Boo-at-the-Zoo test run

So we went to Boo-at-the-Zoo on Saturday. It was as much fun as always – the kids had a good time. G had wanted to test out the green hair spray I had gotten at Dollarama in case I decided to do a Joker. So we sprayed her hair that afternoon. She also wanted to spray mine. The hair spray makes your hair a bit crunchy – and G decided that she didn’t like it after all so she washed it all out. She also changed her mind about being zombies and decided at the last minute to go as a witch.
D3 wore his Clone trooper outfit – what we had done. I had to trim the bottom of his helmet so that he could see out of it and fix the Velcro that held it together. I had made the waist sections looser than they needed to be and they kept slipping down. His chest panel was also a bit flat on the sides and needed to be connected to the back.
He ended up wearing it about 1/4 of the time and then peeled out of it. She stayed in her costume for over half of it – until they made her take it off to go in the funhouse.


All-in-all, it held up pretty well. I’m working on the minor fixes and added the leg pieces. Since my hair was already green, I decided to go as a simple Joker after all.

Zombie makeup test

My daughter is right into Halloween and costuming. I expect it will cause us much stress in a half decade or so, but right now it’s cute. This summer, when she still wanted to be a zombie, we did a makeup test.


I’ve accumulated quite a bit of makeup over the years at after-Halloween sales and she had seen it earlier when we had sifted the closet. She had been pushing to use the makeup for a while so I finally dug it out to check what we had. Plus, I had just finished reading the Cthulhu Live books and they gave a zombie makeup recipe that I wanted to test.

The first thing we did was comb her hair back and cover her face in a basic white color to give her that pale look.


We added black around the eyes and in the smile creases.


We blended this in with a sponge and then added some red gore.


We then wet down her hair as we didn't have gel.

She’s quite the ham.

MBCC 2008

The Manitoba Comic Con was held last weekend at the Winnipeg Convention Centre. The space was ideal for it. It gave lots of room in the aisles between the dealers and artists. The gaming space was set up nicely.
The guest’s alley was a lot brighter than last year. The only thing that could have been easily improved was having the guest’s names behind them instead of just their pictures.

They were saying they had sold 2000 tickets by Saturday morning – not sure how many of that includes presale tickets for Sunday – but it didn’t feel crowded. I could easily believe a turnstile attendance of 4000 – 5000. Beyond that, I’d want to do the math again.

There wasn’t a lot that I felt a need to buy. We did get pictures and signatures from Justin Hartley (Green Arrow), Helen Slater (Supergirl / Laur-el), Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett), Gerrit Graham (Beef, Q), and even Charlie Adler (Cow, Chicken, Starscream).
There was also some photo ops set up so the kids got their photos with ewoks, mogwai, and even an Ecto-1.






The kids dressed up on the Saturday as Princess Leia and Obi-Wan and D3 wore the Obi-Wan again on Sunday. They didn’t enter the costume contest as they had not made the costumes themselves, they would have had to (rightly) compete in the Journeyman category instead of the Young Fan.
The costumes were pretty good but the contest had two common problems. The costumers didn’t do much more than walk out on stage, turn around, and walk off. They should have at least paused and posed so that we could get photos as they didn’t gather after for pictures. Secondly, they didn’t have anything planned for the dead time between the costumes being presented and the judges’ verdict so we just sat around with nothing going on.

I did finally get to see Jamie’s Warhound and also ran into Chris McL again. I did get to see Monsterpocalypse which looks so pretty.



It’s tempting to get into but I’m not sure I can get involved in another collectable miniature game. I might get a starter and see how the rules play. It does look very upsize-able though. I also got to talk to Brian about upsizing some games for next year.

All-in-all, it was another good time. I hope they did well enough to be able to have another one.

Vote Early, vote often

Election day up here.
I don't care who you vote for but get out there and vote for someone.

Be part of the process.

no sleep for the costumer

As of last night, I have her upper and lower arm pieces done as well as front torso and chest. For him, I started on his arm pieces and torso section. It’s not exactly where I would want to be at this time but I do have tomorrow off to work on them as well as a bit more tonight around Survivor.
Barring any major problems, I should be okay for this weekend.

We can see how well they hold up to being worn and what needs to be fixed afterwards.

Where we've been before

My kids went with my folks after breakfast yesterday so we were able to pop in to the flea markets to kill some time without being inundated with request to buy more stuff they don’t need. We haven’t been to them in a while.
The Mandalay Flea Market has shrunk significantly. There was nothing that caught our eye, except some orange leather that we passed on for now. I did find the new Tandy/Leather Ranch location though.
The Ellice flea market used to be mostly empty but has really filled up. There was a nice mix – I actually got a Polar Lights Enterprise for $5 – more about it below.
The Mulvey Market was quite full. It also goes through cycles. It was pretty fun – with a fair amount of relevant stuff. There was a liqueur set with the Blade Runner glasses – but I already have one.

The Enterprise is the reissue one. It is a snap model that someone partially tried to put together, and had tape holding on the nacelle. It also had some of the stickers applied – including one right over the tape. It also had the decal sheet.
It is missing a new nacelle but does have the variant pair. It should let me scale up the ships for Star Trek Ship Battle game. I had been half-heartedly meaning to get one for a few years now. Now to get the Klingon ship.

Poly-sci guys

I’m not a big political science person and yet a lot of the people I am in contact with are poly-sci guys. Christine, JP, Paul, and Shannon are all big poly sci people.

I’ve always been more interested in the personalities rather than the policies. That said, Shan flipped over to the leader’s debates after Survivor and I was hooked for the full two hours. I only saw the English one so I’m going by that. I hadn’t really seen anything from them before so my impressions are solely based on the debate – and my own bias of course.

The clear winners were Elizabeth May of the Green party and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois. Both came across as solid and confident. Elizabeth had her facts down cold. Gilles was a pleasant surprise with a fairly good grasp of English – and a funny way of pronouncing development – and not at all wing-nutty as you would be led to expect from the Bloc.

Stephane Dion of the Liberal (Red) party came across very poorly. If you read his transcript, he was clear and focused but he had came across very weak and sounded like he was having a lot of trouble with English. I have trouble seeing him standing up to whoever wins the election down south.

Stephan Harper of the Conservative (Blue) party came across very indifferent. He has a squinty look that makes it seem like he isn’t listening to what you have to say and doesn’t care about your opinion. He also seemed to deny some easily checked facts.

Jack Layton of the NDP (Orange) came across as a bit of a bully. I’ve been told that his people had told him He also kept saying his name – like the comedians doing impressions of Bob Dole. A good drinking game would have been to take a shot ever time he said “Jack Layton”. In this format, either because of the camera angle or because he kept leaning forward, he also appeared very bald.




The Canadian edition?

Clones, why did it have to be clones?

I finally was able to measure the kids for some foam armor. I measured the arms and chest pieces. I even started one of the arms to see how the glue holds. So far, I’m not impressed with its strength but I’ll try more.

I’m using the basic patterns from http://www.tk409.com/tk409.html but the kids have decided that they want to be clone troopers not storm troopers so I’ll have to make some modifications on the fly.

The kids have black sweats from baseball and dark hoodies so the undersuits should be okay. I have about a dozen foamie sheets so we may need to get more.

Scarless

On Saturday, I popped into Mallabars looking for some rigid collodian – for making scars. It turns out that they no longer carry costumes except a small assortment at Halloween. They sold all of their rentals to Ragpickers.

I also popped into Party Stuff to check out their makeup supply and had no luck there either.

While in the neighborhood, I stopped into Cabela’s looking for a web belt. I haven’t been in the SIR location since they were bought out by Cabela’s and since Cabela’s bought the remaining Army Surplus stock. They didn’t have any web belts at all but they did have some green fletching for arrows – a different project.