It’s that time of year again, and one of the best online resources for Halloween is the Instructables Halloween Costume collection. Since these are instruction sets teaching you how to make your own costumes, I figured I should post now so you had the lead time to start building. Another great place to get ideas and help on creating costumes are any of the Cosplay groups, including Cosplay dot Com or the Cosplay Lab.
It started yesterday, and will be running through next Thursday, October first. Fantastic Fest is a collection of genre or unusual movies held at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas and includes such films as Zombieland, Gentlemen Broncos, and The Vampires Assistant, among many others. One of the co-founders, Tim League, put together a list of 10 must-see movies at the festival, and while I may not agree with him it does give you an idea of just how wide-ranging the Fest entries are.
Coming up this weekend is the New York Animation Festival. The Guest of Honor is Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of the Mobile Suit Gundam series and a songwriter who has worked with a range of folks from Yoko Kanno to Niel Sedaka. Musical guests include AKB48, Swinging Popsicle and a number of others. The Voice Talent guest list is HUGE, and full of some of my favorite voices from the world of anime; see the full list here. Events include the World Cyber Games National Final, Cosplay in the form of the Neo-Victorian Fashion Show (you can say it: Steampunk!), and Zombie Survival training from the Green Light Anti-Zombie Squad.
There are hundreds of theaters around the country that are going to be playing the new movie EUREKA 7 – good night, sleep, tight, young lovers tomorrow. It’s a one-night only event, to see if it is happening near you hit the Event site and feed it your zip code.
If you find yourself flying through D.C. with a layover at Dulles Airport of 2 hours or more, you can take a shuttle over to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Located on the Dulles grounds, it is another branch of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian. Among the exhibits there is the US Space Shuttle Enterprise, and all the satellite, spacecraft, and aircraft displays you would expect. But there are a few other SciFi goodies as well, including the most complete classic ray gun collection I have ever seen, a small assortment of Robots, a phone booth in the shape of a Mercury capsule, and an R2-D2 USPS mailbox.
I can’t help it, sometimes I just wonder about things. One of my current questions is: Will Soar Thoat be doing some of the music for the new John Carter of Mars production? I know, the band’s name is a serious Martian pun, and the Civil War veteran did not arrive on Mars by way of Rocketship, but I still wonder. Continuing on the musical front, there were two versions of the almost-question (they each answered it themselves, so it doesn’t count as actual questions) If I Had A Rocket Launcher. One is a Hi-Q rock construction from musical genius and politically aware Bruce Cockburn, the other a fun little construct from Halo gamers creating their own Machinima. The question this time is, which music video do you prefer? Here are your samples to choose between…