"Go to Russell Street," said my friend Daniel Saver. "It's way better than Halloween at the Castro." Sounded like a plan. Only problem was, it was October 29 when he said this. (Granted, my fault for bringing up the subject so late.) How was I to come up with a rocking costume in two days?
Inspiration struck like a 19th-century rail worker as I thought about episode 4 of CLANNAD. I would go as a character in a visual novel! All I needed was a piece of transparent plastic to doll up as a dialogue box and I basically had my costume. But where to find this piece? ACE Hardware didn't have it, and Home Depot was too far away. The only option left was to scrounge through the piles of junk that littered my boarding house, in hopes of salvaging something useful.
The Junk Gods were beneficent today, and I managed to reclaim a modest-sized, relatively undamaged pane of clear plastic. It wasn't as big as I'd have liked, but I now had more pressing concerns on my mind, like how to attach a rope with which to hang it around my neck. I wanted to drill two holes near the top and run the rope through, but alas, I lacked a drill. It was then that I recalled my hero Kamina's words of wisdom, "your soul is the drill." Well, I tried using my soul, but when that yielded nothing but a bit of existential angst, I settled for taping the rope to the top of the plastic slab.
In the timeframe I had, I couldn't make my dialog box as pretty as the one I'd seen in CLANNAD. I decided upon a spartan layout of a duct-tape border (hey, it was silver) and some paper buttons, with cardboard backing for depth. One foray into the junk piles later, and I had my cardboard. I decided I had room for three buttons, "Save," "Load" and "Option," certainly common elements of visual novel UIs. This left only the dialogue to deal with, and I settled on a quote from the daddy of all dating sims, Sprung.
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Now, if I were smart, I would've gone to a copy shop and had my dialogue printed on a transparency, which I could glue to my dialogue box and then kick back and enjoy a beer. Note the counterfactual use of the "if." Cutting out each letter and sticking it to the plastic with double-sided tape (I tried Krazy Glue for a brief stint, but decided it was too much trouble,) I felt like I was in elementary school again. Except this time I didn't have a Batman lunchbox filled with delicious peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Damn. Placing the letters in straight rows wasn't actually as much of a problem as I'd anticipated; I laid down my dialogue box parallel to the seams on my floor and, as you can see from the photos, used them as a guide. The letters in the mikachan font don't all rest neatly against the same bottom line, though, so my arrangement wasn't perfect (and my spacing was just bad,) but I knew that at a distance it would look more or less fine. Oh, and the job got a lot easier when I realized I could just stick the double-sided tape to the back of the paper and cut both paper and tape at the same time. |
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Russell Street was one big street party, as Daniel had said; roving bands of trick-or-treaters, watchful parents bringing up the rear, navigated the shambling masses of teenagers. One thing the Castro had on Russell Street, however, was creative costumes. There were no slot machines, tequila bottles, or gay couples having sex on balconies above the street (wait, that last one wasn't a costume!) here; the biggest costume I saw was a store-bought slice-of-pizza getup. Well, if you count out the sweet Prowl costume I saw. Wait, shit, that was an actual police car.
In true Sprung fashion, I greeted everyone who stopped to read my sign with a hearty "Pleased to make your acquaintance, I'm Bartholomew Arugula Paisley" (although upon further inspection, the first word should've been "Smashing." Oops) and saw them off with an equally hearty "I'm going to a Players Anonymous meeting after this. Wanna come?" No one accepted. Some girls did ask to take a picture with me, though.
Remember that police car I mentioned earlier? Well, it was barely 9 p.m. when the police began to announce, "The Halloween party is over. Please leave the area." Having forgotten my pepper spray and my bronze medal, I was forced to back down. Well, I can still confuse 14-year-olds in funny costumes by going to an anime con.
The necessary materials assembled, I set to work. The interface part was done quickly, as expected; the tricky part would be the dialogue.
