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.

Lessons learned

Something I'm starting to get about cosplaying is the idea of not necessarily buying a costume to wear, but creating something yourself. Like these highly impressive, award winning cosplayers from Matsuricon 2013 in Columbus, Ohio:

They say this fellow made his powered-armor-type suit out of cardboard,
duct tape, and paint. I don't remember the name of the character. (edit: it's

Jl Prime cosplaying Kamen Rider Decade!)

I recognize this one. It's Lord Death from Soul Eater.

She's a character I think from a video game I haven't played.
(Edit: she's Big Sister from "Bioshock." Yeah, I should probably get a PS3 or something...)

A handmade Transformers Starscream costume, made by cosplayer extraordinaire Chelsey. She gave her
Decepticon a smile. An evil smile. An I've-going-to-blast-you-into-a-million-pieces-with-a-song-in-my-heart smile.

That makes sense. Unleash your creativity and all that. This gives me ideas for long-term projects of my own that will almost certainly require visits to Michael's and/or Joann's (shudder). I've been meaning to hit those places anyway. I need to look into building some actual sets for Living Room Wars. I have lots of ideas for that, too!
In the short term, I'm looking to head to Northern Michigan Anime Con in Traverse City next weekend and Anime USA the weekend after. I'm looking to continue my cosplaying career with a modified Soldier A and something new, for me - an actual character!
For Soldier A, I'm going lighter...

...for something like this...

I can add another uniform to the things-I-can-fit-into-it-again category!

The character I have in mind is still in progress, sort of, but fans of the webcomics I like will recognize where I'm going with this...
 

The rope's for emergencies...