Detective Conan (Case Closed), starring...
Carlos as Kudo Shinichi (Jimmy),
Kirsten as Mouri Ran (Rachel),
Yuki as Kazuha Toyama (Kirsten),
Roy as Hattori Heiji (Harley)


( A few samples )

And the others...
...with more to come.


Back in July, a few of us trekked over to the other side of the Sound for a photo shoot, changed plans a bit, then came back to Edmonds after all for the actual photos. Detective Conan (Case Closed) this time around, with yours truly sneaking out of Agasa Hiroshi (Hershel) by (a) not being balding enough and (b) being behind the camera the whole time (cameras being "gadgets" eh?), and another sneaking out of most shots by looking after bags.

Back to the grind stone to finish off these, and go further back in time for others, too... lest I get more literal pokes. ^_^'

Last night Michael Vick was given an ovation at his first played game with the Philadelphia Eagles after his conviction and prison sentence due to dog fighting and killing. I believe in restitutions and second (and more) chances in most circumstances; perhaps a career unrelated to animal abuse, and add in some moments of volunteering in no-kill shelters to drive the point home.

It's unfortunately true that one man off the field did nasty things to animals and thereby supported an underground industry of abuse. Activists are up in arms that such an individual should not be seen as a role model in the sports world. But from a logical perspective, calling for an NFL or individual-team boycott because of those actions of one player, which has been reported since his Eagles contract was announced, makes no sense.

The central piece of equipment required in all college and professional games, specifically stated in league regulations, is an inflated ball of animal hide, despite there being plastics on the market for recreational use. In that sense, all professional and collegiate players, mangers, game and product advertisers, stadium ticket sellers, and sports media are involved in profiting on animal abuse and death. One man is a target of occasional attention for having done abusive things in his spare time, but all of them get year-round attention while continuing to utilize products of death every day.

I haven't found the specific reference for high school (American) football regulations of ball construction, but I know from personal experience that they followed the professional/collegiate pattern decades ago, and with the practices of pro/collegiate recruitment, they likely still do. "American" footballs use rubber linings (called "bladders" reminiscent of the 19th-century origins of pig-bladder footballs), but the external surface required by league rules is leather (NCAA Rule 1, Section 3 and Wilson's product description as the official NFL ball supplier), therefore a product of slaughter. Alternately "soccer" (football to the rest of the world) according to FIFA rules allows for "other suitable material" instead of insisting on only leather.

How many people seek a team or entire-league boycott because of Michael Vick's actions yet continue to cheer other players and teams? How many protest because of Vick while directly using animal products themselves?

Of course, for consistency, this got me thinking, "What about tennis?" The central regulated piece of equipment there is a ball covered in animal hair (wool felt), so it too isn't completely free from the animal-treatment glare, but it's edging its way through. Tennis balls used to be leather tightly packed with wool; now they're hollow rubber covered in felt, at least eliminating the use of leather. Racquet strings used to be entirely cow (or sheep) intestine, and while a few individuals still insist on using "natural-gut" strings, the majority of even professional tournament players use synthetics now—nylon, polyester, or Kevlar-nylon strings.

Finding non-leather shoes even for sports use is getting easier as demand rises and more companies produce and supply them. Until demand rises for non-abusive alternates for the central tools of ball games, the very balls themselves, it's not really a matter of an individual player's actions.

"It's part of a Time Lord's job to insist upon justice for all species."
~ The (Fourth) Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Masque of Mandragora"

Carlos as Son Goku,
Kirsten as Chichi,
BiZ/BiZria(*) as Videl, and
Jared as Mr. Satan (Hercule)

( A few samples )

» And the others «
Plans were to be at Golden Gardens (just down the hill from where I used to live), but we were rained "indoors" to Gasworks Park instead. I wasn't aware of earlier meetup moments, since I hadn't kept up with the Cosplay.com forums as much, but heard about the location shift during a last-minute camera-store trip. Picked up a hand-strap for the camera, which still allows for the ol' neck strap as backup, and I broke it in during this shoot. Thumbs up for avoiding the twisted-strap around-the-wrist method I've been using most of the time.

While massive-group and convention shots can have their fun moments (and "meh" moments too), they also have the ever-present random crossovers, walkthroughs and distractions that always make clean backgrounds a challenge. We avoided it here for the most part, though there was another private shoot going on (lights-and-reflector helpers and all) and a random pedestrian steel-worker-turned-ninja walking the beams above us near the end. ^_^

There might have been a bigger group had the weather and location change not cropped up, but I was silently glad it was a small one. But I have a long way to go in the "model directing" aspect, since event-press and news histories frown on that with "shoot, don't direct" modes.

(* I'm so bad with names early on...)

When I was in high school(*), to put a photograph online, the following steps were done:

Take a roll of photos (roughly 12-36) with a film camera — mine was a Pentax SLR and 50mm lens, still in use today by a cousin in Norway.

If shot in black-and-white, and you had access to a darkroom, use it for developing/printing; otherwise take the roll to a decent shop and come back for it a few days later, or mail-order them. "One Hour" shops were around, but automation could have funky results (it still can). There was no "Undo". How many images were lost forever in the darkroom? Let me count the ways....

Get access to an image scanner (even if you planned ahead and used slide film, Photoshop's predecessor ImagePro didn't exist yet either) and take along a magazine or book for the waits. For online use, you'd likely just want them to fit on pixelated 16-color 640x480 (.3 megapixel) or b&w 512x342 screens anyway; larger pictures took forever to transfer.

Save your scans to a 5¼-inch or new 3½-inch floppy disk and take it to your home, school or office computer — all of which had different disk formats, matching them up with the same operating system you saved them with.

Then you would call up your favorite file-hosting BBS (WarGames style) and upload using any of the X-, Y-, or Z-Modem tools (or an earlier one called Kermit), taking out the aforementioned book in the meantime during 300-baud (0.3K) connections. You then had a choice of reuploading them to others as well or just telling folks to "go log in elsewhere" to see them — where they'd have to have their own account, too. You might have heard of this new method called FTP, but the commercial shop where you scanned them wasn't setup up for such university and government networks at the time.

If the machine where you uploaded it also had UUCP transfer options (again university or government locations, but a few commercial sites finagled access), you could email it to others with network addresses, though it may take days to get to them along the path of machine-to-machine nightly synchs with aforementioned 0.3K modems — email addresses didn't even have '@' in them yet, so you told the system all the interim server names to use, too.

Sure, postal mail was cheaper and faster, but it was high-tech!


Twenty-odd years later, we have a TV ad of cute kid ("and I'm four and a half") snapping a shot, copying directly to the computer, exposure correcting, and emailing out a many-megapixel picture within 30 seconds. Don't even get me started on the "stick them together" panoramic edition.

* I went through the high school steps, because when I was four and a half, Dad's office computers still used punch cards (Do not fold, spindle or mutilate). Photos around us back then were paper or slides. :p

...there was some old-school romantic comedy to be had, Ranma style:


cpardo as Ranma, Kumi-chan as Akane
(click the pic for more...)

Ryoga was with us in spirit this time, too, as we had a few moments of losing ourselves among the tree-lined paths, exploring our way out. Then some public moments in the International District without lugging the camera out. ^_^'

from The Twilight Zone "Kick the Can" (1962):
"Maybe the Fountain of Youth isn't a fountain at all. Maybe it's a way of looking at things. A way of thinking."
...
"There is magic in the world; I know there is. [...] Friendship is a magic thing."

Submitted for your advisement for the New Year. ^_^

Plus, T-minus Five Days and counting. What to do? :)

There's an upturned double-wheel wheelbarrow under here somewhere, I'm sure of it. It's a corner of the yard protected from the elements on two sides, plus part of the "above" side if you count the eaves of the house. Through the weekend, the snow's been continuing lightly all day and night. The work-day commutes will continue to be interesting for a while.

( It's a wheel-bury-oh... )

( Find the street... )
Pretty when there's nothing much to do, but annoying when it's a hindrance.

P.S. Monday pre-7am tally: roughly nine inches over everything. Final few blocks of walk to work included a push of a snow-stranded motorist; every direction includes a hill, though, so I've done my Sisyphean task of the morning, thank you.

Snow started in Northern Suburbia last weekend, though it was only enough to be official, enough to dust everything. By Tuesday, temperatures were freezing and locals were freaking and bundling up. Scarf and ears-and-fingers cover time, especially for pedestrians like me who spend half-hours and longer in it at a time, but no freaking for some of us.

Wednesday it really hit. Starting before I left work, a stroll toward Aurora and a couple "push the skidding car up the hill" moments left me well ready for a warm assembly-line burrito and rest stop in a cafe. The parking lot became lighter and the cars became prime collectors of snow-chibi material as I left early to catch a bus home, one of the few that already had chains. I was one of the only calm people on the bus as it started taking a more-rerouted-than-usual path, bypassing various hilly accidents and passing a few stops of passengers stranded by late buses chaining themselves earlier in their routes (according to our driver, one route we partially followed had six at once backed up at the college). Of course, I hit the local Thai place for a final warm up.

That night, our town made local news for freeway-ramp accidents and bus outages. (Edit: More dramatic version today in Seattle-proper: clearly snow, buses, and hills do not mix. [KOMO-4, KING-5])

By Thursday, the bus outages and traffic delays spread south for the now region-wide craziness that is "ZOMG SNOW!". More "push the skidding car" random helping moments, more hot tea, and more packed-ice white roads (so you can imagine my thoughts on sidewalk conditions, especially the "lack of sidewalks" areas).

With "more coming Saturday night" forecasts, temperatures likely not breaking freezing until next week, and possibly more snow-rain mixes coming around the same time, it's beginning to look a lot like White Christmas. Sing it, Bing!

( The sauce, she found it. )

( Secret fish-tank path is not so secret. )
The "Ninja leap onto Eric's reclined chest" shot eludes capture. Until then, review medical journals for studies on momentary pulse-rate spikes caused by weights dropped on inattentive subjects' chests. In some Pavlovian kharma, the bell seen in recent shots fails to announce such activity until it occurs.