So today is the other costume day that I promised to my husband – he was starting to offer me money, so I thought that I really had better humor him – and he wanted a Sniper Joe outfit. Apparently Sniper Joe is a Mega Man enemy, a mass-produced Protoman clone. (Brian’s been on a real Protomen kick lately, you see…)

Well, of course I get slightly bored with things like that, so I gave Sniper Joe – let’s call her Sniper Jo – a cute little skirt. Her shield is smaller than it is supposed to be, I think, so let’s pretend she’s an updated model who can take down Mega Man just fine without that clunky big shield, thank you…

So now you have a taste of what this blog would be like if my husband was the artist… Tomorrow, back to cute dresses, I think.

So I did a Dollhouse-themed yoga getup earlier this year during Season 1, at which point I was enjoying it well enough to keep going, but maybe a little dubious, and I still liked Firefly better. As the season progressed, though, it kept getting better and better, ending with the unbroadcasted episode Epitaph One, a depressing preview of the Dollverse’s future. Now we’ve seen where the show is going, I’m dreadfully curious to find out just how it’s going to get there; luckily Fox renewed the show – unexpectedly, I should add – and the second season started yesterday, although I’ll be watching on Hulu tonight (yep, I’m one of those coveted new media viewers).

Epitaph One had Whiskey wearing this dress, although I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the hem really ought to be blood stained and I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it tonight. So far I’ve really liked the costumes for Dollhouse – I bet it’s got to be fun picking out what to wear for all the different assignments. (There’s a sort of meta-costuming aspect to it, too, as we’ve seen a huge costume warehouse in the Dollhouse itself. I would guess that there is some sort of costume director position in the Dollhouse, as I somehow can’t see Boyd picking out those crocheted thigh-highs for Echo…)

So, it’s the 26th, let’s talk Halloween. Like I did last year, I want to do a month’s worth of Halloween costumes. I really like the idea of four “themes,” a new one for each week, and I got a lot of great suggestions, so now I’m putting it up to a vote! This is just for what I’ll do for the first week, so feel free to give me more suggestions for weeks 2-4.

By the way, no one has guessed my favorite Prismacolor yet…

So Brian and I watched Firefly and Serenity earlier this year, and I completely fell in love with the show. I haven’t yet seen any of Buffy or Dr. Horrible, but when I heard about Dollhouse I decided that this time I wouldn’t let Joss Whedon’s next potential hit pass me by, and I’ve been watching it on Hulu. I watched the first episode with Brian, and the next few on my own (my husband having bailed muttering jokes about “quantum leap with spas” and so on). Just as the hype had it, the second episode was better than the first, the overall beginning was kind of weak and episode six was tons of fun. The show is about an organization (the Dollhouse of the title) that removes the memories and personalities from their “volunteers” and hires them out as perfect human beings implanted with the personality and skills necessary for whatever job the client wants. In between jobs, the “dolls” are returned to a childlike state (one poster on the Whedonesque blog noted that they sounded a lot like lolcats — I has a book! — and I wish I could unread that because now I can’t not crack up at some lines) and spend the days in comfy clothes, doing yoga and eating lettuce. I’ve liked the subtle costuming so far, even if there aren’t the opportunities for fantasy like there were with Firefly.

I think Topher’s rather put-upon assistant Ivy is going to end up being the programmer Topher talked about in, I think, episode four — Topher seems to think that his rival Yuma Takahashi is definitely a guy, and rejects the idea that whoever disrupted the programming could be a girl when his assistant suggests it, but Yuma is a suggestive sort of name. “Yuma” seems girly to me, and there’s at least one actress with the name, but “Yuuma” seems more like a guy’s name; I wouldn’t expect Topher to know the difference. (The captions had it as “Yuma,” but that doesn’t signify much, I think.) Anyways, that’s my contribution to the rampant speculation, and I hope I’m right because I look forward to her smacking him down at some point. (For some reason I can so see a bewildered Topher with a line like “I thought all their names ended in ‘ko’?” A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.) For her to be the person who contacted Ballard seems like it might be too obvious, though.

Edit, April 6 – on rewatching Grey Hour, Topher says, I think, “Yumio” while the subtitles say “Yuma.” Yumio being a pretty manly name, I’m not so attached to my theory as I once was!

Actually, I’m not a huge Battlestar Galactica fan, but my husband goes nuts over it. We watched the miniseries together, and I was glad I saw it, but there’s only so much bleakness I can take in my entertainment. Ever since then, we have this pattern where I look at his laptop screen or the TV and ask “What’s going on now?” or “Have they all killed each other yet?” or “Has that Gaius got what’s coming to him yet?” and he will explain it to me, and about half of it will go over my head and the rest of it allows me to form an understanding of the fragments I watch. I follow along enough to know what’s going on, but not quite enough to care, I’m afraid. But I do love this dress that Six wears, especially showcased in this takeoff of the Last Supper.

Brian wants me to do the Viper pilot uniform (the one on the left), and I will by and by to please him, but I’m feeling lazy tonight so just a simple red dress. If you are cutting this out, I put hopeful little tabs on the dress straps, but I think I would recommend you remove them altogether and treat the dress as strapless.

As I noted earlier, Brian and I have been watching Firefly (and we just finished the full series plus the movie, so spoil away if you feel the need). I enjoyed it a lot, although I felt that some of the later episodes were rather weak and that the first five minutes of the movie changed a lot of my perception of the whole first season, which is a kind of jarring way to start out a movie. Brian had to pause while I was going “Wait… what?” In general I loved the dialogue and the characters, but the thing that really hooked me was Inara Serra’s costumes. Inara is a Companion, a sort of futuristic geisha or courtesan, and her clothes are amazing. She wears mostly warm colors (lots of reds and golds) and sumptuous fabrics and has this great style, sort of a mashup of Asian and Indian influences with a big dose of 1930s starlet. I want to paperdoll just about everything she wears! Look at this page with her outfits. Brian and I watched the Dollhouse pilot and weren’t all that impressed, but even if the next few episodes aren’t all that great I’ll probably keep watching just because Shawna Trpcic, the same costume designer that did Firefly, worked on Dollhouse as well. (So far most of the costumes are centered around yoga pants, but that tiny white dress Echo wore to the guy’s birthday party was smashing, even if she probably had to tape it to her thighs.)

I’m afraid the banding looks horrible on this one, and the color isn’t all that great either — the real thing is really pretty, if I do say so myself, and the scanned version is a pale imitation. I’ve been putting off the search for a new scanner, but it looks like I’d better get started. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d appreciate them!

So I saw this pattern on A Dress A Day and thought it was just beyond cute and it needed paperdolling. Seriously, look at the little collar and the pointy shoulders. Adorable. Erin thought it made a good airship hostess uniform, so I added a little cap and little airships around the hem. (Yes, that’s what they’re supposed to be…) Check out the original post and a post about a version of the dress being auctioned off.

I don’t have too much else to say about this dress other than that drawing tiny airships is fun and that my scanner is starting to annoy me (see the banding? It’s been doing that recently, plus the blue is cuter in person), so please go create a dress for me on my dress wiki.

Happy Valentine’s Day, paperdoll fans, and you’ve got to admit that even if it looks like it was bought in a store, this is a delightful Valentine’s dress. Brian and I have been into watching Firefly lately, and we’re almost through the series. (So please don’t spoil anything from the movie or the last few episodes just yet; I know River Tam beats up everyone but I don’t want to know any more.) Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic, falls in love with this dress and gets to wear it to a party. In this very same episode Inara wears what may be the most gorgeous dress ever, but there’s just something about this dress that’s so very Kaylee, and probably instantly recognizable to every Firefly fan.

Don’t be surprised if you see an Inara outfit here too, or two or twenty, because I swear every episode she wears something new that just bowls me over… but for now it’s all about the layer cake dress. Until I revisit the ‘verse, then, do enjoy these Firefly paper dolls. Holly also did two Kaylee outfits for one of her dolls, which you can find here and here. Thanks also to Can’t Take The Sky, a Firefly fan site with great screen captures.

Radar the kitten here! Reportin for duty! Here’s the deal! Liana went to sleep, what a joke! Everybody knows that kittens sleep 22 hours a day yet somehow manage to continually find themselves underfood underfoot and climbing on stuff! Ha-ha! But I have been reformed! So I am pulling my weight (all 2½ pounds!) by helping out! It is pretty rad to be a kitten!

So I scanned in these drawings Liana made of things that aren’t cat food! And here’s what they are! The thing here is the TERRIBLE Ro-Bat! O woe the Ro-Bat! It is sensitive to light on account of its multi creepoid compound eyes! So the Ro-Bat wheels around looking for planets to ruin and despoil! Only to be blinded by the astrobulb on the helm of its lesser bipedal accomplice!

While this is bad news for them! It’s good news for us! Means I am liable to get more of that gnarly cat food! You should try some! Here! Let me put some in your shoes! AWESOME! It is even cute because I am a kitten!

<3 Radar the kitten!

P.S. — Here is a picture of me! Because the only thing cuter than a kitten is a kitten somebody is looking at on the internet!!

You may have heard of Twitter, the latest way for web 2.0 types to revolutionize the world, and what I use for off-the-cuff paperdoll updates, over on the sidebar. I also started using plurk, which is similar but has better organization and makes it easier to carry on conversations. (Twitter now is just paperdoll stuff while plurk is more “here’s what I’m making for dinner,” but feel free to visit my Plurk stream.)

Anyways, Plurk had a design contest recently, so I drew up this one-off paperdoll that uses three of the “plurk creatures,” Plurk’s creepy-cute mascots. Besides the Halloween costumes, the other sets have a more geeky bent to them. Top left, you’ll find three memes that geeks have obsessed over to ridiculous levels: Portal’s Weighted Companion Cube, CATS from Zero Wing, famous for the All Your Base dialogue, and Twitter’s failwhale, the image that signals the site is down. Bottom left, there’s Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, and Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s “father of modern video games.” (His outfit was taken from this BusinessWeek article because it was so cute.)

Sadly, I didn’t win the contest with my little plurky paperdolls, so I’ll have to buy the book I wanted, McGee & Stuckey’s Bountiful Container, with my own money after all. Still, even if I didn’t win the contest, I at least have something for my blog today!

So I’m a big Watchmen fan, and it is with some trepidation that I look towards the new movie. When the trailer came out I watched with joy that was dampened when Brian pointed out that everything looked really shiny and, well, essentially too polished and good; for example, the Night Owl of the comic carries a spare tire, who was this dude in a Night Owl costume looking so svelte? I liked to think that it was a flashback to the younger Night Owl, but I’m not so sure. The comic shows that a bunch of humans dressing up and fighting crime is probably not so cool as we might like to think it is; the movie is positioned to show that wow, it really is badass after all. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised, we’ll see.

Of course, I am content to leave most of the obsessing about the content to Brian and the other fanboys and I turn to what I fangirl best, obsessing about the costumes. Already I can tell you I can’t forgive the new Ozymandias — that is, the dude on the far right of this Entertainment Weekly Watchmen cover. My Ozymandias dresses like wacked-out royalty, and it’s not meant to offer protection or hide his identity because he doesn’t need either. So we can get right past that and look at the girls. I’m torn about the original Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter) — the paperdoll for today is based on her outfit in the comic book, and the new version is even more sexed up — particularly I think the stockings are too over-the-top for her times, although I do like that they connect her outfit to her daughter’s. I like the yellow part better in the movie version, though — very cute and feminine. The original stockings plus the original yellow top would be my favorite version. Laurie’s version of the Silk Spectre outfit I don’t like much, but I wasn’t really a fan of the original version either, so it’s a bit of a wash. I like the new design well enough on its own merits, actually, but I don’t think it fits the setting; Laurie’s mom picked out her costume for her, and her mom would have had an eye for what was sexy and showed off her daughter to best advantage. The movie version of the costume is significantly less soft and vulnerable looking — and really, probably more like what Laurie would have picked out for herself. But it’s too serious; Laurie wasn’t serious about the job of being a superheroine (one that her mom chose for her, essentially) until she was in her 30s.