(I posted this on the anniversary news post, but I wanted to make a copy of it here in my own journal, too)

Gonna have a moment of sappiness here, but honestly, DW is the reason I have my own house, and a job that I loved. I had taught myself CSS/HTML as a teenager, in ye olde Geocities days, and was kind of interested in CS, but I got to college, took an intro CS course (taught in Java) and absolutely hated it. So I got a biology degree instead and then tried to find work with that.

Then, in 2011, when the first giant wave of RP migrations happened, my best friend complained about not liking any of the existing styles and I thought, well, I know a little bit about coding, and I used to play with custom layouts on LJ - and the result was Marginless (which looking back on is kind of eh, but my friend liked it! Fun fact: the default color scheme and it's name are for the character she used it for, lol). And then I learned that style patching efforts were seriously backlogged, so I went 'well if someone can give me pointers, I'll give it a go' and it just kind of spiraled from there? And I learned along the way that I actually do like coding, I just hate Java.

And after a few years of not finding good work and just working temp jobs, I went back to school in 2014 and got a CS degree, and got hired a few months after graduating at a fantastic company that does application security testing (and it turns out that coding for DW taught me much better security practices than like... a LOT of companies have. A depressingly large number of companies). And said awesome job means that last year I could finally buy my own house, which has been like, a life goal since I was twelve.

So thank you, Dreamwidth. I always joke that you pay me in food and fake money (points), but really, you have paid me in support and mentorship over the last eight (!!!) years.

- The extremely tall Giorno at the Friday shoot (like, easily 6'6". TALL BOY)
- The older couple cosplaying Oldseph and Suzie Q at the shoot
- Honestly, most of the Friday shoot, even if it was chaos (the assigned space was waaaay too small for the number of people who showed up, so there was wrangling)
- Giving all my trash children bucellati
- Kira who organized the shoot: I just took a cookie from Abbaccio and stuffed it in my mouth without questioning or thinking
- Getting distracted like four times on our drunken wander from the Sheraton bar to video gaming by moar jojos
- Very drunk friend who has not reached part 5: *squinting at Doppio and Diavolo cosplayers we ran into* Are they the same character???
Me: ....Yes... and no. You're too drunk for me to explain. Actually I'm not sure I could even if you were sober.
- The Mista who like, clocked themselves in the face attempting to hastily salute us outside video gaming
- Finally meeting one of the other JJBA fans in my local EGL comm (who has excellent taste in characters)
- The Bruno wearing a DARE t-shirt that we ran into
- The way any conversation about JJBA just attracts more jojos fans
- Going to the Gender Bending Fashion exhibit at the MFA on Monday and just picking out what jojos character would wear what

(hopefully I'll post photos eventually but it turns out I'm very bad at selfies and didn't get any myself)

One set of armor plates almost done... #toukenranbu #cosplay

Got four of the six armor plates I need for Mikazuki cut out (along with two screw-ups). Having access to a CNC machine helps so much. #cosplay #toukenranbu

So I'm working on throwing together Mikazuki's battle outfit for Anime Central, which is in five weeks (oh god I don't want to think about that). Like a lot of the Touken Ranbu designs, there is kind of a lot going on, so I thought I would break down the components and make some notes of them for my own reference, and maybe that will be helpful for other people out there, too :) This post is going to be the big fabric bits, because they're sort of the foundation of the outfit.

Most of these pieces are actually pretty close to traditional Heian era garments - I'm using Reconstructing History's Heian men's clothing pattern as a base for most of it.

-Kosode: This is really only visible on the concept/reference art - on the in-game sprites, it only shows as the innermost white collar at his neckline. Important, though, because this is what actually covers your arms and sides! His is pretty much the same as historical versions, or a slight varation on a modern kimono - narrower body, no front tuck, ends about knee-length I'm using a white cotton sateen because I had a bunch already, and I'm a sweaty person so I need an under-layer that's machine washable. Mostly done already because I can sew kimono in my sleep, practically.

-Hitoe: The white layer that's mostly visible, right under the blue one. It's pretty close to Heian hitoe, with two exceptions, both in the sleeve area - one is that the sleeves look to be all one piece, instead of made up of two pieces (which is more an artifact of traditional Japanese fabric widths than anything), and then the sleeves are open on the bottom and wrist edge, as well as the body edge. So I'm going to take the traditional hitoe pattern, cut the sleeves as one block, and then line them because the edges are super-visible when they're open like that and I have enough hemming as it is. I think I'm going to buy some white polyester chirimen (chirimen is a type of tight crepe weave that is easily the most common fabric used for kimono). Normally I'd buy a bolt of vintage kimono silk from Ichiroya - you can get them for ~$50 plus shipping, and they're 15m or so - but 1) a lot of the whites tend to have discolored with age and 2) they're traditional width, which is about 15" and thus too narrow for me to do the sleeves in one piece for. Thankfully Tomato has 44" polyester chirimen for ~$14/m on their Rakuten store.

-Kariginu: The giant blue monstrosity. Like the hitoe, this mostly only differs from the traditional cut in having single-piece sleeves that are open all the way around. I'm lining the whole thing because there are a lot of visible edges/insides, and I have the feeling the fabric I'm using is going to be fray-tastic. It's a royal blue brocade with the sayagata pattern woven in - it's a little bigger, with slightly thicker lines than the patterning on Mikazuki's kariginu, but honestly, it's probably as close as you're going to get without actually weaving your own (don't do that, please). Okuyama sells it online, though I was lucky enough that a friend was willing to pick some up in person for me when she was in Tokyo last month, which saved me a bunch on shipping. My sewing project for today, I think!

-Hakama: The only part of this that isn't mostly-Heian in style. Hakama were part of Heian ensembles, but they had fewer pleats than modern styles, and were waaaay longer so they could be gathered up at the ankles and have a nice poof. The pleat arrangement and length on Mikazuki's place them pretty solidly in 'modern' (19th century to present) style. Round Earth's hakama pattern is my go-to for that, though I may leav off the backboard (which is solidly a 20th century martial arts addition). I'm airbrushing the gradient on a heavy matte polyester satin, which, uh, is an adventure. And probably a whole post to itself at some point.

Next time: armor, armor, and more armor!

Three guesses who's coming up soon on my cosplay list, and the first two don't count ;) #cosplay

Last-minute #ouji coord for lunch at Max Brenner - I went straight for dessert, haha. Blouse is #littledipper, cost is #atelierboz and everything else is off-brand.

In 2012, I:
-started volunteering for DW
-had my car vandalized
-got my first 'unconventional' piercings
-went to a (awesome) steampunk con
-went to a real grown-up technical conference
-began the process of lifehacking

I kind of shy away from the idea of New Year's resolutions because, well, they always end up broken, but we'll call these New Year's goals. Things to strive towards, without beating myself up too much if I slip up along the way.
-stick to the two new habits I started near the end of 2012 - flossing my teeth and picking up around the house daily.
-cross some things off my 'want to learn'/'want to read'/'want to watch' list
-get a career-job.

Starting caveat - while I used custom layouts on LJ, and occasionally tweaked some, I never wrote any CSS overrides from scratch, mostly because I remember when S2 went live and I went 'LAYERS? A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE? WHAT IS THIS SHIT I'M NEVER MAKING MY OWN LAYOUTS AGAIN'. So while I can answer a lot of questions about how DW does things, I don't know the answer to 'what's the equivalent of this LJ element in DW?'. I also do not know the answer to 'I broke my imported core1 layout, how do I fix it.' I'm also assuming you know CSS and HTML, but not necessarily any other programming language.

( Onward! )

Throwing this out there while it's in my brain all fresh - someone on the xda-dev forums posted how to access the B&N Nook's annotations DB files, along with suggestions for auto-syncing them via Dropbox (basically a symlink from the user-accessible folders into the root folders). This is all well and good but I am a Huge Nerd and I desire MORE. So basically my rough draft goes something like this:

1) Figure out how to sync the file with my personal server automatically, along with automating import of the SQLite .db file into a server database (this maaaay get tricksy if only because the Nook appears to have some issues identifying what file it's pointing with sideloaded books, which is why annotations seem to vanish, but I'm willing to hack at it - manually tagging books an author when the Nook goes weird)

2) Something to take this database and generate slightly more human-parsable HTML pages of it - annotations and highlights sorted by book, with a separate (dynamically generated) page for each one so I can be fancy and link them and shit. Editing would be nice, but I'm willing to sacrifice that to 'have to do on commandline' - mostly it's that touch screen highlighting is kind of hit or miss so a lot of my highlights have clipped words.

3) MAKE PRETTY WEBPAGE YAY.


(2) is kind of my sticking point because I do know know how to write the things that glue databases and HTML-formatted content together. I know they exist! I know they are usually in PHP and Perl! But I could use some guidance, particularly on the 'okay we've pulled it out of the database, now how do we sent it for formatting?' part - I've worked a bit with straight-up SQL in pulling and pushing data in and out of databases, so I'm more familiar with that end of things.

Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?