Fallout Retro Blue and Yellow Vault Dweller Jumpsuit

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

Brian and I got ourselves a PS3 for Christmas – a little early – and so this Saturday has been devoted to gaming, specifically marathon sessions of Fallout 3. We both loved the first Fallout (and I think he liked Fallout 2, though I never played it), so it was an obvious choice for our first PS3 game.

I took a stab at playing it this morning, but I’m not all that good at any game I deem “twitchy,” which means anything that requires more coordination than taking out your average Dragon Warrior slime, because, although it’s not apparent from this blog – at least, I do hope it’s not apparent – I’ve got some mild coordination issues. Thanks to rather a lot of physical therapy when I was very young, it only really plagues me when I’m trying to remember which button changes the perspective, and the camera is pointed somewhere at my feet, I may have accidentally given my pistol to a dead ant, and oh, by the way, there’s a pair of rabid molerats trying to eat me and I just simply can’t deal. On the upside, that doesn’t happen to me very often, because I play the kind of games where everyone takes turns beating on each other like civilized folk. I can handle a very small amount of twitch in my games – I did play through the first Fallout, once as a pacifist – but past a certain point, I’m pretty hopeless.

Also, I’m pathetically easy to creep out – something about horrifying post-nuclear wastelands just tends to make me antsy, you know? When I played the first Fallout, I nearly held my breath the whole time I was in the Glow. Still, I notice that Brian is just now, after playing all day, wandering around the area I got myself repeatedly killed in earlier, so I wonder if my problem is that I got in too over my head and didn’t realize it?

In any case, Fallout 3 features some nicely tailored, practical-looking Vault jumpsuits, but me, I’ve got a soft spot for the shiny retro ones. The Vault number is on the back, so you can choose for yourself which vaults Ivy and Grace hail from.


Women Airforce Service Pilot in Leather Jacket and Flying Suit with Goggles for Memorial Day

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

Today is Memorial Day here in the states, honoring the men and women who gave their lives for our country. I happened to read a post on Metafilter about the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), a little-known organization of more than a thousand civilian female pilots who flew missions in WWII, freeing up male pilots for active duty. I won’t restate the contents of the whole Metafilter post, but I do recommend you read it if you have some time. I used a couple of pictures from Blitzkrieg Baby as reference for this flight suit and leather jacket with a patch of the WASP mascot Fifinella.

Don’t forget, my contest is still going! No one’s got it yet, so please post your guess as a comment.

How many visits did my site get between (and including) April 1, 2010 and April 30, 2010?

Don’t forget the rules…
1) If you’ve already won this year, please don’t enter.
2) One guess per person per post.
3) If no one gets the exact number by 9:00 PM EST, June 2nd, I’ll pick the closest guess.
4) I’ll give one hint each day the contest goes on.
– Yesterday’s hint: It’s between 10,000 and 30,000
– Today’s hint: The middle digit is 6.


Khaki Trench Coat with Green Dress and Grey Boots in honor of Different Chairs and justweather.com

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

So my husband’s business is called Different Chairs, and he does a lot of different things, but chief among them is web development using Django. He has been helping put together a new weather site, JustWeather.com, which just officially launched the other day. What’s so great about another weather site, you ask? Well, it shows real-time, helpful weather information, it has great animated maps that you can enlarge and it doesn’t have a lot of other information cluttering up the screen — just weather, right? Frankly, it has more weather information than most decent humans want to know, and my dear husband has been living and breathing weather for months now. (There’s a reason our new cat is named Radar. She narrowly escaped being called “Haircast.”)

So, in honor of Brian and the weather site, Sylvia and Iris can now brave weather in a cute short khaki trench coat, although you wouldn’t want to brave too much weather in a skirt like that, I guess!

The Good Queen’s undead nemesis seems to be catching up…


Halloween Costume Series Day 17: Dorcas Snodgrass’ 1910s Light Blue Nurse Outfit with Full White Apron and Cap

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

“Nurse,” of course, is one of the more popular women’s Halloween costumes but I think they’re often of the “sexy” variety; I suppose the connotation is “hot yet nurturing” but it always makes me think of things like getting blood drawn, which isn’t really the intended effect. Thinking about nurse costumes did remind me of this Metafilter article about a nurse named Dorcas Snodgrass who died under mysterious circumstances in 1912. The article links to this picture of her in the Library of Congress photostream, under which there’s a great comment that brings together some New York Times articles about her disappearance and death, officially ruled a suicide. (The Metafilter thread itself is mostly just good for theories and chatting about the name Snodgrass.) So there — not much of an elaborate costume, but a genuinely creepy nurse story for Halloween.