Tim bought me Sims 2 Holiday Edition *and* an expansion pack bundle which includes Nightlife, University, Family Stuff and Open For Business for my birthday. Needless to say, I’m absolutely OVER THE MOON about it. There might be less of me online as I indulge in tinkling around with the game. Woot! Mods and hacks, here I come! :D

Anyway, I received an email from ReviewMe today informing me that someone actually requested for me to review them, for pay. I had forgotten that I had signed up for it. My first thought was to ignore it because, well, I don’t like reading forced blog posts about fake interest in this or that product and I assume others wouldn’t want to read it on mine either. However, out of curiosity I checked out the request anyway, and apparently it was for a cosplay costume site.

I was actually typing out a review for the site but deleted because I can’t get it to flow naturally with what I wanted to say. So I cancelled the review! No US$30 for me. :P But I just want to mention that I do love cosplay. I don’t have the magical sewing skills that some people have (nor the magical coffers of gold that is required to buy custom costumes) however, in my spare time I like look at what some people have come up with.

Some people are just mind-blowingly good with their costumes. For example, take this cosplay of Belle from Beauty and the Beast. OMFG. Not only does it show how ridiculous some costumes in cartoons look in real life, but also how awesomely some people pull it off. Said cosplayer also does an incredibly convincing Aeris from Final Fantasy VII (love the hair). Can’t mention FFVII without throwing in the ever popular Sepiroth impersonators. Man, the hair is so hard to do well. I note that this is just scraping the top of the icebergs, the internet is full of jaw-droppingly amazing costumers, many of them from Japan and China. I’ve seen many in my days but I don’t have links on me at the moment.

What’s also fun, for different reasons, are the really bad costumes. Here’s a nice archive (NOTE YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO BE LOOKING AT THESE LINKS AT WORK. Potentially eye-gouging) and here’s what looks to be an ongoing collection. While I do really admire these cosplayers (and any cosplayers really) for having the courage to go out in public wearing very outlandish garb… for those that have quite terrible costumes, I really wonder what they were thinking?