"Well let me ask you an important question then…what is your cup size?"

Me: This is not an interview, this is degrading. I’m done. (I walk away)

Him: (clearly dumbfounded and surprised) ..Come on, it’s all in good fun!

Me: Being degraded is fun? 

Mandy Caruso, Beautilation

Go to Google Images™, and type in "cosplay".

(Go ahead, I'll wait…)

What you'll see is an apparent Who's Who of characters from comics, movies, games, animé, and television shows.  A closer look reveals that it's pictures of people (and a few dogs) dressed as those characters or interpretations of them - mashups, steampunk, crossplay/Rule 63* versions - at conventions, studio setups, or appropriate locations. And there are a LOT of pictures.**

Welcome to cosplay. To slightly misquote the infamous Darth Laurie, every day can be Hallowe'en.

Originally, cosplay - an obvious combination of "costume" and "play"- was almost exclusively an homage to characters from Japanese animated programs, or animé.  Cosplayers would construct intricate costumes faithfully based on those of their favourite characters, and then have themselves photographed in appropriate settings for the characters they were portraying.  Cosplay originates in Japan in the late 70s or early 80s, and as it became increasingly popular, it made the transition to the rest of the world.

Having made that transition, it has become hugely popular on a global basis, to the point that a separate industry in cosplay support has developed, with companies suppling accessories, weapons, patterns and costumes to the cosplay community.  (I've listed a few stellar examples at the end of this posting.)

In spite of my own costumed appearances at Hallowe'en, cosplay doesn't really appeal to me as a hobby, for a very simple reason.  I'd rather make something completely original rather than duplicate an existing creation - not to suggest for a second that there isn't room for originality in cosplay, but it's generally a venue for duplication and interpretation rather than genesis. However, due to cosplay's enormous popularity, I consider it to have achieved a status as its own genre within the community, and follow it the same way that I follow books, comics, games and so on.  I admire cosplayers for their creativity and their craft, and the sense of commitment, accomplishment and enjoyment that they bring to their hobby.

That being said, cosplay has been the target of some of the stupidest comments and problems that have ever plagued a fan community.  Cosplayers have been the victims of three main problems: sex, race and entitlement.

Let's start with sex.  (As the bishop said to the actress.)  Comics and genre movies and games are all guilty of idealization and objectification of women to a greater or lesser extent, no argument there.  (I've commented on this previously, regarding Red Sonja and Wonder Woman.)  What this means to the cosplay community is that in order to accurately portray certain characters, women wear costumes that reflect the objectification from the original material - in other words, tight spandex and outfits without a lot of coverage.

The question of female empowerment has already been discussed here, and as in that discussion I can only comment from my own perspective.  Regardless, I think that any sensible person would agree that if a woman actually did decide to dress provocatively to attract male attention, there are easier ways to do it than by spending three months sewing a Poison Ivy costume and wearing it to a convention.

However, the problem is not the people in the costumes.  The problem is people who come to the false conclusion that because someone at a convention is dressed in a leafy bathing suit or spandex tights, they are a valid target for verbal or physical harassment.

Although she's probably not the first person to actively protest this kind of treatment, cosplayer Mandy Caruso certainly stands at the front of the line in terms of having both stood up to an abusive interviewer when dressed as Black Cat at a con, and in posting the details of her encounter on Tumblr for all and sundry to read.  Mandy's experience became part of a growing movement to address the issue of harassment at conventions, resulting in the recent Cosplay ≠ CONsent campaign started by 16-Bit Sirens, which has struck an obvious chord within the community.

Next we have the problem of race. Astonishingly, there are people who feel that cosplayers should only play characters of their own colour.  This particular bit of insanity was brought to the forefront several years ago when cosplayer Chaka Cumberbatch posted a picture of herself as Sailor Venus, prompting unbelievable comments like, "For a black cosplayer (not to be racist) she did an amazing job!"

Ahem. Everyone, I'd like to introduce Yaya Han.

Yaya Han is living the dream as far as the cosplay world goes.  As far as I can tell from her FaceBook page, she spends almost all her time visiting conventions, where, in addition to selling the products from her cosplay accessory company, she appears in the costumes she has made, judges competitions, sits on panels, and otherwise supports the community.  In the above photos (my apologies for lost copyright tags on one or two) she appears as Wonder Woman, Power Girl, Arkham City Catwoman, Baroness DeCobray, Carmilla from Vampire Hunter D, a Dark Elf, the Scarlet Witch, and a Granado Espada Wizard, none of whom are Chinese women in their original versions.

So what?  Ms. Han obviously possesses an incredible eye for detail, mad skills with a sewing machine, and a huge commitment to her hobby/profession. How unfortunate to try to limit that commitment by suggesting that she should only appear as Mulan or Chun Li because she's Chinese.  What a bizarre idea!  Does that mean that Canadians can't go to conventions dressed as Captain America?  (Any American readers who have the urge to say "yes", be careful about what you start. Wolverine was originally a Canadian...)

I think that what this really comes down to is the question of entitlement, or lack thereof:  the decision by part of the fan community that cosplayers - especially female cosplayers -  are literally just posers, without a "real" commitment to the genre.  Unfortunately the poster child for this sad philosophy is an actual comics professional, an artist named Tony Harris whose 2012 FaceBook rant against fake geek girls was so extreme that at first it was assumed that his account had been hacked. 

In spite of my jokes about wanting a higher geek rating, I don't for a moment think that there's a ranking system for geekhood - we are not better or worse than each other, we are just different in terms of what we know and like, and how we choose to express it. 

In a way, this blog is an example of that. I started this blog partially as a writing exercise, an ongoing motivation to sit down at a keyboard on some kind of regular basis and put words in a row. But I didn't randomly decide on science fiction novels, fantasy games, Doctor Who and comic books as topics - those are the things that I enjoy and are a large part of my life, and this blog gives me a way to have my own voice regarding them.

On that basis, I have nothing but respect for anyone, regardless of race, creed, colour, religion or cup size, who has made the same decision - the decision to commit, to have a voice, to tell the world what they love.  The fact that their voice may involve fabric and wigs rather than adverbs and HTML just adds depth to the topics that we're all talking about.

So, just to summarize: we're talking about people who have spent countless hours and hundreds of dollars to create costumes, who have then invested in plane tickets, hotel rooms and con tickets in order to show off their handiwork and share their craft with their peers, who then get hassled by slack-jawed mouth-breathers who ask them about their cup sizes or grab their butts - and there are people who don't think that they're serious enough in their commitment to be allowed - allowed - to wear the costumes?

To quote the Bunny, it is to laugh.

- Sid

SHOUT OUTS:

Mandy Caruso:
http://beautilation.tumblr.com/ 

Anthony Misano:
https://www.facebook.com/HarleysJoker
https://www.facebook.com/TheBatmanChronicles

Chaka Cumberbatch:
http://www.xojane.com/issues/mad-back-cosplayer-chaka-cumberbatch

Yaya Han:
http://www.yayahan.com/
https://www.facebook.com/yayacosplay
http://yayacosplay.deviantart.com/gallery

Svetlana Quindt:
http://www.kamuicosplay.com/
https://www.facebook.com/KamuiCos

Harrison Krix:
http://www.volpinprops.com/portfolio
http://www.flickr.com/photos/volpinprops

Catherine Jones:
https://www.facebook.com/gstqfashions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gstqfashions

* Rule 63 states that for every fictional character, there exists a counterpart of the opposite sex:  Antonia Stark/Ironwoman, Prince Peach, Lucia Skywalker, Harlan Quinn - you get the idea. A formal example would be Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

** As a generalist geek, I cast a wide net, so I have a pretty good recognition factor for costume origins.  Ironically, considering that cosplay starts with animé, those are the outfits that I generally don't know, and I am unfortunately forced to categorize them in my head as "based on one of the thousands of Japanimation sources".

As opposed to reblogging the same picture a million times, which is Tumblr.

March 30th saw the the official premier of the current Clara Oswald, the new companion on Doctor Who, and I'm sorry to say that I found the whole thing to be a bit dull.  A couple of clever bits, but generally the episode was trying too hard in terms of setting up the new big plot point for the coming season, and showing off for the new companion. (Hopefully the new companion - we've seen the woman three times and she's still not really on board, in the most literal sense.)

I think that the companion recruitment process has become flawed - the last few pickups have seemed contrived, somehow. The joke is that the 2012 Christmas special gave us a charming, heartfelt scene between the Doctor and Clara, a meeting of minds and a meeting of hearts, a tender, magical moment that began the Doctor's return to the world after the loss of Amy and Rory, all thanks to Clara  - and then they killed her.

I think it's a shame that they didn't decide to go with the Victorian Clara as the new companion.  It used to be that the Doctor's companions came from the full range of time and space, but all the new ones have been uniformly British and modern.  Isn't it time for a different perspective?

However, full points for the following joke from Saturday's episode:

Doctor:  This whole world is swimming in wifi.  We’re living in a wifi soup.  Suppose something got inside it, suppose there was something living in the wifi, harvesting human minds, extracting them.  Imagine that…human souls trapped like flies in the world wide web, stuck forever, crying out for help.

Clara:  Isn’t that basically Twitter?

- Sid

"Better, Stronger, Faster."

I recently upgraded from my beloved but aging 6 megapixel Nikon D70 to a shiny new 24.2 megapixel system.  Shortly afterward, I had dinner with an acquaintance who, among other products, sells professional quality digital view camera backs. To my surprise, his top of the line sensors only weigh in at 80 megapixels of resolution.  I realize full well that pixel count alone doesn’t dictate quality, but I would have expected that high end pro equipment would go into the hundreds of megapixels – gigapixels, perhaps. 

But this gives rise to another question: at what point does technological improvement become redundant?  After all, if there’s a level at which a digital display contains more information than the human eye can differentiate*, why bother?

Ah, well then, obviously the next step is to upgrade the human eye.

And that may not be a joke. The creation of a direct neural link to hardware, visual or otherwise, would probably mean the biggest change in the world since the invention of the wheel, if not fire.  As one of my co-workers pointed out, the limiting factor in cell phone development is the human hand.  Current state of the art might well allow for all of the components of my iPhone to be crammed into something the size of my little finger, but the necessity to allow for physical manipulation of the controls makes that impractical.

Once that technology can be distributed here and there throughout your body – a node on your hand to answer calls, your retina overlaid with a HUD, an antenna plated onto your skull, the audio feed direct into your aural nerve, and so on – the nature of our interaction with technology becomes completely different, as much a part of our personal kinesiology as nodding our heads or blinking our eyes.

Not surprisingly, the concept is fairly common in science fiction.  William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy includes “simstim” as one of its props.  The concept is that headsets would allow the audience to experience a full sensory duplicate of a celebrity's glamourous life directly from the star's point of view:  visual, auditory, sensual, etc.

The exact process is characteristically undefined, but the most evident part of the technology is implanted artificial eyes, complete with corporate copyrights etched around the iris, that somehow transfer visual input into a digital format as well as functioning as eyes. (Presumably there are equivalent devices to allow for transmission of the other sensory inputs – in spite of the, ah, comprehensive nature of the experience, there’s no suggestion that all the critical aspects of the performer's anatomy are replaced.)

The technology of the Sprawl also allows for users to add sockets that allow them to access experiential information from silicon chips** and as a result be able to speak other languages or fly airplanes, at least as long as the chip is in place.

Samuel R. Delaney’s 1968 novel Nova posits a more physical approach, with interface sockets on both wrists and at both ends of the spine. These sockets allow the user to plug into any and all types of hardware, turning everything from flying a starship to operating the power winch for a fishing net into the same sort of directly experienced physical activity as climbing a flight of stairs or sweeping the floor. The result is a changed world, where everyone’s work has become a direct physical part of their lives, with a corresponding increase in personal fulfillment and worker satisfaction. 

The real question is not whether or not this sort of technology is feasible.  Medical technology is already taking its first fumbling steps into allowing blind people to perceive the world through hardware connections to the brain.  The question is a far more fundamental one:  would sockets be a privilege or a requirement?  This is a question that would depend entirely on how the interface system would be integrated into society.

On one hand, it could become the mark of the elite, where digital eyes and biomechanical hands would only be available to the now-infamous one percent, a sort of bionic bling. The other option is that it would become the mark of the underclass, a clear sign that the possessor has quite literally become part of the corporate machinery.

Hopefully there's a third option, an option closer to Delaney's future. where everyone would gain from the process, creating a world which was simultaneously larger and yet more personally connected than the one we live in now.   

- Sid

* The resolving power in pixels for the human eye is a difficult question, depending on whether you count all the photoreceptors or just the colour-sensitive cones concentrated in the central foveal area of the retina. Depending on what you pick as a cutoff, we may or may not have digitally exceeded the eye already.

** Daringly called microsofts:  you can almost hear the copyright lawyers salivating...