Alice in Avalon

Today's update concerns an upcoming cosplay skit project that I've been developing for some time now! I usually post after the skit about my design concepts and inspirations, but I'm really excited to share my thought process, research, and goals towards this project! Since I was inspired by a particular piece of media, our project is currently named the T-1000 (I'm sorry, James Cameron), and will ideally be completed later this year.  While picking the series, I knew at once the kind of tone and atmosphere that we wanted, and it just so happened that a certain scene featuring the two characters we wanted to cosplay had the exact style based on our inspirations. Beyond the video background, our skit's themes are of teamwork, the dynamics of a student and mentor, and the courage it takes to become a hero in the face of the unknown. As storytellers, we want to create a skit that will put on a show, but also share our message, and invoke strong emotions to our ...

If I don't post, it's because I'm at my busiest. It's true. At least, I hope so. I've actually been quite active with cosplaying and more skits over the past year! Honestly, I try to post often, but I'm terrible at it, so I'm going to go ahead and admit that now with the hopes that I'll actually improve on it for the rest of the year. Maybe that should be my next New Year's Resolution. I'm going to get ahead on it though by finally attempting to use this blog once more to chronicle my upcoming progress on several new cosplays, along with one special one that I've been itching to finally make. In a lot of ways, I've done more than I've had with cosplay throughout this year, although it's also been a bit of a time-out in some ways. I've competed less for numerous reasons, but it's mostly been because I'm working on some more intricate skits for the next year. We also unfortunately had to drop out from one last ...

Whew, it's been busy, but I'm being as productive as I can be! I'm a little dazed that Anime LA is only a few months away! "Technically" I've started, but I'm not where I want to be. Obviously with the holidays coming up, I'm going to be doing my very best to keep my eyes on the goal! On top of that, I start school again this upcoming week! It's kind of weird starting when my friends studying are on break for the Thanksgiving week here. I'm here just hoping I can brave through the holiday sales and crazy store hours, but we can get through this!

Happy Summer! It's been such a crazy summer, and while I don't intend to get too carried away with this post, I wanted to share some pretty fun updates that have been going on. Over the summer, I competed at Anime Expo for the World Cosplay Summit USA finals! It was such a crazy experience and while we didn't get the title, just being close in this race was more than enough for me and Shii this round. I definitely have plans to try again since it's still a brightly burning dream to do it, but I will admit how much work it went into to get this rolling in such a short amount of time! Needless to say, it really tuckered me out. While I've been organizing my plans for the year, I haven't really done much sewing since AX given how much of a boot camp-like experience it was, but I sincerely don't regret. We had such an amazing wealth of friends, fellow cosplayers, family, and people in our community who showed nothing but love and support for us. Most impor...

Or so I say, as I see how this year pans out with the rest of my plans. Anime LA was last weekend and I have to stop and say how absolutely awesome it was! It's great to see this convention grow over the years, especially since it's my favorite convention next to Fanime. I spent a chunk of Saturday admittedly dealing with masquerade, but overall, the convention as a whole was absolutely great. I talked to so many people, got to take lots of pictures of amazing cosplays, and I love how it hasn't lost that fun convention vibe. Even the weather was on our side!

I'm here, I promise! And with lots more good news and lots of hope for 2017. I know that everyone's probably heard the phrase, "Please let 2016 be over already", and while it's pretty true, it's hard to also not look back and realize that with lots of difficulties comes some of the best moments. 2016 was a difficult year for most people, and was quite the rollercoaster for myself. I feel saddened by the loss of great celebrities and heroes, but I also mourn greatly the loss of the real people in my life and changes which, with some transitioning, will hopefully bear better news and promise as the new year begins. It's important to remember, as I often have to remind myself personally, that happiness is oftentimes the byproduct of living, which means for as much difficulties and pain we hate going through, happiness is usually the small, twinkling moments we have to live for. So in light of this and given that it's the end of the year, I wanted to...

A happy way to kick off the cosplay season! It was a total surprise, but I'm so happy to say that Lyric and I won Best in Show at Anime California 2016 this year! I think I'm even more over the moon by the fact that it is my first Best in Show and it had to be with Utena. It's so picture perfect. I promise to put up better pictures soon! Shoutout to Shii's Peter Pan for letting me be part of the "No Grown Ups Allowed" Crew.

I'm both humored and gutted with nostalgia when I think how about ten years ago, I was watching Onegai Twins and buying kotoko, Mizuki Nana, and angela singles, daydreaming about Utena and calling myself a prince, wearing a Nadia shirt until it mysteriously vanished, probably back into the seas, and had just gone to ALA cosplaying Sohma Kagura with my friends. Now fast-foward to now, I got through Owari no Seraph: Battle in Nagoya and started up the winter anime season, buying Utapri, Lovelive, angela, and Faylan CDs, giggling about Fushigi Yuugi musicals, wearing a Sailormoon print shirt, and just came from ALA having cosplayed Utena, who I still daydream a lot about. 2006 is kind of a cool year to look back in some ways, and I think personally it was around that frame of time when I was having fun getting to watch more anime and be in on new titles that I could find online and not have to wait just for cons or select video stores and places to have them. It used to t...

Time to take a trip to Australia! I am a victim of the Cosplayer's Halloween Curse! There's no hiding that this month is probably (and hopefully) the stretch of the Great Time of Derp, which has spanned for over a a year of a lot of derp. Despite my rougher looking schedule, I was encouraged by my recent derp of not being able to hit the Highland Games because the weather was so awful to treat myself to looking forward to dressing up for Halloween. Which basically means, what do I want to sew?  My friends and I don't often have huge plans for Halloween, but we love the novelty of dressing up, yet again, as if we don't nearly three times a month. But it's uniquely fun in its own way, because you get to dress up with friends who don't normally do other than on Halloween . Given my lack of last year's posting, I didn't get to mention much that I went back and fixed my old Usagi seifuku to attend a friend's party. I made the costume for Comikaze...

Australian movies, here I come! Or rather, many movies in general. Things have been winding down since coming back from PMX! It's crazy to see that I'm finally working on my way to update and get things rolling. I think that in many ways, it was an eye-opening experience for me. I don't really need to begin with the same old story that work, school, and life had been so overwhelmingly busy that although I have been productive with cosplaying, I really haven't sat down to reflect upon how much I work at things. The benefit to that is really living without the necessity to blog, to simply live and keep on going forward, but another beauty of life is also looking back at posts and absorbing those good spirits and remembering all of the great things you can accomplish, even against all odds. PMX for me this year was probably one of the hardest conventions to get enough time to get things done for how I wanted them to be. For starters, I had great plans with my frien...

And as usual, it's 3am here and I'm completely elated to be journaling again. I honestly feel like I own my blog a personal apology for not keeping up with it, even though not keeping up with it feels like a good sign of actually living life, yet I like chronicling things, and it's one big paradox! And as usual, I have my portfolio site but I cannot abandon this blog at all. I won't. I decided, and it's final. If I could find an awesome way to integrate it, that would be amazing. I'm don't want to just let things go by without getting the chance to talk about them, because otherwise I feel like it just fades away in a sense. I spent today ruminating that my work situation, which I have mentioned here before, has been extremely busy and without sugarcoating it, difficult. It is severely understaffed and I spend fifteen hour workdays alone, and while I'm blessed to be able to motivate myself, I'm definitely suffering a little creatively on the in...