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Since 1832 the Strasburg Rail Road has been running steam trains through Pennsylvania, and is the oldest continuously running steam powered train service in North America. So it is only fitting that in October it will be hosting the Steampunk unLimited, a festival of musicians, craftsmen, authors, and cosplayers taking place in and around the massive trains. Some of the musicians include Abney Park (the first track here), UnWoman (the second song on the page), and Frenchy and the Punk (the final track here). I couldn’t find their author listing, or I would have posted it here.

Awesome Con in Washington D.C. this past weekend certainly lived up to its name, and its rep. They had a huge collection of actors, artists, and authors (and that only covered the first letter of the alphabet) doing their best to make the gathering memorable. Pretty much all of the guest actor/voice talent celebrities manned (personed?) a booth on the bottom level, off to the side of the hucksters area by the primary entrance, most of the time they were not doing a panel or presentation. Between those two groups were the artists, both Comics and Fine, with quite a few other visual disciplines mixed in. That last sentence gives you the idea, but not the scope, unless you expect there to be a hundred or more impressive illustrator/storytellers on the multiple-football-field sized area you are crossing to get to your next scheduled event.

They had some presentations I never expected, like Twisted Toonz, where a group of world class voice actors played out a famous movie as totally different characters than the ones in the original. This year the film was The Wrath of Kahn, and the voice of Wini The Pooh coming from the bridge of the Enterprise was one of the the least disconcerting aspects of that presentation. I can’t wait to see another show organized around the same principle, it was absolutely amazing and entertaining! Although the voice actor tasked with being Bill Cosby for one part of it kept looking out at the audience like he was trying to find an escape route.

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The first video in this set is Anime USA 2014 Cosplay: “Second Wind”, the following stream is the AwesomeCon attempt last year to break the Guinness Book of World Records for the most numbers of Cosplayers/SuperHeroes in one place. They didn’t break the record, but it must have been a hoot and a half to make the attempt!

I know this is very redundant of me, but I found a ton of great stuff yesterday while looking up the last AwesomeCon event, DC’s version of ComicCon, so I wanted to share a few more today. The first one is a Cosplay LipDub (what anyone else would call Lip Syncing) from last years Anime USA event. The second one is more Cosplay set to music from AwesomeCon itself, and while you will see some of the most popular Cosplayers from yesterdays posting, lots of these folks were overlooked in both of those videos, and deserved to be noticed. Enjoy!

Another excellent example of Cosplay, this time from the 2014 AwesomeCon convention, the ComicCon event in our nations capitol (unless, obviously, you are from some other country, in which case the correct phrase would be their nations capitol). This video was put together by the Close Quarters Cosplay team. Because I couldn’t stop there, I also had to include their Anime USA 2014 Cosplay Fun video, and I think they made an excellent choice for the music bed on that one. I particularly liked that they had a Cowboy Bebop track running while the Cowboy Bebop Cosplayers were on the screen, but the TommyHeavenly6 was a very nice touch as well.