My Hero Academia cosplay w/ @dartstrife!

I’m checking in with a blog post a little early. The last two nights, I missed, and that bums me out. It’d be worth it if I had more to show for the time spend doing other things. I glanced at some cards at home and thought, “…I’m going to build a new Magic deck!”, like it was a quick thing. Two days and $125 in new cards later, I spiraled in a manic tailspin of building what turned in to five new decks. Tonight, I finally had all the pieces I needed to crush my enemies. @tarotbyfergus showed up and guess what?! They fucking suck! I lost almost every game. I’m so pissed. I need a break.

So, I’m taking a voluntarily, mandatory break from Magic and focusing on work. The thing I should have been focusing on to begin with. Quite a few months ago, @vermillionfox and I met with our friend and anime fan, @dartstrife. He hired me for a cosplay-type shoot of one of his favorite mangas, My Hero Academia. Full disclosure, I’m not much of a manga reader other than Junji Ito, but he had the source material, shared it with me and we thought about costume and shoot location. After some discussion, we set a date to make some magic.

@vermillionfox did have the day off, and we made our way to a park with mill ruins near the river. You can see some of location in my post from two years ago, “Sneak peak of my first cosplay shoot: Liliana Vess from Magic: The Gathering!”. The space was perfect for this shoot, even at once point, we found a stone wall with collapsed bricks that looked like someone’s body was slammed in to the structure. How perfect! To wrap up the shoot, braving the Minnesota fall weather, @dartstrife stood near the edge of a ledge and I managed to capture an eagle in flight above him!

This shoot was as close to perfect as it could get. Sometimes it just all works out, and this was one of those days. @dartstrife is a good friend, regular MTG player at @caffetto, and all of us hanging out and collaborating was a highlight of the fall. I wish I could have gotten to these sooner than now. More to come. I owe him at least two more sets of edits and he’s going to eventually turn them in to a battle manga-style collage. Thanks for reading and those who missed me during my neurotic absence. For more photography, follow me here @kommienezuspadt!