Felocity

Cosplay is a wonderful thing. It is meant to be shared, and so here are ALL the details about how I did my costume for Captain Kuro from One Piece. All the stitches, all the fabrications, and all the messy stuff I did to make his claws is in here. I've also included pictures which should make things a lot easier. I liked showing people how I made these claws last year at Anime Expo, and I'll enjoy sharing with you now how I did the improved version. If you want to use these pictures as reference and build your own claws, more power to you! See the little CC in the lower right though? The creative commons license means you are more than welcome to take this, repost it, etc, but you must attribute (a link to this mayhaps?) and release under similar terms. In other words: just share, damnit! That being said, let's get started.

The Kurotorial (as I liked to call it) has three major pieces. The claws, the outfit, and the Jango. While you may have no control over the last one, the first two you most certainly do. Kuro only looks cool with his 2-3 foot claws, so we are going to dedicate this segment to that topic. Eventually, I will also write up the fabric part, but that is truthfully the easier of the two. Before we get too far in though, I need to establish some ground rules for my cosplay: I don't sew, I can't sew, and any sewing is going to look fucking ugly and so I hide it as best I can. I call this "Structural Sewing" and anyone can do it. It revolves around the idea of using more thread than is ever going to be necessary. Yes, even I can do "Structural Sewing". The second thing is, I like super glue. Actually, I like glue period. I believe the right glue or epoxy can bond ANYTHING, and I have been proven right again and again. The third thing is, I like to buy as much pre-made stuff as possible, and modify from there. This directly relates to point 1 called I can't sew at all. This costume could never happen if I couldn't buy dowels, gloves, precut fake black fur trim, etc. Thankfully, cosplay encourages innovation. I like to abuse that. Just to recap, avoid sewing, love glue, pre-bought items. Good, let's start on part one, the blades.…

Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra threw one of the most enjoyable concerts this last Wednesday night at the House of Blues. It was my first concert, it most certainly won't be my last, and I loved every minute of it.

I was on the road by Tuesday at about 1 or so, putting me dead stopped in L. A. traffic about 5:30 with a destination of Riverside. I slogged through the masses of cars, and made it in pretty decent time. The directions weren't too bad either. I would be staying with Christine who was kind enough to lend me her patience, floor, and computer. In exchange, I stretched my brain in the name of getting programming projects done. It was a very simple and cute apartment, though wicked hot because of Riverside and being on the second floor. I got my stuff up into her place, and then we went to a place called "Islands" for dinner. (Note: Riverside has a Shakey's Pizza, which I remember from Ani-Magic. Cool!) I ended up eating a specialty burger called a "Bluenami" which was loaded with leafy greens and bleu cheese. Add chips, salsa, and a bottomless glass of soda, and it made for a wonderful dinner. And we had 80's style surf music the entire time! I forget when I fell asleep.…

This blog lets me organize things so much better, so I can actually track my cosplay developments for my second revision of Kuro from the anime One Piece. The biggest task this time around is to redo the claws. The ones I had last year were adequate, but were not nearly the caliber I wanted them to be. The laminate didn't set right, there were a few bubbles, and the gloves were a task and a half all on their own. The undershirt wasn't quite right, but the shoes and coat were spot on. The main thing though were his claws.

I don't want dainty only foot long claws, as they lack the amazing effect my two and a half foot claws did. I could move them about seamlessly, and they were light enough that I could pose just like Kuro. This time, in the spirit of helping everyone do better cosplay (we all learn from each other) I am going to blog and post photos of the entire costume process. This way, when all is said and done, you can see a step by step journal for the creation of Kuro.…

I used to count experience as something that was nice to have, but simply reduced the learning curve of a project. In the event of the Kaizoku-Fansubs move, it also reduced the amount of headaches in migrating data as well. We got everything moved over and transitioned by 9:00 this morning, leaving us a whole 12 hours for the DNS to finish resolving for everyone else. The tracker is working, the forums are up, and we are barely making an impact on the new server-- exactly what we could have wanted. The folks at anikei.com were nice enough to lend us the server for use. It's a very powerful server though, and seems to be holding up a couple of very good anime sites. Most notably Anikei.

It turns out that the Xoops CMS we were using was so PHP / MySQL intensive that it was binding up the server. There was simply no room left for requests. The end result took down K-F's tracker, forums, and 8 other web sites who were also on infra's servers. It's a good thing we moved too.…

I've found that the more meetings for other conventions I attend, the more I learn about things I would and wouldn't want to do if I had to organize things. This last weekend was the Fanime Dead Dog, which was nothing more than a barbecue that halfway through had all the senior staff run off to conduct business. I had some very colorful words to describe what it felt like, but the next time Google comes by, I'd rather it not pick them up. The lesson to be learned is that you cannot mix food, fun, and work. For you English majors, one of the words there just doesn't belong. For you meeting planners, you probably already know that you can't add work to food and fun (but you can add food and fun to work). If that sounds a bit odd, let me explain.

Nobody likes to be talked at, let alone down to, and most certainly nobody wants to participate if they feel like their opinions aren't being heard. The same is true of office meetings. Even the most vocal of people fall silent when they discover they are being ignored. To cite the Fanime retreat as an example, the con chair held two separate gripe sessions, one with the general staff, and one with the department heads. Feedback targeted for a specific department never made it there most likely, and the chair even put themselves up on a table over everyone. It may be subtle, but it has an impact. RECCA was almost just as guilty, in the simple since we didn't get the general staff as involved as they should have been. However, by sitting around a table and talking with groups, everyone's comments were heard. In fact, everyone there was forced to have an opinion and talk a bit. There was food, though there wasn't much fun, but most everyone said they felt they accomplished a lot at the meeting. I challenge you to ask that of another staff's dead dog. Now here comes the important part: Other convention staff groups should learn-- try new ideas and hell, steal ours! Take the time to look at what works and doesn't work with your group. Take the time to work with each staffer, even if only for a few minutes so that they feel like they are helping on something big and important. Just take the time to care about every aspect of your convention; care about everything from the big name guests you are bringing all the way down to talking one on one with staff and convention attendees.…

I feel as if finally I have found a decent newsreader; capable of getting regular RSS, ATOM based feeds, and even retrieving friends only postings from LiveJournal and DeadJournal, allows you to authenticate for protected feeds, has systray notification, and is five to seven times faster than any other solution out there. NewzCrawler is the most effective reader of its kind, and is the first for-pay reader that has actually been worth its price tag. At the nice cost of only $25, you get a very clean, simple, and effective 3 paned interface with compatibility for everything that you need. Normally, I am a fan of open source solutions that are free to develop and tweak. I am very happy to say there is little I would change about this product.

The catch is, you must use LiveJournal's new "digest" mode authentication for RSS. You can access it by attaching ?auth=digest to the rss URL. For example: http://www.livejournal.com/user/data/rss becomes http://www.livejournal.com/user/data/rss?auth=digest…

I thought it was going to be hard, but it wasn't. Thanks to the easy export of MT and the import wizard in b2, moving blogs, categories, comments, and authors was a snap! It only took a few minutes to redo a few things to my liking, and now I am running a full php based solution. Many people have made the jump away from Movable Type, myself included. It has started taking longer and longer to do a rebuild, and after trying the Typekey service, I found it did very little for me. (Especially the part where nobody wanted to sign up). I had to get away and try something different.

A while back, I had helped Dave get his own blog up and running. In setting that up, I fell in love with b2's structure. It was kind of clunky, but I could do something I had been wanting to do for a long time- step around templates. I like having a back-end application for data entry, but when I want to display my blogs, I want to most direct access to it. The EvoSkins are nice, but nothing will ever beat the ability to set some parameters in a stub file and have 100% control over your layout on a physical level. Templates are nice, but the instant you start doing things such as custom views, file includes, and php based queries in addition to your blog, the skins just don't work as well as you would like them to. Enter the stub file- small, simple, allows you to set template variables on the fly, and just works. As a person who wants a site dedicated to experimentation and development, I couldn't have found a sweeter deal.…

Hah, I fooled you, instead of swtching to b2evolution, I went ahead and put up my Files section, containing links to active projects and bits of code. These include the hacks I wrote for migrating Invision Power Board to Xoops, NetProject (my project manager module), and my most recent thing which is a PHP based server-side image map for use on the Gaia Online boards. If you came here from the XOOPS site, you will find what you are looking for there as well.

As for b2, the conversion script is done, so I expect to do the switch some time this weekend.…

Fanime 2004 kicked so much ass it made your brother's cousin's sister's mother's something-or-other wish they were with us. For being in a completely new location, the show was awesome, and big kudos go out to everyone who made it possible.

Purr: Smooth sailing (mostly), good Ops, very social feel, meeting cool people, watching a very cool panel take place, "Turn Left, Turn Right", "Battlefield Baseball", no overbearing industry presence…