Sadly didn't get to go do anything halloween-like this year, no parties to go to or anything. I did however remember that I hadn't put up any pictures of my tail which was finished this summer for AC. As shown here it needs to be re-airbrushed to get the fade to the black tuft right again, you can see slightly lines where the paint wore off from wearing the tail almost constantly for three days (though it does give a bit of an idea of the spinal structure underneath) I'm very happy with the way it turned out, I haven't seen many really good lion tails out there. The two major details I tried to fix that I have yet to see on another tail are as follows:

1) From what I've been able to see, the tail-tuft is usually black in color, and does not match the mane color of the lion as is most often portrayed in cartoons and drawings. In white lions the tuft is usually the same blonde-white of the rest of the fur.

2) The coloration of the tuft usually does not correspond to the length of the fur. Often the black will start to fade in several inches before the fur actually gets long at the tuft. In other costume tails I have seen, the tuft is made from one fur fabric, (usually dark brown) and the tail a shorter tan fur. Airbrushing with textile paints was used to give the color a gradual fade to black rather than a sharp change at the seam.

Another major improvement is the way the tail hangs. Most costume tails I have seen for sale at cons are just a stuffed tube of fabric. The spine of this tail consists of a steel cable attached to a belt clip, with wooden disks spaced out by wooden beads to give the tail a spine. I have so far not been successful in adding the proper elastic to make the tail curl upwards, but now it at least has a nice flick to it when it moves.

The software that this is running is called Simple PHP Blog and is quite nifty. Just needs PHP 4 I believe and unzip up to your server, log in and go.

Okay, after giving iBlog a way too short trial (I strongly believe shareware programs should give longer than a month trial for those of us who only use programs like that occasionally. I prefer programs that work on number of launches or similar) I decided to consider paying $20 for the software since it was rather slick, mac based aaaand produced in the country responsible for outsourcing of many of the US tech jobs (now its probably our fault for giving tax breaks to companies for outsourcing rather than putting taxes on outsourcing, thus making it more competitve to hire employees in the states but thats another rant) I have nothing against India or programmers living there, however I believe they get enough money out of the U.S. economy and don't need any of mine. Especially when open source projects do what I want and do it better. This took 2 seconds to install, another 20 seconds to configure and here I am writing this. Will have to see if the program actually works but I hold high hopes given how easy it was to get going...*sigh* now to migrate those few posts that went up under iBlog and toss that program in the trash.