Gen Con 2024: Forward Into the Past

If there's one thing about Gen Con, you're never sure what will attract your attention. To borrow an overused term, you think you do, but you don't.*

And 2024 certainly delivered on that premise.

My wife hadn't attended since 2015, so she was excited to go. We picked up my son and his partner at 7:30 and pointed our car west on I-74. Destination: Indianapolis.

We parked just outside of Lucas Oil Stadium and headed north a block or two to the Indianapolis Convention Center.

Yes, the Colts play here. Does it show?

Along the way, there was evidence that there was going to be a crowd inside.

Uh oh.

Yes, Gen Con was sold out all four days beforehand. According to the post-con press release, there were over 71,000 attendees throughout the entire con, and yeah, once you got inside the Convention Center you could tell.

I apologize for the blurry photo, but I was
in a hurry as I was being jostled along. But
hey, dice are dice and Chessex was everywhere.

(The rest of the report is after the jump break due to the sheer number of photos.)

Musings on that Creative Cosplay Impulse

While you'd never guess it if you met me in person, I'm quite enamored of cosplayers of all stripes. 

There's the professional cosplayers --those who are paid to cosplay, from the so-called "booth babe" gig to those who cosplay at a con to mingle with the crowd*-- and there's the various levels of amateur cosplayers. The amateurs range from raw newbies to those who work on their cosplay with a level of professionalism that rivals those of the actual pros.

Svetlana and Benni, the people behind Kamui Cosplay.
They not only create and wear cosplay for events, they also
publish digital (and print-on-demand) books on creating
your own cosplay. Full disclosure: I own one of
their books. From KamuiCosplay.com.

Svetlana in Druid Tier 9 gear
from World of Warcraft.
From KamuiCosplay.com.

And I know that some of them will get mightily offended when I lump them in with the cosplay crowd, there's also the historical costume people --ranging from SCAdians** to historical re-enactors of various stripes-- who research and create their own clothing with varying degrees of faithfulness to historical accuracy.

Union Civil War reenactors at the "A Step Back in Time"
event at the Sharon Woods Heritage Village Museum.
From Cincy Magazine.

To me, I consider all of this part of cosplay. Your research, design, and engineering (whether by needle and thread or actual machine shop equipment) for the outfit you're working on is going to be just as rigorous as you want it to be. Having seen a lot of the cosplay YouTube videos --such as those from Mineralblu or Justin Cosplay-- there's no real difference in quality between the various groups.

Part of my interest is because I enjoy working on and creating things***, but also there's an undeniable amount of beauty in cosplay. 

Screencap of Dokomi 2024 in Dusseldorf, Germany,
video by Mineralblu. One nice thing Mineralblu does
is put the names and social media for the cosplayers
in the video without having to switch on closed
captions, so they get full credit.

Another part is understanding the how behind the cosplay designs that elude my oh-so-not-with-it brain.

I mean, I can comprehend using 3D printers for a variety of purposes, and foam sheets from the hardware store (such as this from Home Depot) to make armor and whatnot:

From Flooring Inc's website.
The website I linked to is an entire entry
point into how to use foam for armor
and shields. I kid you not.

Yes, I also understand the power of needle and thread, whether by hand or by sewing machine. I've described sewing machines before as power tools for cloth, which makes it sound more like something that belongs in a garage shop than in the corner of a bedroom.

Or in storage in the basement. 
Yes, that's my machine, built in the late 1970s.
And holy crap is it heavy.

I also understand the ability of makeup or a wig in the hands of an expert to transform someone.**** 

Screencap of Dokomi 2024 in Dusseldorf, Germany,
video by Mineralblu. 

While I was peripherally aware of other things out there to assist a cosplayer, I have been still quite surprised at the extent of what's available. Such as contact lenses for the eyes:

Those eyes...
Alexstrasza cosplay by DarkLadyCosplay.
From DarkLadyCosplay on DeviantArt.

Or that so-called "boob tape" is a thing:

Apparently this movement got a boost from
Kim Kardashian of all people, which is likely
a big reason why I never heard about it before.
The pic is from boob tape brand Skines.

When a magazine known for household tips and tricks such as Real Simple runs an article about how to use boob tape, you know this entire thing has gone mainstream. All my brain can think of is that removing the tape must really hurt like hell, but the various forms of boob tape is safe for use on the body, so hopefully it doesn't hurt like when you're waxing your body.

Steve Carell from The Forty Year Old Virgin.
Supposedly he was never told about how
this would feel before the shot, and
this was his real reaction.

There's an entire cottage industry surrounding items for cosplayers, whether intentional or not. Companies that you'd never expect to have anything to do with cosplayers, such a Flooring Inc. mentioned above, have web pages on how to shape their products for cosplay gear. It all spends, I guess, and if cosplayers are going to shell out money for your company's stuff, the easiest thing in the world to do is to encourage those sales.

***

Things aren't always sunshine and roses, of course.

There's a reason why the slogan "cosplay is not consent" is a thing, and that's because some people can't keep their hands and their words to themselves. 

I get that someone in their cosplay outfit can look damn hot --just watch a video or even looking at the small samples here and it becomes pretty obvious-- but a cosplayer looking hot or acting/posing in a sexy way doesn't give an onlooker license to act like an oversexed creeper.

Basic common courtesy can go a long way toward interacting with cosplayers, but also recognizing that there's an "in-character" and an "out-of-character" mode for them is highly important. Just like any actor who slips into character, they may act in a fashion they may definitely not feel internally. Sure, that Harley Quinn cosplayer gave you a grin and a wink while striking a pose, but that doesn't mean that they're giving you an okay to go and pursue them. Or grope them. Or berate them when they refuse your advances.

***

I could go on and on about details surrounding cosplay and historical re-creations --in another lifetime I would likely have been busily working away at Colonial Williamsburg in their archives or assisting in restorations rather than working in IT-- but I'm going to end this with a couple of videos on the creation process:

I really love Svetlana's energy in her videos as 

well as the details during creation.

And the corgi is massively cute.

While I could have picked the video Bernadette

made about the time she made an OnlyFans for

"saucy Victorian ankle pics" (oh, it is funny

as hell), I went with an actual dress creation video.

*Some professional cosplayers get involved with con events, such as judging amateur cosplay contests or holding workshops on cosplay and the cosplay process.

**I've mentioned the Society for Creative Anachronism several times in the past; they were my initial exposure to amateur level historical costuming. Yes, I've visited Colonial Williamsburg, but I've always considered the re-enactors there to be purely professional in nature. The SCA was my first exposure to true amateurs who research and create their own period clothing. I met my first Civil War (or other) re-enactors only after my first (and only) SCA organizational meeting. 

Why didn't I join the SCA? Well, that's a story all by itself, and one that won't fit here...

***When my primary care physician suggested I go on vacation to relax --yes, really-- I immediately thought of woodworking projects. Such as creating this outdoor end table using 2x4 and 2x6 pieces of wood:

****Okay, time for a short story.

Back when I was a junior in college, one Saturday night my friends and I stopped by the dorm of some girls we knew before everybody was to go out for the evening. Two of the girls were to join us later --they had some event to attend first-- and they were finishing up makeup in their common room when we walked in. For the most part, the girls didn't wear much in the way of makeup --after all, when you're up until 1 AM studying and then have to go to class at 8 AM the last thing you want to do is spend time doing makeup-- so when they came into view I was stunned by what I saw. Before, they were 20 year old friends of mine, but after...

If you've seen the transformation that Katy Perry makes when she puts on makeup, you get the idea.

I'm pretty sure my brain broke that evening.

EtA: Fixed some formatting.

What the F is Filk?

If you're not familiar with the term "filk", it's a specific subgenre of music that references SF&F media, placing the SF&F topic into a musical framework. We're not talking about a soundtrack, or even something like Toss a Coin to Your Witcher...

...but typically a replacement of lyrics of an already existing piece of music.* Like oh, say, replacing the lyrics in the Beatles' song Penny Lane with an ode to Middle-earth:

From my copy of The Tolkien Scrapbook,
Page 144. Apparently a lot of people
on Goodreads don't understand that
The Tolkien Scrapbook's origins
are long before Tolkien himself was
ever taken seriously by academia,
much less the Peter Jackson films.

Filk appeared with the rise of the SF&F convention scene, and I suppose you could argue that the bastardization of the words "folk music" is where "filk" got it's name. My guess is that we're talking about, oh, the 1960s or so given the rise of folk music in the popular consciousness at the time. 

Despite it's age, some people have issues wrapping their heads around filk; even if they are inclined to accept cosplay there tend to be raised eyebrows at filk songs and performers. My suspicion is that because cosplay is primarily a visual medium --and let's be honest, there are a lot of attractive cosplayers out there-- it's easier to accept cosplay than filk. 

You get the idea.
From BlizzardTerrak
via Pinterest.

Now, if you like your football/soccer, you're probably familiar with the replacement --or insertion-- of lyrics specific to your team, such as that found with such creative editing of Classical Music or Hymns, so the basic concept isn't completely unfamiliar to people. This isn't the adoption of an existing song as your club's theme song, such as Cincinnati Bengals' Welcome to the Jungle, Liverpool FC's You'll Never Walk Alone, or Crystal Palace's Glad all Over by The Dave Clark Five,

but something like a full version of this sort of thing, taking the melody from Land of Hope and Glory to tell Nottingham Forest (among others) to go piss off:

***

You're probably wondering where the hell this post came from, and I'll be honest this wasn't what I had in mind when I sat down to write on Tuesday. (That post will come later.) In this case, I pulled up YouTube to listen to something --I was originally thinking of something mellow to get through my morning workload, such as French Impressionistic pieces, but instead this old chestnut appeared on my feed:

And so I went down that rabbit hole for the next half hour, listening to piece after piece, because when you start YouTube just starts throwing everything vaguely similar at you.

A lot of those pieces are listed as "WoW Parody" or "[insert franchise here] Parody", which I guess filk could fall under,

but I also would argue that the term parody makes light of what is clearly a labor of love. It's fine for the music to be self-aware and not take itself seriously, but I typically think of a parody as something that can be easily dismissed when people want to discuss "real music". Sometimes, however, the "real music" gets overshadowed by the parody to the point where the parody is more well known than the original piece it was based on, such as Weird Al's I Lost on Jeopardy eclipsing The Greg Kihn Band's (Our Love's in) Jeopardy. 

This isn't a plea for filk to be taken seriously --after all, it already has its own website at Bowling Green State University in northwest Ohio-- but more a celebration of the form. Or raising some visibility to it.

Locally we have a true community radio station, WAIF-FM 88.3 MHz. There are only a handful of community radio stations in the US these days where you can donate money, become a member, and actually get air time for your show/program. These are distinctly different than public radio stations, which are far more organized and tend to be affiliated with colleges/universities or other non-profit organizations. Community radio stations are just that; they take their mission very seriously, even if the programs themselves can skew very oddball at times. (I personally recommend listening to the Rockin' and Surfin' Show on Saturday nights; if you like your surf music, you'll love that show.)

From WAIF-FM.

And when I said anybody could put on a program, I meant anybody. Back when I first started working in IT in the mid-late 90s, I knew a guy from work who had a radio show on WAIF that was strictly filk music. You might think that a once a week hour long show might run out of filk music to play after a short time, but he was able to come up with new filk pieces on a regular basis. I've no idea when he stopped producing the show as it's no longer on their lineup, but it's still a nice reminder that there have been people out there, raising filk music's visibility.

So have a couple of pieces of filk music for your day...

It wouldn't be Christmas without

HP Lovecraft, I suppose...

For those Honor Harrington fans...

And it wouldn't be a filk session

without a Star Trek song, by way

of Kermit the Frog...

*That's not to say that some people don't expand the definition of "filk" to cover new pieces of music based on SF&F topics. Or RPG topics. Or video game topics. I mean, there is the band Harry and the Potters, after all.

Gen Con 2022: It's Good to be Back

Guess who just got back today?

Them wild-eyed boys that had been away

Haven't changed, had much to say

But man, I still think them cats are crazy

--Thin Lizzy, The Boys are Back in Town

(I added a jump break because, well... There's a lot of photos from both my son and myself.)

If there's one truism about a trip to Gen Con, it's that I don't get a lot of sleep the night before.

Not because of excitement, although I was looking forward to going for the first time since 2013 (ish), but because of.... Whatever.

In this case, I'd set things up to get around 6 hours of sleep, which would have been perfectly fine for me, but I woke up after 4 hours, wide awake, and I couldn't do anything about it. And I just knew what it was going to mean in the end: I'd be tired on the drive back home, and I'd be hunting for a rest stop so I could zonk for 1/2 hour.

But still, I did try to rest, so that kind of helped.

All things considering, we got off to a pretty decent start, although we had a rabbit in our front yard right by the driver's side door that simply refused to move when I wanted to get in and leave.

"Come on, buddy," I told the rabbit, "you've gotta move. I have to go now."

After about 10-15 seconds of staring at me, the rabbit finally hopped a couple of times and let me in.

***

This year it was just my son and I, as my wife took a pass at being around crowds, my youngest had other commitments, and my oldest was going to get her SO back from Interlochen, where they were an instructor this Summer. Given that I was fully vaxxed and that Gen Con had a "mask on" policy the entire convention, I was reasonably confident that things would be fine. Still, I was a bit nervous when we got in line for having our vaccination status verified, 

but I need not have worried. We zipped right on through the (small) line and secured our verification tag.

In what became the theme of our Gen Con trip, we arrived at Will Call for our tickets and said "Well, the line doesn't seem to be too long." About 5-10 minutes later, we got through the line and got our badges. (You need your vaccination status verified before picking up your badge.) We turned around and....

The line stretched almost to the bend in the hall. 

"We got here at just the right time," my son observed.

Busy Hands

I have a confession to make.

The urge to build, to construct, to create is deep inside my bones. 

Among the stories that my mom uses to embarrass me with* is the one that when I was about six, my great uncle came over to help my dad with some of the chairs around the house. There were two chairs that could spin around and then rock back and forth. My dad and my great uncle were going to try to lock down the chairs so that they didn't rock, because we'd had a few "incidents" with my brother and me wreaking havoc with those chairs. 

They looked a bit like this, only one was
red and the other was blue.

 

While my brother quickly got bored and wandered off, I stuck around, watching, while they tried and failed to figure out how to prevent the chairs from rocking back and forth. After a while, I spoke up and suggested that they bolt the two plates together by drilling holes in the plates and using bolts to tighten and hold the plates together. My dad and my great uncle looked at each other for a moment and went "Ohh....." Within about 45 minutes they had both chairs locked down properly.

A year or so later I was given for my birthday two items: a bonsai kit and a Handy Andy junior handyman set. The former had some seeds that turned out to be dead already --I planted and watered them according to the instructions, so I know-- and the latter had a real screwdriver, a hammer, a plane**, two saws*** and just enough wood and nails to build a toolbox to hold everything. 

Perusing the internet for a while yielded this.
Although it has a triangle and only one saw,
this model also had its own metal box.

 

I had to wait a week --a sheer eternity to a little kid-- before my dad had the time to help me build the toolbox. Once that was built, I wandered around the house for days, looking for things to build. Sadly, there wasn't anything to work on, and my parents weren't interested in suggesting things for me to build (something about me hurting myself), and my toolset eventually sat in a corner of the garage, gathering dust. I couldn't afford to buy any wood without assistance, because my parents seemed to think that we lived in 1957 instead of 1977 and would only give my brother and I a quarter per week for our chores****

Pleas for a chemistry set yielded a big fat "no", but I did get one of those 175-in-1 electronic sets from Radio Shack for Christmas a year later. Alas that my parents did not like the beep sounds it made when I built the circuits in the instruction book and took the batteries away from the set, again rendering the damn thing useless. 

This was the story of my childhood: I'd get something to foster my urge to build things, get partway along, and then my parents would step in and neuter the project before I could finish it. I think this is the origin story of my vast amount of incomplete projects lying around the house, because I was trained to expect to get hamstrung or sidetracked by my interests.

That being said, by the time I graduated college I began to build a few things using my own money, such as a bookcase I designed to hold mass market paperbacks. The entirety of my F&SF book collection was in mass market paperbacks, so I knew exactly what I needed and built the thing from scratch.

Here's the proof. It's still in
my basement, 30 years later.

My interest in building things isn't limited to woodworking, as I'd posted in the past about my attempts to repair/recap an old Sony AM/FM radio, but I've also been called upon to perform emergency sewing for school projects. Such as the one time I made a dalmatian outfit for the youngest mini-Red to wear for her school play, or the time my son wanted to go as Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, for Halloween. If you know Classic Doctor Who, you know that means the scarf. Since I didn't (and still don't) know how to knit, I bought a ton of cheap felt and stitched it together using a sewing machine, using the lengths found on doctorwhoscarf.com as a guide.*****

Among my other hobbies/projects are my on again, off again affair with homebrewing, building/repairing stuff around the house (including putting a replacement roof on the back porch after Hurricane Ike hit back in 2008), stereo speaker building, and gardening. 

 

Living proof that I can actually complete
a project. And they actually sound good, too!

But one thing that has always caught my eye but I never followed through on was garb/cosplay creation.

***

If you've ever been to a Renaissance Fair you've seen people --some performers, some just fair goers-- dressed in costume. To someone outside of the community it appears to be just that, a costume. But to someone involved --or someone from the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA)-- that's known as garb. I've known SCAdians who rummage through various patterns at a Ren Faire, looking for that one pattern that would complete their formal outfit. Or people who take great pains to study costume and clothing from the Middle Ages to get something exactly historically correct.

The link I provided above shows Faire goers as well as Faire staff (from the Ohio Renaissance Festival), and obviously not everything is historically accurate, but it certainly appears quite fun. For me, however, I've an urge to create garb and/or cosplay just because. 

Oh, I wish. The T2 Paladin Cosplay from
tamuicosplay.com. Svetlana and Benni
work their collective asses off, and it's amazing
what they can achieve.

 

But, and this is the sticking point, not for me personally. I know, given my build, I'd be more of a candidate for mimicking Falstaff or, say, Henry VIII, but I'd rather not do that.****** I would like to make stuff for someone else, however, time --and most importantly, money-- willing.

 

Thanks a LOT, Shakespeare. From
the Mary Evans Picture Library, via
fineartamerica.com.

I need practice with a myriad amount of skills, which is kind of a sticking point. Like, say, sewing. Or foam armor making. Or dying/painting. Or simply "not burning the house down".

But I look at the compositions that Kamalia puts together on her blog Kamalia et Alia, and can't help but wonder how I'd put together that sort of transmog into a real costume. Like her current one, which includes outfits entitled "Restless Dreams" and "Like, Totally, Not a Death Cultist, Okay?"

Just, wow. Kamalia, I bow to you.

 

I think I really need to brew some beer to take the edge off of this urge to create. Or maybe design an RPG setting. Or something, because I simply don't have the money or space to create new hobbies for myself.

(I bet when you saw this title that I was going to talk about Elden Ring or something, right? Well, if you want to read about an older person trying the game, go to Tobold's Blog to read about his attempts to play an action RPG that's as unforgiving as the Dark Souls/Elden Ring games as a person whose physical skills aren't what they used to be. Like him, or me.)

*There was one time, about a decade ago, when I was helping my parents out around the house with something and my mom wandered by and said "Oh, you were breastfed as a baby." I looked around, bewildered, saying "Where on earth did THAT come from?" My dad just sighed.

**My parents, in their quest to make sure I didn't kill myself by age 10, immediately took the sharp edge out of. Which, of course, rendered it useless.

***One was a coping saw and the other a "regular" saw, which they took away from me as well. Okay, they let me keep the frame of the coping saw but took away the blade portion, rendering that useless too.

****One of the reasons why I wasn't big on making the kids do any chores for money was because my time was worth so little to my parents that they simply gave us a pittance, even for 1977, to spend. I mean, I could play exactly one game of Pac-Man on that quarter allowance, which lasted up until high school for me in the mid 80s. And if I wanted to buy a paperback book, they ran $2.50 in the late 70s and then $2.95 in the early-mid 80s. (Plus tax, you know.) That'd take me 3+ months to get the money for a single book.

*****If you try to put in https, your AV program might complain about the site because it only has an http version available. Just a note.

******And while it's going to be a very long time before I lose enough weight to get my health issues under control without drugs, if I did manage to do that I'd actually consider wearing something. 

 

EtA: Corrected a grammatical error.

And now for some Lighter Fare

After the emotional rollercoaster that was the Overwatch short film Alive, I figured you'd want something a bit happier and lighter in tone.

Sure, I could have gone completely off the rails and posted about the NCAA Men's Basketball National Title Game, but not everybody is a college basketball junkie like I am.

But I really like Sneaky Zebra's YouTube videos of cosplayers at Cons around the world, so I thought I'd give them a signal boost for their latest video, from WonderCon 2016:

And, for those more interested in MMO cosplay, their BlizzCon 2015 music video:

Sneaky Zebra also has a Patreon Page, so you can support their work.

Oh hai, Friday. Where'd you come from?

It's been a busy week at work, and I've not had much time for writing.  Therefore, check out this female Draenei cosplay instead:

From fashionablygeek.com.

Yes, there's several more pics at the site; go see it. I'm seriously impressed by the amount of work that went into it.

EtA: Fixed the broken link.

Weekend WoW Cosplay

I was impressed, although I still prefer the red and gold of the Blood Knights.

Quick Weekend Post -- D3 Cosplay

I don't often post things such as cosplay on here very much, but I do keep tabs on various cosplay items. (Having kids who want to dress as, say, Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor or Tauriel from Hobbit Part Deux will do that.)

Anyway, I came across this cosplay of the Diablo 3 Crusader, and I thought I'd share the love. Click on the pic to be taken to the full post.

EtA: Updated the link as it broke.