On beginning a new chapter in life

I know that every year, thousands of people make the proclamation that this is the year that they will see a New Year’s resolution to its conclusion. Statistically speaking, most of those resolutions only last til Mardi Gras (or the appropriate pre-Easter festival in whatever part of the world you’re reading this post from).

And sadly, I’m one of those many people who don’t see a resolution through. Until this year.

For 2012, I’m making something of a fresh start. And I’m doing it with goals I’m hoping are somewhat attainable:

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Random Thoughts on Future Costumes

Once again, I was lazy and horrid and am fast running out of time to do the Dragon*con costumes right. As is, I finished up the corset for Yami and am going to try and finish up my coat; I have fear that it won’t turn out right. Either way, the remainder of both our costumes, because I was a lazy bitch as usual, are going to be thrown together from whatever happens to be in our closets and chests-of-drawers.

Even so, I’m giving thought to next year’s costumes, which I fully intend to start working on in friggin’ January.

We’re thinking of doing a Bad Girls of the 80′s theme for at least one day next year. For Yami, this means I will be attempting to sew a Baroness costume; I’m pretty sure I can pull this off. For myself, this means sewing and piecing together things and buying a wig for a Stormer costume. Again, pretty sure I can pull this off as well.

Additionally, for some reason? I’m still pondering doing a Lady Loki costume, but with a twist. Because every other comic and movie has been given the steampunk treatment, whose to say that I can’t do the same. Plus, I already have a gorgeous green corset.

And that’s my babble. Now off to finish the work day and see what the evening brings.

Costuming and Cons

So, as probably none of you know (unless you come here from my Twitter feed – katsuko1978 – which means you likely follow my dorky little livejournal katsuko), I’m planning to attend two conventions this year. The first one, Dragon*con, is one of the biggest sci-fi/fantasy conventions in the US. The second, Necronomicon, is a fairly small South Florida sci-fi/fantasy/horror/gaming convention.

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Of Blogging and DDoS

As a few of you might know – if only from stumbling about the internet – I have a couple other blogs, notably on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. I have a short-term paid account on DW that I’m thinking of extending or buying a seed account whenever they reopen the option, and have had a paid LJ account for the past three or four years.

Recently, however, there’ve been… problems… with LJ.

Beginning late last week, LiveJournal went down abruptly as the result of a DDoS attack. It took some time for the site to come back online, but since it happens every now and again, I just shrugged and went on. As of this morning, LiveJournal has suffered from four DDoS attacks in a span of five days. That means out of a full week, the site has been unavailable more than it’s been there for users to access.

So, my dear best friend/roommate/hetero ace life mate did some digging… and found that the problem is originating in Russia. The article she linked me to can be read here, and is only one of many making this claim. I did a Google search before sitting down to type this post and found that there are over 120+ articles making similar claims.

This is very much a problem. And it seems like until someone fesses up and knocks it the hell off, the problem will just continue. Meanwhile, paid users like myself are paying for a service we aren’t even receiving and permanent users like some folks on my LJ friends list are just screwed outright; even if (not when, as I refuse to hold my breath) paid users get reimbursed for the downtime or an extension on their paid services, permanent users won’t get any sort of apology aside from something along the line of “oops lol our bad.” And that, my friends, is just poor consumer relations.

Writing Well vs Writing… Not-so-Well

In general, I read a lot of fanfiction for those series I’m interested in. The one glaring exception to this is CSI:NY, and that’s only because I prefer to avoid spoilers plus I’m more than content with how the series handles Danny and Lindsay (also: CSI:NY fandom seems to be obsessed with pairing Danny up with every character not Lindsay, and that don’t work for me).

Because I read a lot of fanfiction, I see a lot of different writing styles. Some of these styles are good, some aren’t my thing, some are just plain horrid. I also see a lot of things that if I ever tried to pass it off for any of my middle-through-high-school creative writing assignments the teachers would have been likely to eviscerate me for murdering the English language.

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On Fandom

It’s been a good while since my last post – June or July of 2010, I believe – and I think it’s about time to get something new in here. And because I’m involved in fanwriting and do enjoy books/movies/television, I thought I might write a little bit about fandom.

Basically, fandom is a double-edged sword once you get yourself involved in it. The safest place is on the fringes, but sometimes you find yourself pulled into something you never, ever planned on getting caught up with. Read the rest of this entry »

Botcon 2010 (or, How I Spent 3 Days at Disney and Didn’t Have to Shoot a Damned Mouse)

Blogger’s Note: This was originally typed up on June 28th and appeared over at LiveJournal. I’ve made a few edits to remove coding that only works on that site and reposted it here as well.

So I’m back in Tallahassee safe and sound (although Sunscream really wanted to just take a goddamn nap and fuck whether we were at a gas station when she did it about 90-some miles from home, but my girl started up again after I asked someone if they could give me a jumpstart…) and taking another day off from work just to rest and relax and get my usual Sunday chores done in the time I have so that me and Li don’t have to explain why we’re going to work naked for a couple of days. So I figured I’d write up a quick little post on my impressions of Botcon.

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Rant of the Moment: Department of Redundancy Department

I know that my last few posts here have been film reviews – and wow, has it really been close to a year since my last new post? – but there are times in my randomocity that other thoughts cross my mind and I feel the need to get them the hell out of my head. Today, oddly enough, seems to be redundancies and just how much they piss me off with the overuse of them.

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Movie Review: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

So, I just got back a little while ago from seeing G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, and I come away with mixed feelings. On the whole I enjoyed the movie, but if you’re a major fan of the original 1985 series and/or any of the subsequent comic adaptations, then you might want to give this one a pass.

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New Review Coming Soon!

Possibly as soon as this weekend. The BFF and I area making tentative plans to go see G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Saturday morning, the earliest possible showing. Should we do thusly, a review will be coming quickly thereafter.

…although I still maintain that NEST in the TF:RotF universe is a branch of the Joe unit, and Hawk is bitchy because Lennox gets to play with the giant alien robots.