Cosplay goal achieved: Spider Jerusalem.

So this weekend was MCM Comic Con at the NEC in Birmingham.  I've been off the convention circuit since Birmingham Comics Festival in April of last year for various reasons, but managed to come back this time with a brand new cosplay: Spider Jerusalem from Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan.

For many years Spider's been my favourite comic book character and Transmet has been my favourite comic book series, but as I've had no experience in making props I've always had to put him on the cosplay back burner due to those pesky glasses!  But this year I finally had a crack at them and came out with something workable, bought a cheap suit on sale, picked up a cheap shoulder bag with radioactive decals and a transient smiley badge, and put the whole thing together!  Ended up having a great time at Comic Con.

So first of all came the big disaster.  Got up at 4am to start the tattoos, which I actually thought was overkill.  Turned out I needed every minute of the 3 hours until 7am when I had to set off for the train!  However, seeing as this is the first time I've cosplayed with asymmetrical makeup, I forgot to flip the head tattoo in the mirror and painted it onto the wrong side.  I didn't realise this until I was already on the train en-route to the NEC, so I just had to grin and bear it throughout the day.

Fortunately no one picked up on it, and on the rare occasion I was recognised I pointed it out to avoid any heckling.  Every time I did point it out, folks just shrugged it off with a "dude, you're still Spider, and it's awesome", which was really encouraging.

All in all I was stopped by people who recognised the character a grand total of 6 times, which made a somewhat relaxing change from the 100+ stops I usually have to make as The Joker!  It left me much more free to enjoy the rest of the convention, in spite of my inability to recognise colours for the entire day.

For once I had a bit of spending money, so I was able to pick up a few bits and pieces, including the Hostage Negotiator board game, a Harry Potter scarf (Slytherin all the way!), and some Christmas presents for family.

Of the two show highlights though, the first was meeting Alix Wilton Regan, a fantastic voice actress and bloody lovely person to boot.  As a Bioware fanboy she's Comm Specialist Samantha Traynor from Mass Effect 3, and my chosen Inquisitor from Dragon Age Inquisition.  As she didn't have a queue I was able to chat with her for a good few minutes about Dragon Age, Mass Effect (she liked my tattoo), Andromeda, and she seemed genuinely interested in the character I was dressed as.

I loved the message on this one :)

The second highlight, was getting my photo taken on the Iron Throne, from Game of Thrones.  There was a booth there where for £10 you could get your photo taken on the Iron Throne, or for £25 you could have it taken on the throne with Joffrey's crown and a sword of your choice.  Both options were expensive, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity and went with the cheaper package.  After a little bit of photo editing to move the head tattoo to the correct size, this was the result...

House Jerusalem: We Hate it Here

After a few hours of wandering the halls, admiring the cosplay, buying things with money I don't have and enviously staring at things I couldn't afford, it was time to go home.

Seeing as I was only stopped for a couple of photos and I wanted some more cosplay images to mark this occasion, I took a few more outside the flat after I got home.  Again, I had to tweak them a little to get the tattoo moved, but was happy with the outcome.  A couple were just bog-standard poses, but I also tried to replicate a couple of my favourite cover images from the series... not always accurately due to working from memory!  But here they were...

All in all, pretty amazing day.  I am, however, having to come to terms with the fact that I'm not as sprightly as I was when I started cosplaying 10 years ago, and my hips are the ones to suffer from walking around a convention hall all day.  Perhaps I should switch to the version of Spider later in the series when he becomes ill and has to walk with a cane...

Anyways, I'm by no means done with Spider.  For one thing I want to go back and do him properly, actually putting his tattoo on the right side of the head, and I want to tidy up the arm tattoos (which were far more visible than I was expecting).  Prop-wise, I'm also hoping to have a bowel disruptor, two-faced cat, or Chair Leg of Truth to take with me on my next outing... time will tell which one wins out!

Getting ready for harvest mice

This month marked the 4th year of me living in my little flat, and whilst it is small, it's served me well and I'm still thoroughly happy within its four walls.  It also marks four years for my marine aquarium, which is still going strong, with a trio of assorted fish, a coral banded shrimp and a fairly colossal hermit crab.

But as beautiful as the tank's inhabitants are, I've been fancying having a little more life to share the flat with me, so over the last couple of weeks I've been looking into harvest mice.  They're small, relatively easy to care for (so if I'm stuck in work until stupid o'clock day after day, they won't miss me), and are the dictionary defenition of cute.  They're also absolutely tiny, which suits the size of my flat down to the ground.

So today I've been assembling their tank, with a view to picking up a pair of little critters next weekend, and here are the results!

 

 

 

 

All in all, around £90 was spent on this setup.  This consisted of:

• A medium-sized glass tank with a single shelf and fine-mesh lid, for good visibility and security
• A food bowl and shallow water dish, for obvious reasons!
• A little wicker wigwam and ball, both for hiding purposes.
• A length of bark for climbing.
• A pair of wooden ladders/barriers, which can be shaped for various purposes.  One is shown above, the other is being saved for later.
• A nut selection in an edible wafer bowl.
• Another nut selection in a hollow bark toy.
• A herb tunnel, containing hay (also saved for later).
• And a bag of wood shavings and straw.

My parents have just been trimming the pear tree in the garden as well, so I popped by for some opportunistic branch gathering!  I picked a handful of branch ends, using three for the tank and saving an extra couple for later.  It might seem odd to be saving so much "for later", but I like the idea of giving my mice something new to explore further down the line.

 

So next weekend I'm aiming at picking up a pair of bucks to inhabit this little tank, and depending on what they enjoy I may have a slight reshuffle, but for now this is how things are looking!  Hopefully I'll be updating with some photos and maybe even a short video soon!