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Strapless Fire Gown in Orange and Red

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So some days I’m happy to draw, and I can slave over little picky details for hours and not get bored. Some days I’m not that into it, but after a half hour nothing can make me stop. Then some days I just want to color, and not in a reasonable kind of way but just in a wild way. That’s what led to this dress. I’m kind of so-so about it, but my husband really thought it was pretty. He also said “It’s the kind of dress where, if you took it to a dressmaker and asked to have it made, you’d get punched in the face. But it works as a fantasy dress.” And so I posted it. Paperdoll fans, you don’t know what kind of debt you owe to my husband, because a lot of things I’d draw I’d probably never post if he didn’t look and say “Oh, it’s cute!” I’m very critical of myself, so if he thinks it’s OK, probably it’s OK…

No one has guessed my favorite color of Prismacolor… I’ll give just one hint, it is NOT my favorite color. (You can guess what my favorite color is just by taking a good hard look at this page… *cough*green*cough*)

Nera’s Dress from Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

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Brian got Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride a little while back, and we traded off turns playing it for weeks. In terms of overall plot it’s pulled straight from the big book of RPG cliches – evil dude wants to take over! only the legendary hero can defeat him! queens are kidnapped! – but there’s two things that really make it great. One is “party talk,” where in different situations (entering a new town or dungeon level, for example, or after talking to most NPCs) you can talk to the characters that are in your group. The amount of dialogue this game must have is staggering – imagine writing a different response for all those different characters! It’s amusing because a lot of the time it’s stuff that you, the player, are probably thinking, so hearing it from another character in their own voice can be a little startling. It really helps make the characters real, too, when they have their own takes on situations or wonder about things that you might not even have noticed. That leads into the other thing that makes the game great: the generation system. You start out as a little kid, then time skips forward and you play as an adult, getting married, and then time skips forward again and your children are old enough to go adventuring with you. So it’s not like your character is accompanied by some random red mage, fighter and white mage: you’re almost always with friends, often with family, and they always have some interesting thing to say. For someone like me, who likes story and character interaction better than battle systems and so on, the game was great fun.

In the DS version of the game, you have the option to marry three women: Bianca, your childhood friend, Nera, the kind and gentle daughter of a rich family, and Deborah, Nera’s haughty and blunt sister. The game pushes you to choose Bianca (you have adventures with her in your childhoods, Nera has another guy that loves her, heck, in the old versions of the game if you didn’t choose Bianca her father died) but you can choose any of them. So I did choose Bianca my first time around, but Nera definitely has the prettier dress, and anyways she’s more my type, if I was a male RPG hero. (Although I suspect that playing the game with Deborah around to talk to is the most fun.)

Red Tank Top and Gray Yoga Pants Inspired By Echo in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse

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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!

Six’s Red Dress from the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries

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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.