This is me lately

Minus the caffeine pill addiction, but it’s how I feel way more often than naught.

I have a lot of things that I feel I need to do: edit down nearly 2,000 pictures from Europe and Korea.  Write about experiences in Korea.  Build a prop.  Take care of household chores, like replacing the kitchen light and paring down the shrubs.  Write some more, about random, inane things for a brog that’s been down since fucking April, that nobody will see until I migrate my site.  Clean my house, so that I can someday sell my house.  I need a haircut.

So what do I do?  Write about how I feel like I don’t have enough time, or any time, instead.

In my defense, I am currently not in a place where I can do much of my self-imposed workload, although I could write about Korea but I was there for two weeks how can i parse it all down to a few words???

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How to build an Academy Darius axe in a week

Something I never did in a timely fashion that I remembered that I wanted to write about, was a post about the construction of the Academy Darius axe I had made for my corresponding costume, that I wore to Worlds.

Two key challenges were in play when constructing this prop: time, despite the fact that I had the idea to make this costume for quite some time, I’m stupid and waited until later in the game to start, everything, including the axe.

Additionally, there were size limitations to the axe; because I was transporting this prop in my luggage to Europe, it had to be able to fit inside of a standard full-size piece of luggage. My solution to the size limitations was to modify the scale of the axe in general, as well as creating the axe in components, fit inside of luggage in pieces, and be somewhat easy to re-construct and break down in Brussels and Berlin.

Ultimately, I would say the size of the axe isn’t 100% scale, but when it comes to League props, 100% scale isn’t always realistically feasible; otherwise, I would’ve had a 56” Riot Graves gun that probably would have weighed 30 lbs, and my pink Taric hammer would’ve been taller than me and more than 60” hammerhead.

But anyway, here’s a fairly quick run down of what I used, how I did it, and the general process of how I made an Academy Darius axe in a week.

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Photos: Jinx/Fishbones photoshoot candids

Note: the following post is from approximately one year ago, held back as a courtesy.

Good things happen when involved parties collaborate.  I came along to help out where I could with a photoshoot that featured Jen’s Jinx costume, the finished Fishbones bazooka by Volpin Props, shot by Joseph Chi Lin.

Obviously, this is relevant to my interests as Jinx is one of my favorite LoL characters, and all involved parties are what I’d consider friendly, so I can say that in spite of poor weather and typical Georgia summer heat, I had a good time taking part, and making a directional suggestion or two in my own right.

I thought it would be a good idea to bring my own camera, because I thought I’d want to take pictures of the street graffiti of the Krog Street tunnel, but ultimately, nothing in particular in the caught my fancy, due to the incestual mishmash of tags upon tags upon tags creating a whole lot of artistic vomit.

But it was good that I did, because I was able to take some candids of the processes of setting up our area, a few shots in between poses, and just a behind-the-scenes feel of what turned out to be an awesome example of talented parties collaborating for the sake of good art.

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The weekend of productivity

Since the start of the new year, I haven’t really done much. Just about every weekend has been spent at home, where I ultimately have done nothing but play a lot of League of Legends. Now it’s not that I don’t enjoy the game immensely, but the bottom line was that I was not being very productive with my weekend spare time, and I think it began to creep into my head that I was really wasting a lot of time.

Wasting time is one of my biggest pet peeves, and you really haven’t seen me get bent out of shape until you see me when I start feeling like my time is being wasted; especially when it’s by circumstances caused by someone/something other than myself.

Long story short, I challenged myself to get off my ass and actually do something this weekend. At any given time, I’ve always got a project or three that I want to do, but have always sat on my hands and done nothing, until I felt they were warm enough to start spamming QWER keys and right clicking on LoL. So basically I said to myself to simply fucking do something this weekend.

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Riot Graves costume construction: fin

Alrighty then, Dragon*Con is a month beyond us now, and I feel like I’ve caught up on a lot of things in terms of writing, processing pictures, more writing, and simply getting back into the swing of things. That being said, I realized that I never followed through with my promises to myself and to my seven readers that I’d do my best to chronicle the construction of the Riot Graves gun for the costume I wore at Dragon*Con, and subsequently the other costume components.

So, unlike the LeBlanc staff process that I compartmentalized into many small posts, screw that, I’m just going to go straight into covering everything I possibly can, as detailed as I can, as it came to the construction of the Riot Graves gun, as well as the armor pieces and other doodads necessary to put together the Riot Graves costume.

Admittedly, there aren’t going to be nearly as many photos as I hoped there would be, because frankly there were points during the construction where there simply wasn’t time. Either I would be against the clock against chemical pot life and cure times, or after my haphazard minor league baseball trip, I was against the clock with Dragon*Con quickly approaching. I suppose inquiring minds will have to settle with my intrepid writing abilities instead at certain points.

Photo courtesy of Joseph Chi Lin Photography

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Dragon*Con 2013 Pictures: Saturday (LoL candids)

But of course I had a secondary camera I had on me while taking part of the League of Legends shooting!

The good news is that instead of my busted old Sony Cybershot I had for a secondary camera, I had something that was able to at least take shots in focus.  However, it’s still a plain point-and-shoot, so the flash tends to eat things alive, but at least the subjects were in focus.

Much like last year, since there’s a lot of waiting and standing around, while rangling LoL costumers and taking turns with who’s shooting with the marvelous Joseph Chi Lin, I figure there’s plenty of time to take random candid shots of my friends as well as other LoL costumers.  And sweet merciful jesus were there a lot of LoL costumers hanging around this year.

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Impending brog hiatus

I feel the need to write something before I embark on a four-day weekend a week before the craziest four-day weekend of the year.  Needless to say, between the events of this weekend, and the events of next weekend, there really isn’t going to be much time for me to actually makes posts to my beloved brog, unless it is of the mobile and fluffy variety.  I take pride in my ability to maintain commitment to my brog, and refusal to let it become one of the millions of blogs out there that have gathered dust and been abandoned by disillusioned posers from all walks of life.

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