Box of Hats and Wigs

MCM Expo set 1: Me and other Doctor Who cosplayers. 

gottagetmyjam:

OH MY GOD THERE WERE SO MANY DOCTOR COSPLAYERS THERE.

Here is the most adorable doctor cosplayer ever. *w*

This picture probably sums up my Saturday - getting hugged lots and having lots of photos taken. Bizarre day - exhausting but very fun.

“It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.”

A famous line within geek culture. Dating back 22 years to the original Legend of Zelda game on the NES, it’s the advice given by an Old Man as Link is given his first wooden sword.

It’s also a piece of advice I should follow more closely, especially when going shopping… but instead of a sword, the life saviour presented to me should be a companion. Somebody with the primary function of stopping me from going “ooooh!” and buying ridiculous things, with a child-like enthusiasm which led to me working my way through 2 advent calendars in a row in a countdown to advent.

Recently, the person with me has been my flatmate, Scott. After considering a few potential multi-buy offers that could benefit us both, something potentially tragic happened. I had slipped out of his sight.

Meaning well and just intending to purchase another bottle of ketchup, the position of the condiments in my local Morrisons just has to be opposite the home baking products – and hidden, near the bottom, a product which calls to me with an irresistible allure.

DALEK COOKIE MIX.

Quite frankly, for a split second, my life felt almost complete. Only almost, as further achievements I aim for involve getting a single in the Top 40 as well as finishing my book. Oh, and Jonathan Cresswell branded kitchen utensils. Don’t ask why though.

Thankfully, as I live in what could fairly be described as a flat of nerds (Serious Cat adorns our front door and games of Magic the Gathering can sometimes be seen in the kitchen), Scott’s reaction was not “what the bloody hell have you bought this time”, more along the lines of “OM NOM NOM”.

However, in a combination of haste, stupidity and sudden distraction thanks to an offer for two packs of doughnuts for £1, it wasn’t until I got home that I realised that a cardboard box could not possibly contain everything one needs to produce proper biscuits. A quick glance on the back of the box showed that you still need milk, eggs, flour (for dusting) and a rolling pin. Of these four things, I had a grand total… of none. A trip to Morrisons the next morning was in order.

Thankfully resisting the smell of purchasing another 10 jam doughnuts, a quick dash round the shop meant everything needed (and some white chocolate chips for luck) were ready. As the 7 o’clock deadline known as “The Waters of Mars” drew closer, I asked Scott if he was ready to get cooking – which led to the manliest conversation in the history of mankind.

“Wanna bake some cookies?”

“Sorry, I’m busy knitting.”

More masculine words have never been spoken.

Later that evening, Operation: Cookie began. And yes, that was a blatant attempt to try and make it appear manlier.

With a GCSE in Food Technology, making cookies, particularly ones from a kit marketed at a young audience, shouldn’t be too difficult.

Well, apparently it is.

What should have been a simple mixing of ingredients in a bowl became a mess of childlike proportions. Offended by the amount of egg required compared to the amount of egg I purchased and the lack of effect it was having, I proceeded to add a bit more of the mix than suggested, ending up with me running round trying to find the flour to stop it being anything more than a gooey mess. The kitchen would have been cleaner if I filled the room with trampettes and balloons filled with paint. Actually, that sounds like fun…

To get the perfect cookie shape (which of course is that of an alien with the desire to destroy the universe) once you’ve rolled the dough out, a Dalek shaped cutter is included. Easy enough, stick it in the dough, pull out, Dalek with imprinted detail. Very nice. The upside of this is that even once the cookies are made, you’ve still got a plastic cutter so EVERY food can resemble a science fiction villain! There is a small issue though and it’s that the cutter is quite small. I’m also not sure what else you could really make with it though… perhaps Daleks could be the new tubby toast?

With cookies cut, and on the tray, they were ready to go straight in the oven for a good crisping up. And due to my laziness and believe that according to the laws of cooking everything should be cooked at 200 degrees for 20 minutes (or multiples thereof) they may have been in the oven slightly long and ended up slightly black. Weeeeell… some of them may have been completely black. That was for accuracy, see, as there are black Daleks.

Included in the pack to decorate was a tube of some possibly lemon-like icing-type thing, and rice crispies that wouldn’t be high enough quality for the Tesco Value range. Combined with some red chewy strip sweets and white chocolate chips, Scott and I set to work with decorating them.

…and we got bored quite easily. If doing the same tedious decorations on all of the Daleks was a chore for us two, I hate to imagine what it’s like for the ten year olds the product is aimed at. As we got through them the Daleks got a bit more silly, one just had two chocolate chips and was dubbed ‘Nipple Dalek’, one of our black Daleks was left as-is to become ‘Racially Diverse Dalek’, and a ‘Retarded Dalek’ was covered in the rice crispies for no reason whatsoever.

I’d really like to be able to give a decent verdict on how they tasted but when slightly overdone they’re not really ever going to taste that good. We did appoint flatmate Ofori as a tester, but he told us “I ain’t eatin’ no black cookie!”

Perhaps offering them to a black flatmate wasn’t the most politically correct result of cooking that’s ever taken place.

After managing to appear on everything from Desert Island Discs to Never Mind The Buzzcocks, and turning up on our screens 39,482 times in December (that’s the actual number, and not made up in the slightest), David Tennant finally handed over the keys to the TARDIS in his final episode of Doctor Who.

On the whole, Tennant’s final episode, The End of Time: Part Two, was an exciting affair with some genuinely fantastic moments as The Doctor had to cope with his inevitable and impending death. Murray Gold’s excellent musical score punctuated dramatic scenes as David Tennant brilliantly portrayed the character’s anguish as he decided to sacrifice himself.

Unfortunately, the episode also suffered from a condition called Russell T Davies-itis, which means for whoever much good he has done by bringing the show back and giving it a much more prominent emotional core (he is the man that wrote Doomsday, after all) he also has a habit of writing over the top, ridiculous and needless plot strands that can just be baffling or self indulgent.

Those days are now over, as with Tennant leaving, Davies is also handing over the reigns of the show over to Stephen Moffat, who wrote episodes leaving children across the country scared of statues, shadows and gas masks. The teaser trailer for the new series is available on the Doctor Who website and with any luck it’ll be the best series of the show yet.

Moffat’s great writing of both comedy and drama is one reason to be excited, but personally I’m more looking forward to there being a new Doctor. And why?

As well as looking like a McDonalds Happy Meal toy, I also happen to resemble the new Doctor. As well as being something people may notice me by, it is most useful because come Spring, I will have one of the simplest but most effective fancy dress costumes possible.

However, there’s another element of it which I’m quite happy with, and it’s to do with the way the comparison between myself and Matt Smith has been made.

This basically positions me as a “more attractive Matt Smith”, which is something I’m pretty happy with. However: most people won’t know what Matt Smith’s Doctor looks like until the new series launches, unless they’re the more obsessed fans of the show who, like myself, have looked at the photos of the new series online.

Now, this presents me with a tight window of opportunity. If I manage to play things right, I can turn it around, so people who see me think that Matt Smith is a less attractive Jonathan Cresswell. All I need to do, over the next few months, is gradually start wearing the sort of clothes you might find as the Doctor’s costume.

I already regularly wear a corduroy jacket (I’m stylish for an 18 year old), so a tweed one won’t be too surprising; my wardrobe consists mainly of shirts, so I just need to choose which colours I wear with a bit of a thinking, and a few minutes working on my hair should get that about right. Working in the bow tie might need a bit more work…

It might seem like a highly pointless exercise, but there are three simple reasons why I’d disagree with that. Firstly, most of my spare time is done on pointless things so I’m quite happy with that. Secondly, it’s a bit of a boost to my ego to get people saying that Matt Smith looks like me. Thirdly, if Matt Smith can get an assistant like Karen Gillen (who plays Amy Pond), and I’m the more attractive version of him, then by logic I should get a more attractive version of Karen Gillen as my assistant, and that seems like a perfectly good idea.

I’ll probably forget this plan in about 3 days time (about how long it’ll probably take for me to forget to blog), but for now, before anyone asks me… yes, I do realise we look alike.