Northern Mich Con!

Northern Michigan Anime Con was great! Drove up to Traverse City and wore my Soldier A outfit. Still self conscious, suiting up in the parking lot and walking past the normal hotel guests. Then I spotted some samurai, sailor suit school girls, even some military-ish types (I'm looking at you, Hetalia) - ah, my people!
Voice actor guest was the awesome Cherami Leigh.

She plays one of the characters on my Soul Eater banner - Patty, a Demon Weapon who's basic combat form looks sort of like an M9 pistol.

The character normally looks like this. BTW, Cherami gives fantastic autographs!

  So now the banner appears thusly.

Autographs from half the illustrated cast plus half a dozen who aren't drawn on it!

My Fullmetal Alchemist banner is also looking most excellent.

Despite the anime having roughly a billion characters, I got a banner featuring just the two leads. Oh well.
Another awesome Cherami autograph!

My first attempt at a cosplay raygun's coming along.
Read a bunch of cosplay LED forums and blogs, soldering tutorials, resistor calculators, circuit schematics, but they all pretty much went out the window once I looked at the mess of LEDs, wire, and plastic piled up in front of me.
My dad has a soldering iron but recommended just binding the wires together with electrical tape. I happily agreed. And finding the technical specifications and resistor calculations hopelessly incomprehensible, I decided to just wing it.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here is your rig.

Is a 9 volt battery somehow enough to light a 12VDC LED along with a 3mm LED? I couldn't figure the calculation, so I just wired them together. So far, so good.

kazaaaap!

The ray gun and uniform, which is also coming together, is for a Marine from the excellent web series Voyage Trekkers.

The fellow on the left is a Marine, Sgt. Chan, played by Jeffrey Lamar. To his left are other brave Voyage Trekkers crewmen  of the GSV Remarkable, Lt. Jayda (Logan Blackwell filling in for Brian Blackwell), the Chief (Ricky Brindly), Dr. Rena (Gabrielle Van Buren), and Captain Sunstrike (Adam Rini).

My ray gun only very slightly resembles Todd Cook's official and very professional design.

The black-and-white coloring, at least. I bet his calculations added up!

I figure the one I'm making is an older, assault ray gun (light), used by a Marine on the ship. I'll clean up the wiring, hopefully strengthen the connections, and generally finish it as much as possible for Anime USA Con in Washington D.C., up next. For later, the experience gives me ideas for an assault ray gun (heavy) project.
A different cosplay costume each day is common, so I'm planning for The Other Grey Meat sack brigader on one day, Voyage Trekkers Marine the other.