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I don't leave for Dragon*Con for another two days, and I'm already done with everything and three-quarters packed. No, I don't know when I was replaced by a pod person either. #cosplay #cons #dragoncon

1) I can tell I haven't done any frontend design work in a while because I went to write some CSS for a work thing yesterday and had to pull up the site-style icon page (which I wrote!) because I couldn't remember CSS vertical align stuff.

2) Likewise I need to make a quick vector text graphic to go on my shirt for Lup and I used to be able to just throw some fonts together real quick and be pleased with the result and now it's taking me forever? Like this is basically the equivalent of a website header text graphic and it's just not working for me.

3) That said, I missed the widespread adoption of flexbox and just found it this week and it's basically amazing. Like, solves most of the problems I had with CSS, honestly.


Alright, back to banging my head against design.

Saiyuki - Journey to the West but with really dumb bangs. #saiyuki #cosplay #sharaksanzo

Because we are now at T minus one month, and I haven't actually written anything about what I'm doing! I decided to try and focus on easier stuff for this year, particularly easier stuff I wouldn't melt into a puddle in. This somehow turned into 'kickass ladies plus Ieyasu' but I'm okay with that.

-Jean Grey/Phoenix (X-Men) - this is mostly a fix-up job on an older costume - turns out metallic spandex is really sensitive and prone to damage. I'm mostly done with the touch-ups, and hopefully I can finish the last little bits (recurling the wig, new sash pin) this weekend

-Yagen Toushirou-inspired bikini (Touken Ranbu) - because Labor Day in Atlanta calls for some poolside action. This one is done.

-Sharak Sanzo (Saiyuki) - I've wanted to cosplay her since she first showed up in the manga, and now that the new anime is airing, it seemed like a good time to finally do it. All the sewing is done, so I'm on to accessories, which are mostly simple aside from the sutra.

-Lup (The Adventure Zone) - soooo I haven't actually started this yet, but, uh, advantages of podcast as a medium? No canon character appearance! I do need to get started on this this weekend, though.

-The Brand (Saga) - Also not started, though this is mostly a bought cosplay, and is also the one most likely to get cut for time. We'll see.

-Ieyasu Tokugawa (Sengoku Basara) - Another touch-up costume. I've got most of the changes and fixes made, but I still need to remake the neck guard, having thrown the previous one together the day before the con.

Think I'm in pretty good shape over all, but we'll see.

Some assorted thoughts which I will try to keep spoiler-free? No guarantees about stuff in the comments though. I'm about halfway through and oh my god this series is so good.

-Jingrui is like, the obligatory precious cinnamon roll too good for this sinful world, too pure.

-I can't think of the last time I watched something live-action where men were allowed to show this dynamic range of feelings, both physically and verbally. And even in anime, dudes crying is usually only at the emotional climax of stuff, so it's really nice to have a range of sorrow and regret and longing and joy regularly shown from a variety of characters.

-Likewise, it's really great to have a huge variety of women of various roles and backgrounds and motivation who get plenty of screentime - there's definitely a sense that even if their positions are different than those of the men, they still have a great deal of power of various forms

-By which I mean I would let Nihaung use me as a doormat, what a fucking badass.

-Commander Meng does not have an ounce of guile in his body, and it's sort of adorable, particularly after he was introduced as such a serious badass.

-Basically every interaction between Lin Shu and his household is wonderful and precious. It's really clear how much they all care about him, even if they don't know how to keep him from literally working himself to death.

-EVERYTHING IS SO PRETTY. Comes with the 'historical drama' territory, I guess, but god, some of the hair ornaments are to die for.

I've been playing around with Python more lately, in part because it's one of the two main languages in my company's codebase (the other being Java, which just, kill me now, basically), and in part because it's like the one language with a good selection of OSS web frameworks that isn't PHP or Javascript. PHP is sort of a hot mess of a language, and most of the frameworks have security holes of varying degrees (I'm pretty sure my Drupal install is how my last host was compromised), and Javascript as a primary web framework offends me on general principle. I have a bit of a reputation as a Perl stan - I can recognize it's shortcomings, but I really enjoy using it. Unfortunately Perl web frameworks fall into two categories - so minimalist you're doing 99% of the work yourself (Catalyst) or a full app that you can't really change much on without a ton of work (Movable Type). In contrast, there's a number of popular, actively supported Python frameworks ranging the whole spectrum from lightweight to mostly-complete CMS.

And I'll admit some of my hesitation to get deep into Python is some hype backlash because Python people tend to be really evangelical about Python. But after doing more work in it.... I can kind of see why. There's a lot of the features I love about Perl - dynamic typing, good string support, agnostic to functional vs OO paradigms - without Perl's frustrations around variable passing and passing references/values. I do miss Perl's variable interpolation working in Python 2.7, but apparently they've added something similar in 3.5? I also appreciate that the Python community seems to be really good about docs - that's made a huge difference in getting up to speed on stuff. I ended up working with Flask, and got like 80% of a new cosplay site going over the course of about four days. The site is now up to 90% or so - I'll probably share a link here once I've got more content and whatnot up.

But yeah, you can probably consider me a convert here.

Things I did this weekend: got an oil change, built a computer, and gave myself space hair. #dyedhair

You'll have to make a new layer in the Advanced Customization section - the easiest is probably to create a style-specific layer of type 'theme' and 'style' matching whatever your current layout is. Paste in the source code of your current theme layer, which you'll have to find on the list of public layers, and then add your overriding code at the bottom, and click 'Save and Compile'. You should then be able to find it in your custom layers and apply it, though you'll have to redo your other customizations.

Alternatively, you can add the code onto the bottom of the wizard layer already generated by the style interface - it'll be listed as 'auto-generated customizations' and highlighted to show that it's in use. However, if you add the new code there, and then make changes through the style interface, you'll have to go back and re-add the code - the info in the layer gets wiped out when you save changes in the interface.

(this is a reference post for me to link to, to save having to type these instructions up multiple times!)

My name is Mikazuki Munechika. I’m one of the five great swords of Japan, and well, I’m also said to be the most beautiful.
I was born near the end of the 11th century. I guess you can say I’m an old man. Ha ha ha.

• ☾Mikazuki Munechika | momijizukamori
• ☉ Photography | pinnedtogether
  

Still need to reassemble my sword, but otherwise, fancy grandpa is as done as he's going to be for ACen. #cosplay #toukenranbu #mikazukimunechika