Boo

Are you scared?

Eh, doesn't matter. Halloween is upon us, and I have so little to talk about, I figure it's worth my time to just talk about the blindingly obvious subject of All Hallow's Eve. Halloween to those not in the know.

So, randomly, someone decided to dress up scary on October 31st. Then this spread, with people basically threatening others to give them an offering to not play a trick on them. People then decided that they should dress up, but skip the house to house scrounging for sugary substances and just party. Honestly, the history of this day is unknown to me, so I'm going to spend about 5 lines reading wikipedia.





There.

Ok, apparently, it's just a festival of the dead that got mixed with a festival of gathering, and then a sweet merchant decided to make some traditions. It may have been a day originally to help the souls of lost ones pass on, but then someone threw in a werewolf and everything got a bit messed up.

Change of pace. I'll tell the random blog reader of a scary new creature I want to become the new vampire, except not over-saturated. It's called Lacerta Aranea.

Powerful and carnivorous, and yet so gentle. When it first came around, weeks after the meteor stuck the earth, it started to scavenge. It feasted on the meat, and then laid it's eggs. The eggs are opportunistic, instinctively knowing when to awaken. But sometimes, they make mistakes.

The Lacerta Aranea, or Lacanea, will occasionally be born at the completely wrong time. But they can't just starve themselves, can they? That wouldn't be an effective creature. They have their own methods of catching their food, but they are just so gentle. They are the definition of "You have to be cruel to be kind". They lay traps in obscure places in the world where an occasional human would travel and lose themselves, such as crevices and ridges. If one accidentally fell, you would land in their web and you would be their food.

But they won't kill you. And they won't eat you alive.

You will die from the poison in his web. Then they will eat you.

It may save your life from your own foolish accident, and you may live longer than you would otherwise. Escape won't save you. Everyone who touches his web is his food, and there is no antidote aside from being him. Once you die, he will hunt his food. He is drawn to it. He can smell his poison from across even the stars.

He is not a monster. He is not stupid. He is not unreasonable. He is just starving, and is designed to crave whoever has touched his poison. Don't try to save the corpse, cause nothing can stop him. Just... don't touch the web.

It's a work in progress, but I think the concept is solid.

Cosplay part 2

In my last post (I made it a few seconds ago, but having two posts makes it look like I'm doing more for the blog. I'm not, it's the same content, but I'm sort of carrying the whole ruddy team. I checked, and it's six months since turnip or angel updated.

Cosplay trickery!!!

So, a costume is something that isn't you and isn't ordinary. Often a part of popular culture, but there's a lot of popular culture so you can slip behind the lines.

First of all, you can take the HIPSTER route.
Popular culture is so enormous that nobody can know it all. Just dress as anything snappy and seemingly fictitious. Rip a t-shirt and draw on blood-splatters. Carry a fake sword and fake specs while hiding your face in the shade of a low hanging hat. No top, but a pair of gloves. Everyone will assume you to be cosplaying something obscure and just assume they don't get the reference. If someone decides they just must know and asks you, just say some generic title (I'll come up with a blog for tat later, but stuff like 'Darker Chair') and claim it to be new and upstarting.

Alternatively, there's the EXCUSE route.
From the man who brought you such funny but utterly bullsh*t excuses like "My homework from last week is apparently a cannibal", we bring you "I'm wearing a Ninja costume. I'm not dressed as a ninja, my costume's just really stealthy." Nobody will care, and they may think less of you, but your friends will stop pestering you. Well done "Undercover ____"

Here's one I'd wanna do. It's the CREATOR's way out.
If I become famous enough, but not known for my face, I can make a simple to make and relatively awesome character outfit. Then simply dress as that. Or, conversely, dress as something cool and slightly abnormal, and then write it into the show and re-wear your outfit. It's basically cheating in real life, but you can always say he's an actual character.

Cosplay

Yes. You read that right. Of course, since you are either Angel or someone that accidentally landed on this blog through the most messed up google search ever, you aren't that surprised.

It's basically the action of dressing up as a thing. What kind of thing isn't in question, but as long as it's a thing, you're cosplaying. Halloween is basically a popular day of cosplay. I mean, you see pirates, Stormtroopers, the doctor, something steampunk for some reason, a Pokemon or Pokemon anime character, Chell, Miku Hatsune, Mario, an alien and a box (if it's not a companion cube or solid snake, I'm confused too. And then you actually enter the convention.

Why do they do this? You mean, aside from the fact that it's fun to act bizarre and that your conversations with people suddenly diverge from basic weather and damn buses being late to something related to your character (except from all those times when people just don't talk to you at all) and the fact everyone starts to think you awesome? I dunno, some fetish, maybe...

I've cosplayed once (I was a Sableye and nobody knew or cared) and it was fun. Plus I now have a purple hoodie with a green circle in the middle which adds character. I took off the lopsided ears to make it suitable for standard society. People still ask about the circle, but I just handwave it.

The whole experience rocks! I was executed by order of the Empire! I have the picture to prove it! I once saw Matt Smith's Doctor in a swordfight! Emmett Brown took my photo in front of the Tardis! You haven't lived until you've walked past a massive off-worlder from the planet Lala Croissant and said a nonchalant "sup"!

Admittedly, gathering a costume is tricky. I can think of some ways in which you can trick people into believing you're actually in costume, but it's easier to just say "CBA with a costume."

Sci Fi Romance

It's pretty gross, if you think about it.

Ok, let me explain the basics. The main romantic basis is that us and the off-worlders are high intelligence beings, similar and different at the same time, and there's just a link between the two romantically linked characters. Different DNA, which makes them unknown and peculiar.

You know what else has different DNA from humans? Sheep. Yeah. They're basically clever sheep. They look similar, but the basic instinct is the same as a human/sheep relationship. And that's just weird.

Then there's just the basic fact of styles of reproduction. What if he wants to reproduce with a human female, courts her, brings her to his room, then stands around waiting for you to lay eggs which he would then fertilise? Yeah. He's not actually a mammal, but a reptile that looks similar to humans. Ruins it a bit, huh?

And even if the reproductive systems were similar, why would he wanna do a sheep? He's not that weird.

How can you actually link a species who is rare in both mating for pleasure and having the largest mammaries in comparison to their body to ANY other species? Even if we did meet a race of similar skin texture, height, girth, mass, mating methods and intelligence, how can you be sure they're interested? Oh, and what if what we consider males are considered their females?

Additionally, black widow spiders. I don't even need to explain the complications there.

You can romanticise the cosmic differences, but you can't romance the cosmic difference, which rather defeats the purpose. Any story which states there's a couple between humans and another species either doesn't understand sex drive, or is based on weirdos.