Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

Promethea's shoes arrived today. (I bought them on Ebay. Amazing, no?) They are even shinier than I imagined them. Perhaps too shiny. Oh well, I can manage that with a little rub-n-buff if strictly necessary.

More importantly, I'm committed to the costume now. Why walk this path, that leads to skirt-wearing (short skirt-wearing, even!)? The sheer badass factor, apparently. Seriously. If you have not read the Promethea comics, and you are local, we can loan them to you. (And should, since we came to have them through the benevolence of gamera_spinning.)

Still to do:
- Poke niveus_tigris about the leatherwork and wait patiently for him to find the right leather.
- Convert loose fabric into skirt and top. (Should be easy)
- Sculpt and gild shoulder pin. (Super easy)
- Acquire wig. (Probably expensive, but easy)
- Build caduceus wand out of er... well, something. Still working on that concept.
- Pay niveus_tigris for leatherwork.
- Get ballsy enough to walk around in public with that little clothing on. (Not so easy, but hey. It's only one day, right?)

Captain America, disheartened by recent reports of his death, gets all drunk and disorderly in Florida.

You cannot make this shit up.

DOOM has been kind enough to give me an identity in the DOOMniverse, which I deeply appreciate, as comparing people to comic book characters is one of those core geek activities, and I always like to be in on them. As it turns out, I seem to be Moondragon.

I'm fine with that, really. I mean look at her. She's a priestess and a scientist, a hero and a villain, possessed by demons, bitchslapped by gods, an admirer of men, an admirer of women, massively arrogant, and had her ability to reproduce revoked on the grounds that she wasn't human enough and oughtn't to spawn. I am down with all of those things. She's primarily a mentalist/telepath sort of character (though, like everyone else in the Marvel Universe, was trained by monks and is also a martial arts master and yogi -- I'm not much good at that part, personally), so that sort of works.

And, she's a comic character I'm actually familiar with -- I had a few Avengers books when I was a kid, and I remember thinking then as I'm thinking now, "Man, they will let anybody be an Avenger. First-string heroes, second-string heroes, gods, magicians, third-string heroes, superhumans who can't decide what hero to be (somewhere in there, Ant Man turned into Yellowjacket, and I never could figure out how), superhumans that can't decide what gender they are (I fortunately did get the issue where guy Cloud turned into girl Cloud [or was that the other way around?), reformed supervillains, unreformed supervillains, any damned body can be an Avenger." "So you used to be Madame McEvil? Sure, come join our team! There's a place for you in the Avengers!" Remarkably equal-opportunity, those Avengers. I like that.

However, I am not so down with the outfit. If I'm going to be Moondragon, Moondragon is going to have to wear a damned lot more clothes.

Everybody loves a three-day weekend. Here are the highlights:

- Friday Night Supper Club. kittenpants and I met sxypaganmom and kcgreenman for pizza, following which, we had a huge discussion on philosophy, religion, and ministry. This led us out of the pizza parlor, down the street for ice cream, and then, when we'd out-talked the ice cream shop's open hours, off to McCoy's for a beer. Good times.

- Sobriety checks. Kansas City cops are infinitely nicer than Jacksonville cops. We pulled out of Westport on Friday night, and were shunted into a sobriety checkpoint. The cops there were friendly and pleasant, which was sort of a surprise, since my experience of checkpoints has been entirely one in which the cops were primarily there to pick a fight. "Have you been drinking?," they asked. "I had a beer," I replied. "Okay then, go on through. Have a nice night." Unbelievable.

- Half Price Books. $75 later, we have some very exciting titles. And a Wheel of Time d20 book, so that I can make a new character at home after my party leaves me to die by torture at the hands of the Children of the Light, because they're not sure rescuing me would be the right thing to do. It would, after all, be breaking the law.

- Ritual at Gaia. Did not suck, despite being spontaneously created. Also, any public generipagan ritual in which one can invoke Fotamecus as rite patron is fine by me.

- X-Men. Good, but hard to watch, the new one was. Made me cry in several bits. Too many of my formative experiences were all about comic books, I think. Can't talk about it without spoiling, so let's leave it at this, since this is the Most Important Question of the Day:

[Poll #738776]

Yesterday I managed to miss out on month-end reconciliation at the jobplace, which was good, but only because I was unpleasantly ill, which was bad. From looking at the emails that accumulated on how the close was to be done, however, I'm willing to claim the whole thing as a victory, since if I had been here yesterday, the Steerpike-o-meter would have definitely gained more than a few points.

Also, taking the day off allowed me to finish the Promethea books, and start digging through the annotation website that adammaker so graciously pointed me towards. I was pretty pleased with the books from start to finish -- the ending is lovely. I continue to find the Jack Faust character weirdly endearing, especially near the end, where he's admitting to not being quite ready for this whole "immanentizing the eschaton" thing. But maybe I just generally have sympathy in my heart for scummy magicians. It's happened before.

The annotations pages are a little odd. The guy that does them knows all kinds of crazy stuff about Alan Moore and comics in general, and is able to pick out things like "In this frame, there's a sign with this name on it, and he's the guy that inked The Watchmen", but totally blows it on a lot of the subject matter. He's got a bit on the issue that's Sophie and Barbara in Tiphareth, where he fails to identify Osiris -- he's like "and then there's some Egyptian guy, can anybody tell me who he is?". And he has no concept of the use of numbers. I may be sending him a note or three. That is awfully like participating in fandom, but I suppose if I have to have a fandom, this would be the one for me.
( And then, there was snarky doom. Cut because I got rambly. )

Late last night, I was reading some more of the Promethea comics... There's an issue where the snakes in the caduceus (Mike and Mack, appropriately) are showing her the Tarot trumps (overlaid with the history of the world and Crowley's imaginary mongoose joke), all of which are crazily illustrated and accompanied by a set of Scrabble tiles spelling out an anagram of 'Promethea' which is more or less appropriate to the trump. I'm going through this and thinking "Wow! These guys really put some thought into this, it's fantastically clever and well-worked."

And, then, I turn the page to The Aeon. The Aeon is represented by Harpocrates, as portrayed by Harpo Marx, above a field of souls rising. He's wearing his traditional baggy jacket and jaunty hat, both of which are covered in ankhs. He is raising his horn, and the sound produced is rendered as "ANKH ANKH". I nearly pissed myself laughing. I have totally envisioned Harpocrates as Harpo Marx before in my work -- it's the sort of thing my brain does. Apparently, I'm not the only one.

So I hauled my ass out of bed and went upstairs to share this bit of wild amusement with someone, which turned out to be triadruid, who was working on a website. He sort of looked at me blankly, and said "I'm glad you're enjoying that, but I don't get it." And lo, I was crushed. But only for a second. Then, it was funny again.

I've also been enjoying particularly seeing Barbara, a female lead character who isn't wildly thin and attractive (even though in many of the books where she appears, some other character will make fun of her appearance -- she doesn't much care). You just don't get a lot of that in any media, especially not graphic formats.

I mean, here's a comic book character that I could dress as and pull it off. That doesn't just come along every day. It even made me think about doing a Promethea costume for DragonCon, for about half a second. I suppose I could, except that it would break nearly all of my rules for costuming -- let's see... requires hand props, shows a lot of skin, few buy-able components, no pants.... yeah. Would be cute, but waaay too much trouble. That's cool though. Our costume plans are largely made for this year anyway.

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war21.html
Inevitably. GYWO does freedom food.

Grumble...twitch...grumble...