The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Today I went to Girocomic, my local comic-con. I went in costume: it was a Ghostbuster costume I made a couple of years ago by sewing Ghostbuster patches onto a beige jumpsuit and sticking computer parts to a cardboard box. This morning I even made a ghost trap by wrapping a shoebox in black sellotape and shoving a yellow ethernet cable into it. It looked great!

5-year-old came with me to the comic-con. He went as The Faceless Demon, which was a store-bought costume consisting of a black robe with a hood pulled over his head backwards.

5-year-old was hungry so I bought him a burger and chips, which he ate while watching the K-pop Random Play Dance, which consists of multiple K-pop songs played back to back to which anyone familiar with the choreography can dance to. I wish I could go to K-pop dance lessons because the dancing looks like fun, but unfortunately the average age of the K-pop dancers is about twelve so I wouldn't be able to go without looking like a paedophile. Then 5-year-old said, "I don't want any more Daddy," and I was excited because I thought he'd give me a half-eaten burger to finish, but instead all he gave me was a solitary pickle.

At 6 pm was the cosplay competition. 5-year-old and I queued up to go on stage. Also in the queue was Wolverine, Bill Cipher from kids TV show Gravity Falls, Huggy Wuggy from the indie game Poppy Playtime, Mario, Mario's brother Luigi, Mario and Luigi's mortal enemy Bowser, obscure Pokemon Infernape, Chainsaw Man, Miss Fortune and Ahri the Nine-Tailed Fox from the game League of Legends, Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII, Harley Quinn (complete with roller skates), three animatronics from the game Five Nights at Freddy's, and many more.

Most of the costumes I didn't recognise and can only tell you from watching the video of the competition afterwards on Youtube. It was nice though that people dressed as their favourite characters. That's what comic-con is about: express the things you love.

It was our turn. We went up on stage.

5-year-old threw sweets into the crowd. He's not very good at throwing things though due to the inheritance of my clumsiness genes, and the sweets landed at the front of the stage by the feet of the judges. The judges didn't look impressed. I tried to salvage our chance of winning by swinging my ghost trap round and round like a lasso but the judges just looked peeved off and I'm lucky my ghost trap didn't fly off and hit one of the judges in the eye. Then we had to get off the stage but they had changed the side of the stage you get off this year and so we couldn't figure out how to leave. Eventually we got down and I felt elated that it was all over.

5-year-old was sure we were going to win the €150 prize for best costume. He wanted to use the money to buy every Lego set from the toy shop. Every Lego set. I'm pretty sure he'd need more money because the Spiderman No Way Home Final Battle set with three Peter Parkers is already 99 euros alone. But in the end, we didn't win - the winners were the three people dressed as the animatronics from Five Nights at Freddy's. Their costumes looked professional, almost too professional, as if they had bought them from a little-known website called Amazon.

Here's the winners:

5-year-old was upset we'd lost. Then he went to inspect the floor to see if there were any sweets left but there weren't because other kids had already picked them up and taken them. This upset 5-year-old further so I bought him a packet of jelly beans. He had never seen jelly beans before and was fascinated that each jelly bean was a different flavour. He gave me the coconut-flavoured jelly beans because he didn't like this flavour.

We shortly went home, which was probably for the best because my costume was falling apart by this point, held together as it was literally by glue and sellotape. When I tried swinging my ghost trap around again to impress people it flew off the ethernet cable and hit a child in the eye, and I'm just kidding, it didn't hit a child in the eye, but my ghost trap did fall off the cable and to the floor.

Maybe next year I'll just rent a costume from the local costume shop and claim I made it.