Costume Fails

The 2012 New York Comic Con is coming up, and by "coming up" I of course mean in two months. That may not seem around the corner-ish to you Muggles, but for we geeks that's practically tomorrow.

Thing is, October is generally a busy month for me. I've got my son the Juban Princeling's birthday on the 8th, my husband's birthday on the 17th, my brother Mr. Funny's birthday on the 22nd, and Halloween on the 31st. (I guess technically we all have Halloween on the 31st. But I like it more than you do, probably.)

That's two things I need costumes for: NYCC and Halloween. 

Halloween is easy. My friend NoLa does a theme party, and even if she craps out on the party I still make us dress up for it. Last year she used the excuse of having "foot surgery" and "not being able to walk" for "10 weeks" as her excuse not to create a space alien theme party, but I still made the Princeling dress up as a spooky alien, because do you know how hard it is to find a space alien costume for a 3-year old? Surprisingly hard. But it paid dividends in cuteness:

"I'm a spooooooky alien!"

This year her theme is Classic Haunted House, though she's threatened to crap out on me again. Doesn't matter. I already have our costumes: we're going as the ghosts of a family who drowned in the Gowanus Canal. Body glow paint will be employed, as well as our masks from Sleep No More:

"MacBeth hath murdered sleep!"

So, Halloween is covered.

My problem is what to wear for NYCC.

NYCC does a Family Day, and I want to take the Princeling for his first ever geek con. One year they had the New York Jedi Academy - yes, that's a thing - train younglings on how to use light sabers. If they do that this year I may actually drop dead of happiness. But I've been racking my brain for good mother-son costumes for us. The problem is that most mothers in fantasy and sci-fi are either dead or bat-shit crazy. Some ideas I've had for us, but had to dismiss:

• Joffrey and Cersei (My son will be 4, and I know I'll end up having to schlep around the head on a pike when he gets tired of it.)
• Superman and his Kryptonian mother, blown to smithereens (too depressing for a 4-year old)
• Spiderman and whatever happen to his mother (ditto)
• Harry Potter and Ghost Lily Potter (super ditto)
• Spock and Winona Ryder (seeing a pattern, yet?)
• Luke Skywalker and Padme Amidala (I cannot pull off a white bodysuit) (no, not even a little bit)

Maybe we can do Wesley Crusher and Dr. Crusher? I already have the red hair. All I'd need is the blue ST: TNG body suit (still more flattering than Padme Amidala's), a tricorder, and a poorly hidden lust for Jean-Luc Picard. Like that would be so hard.

Ideas? What sort of family/parent-child/group costumes have you all done?

The Idiot Box

One nice thing about summer - besides baseball, mojitos, and key lime pie, which are pretty much summer's only redeeming qualities as far as I'm concerned - is the lack of TV on TV, allowing my husband and I to catch up on shows we otherwise would probably never get to watch because we're too busy watching other shows.

By Photographer: Hana Kirana (Flickr.com - image description page) [Public domain or CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

During any given TV season, we can be found watching:
Dancing With the Stars (well, I watch, my husband complains) (but he secretly watches, and that's how he's able to accurately predict the judges' scores each week)
How I Met Your Mother
Cougartown
The Middle
Modern Famly
Suburgatory (which I only watch for Jeremy Sisto)
Don't Trust the B- in Apartment 23
30 Rock
Community
Up All Night
Top Chef
Louie
Portlandia


And, when there are new episodes online:
The Guild
The (Mis)Adventures of Awkward Black Girl


That's a lotta TV for one couple with two itty bitty children.


We're also too cheap to subscribe to premium channels, and by "too cheap" I mean Time Warner already has dibs on our most vital organs and one of our children (I won't say which one), and yet the service is kind of shitty. Kind of really shitty. So we're unwilling to shell out our other child and still wind up living in boxes under the Brooklyn Bridge just so we can get HBO, when Netflix will send us HBO shows for less than half the cost. Sure, we get them about 18 years after they've aired, but so what? Game of Thrones is timeless.


The problem with doing it this way, though, is we go through an entire season in less than a week. We wrapped up season 2 of Treme in about four nights and season 1 of GoT in less than a week. After tonight it will have taken us all of two nights to get through season 1 of Bored to Death (Brooklyn, holla!)


And then we have to wait a whole year for the next season to come out on DVD.


And if you're thinking that we can just pirate or bootleg stuff off the internets, well, my friend, THAT IS HIGHLY ILLEGAL AND WE WOULD NEVER EVER DO THAT, DO YOU HEAR ME FCC?

I <3 the FCC

Also, we tried that and it didn't work. For a long time we were all caught up on True Blood for free, but some wonderful, puppy-loving, highly attractive and clearly intelligent person over at the FCC must have caught on to all these nasty, no-goodnik pirating sites and shut them down. (I swear to god, if I don't get my Eric Northman fix soon I will cut a bitch. Not you at the FCC, I love you and want to have your babies, and by the way, have you lost weight? You look fantastic.)


So if you watch GoT the way god intended - on HBO - or Treme, or Boardwalk Empire (next in our Netflix queue after BtD), or Carnivale (after BE), please don't tell me what happens. I need something to keep me occupied next summer. (The chef and the jazz guy are totally going to hook up, right? NO, DON'T TELL ME!)


How do you get your fix of your favorite shows?