This is just too cool. Stephen Colbert dons a Neil Young costume and redefines the meaning of cosplay.

 
Crosby, Stills & Nash on the Colbert Report:

2007 is leaving us, or rather we are leaving it behind in the dust of a brighter future. Luckily we have no need to get too worked up over the things to come. There will be much to cheer and surely plenty for jeers. However, that’s all speculation.

We can, however, look back at all things worthy of all exclamations…

“glorious!”

“ugh…”

“what the!?”

“scrumtrilecent”

“no comment”

“…”

Here are our picks for the 2007 Winners and Losers are:

• Big Daddy - This year, Big Daddy wins. His battled inner self lends to so much love and yet so much distaste. Hey, all of us who experienced Bioshock know that the Big Daddy is easier to identify with than we thought at the beginning of the game, right? Status: WINNER
• Political Correctness - The world collectively sighed this past year when Santa Claus briefly lost a bit of cheer and started to chuckle with his “Ha, Ha, Ha”. Status:LOSER
• Cosplay - We probably covered more cosplay than anything else since the blog has begun. We have written cosplay articles over and over and over, again and again and again. Cosplay, being just another reason to get costumed, brought us some great homemade costumes, new entries to the excitement, and all around generally fresh entries to the fun. Look out for big cosplay events in ‘08. Status: WINNER
• Autobots and Deceptecons - This year, Michael Bay brought childish nostalgia and fanboyism faster than Timberlake brought sexy back. The Transformers movie was a tribute to all things awesome in the 80’s. What’s more is that it inspired the most fanatical of do-it-yourselfers to make some classy costumes. Status: WINNER
• Cosplay, again - Yeah, there were some not so good moments too. Status: LOSER
• Homebrewed goods - Likely a winner every year, we found some classics this year and can’t help but applaud the ceaseless creativity out in the community. Status: WINNER
• Elven Fantasies Come True - This has to be my favorite story of the year. I showed this to every person I know. The response from the community??? Some people actually would do it! Hey, I can’t make fun, it’s just not on my list of operations to get in my lifetime. Status: WINNER and LOSER, depending on how much humor matters over prudence and good sense.

OVERALL WINNER - This year it goes to Bioshock and the Big Daddy. Nothing captivated our attention and brought such a positive, yet eerie, light on the costuming scene. We expect to hear more from 2K games on this title and would be absolutely tickled to find more amazing Bioshock cosplay for the pages of MyDisguises.

“Uhh, I’d like to thank Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine for artificially creating me. I’d like to thank my fellow Big Daddies. I’d like to thank my mom and dad for teaching me to be nice to my friends and always look out for them… oh man I’m embarrassed… this is all so new to me…”

We can’t list them all, but there are surely more. Put your picks for 2007’s winners and losers in the comments section and let us know what we missed.

 Across the gender lines, Cosplay tends to favor women. I’ve noticed this ever since I got into the cosplay scene for MyDisguises. As a total rookie, I didn’t come to expect this. I did realize, however, that many popular cosplay characters tend to be males. So how does it figure?

Well, there are a number of theories. Maybe it’s the fact that a lot of anime characters look gender-bendingly female? Is it because women like to dress up more? There’s also the fact that cosplay costumes are basically DIY, and more women sew and make clothes… I’m not totally sure.

 I took it up with the pros at Cosplay.com forums just for some real input. The thread has gone wild, and there are a number of great ideas as to why more women dress up in cosplay than men… or so it seems. Check out the tread and add your input.

Second Life is altogether converging more and more towards a virtual version of your first life. In a mass effort to defeat the purpose to make a virtual getaway, is the trickling of reality permeating and polluting the Second Life experience?

According to this news article posted yesterday in Strategy Page, the US Army is taking advantage of Second Life for training purposes. In the wake of the severe push towards a greater online community they have even created their own tools on a separate and private Internet to effectually accomplish their civilian training exercises.

In an article we posted earlier, we highlighted the terrorist usage of worlds like Second Life as well. What does all this mean? First and foremost, it means effective tools for training at minimal cost. And that’s just what government and terrorists alike are looking for.

But this is just another step in the direction of making the real world and the virtual world blend on a deeper scale. Second Life has been a haven for educators, organizations, political movements, and prominently, businesses, to gather and accomplish their real world goals. Universities have also been known to construct virtual campuses for their students to partake in. What keeps people interested then, if everything is becoming a mimic of it’s natural self? Is it the curiosity factor? Is it the wow factor?

Major critics to Second Life tend to believe that the world will be short lived. Most of them claim that everyone is there to make money from each other, but few are there to spend it… and its getting worse. Second Life also has a large learning curve, clunky interface, and sluggish performance. It’s vast, creative, open world is what’s killing it’s experience for many.

With most visitors to SL going there for an escape the question is whether these real world mirror imaged organizations and movements are just clogging the virtual space, or whether they’re contributing to its growth and intrigue. Our position is that businesses help promote growth so long as their efforts and intentions stay in Second Life. But when companies use the virtual space to accomplish real world tasks primarily, it’s just suffocating the environment.

What about you? How much would you like to see Second Life cater to the imagination and unfolding of its own environment? Does Second Life suffer at the expense of the real world?

“there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups in Second Life and they use the site for recruiting and training. This is on top of the Second Life Liberation Army. “

In light of the Second Life comment I made earlier, I thought I’d address this current news story that’s abuzz in the virtual world space. According to articles located in Slashdot, P2Pnet, and other techie news sources these virtual worlds like Second Life are becoming a hotbed for terrorist groups to train and enable sympathetics to become recruited.

As opinions shoot back and forth, I have to wonder what the other groups think about this. By other groups I mean people who use Second Life for profit and positive interaction. The real world implications are vast, but is there any way for people to stop this kind of open, virtual world extremism? There has already been a case of “virtual terrorism” in Second Life recently in efforts to make a point. But what happens when these issues cross over into the real world?

Real World Control over A Fake Environment

I mean no harm in saying fake, but in comparison to what life really is, Second Life is an alternate reality. As such is the case, how do you police a virtual world? As it stands, the debate over Internet governance weighs so heavily in favor of total decentralization that it would mean the same thing. Having any kind of policing in a world like Second Life would indicate that some form of government would have to exist. Who would this government be? Is Linden Labs responsible for not only governing the technological implementation and advancement, but also the social behavior of its residents?

And that’s not the end of the problem either. At this point the biggest draw to Second Life has been its free and open format. It allows people to access and do whatever they want, within the technical limitations of the environment. This culture has developed so far that any truncation of “virtual rights” would alienate the users as a whole. How would Linden Labs or anyone else ever enforce restrictions? How true are these allegations anyway?

Behind a Virtual Mask

This isn’t the first time that things like this have popped up about terrorism on the Internet. Terrorist groups have been known to assemble on the Internet as a form of cheap and effective communication. We have such a hard time cracking down on kids taking the new Avril Lavigne song, so it makes sense that extremists see this crack in the armor as a chance to exploit and promote their ideals.

So what does this say about people using the Internet to mask who they are and be something else? The virtual community provides so much positive and forward thinking but also engenders some of these large problems? Does this anonymity lend more to negativity than it does to progress and positive global thinking?

It’s a shame that there are a few that ruin it for the whole, but issues like these don’t go unnoticed. As the electronic frontier gets pushed further into unrecognizable territory, opponents speak out more in defense to the electronic community. Yet, the modern rush doesn’t slow down. Government leaders all over are petitioning for a stranglehold on these technologies in order to regulate just how much of this extreme information gets tossed around. On the other hand, the people speak out against government in defense of their rights. Techies are typically afraid that ulterior motives propel governments to seize large scale communication rights for their own gain.

As for you and I, how do we maintain the right to participate and live anonymously with strangers? Is there ever going to be a way to facilitate positive global communication with strangers without the demons inside coming out of the small minority who want to use it for negative gain?