absolutely radical, professional looking things, and when the photos were done, I was looking at something which had a caliber equal to those outfits. I was a little weirded out and chuffed at the same time.

So there's that.

Now you know what I planned to do, and what I actually did. Now lemme tell you about what I want to do next.

Supanova is this weekend. I'm planning to, after Tuesday, make a rifle for the outfit so I have somewhere to store my things while I'm walking around (No pockets for Tex. I'll just make the stock and cartridge hollow in the rifle and put my things in there). I also entered into the cosplay competition at Nova, because it's kind of worth seeing how my thing stacks up against everything else. I mean, I'm still expecting the mad freakout because everyone else in the advanced category will have radical stuff too. And I can't enter the novice category because I've been making costumes a while. I've just got to step up my game.

Also, I can't enter Tex in any Animania competition for cosplay, because she's not from an anime, manga or video game. Which is a pity but hey.

But there wasn't such stipulations for Nova. So I may as well see what I can do.

Now. Future stuff.

I'm still keen for an internship bout in the film industry. I just ran out of time for it in Directed Studies. I'm currently looking at options for taking some next semester. And by that I mean 'incredibly flat out, will start looking as soon as I can start working at normal times again'

Can I talk about that for a moment? Since Semester classes ended, I've pretty much been working until 2 or 3 in the morning, and then packing up and sleeping in. It's a weird method, but it works. Until your dad needs you to go and get an ignition coil from somewhere in Newie, and you've gotta get there at 8. Or you have an assessment date to meet on Monday at 10am. And you find it difficult waking up before 10.
Then you're in trouble.

*sighs*

I still want to get to make costumes for (probably) film. If I had the choice, I'd probably stick with the idea that The Beta Experiment was kind of looking at: That essentially, all of my projects are prototypes and they don't usually get past the Beta phase because I only make one-offs. I can think of next or exciting ways to make the things easier next time (So, I now have patterns for the armour if I ever want to make them again, and if I could, I would probably make them in fibreglass. Which would be easier to mass-produce, because I could just make one mould and cast from that.)
I love creating things, and I love designing things, and I can do either of those, but I have stacks of fun when I get to do both. So designing and prototyping my stuff is probably the best outlet at this point in time. I guess in a way I tend more towards the manufacture side of things though, because the cosplays are already determined in their aesthetic appearance. I just have to figure out how to make the ruddy things work. It's brilliant.

If I was better at maths, and had enough time to keep studying, I'd go do engineering or something.

*laughs manically*

So, how do I feel at the end of this shebangabang?

I think, in spite of the time-consuming-ness of the armour, I'm happy with it. I'm satisfied with everything that went in to the project, and I'm satisfied with how it turned out. I've got plans on tuning up both of the costumes that I made anyway, and will probably get onto them sometime in the near future.

(Invest in a morphsuit for the Hollow, so I never have to worry about paint flaking off)
(See if I can improve the mobility of the armour. Once everything is on, I no longer have the option of scratching my nose currently.)

I'm also really tired, because this course demanded a lot, and I gave a lot. But it was a good a lot.

In first year, I visited some friends who at the time lived out in the glasshouse mountain country in southern Queensland. One of the days we were out there (there was a few of us) we climbed one of the mountains; Mount Tibrogargan (best. name. ever.)
And it toasted me. I was so worn out by the time we got to the top. And then we saw the view.

And that made it completely worth it. Even if all we'd brought to eat were peanuts.

That's kind of what it's been like doing Directed Studies. I've had fun. I hope that everyone following the blog has had fun too.

...

This blog will, probably in the near future, go back to being my standard blog. I'll still end up writing heaps about making cosplays and stuff, but Directed Studies is just about finished, and so am I.

There's still a bit for me to get done before things are ready for tomorrow. I'll hop to it.

Brooke out.

SOON

It's now Wednesday night/Thursday morning.

Imminent deadlines cause me to go nocturnal, for some reason. This is sometimes a good thing.

On Tuesday, I painted the armour. And then tonight, I painted the armour.

Tuesday was working with an airbrush, which meant that I got all of the armour done - probably the most constructive day I've had in relation to this whole project in a long while. And just now I've drybrushed on some silver to the edges of the pieces so the things look like they've been made outta metal.

Guess which genius lost the nice camera?

And it's 1 AM and I'm sitting here, sipping mulled wine and listening to Anberlin. If I didn't have so many deadlines, this would be a rather nice place to be.

Where to begin?

Okay, there's the paint. This afternoon I also did a spotlight run.

Can I just talk for a moment about how much I detest spotlight? I mean, it's a good place to go find stuff, and your odds of finding stuff to sew with are reasonable, but for me to go there is like for an electrical engineer to source parts for a build from Dick Smith.

Once upon a time, Spotlight would have been a good place to go buy everything. For the most part now though, they stock stuff for quilts, craft, making-your-own-formal-dress and little else.

Fortunately, I just had to buy velcro. So the armour can stick when I put it on. I forgot the glue that I'll need for the wetsuit, which means I have to go back tomorrow TT.TT

Yeah. The wetsuit, which I cannot remember if I mentioned earlier, is the suit that I'm building the armour off. I like the visual texture of neoprene and how it kind of looks like it could work as a real-life interpretation. I mean, the other options I had were standard/close cut clothing (too baggy) or a morph suit (not substantial enough).
So I was really always going to be using neoprene. If I could have built it from scratch, and cost wasn't an issue, I'd have used something much thinner, but hey. I have a steamer that's two sizes too small and that's what I'm using. I'm cutting panels into the suit to compensate for the small size and will cover them with mesh to avoid heatstroke and the dozen other things that can happen when you wear a long wetsuit for too long on a hot day.

I kind of wish I had a camelbak to fit into the thing. That would make the carrying of drinkable water easier. Anyway.

What's left?

I have to finish the paper side of things for Directed Studies - there's bits like techniques and artists I looked at and things I went to that I didn't mention in the blog, and they all need to be written out.

The wetsuit has to be vented, detailed and finished.

The armour needs some finishing things done to it - small details and sealing. Sticking the velcro in. I showed Dad the helm tonight over Skype and suddenly he's pretty keen to help me put some LEDs in it. Which is exciting and nice. That happens this weekend.

I need to go back and find all the bits for the Hollow so they can get presented on the 18th, which is assessment date.

And photos.

I chucked this up on facebook the other day, but it's worth sharing here because there are people who read the blog who don't have me on facebook.

Bec and I headed out to the industrial area behind Cardiff on Monday arvo, in search of a slightly urbanised yet desolated area that would be good for location photography. We've gone out to this area before - Bec's shot a video installation out there, and it's where we took photos of a storm a few months back. It's the kind of area that attracts hoons, something which the scattered rubbish and patina of black elevens on the bitumen can attest to. So we weren't really surprised to see a police car parked next to some purple souped-up thing about 800m from where we were.

I think the place was originally planned as housing, or maybe more industrial zoning, but there's nothing there but sealed roads. It's not uncommon to see L-platers around the area either. But yeah. The other cars were like the next street over but because there's no buildings, we still had line of sight.

I took some photos with my phone, for looking at later and assessing viability.

And then about fifteen minutes later, the police car ambled up next to my vehicle.

It's funny how even when you haven't been doing anything wrong, and you know you haven't been doing anything wrong, that a policeman with two giant German shepherds in the back of his car can make you feel a little nervous.

Anyway. He was headed over, and I could see him heading over - I was near the car, and in a position where 'can't walk off, he's seen me. Can't get in car, he's seen me.'. So I stuck my hands in my pockets awkwardly and waited.

The next five minutes was probably the most amusing I've had trying to explain some facet of cosplay to someone not familiar with it.

He asked what I was doing.

"Oh, just looking for a place to take photos of a costume,"

"What kind of costume?"

I paused. This was the easiest and hardest part to explain.

"Halo armour?"

It got a laugh. Thankfully, it seemed that the man knew about the video game.
Once he understood that I was looking for a place that would make for a good backdrop, he seemed satisfied, and went to go talk to another soupy-looking car that was parked a way down the road. The dogs barked madly as he left.

I guess I could understand the interest. It wasn't until later I realised that the dogs might have been for the smelling out of harmful substances, and from a bystanders view, we were a couple of girls who drove somewhere, hopped out and started looking at the ground and taking photos of it. I think there's a fenced-off mining area nearby too, so yeah. That was Monday's adventure.

I think maybe there's one more blog post I could try for before assessment date. It'll be a retrospective.

I may or may not have just entered the costume in the Cosplay prejudging competition at Supanova. Hopefully it'll go well. We'll have to see.

I booked the airbrush for next Tuesday...

...so I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious.

It was with great protest I decided that if I tried to keep going with the armour at this speed, and do Sheik, and do fibres, I would probably die. And I'm still recovering from yesterday/Wednesday night's madness, so there is that.

The Seventy percent 3500 word essay is in. And I still have a sleep debt to pay.

Also, I'm writing from the incredible student gallery of Watt Space, and my headphones have chosen here and now to pack it in. Ah well. I tend to use headphones all the time, and have never really been kind to them. So I only buy cheapies. This pair has lasted me a bit over a year. Well, either a year or two. Can't remember. But for ten bucks and me thrashing them, that's okay.

Alright, where to begin?

For reasons such as 'I did not want to do the essay', I left it to the last minute and put the production of the armour on hold for this week. Which will make this weekend rather busy, but hey. The essay's in, and that's important.

I finally networked with the people attached to the airbrush and made friends with it yesterday. I think I've kind of got the hang of it - fine detail is something I'd still have to get my eye in on, but I'm fairly confident that that will come while working on the big bits. I like how an airbrush can apply acrylic paint without using a propellant or solvent. That was the big hassle/trial problem for using paint on the foam armour, and I think that at the cost of a nice sheen, it will work in any case.

So there's really, sadly, not much progress to report on that side of things. I guess I could work through the concept of it though. Like, why it is I picked Tex. There's a few reasons, and some of them have spoilers for the later seasons of Red vs Blue, so if you would rather skip them, scroll down to when there's big text or something. There's no spoilers as far as I can remember for the first five seasons though. So all good on that account.

Also, spoilers for the Hueco Mundo arc of Bleach, and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time. And Final Fantasy VII, I guess.

I'll write up what was so fascinating about each one I picked, actually. Even the outfits I ditched. Spoilers ahead and stuff.

Anyway. Begin.

I picked the Hollow for a few different reasons.

There's a certain kind of allure that comes with insanity. Perhaps it's a zero-accountability thing, perhaps it's the fact that insanity rides on impulse and stuff. Plus, the hollow was a type of butt-kicking that sagas are sung about.
I like that.
There was the degree of unpredictability, and raw power, and despair that drew me in with the idea. Plus, I wouldn't have to tuck my hair under a wig or anything.
I think that the fact the hollow was the flipside of the character was a drawcard as well. That in spite of the fury and terror that the character embodied, it was still Ichigo. The drawback for the creature was actually the loss of reason though - a double-edged sword. Unable to tell friend from foe, the hollow was capable of lashing out at anybody.

The hollow is a reminder that I have the potential to be a monster.

Now.

Tex.

Tex started off as a ring-in character in the Red vs Blue series. She gets sent in as a freelancer for Blue team, and all they know about her is that she's prone to violence (Which is due to an aggressive AI that was implanted in her head) and that she had some kind of long-standing attachment thing to Church, one of the other main characters in RvB.

And then as the series progresses, you kind of see that she's actually a decent soldier, as opposed to the rest of the characters. That she's keen on ending the war between humans and aliens (covenant) and that she'll go to any length to do so.

And then something real weird happens. You find out that she's some kind of memory - that originally, she was someone dear to the creator of the AI, and she'd died, and he'd somehow made a copy of her. This ends up making more sense later as you find out she's actually an AI herself. Or, to be more precise, she's a fragment, a byproduct of creating another AI. That she existed, self-aware, but was always doomed to fail at the big things she tried to do, because all of the memories that she was built out of were centered around her being dead; that there had been a failure in the system and she'd died as a result of it.

She wasn't aware of this herself for quite some time, and when she did learn, it changed quite a bit. She tried to save what was left of the AI she'd fragmented from, but, because it was part of her composition to fail, she couldn't.

Probably the saddest thing about her was that the Director, the man who accidentally created her, kept trying to bring her back. Because she was all that was left of the woman that had been dear to her and had died. And it never worked properly.

So what then do I find interesting about Tex?

She's really good at being a soldier. At fighting and doing things and she's always motivated to save people. But no matter how hard she tries, she can't. She'll always fail - it may not seem to be her fault, but she'd end up blaming herself anyway.

And she doesn't exist properly; she's a memory, a shadow.

Also, I'll just put in here what I mentioned casually earlier. She's the Beta AI. Hence, The Beta Experiment.

I so sneaky.

...

Next character I wanted to do/revisit was Sheik.

Sheik arrives in the Ocarina of Time storyline shortly after the main character (Link) travels forward in time seven years (effectively).
Flipping mysterious, Sheik usually seems to know where Link has to go next to defeat Ganon's power in that area of Hyrule. I think the first clue the player even gets to the character is when Ruto (one of the sages) calls the Sheikah a young man.
So Sheik kind of exists as an assist character. The first time you see something serious go down with the character is just before the Shadow Temple, when Sheik tries to seal off the evil at the bottom of the well. It doesn't work, and you have to progress through the freakiest dungeon known to man.
Anyway. Track through that one and the Spirit Temple, and you head back to the Temple of Time, because you get told that there's someone waiting there for you.
It's Sheik. Who is actually Princess Zelda; gone into hiding for seven years while you, Link, had been missing from the world. Funnily enough, it's the moment that Zelda takes off the disguise that the big bad finds her and takes her away, since she holds part of the supreme power, the Triforce.

So, Shiek exists as a princess in exile; one who'd adopted a full disguise to stay hidden and yet still remain fully useful to the mission of freeing Hyrule from the evil king's grasp.
Something similar goes down in one of the later Legend of Zelda titles - Windwaker.
It was cause enough for me to giggle when I realised. Because in 2011 my sister and I went to a convention as Sheik and Tetra. Pirate and Ninja, but both effectively Zelda.

Sheik is kind of like an important character but not. I've heard many speculations over whether the character itself is male or female. My counter argument is that I have never ever seen a male Sheik cosplayer. And she's Zelda, so there is that.

So far we have three characters which

A) Forsook social expectations for combat

B) Don't exist properly

C) Are second-fiddle characters to the story.

The fourth originally planned was Aerith Gainsborough, from Final Fantasy VII.

Now, Final Fantasy VII was a game I didn't actually get into contact with until high school, when my siblings and I were wandering around Target and Jack spotted Advent Children in the DVD section and tried explaining the plot to me, as someone who had no idea who the characters were and what the plot was.

So, like, a motorbike that also functions as a knifeblock for your swords, and there's giant swords and stuff that explodes, and a bunch of kids are sick with something, and there's explosions and stuff.

I bought the DVD, and we watched it. Confused as buckleys, I turned to the internet for some explanation into the characters.

Just a word of advice - be very careful when turning to the internet for information. It can be a scary thing.

Um.

Okay, so after watching Advent Children, I kind of gathered that Aerith was important to the story, but she died, and in Advent Children she kind of pops up a few times. Like she's trying to help the main character (Cloud) get over the guilt that he has because he couldn't stop her from being killed. From wherever she is on the other side of death.

And in VII Aerith was supposed to have a major role in stopping the big bad from wreaking the world, and then she dies, so everyone's like 'aw crap, now we can't stop the world from ending', and then they find something she left behind that would still be able to stop the big bad.

There's a giant meteor that crashes into the planet, and the counter-attacking magic that she was part of save everything, and that's that.

I realise that it's not my gift to explain part of a narrative without explaining all of it. Apologies.

So, Aerith (At least in the spinoff movie Advent Children) appears as a character who, like the three before, only half-exists.

Considering a bunch of other characters I'm kind of keen on doing sometime in the future, I think this might be a trend. Hmm.

Anyway.

SPOILERS END HERE. SO DOES THE MAJORITY OF THE BLOG POST.

It's now Wednesday again. I'll start a new post to let everyone know how the painting went.
I finished the foam patterns for the chest on Sunday and the helm on Monday. Sunday arvo I tried everything I'd built on over the wetsuit, which was fun. It's still difficult to move in, but I'm hoping that's because the armour isn't stuck to me and thus keeps falling down (Shoulders, thighs). Velcro soon.

Have a progress photo.