This is a thing that happened because of the awesome creative people I’ve met in fandom, all building original ideas off one another’s work. I hope we can keep doing these kinds of projects with our OC’s in the future.

Crystal Entropy: Mai Sheri Costumes
Camera, editing, effects, voice over: Dan the Video Ninja 
Voice over: Doctor Holocaust 
Voice over: Professor M. Hades
Concept: Professor Enigma  

For more about Crystal, check out her gallery page.

So the reveal of Geek Inked Magazine's April cover shoot was today... I am so floored. I'm not going to ramble on and on with this one since it's pretty self-explanatory ^_^. Set of photos and a little bit of an interview are on the site (just click on the image above). I wasn't actually supposed to be their cover girl for this month, but had the fortune of being in the right place at the right time.

As a bonus, I found a video from the con which has a little bit of behind-the-scenes of my shoot, as well as a snippet of my time on stage being introduced as a masquerade judge.

Although I wasn't there last year, I've been attending Ad-Astra since 2006, and returned this year because I was asked to be a judge for the masquerade. As experienced as I am and as much as I love working backstage at masquerades if I'm not entering, judging is not something I feel I'm suited for, but the masq director cornered me on this one LOL. I have to admit, it was nice to be back. Being a literary sci-fi con, there's an atmosphere of chill maturity and friendliness that I don't see often at other media conventions, and I really like it. It was nice to see many aquaintances again who either don't attend the other local anime cons, or whom I simply tend to miss at bigger events. Unfortunately, Ad-Astra's membership has been declining slowly but steadily (since before I even started attending), which was evidenced in the quiet hallways, decreased variety of programming, and only a small handful of my cosplay friends attending. The vendor's room felt like the only area of the convention where people were actively mingling. So Saturday, when there were more people in attendance and I had my masquerade duties to keep me occupied, was good fun, but Sunday when I was there on my own with no plans between handing out the masquerade awards in the morning and a photo shoot in the afternoon... I got pretty bored :(

Anyways, the masquerade was great; small but we had some strong presentations and lots of pretty costumes. KW Iron Man couldn't bring his suit to enter, so he had a go in the "Lightning Round" and made what was later dubbed the mk. "Downey". Kheru, one of my fellow judges, brought out her gorgeous layer cake dress (Firefly), and I did myself up in my Crystal Entropy costume, and was asked if I was riffing on Elsa for most of the day LOL. Sunday I brought out Mrs Impossible, simply because I wanted to get photos of her at a bar and Ad-Astra was a good opportunity to do so. Below you can find a small collection of photos taken by myself, Iron Man, and Rob Olsen. I shot with Rob, who I met at Tri-Con, both days; the Mrs Impossible photos have been added to my Venture Bros gallery, and Crystal photos will be updated a little bit later.

I hope that all of my followers are having a pleasant holiday season, no matter what you celebrate! Unfortunately, things have been unexpectedly "interesting" for Elemental and I here at the Mystery Shack, as an ice storm came through Toronto on Dec 21. We lost all power and heat so almost all of my plans for making gifts and uploading photos and, well, everything got thrown out the window as having food and a warm place to sleep and keeping my phone charged so I could stay in touch with my friends and family became more important. Fortunately we have some wonderful friends who put us up for a few days, which I am eternally grateful for. Power to our building was restored on the morning on the 25th (BEST Christmas present!) but the heat was out an additional day and only just came back on this afternoon (the 26th). And with that, I'm (hoping) to get back to my regularly scheduled... stuff.

As I keep mentioning, I have a large back-log of photos and videos and stories to share, and so I've decided to do a "12 Days of Christmas" series, with something new posted on the site for each of the 12 days. There might be some hiccups around New Year's Eve, but hopefully I can schedule things so that it works out.

Day 1 comes to you (slightly late but still seasonally appropriate) in the form of a video that Captain Awesome and Dr Holocaust asked me to do with them. Filming was really cold but lots of fun, and in the end we definitely got a cute holiday video out of it!

Day 2 is also pretty appropriate given that it's SO FLIPPING COLD HERE RIGHT NOW! 
ahem.
Crystal Entropy is one of my very few original character costumes, but I keep dragging my feet on actually doing something with her back story (either writing, or a photo story, or a video series or something). Inspiration can come from strange places though, and when I got to meet Professor Enigma/Rabid Lemur at NYCC this year, she presented me with a piece of fan art which just floored me (fan art never happens to me to begin with, let alone something this cool). The art was based on a lame prank I pulled on Dr Holocaust during VEDA, and since it looks like a movie poster, The Video Ninja and I decided pretty quickly that we need to do a video project to go along with it! Now that we've had a good snowfall here in Toronto, we might start recording soon, which is exciting. And awful, because recording in the freezing cold is never as fun as the end results make it look.

That was a very long story just to say look at this cool art, and I posted the photos of the "winterized version" of the costume that  Kevin took at Con-G last year! Click here for the gallery! (most days of Christmas won't come with nearly this much writing. really.)

Above you will find a little introduction to Con-G, and my participation in the convention this year.
And below is immediately after I got home from the weekend:

As for what happened in between those videos...

   As I mentioned in the video, the Greyhound bus which my friends and I took to Guelph ran late, which means that Friday became much more of a rush than I had wanted. By the time Dan (The Video Ninja) and I had checked into our hotel room, I barely had time to unpack my supplies for my mask workshop, unpack the decorations for my birthday party, and throw on my costume before I had to run out and find my panel! Luckily I have awesome friends, so Featherweight picked up my badge for me while I was running around in a panic and Dan set up the decorations I didn't have time for while I was teaching my workshop.
   The workshop itself went well, I think! There were a few hiccups of course, like taking a little while to set-up all the materials and equipment, no tables for people to work on their masks, and ironing boards with legs that would't lock, but we managed. Having learned a lot from doing previous mask-workshops, I started with a demo and provided templates for everyone to use for their own designs. Featherweight was a fantastic help by monitoring irons and keeping people on track for which step came next. Unfortunately, since we had people dropping in throughout the 2-hour block and I didn't actually count how many pieces of foam and Steam-a-Seam I had pre-cut I don't know how many people ended up making a mask, but we're guessing 15-25. I wish I'd gotten photos of everyone's work, but I was too busy keeping things running to take pictures before people left. Featherweight did record the demo portion of the workshop panel though, so that might go up as a video later this year.

   Saturday brought on another full day of panels! One thing that I liked about Con-G this year was the flexibility of panels (at least in terms of the cosplay track; I can't speak for the rest). Because it's a (relatively) small convention and almost all of the guests and panelists have been cosplaying and attending conventions together for years, we know each other's strengths and we help each other out whenever there seems to be a need. Sometimes it's pre-planned (like Featherweight being my assistant for the mask workshop, and I being his assistant for his puppet demo) but sometimes it's not. When it appeared that I was going to be the only panelist for "Masquerade 101", my friend and all-around awesome cosplayer Brian volunteered to join me, and Jo (the panel coordinator) managed to snag Mark of ConBravo! to share his advice as well. While I could have handled Masquerade 101 on my own, it's always better to have more than one perspective, so I'm quite grateful to the guys for jumping in with no notice. And I got to pay the favor forward immediately afterwards by sitting on the Props Q&A panel with Featherweight, just being back-up, since Kudrel was running a few minutes behind. 
   Right after props was GillyKins's spandex panel which I attended, after which I got an hour's break (trading Olivia of Olivia's Atelier the use of my glue gun in exchange for pizza XD) before cutting felt with Featherweight for his puppet demo. This year's puppet was Yakko from Animaniacs, which we got done in time, and was presented to Rob Paulsen on Sunday - he loved it! (photo snagged by Fazeman). Had a very slow dinner (what's with the service at hotel restaurants during cons??) with good company including Dan, Jackie, Elemental, The Letter Jay, and Trish before heading to the main room to watch the masquerade. Which was great, and you can watch right here.  
   The last panel of the night was shortly after the masquerade ended, so I had just enough time to grab my hoodies from my room before meeting up with Brian and doing my "Hats Hoodies and Kigus" panel. I think it went well, but I was also pretty tired by that point. We had about the attendance I would have expected for that time slot. People asked lots of questions and we had lots of examples to share, and I sketched out one hat and one kigu design by request. I pretty much hermited in my hotel room for the rest of the night, not having the energy left to deal with energetic dancing people or drinking party people. Several people came to visit me though, which was really nice.

   I didn't have any more programming to do on Sunday, so I saw a lot more people! ^_^ Sunday included going to panels about masquerade judging, how to crochet, Rob Paulsen's Turtles panel, and the closing ceremonies. I wore Crystal Entropy, which is an under-used costume because of reasons, and did a shoot with SolarTempest as well as a quick interview with Dan. I had a delicious lunch with friends at Cora's, and got a lovely thank-you gift from the Con-G staff <3. The big news from the closing ceremonies is that Season 6 (2014) will be the last year for Con-G. So if you've thought about checking out the con but haven't had a chance - make time for it next year! Let's make the last Con-G the best Con-G! ^_^

My plan to start 2013 off on the right foot by posting more blog and updating more regularly is not going as well as I planned since it's already February, but hey, you gotta start somewhere. 

First off, appearances around the web! 

In other web-based news, I have posted 2 new videos this week - one is a blooper reel from the vlogs  did with the Video Ninja in 2012, and the other is a video of the masquerade entry Kurumasha and I did at G-Anime last weekend. They're both pretty entertaining, in my humble opinion, which means that videos or the rest of the year are only going to go downhill LOL

My friends over at WE Tangent produced a musical based on NaNoWriMo in the fall, and if you haven't seen it or heard of it yet (and you're into that kind of thing) you should check the whole thing out over at nanomusical.com
I make appearances as an extra at the kick-off party in Episode 1 and at the TGIO party in Episode 6. I dance. It's special ;)