What warrants Halloween immortalization?

Dear Hipster:

Help! Halloween is upon me in mere days and I don’t have a good costume idea! Please inspire me!

— Hillery

We hipsters generally excel in the fine art of the clever Halloween costume. Our innate sense of irony facilitates costume design, and that celebrated hipster penchant for crafting and DIY ensures that no corners are cut in the snipping, gluing, and papier mâché-ing of the physical artifact in question. In my experience, many of the best costumes are timeless or topical.

Timeless costumes are easier. For example, characters from old cartoons and TV shows almost always kill it at parties, especially when the majority of partygoers have passed their quarter-life crises and stand a chance of actually having seen ThunderCats or He-Man. Dig into the past and find something memorable. It’s that easy.

Topical costumes require greater savoir-faire. First, you must sift through the past year’s laundry list of current-ish events, deciding who (or what) warrants Halloween immortalization. Then, it falls to the designer to create an instantly recognizable costume. I of course recommend you stretch your imagination, but since Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, you’ll be able to throw together a pretty good costume with the downtime before the parties get rolling. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Donald Trump. Match up your grandfather’s old boxy-shouldered power suit with a large, boring tie. Add a ludicrous wig, or a “Make America Great Again” hat if you’re lazy or if you think the suit doesn’t send the message. Bonus points for having an opinion on everything, especially if that opinion consistently revolves around how great you are.

El Niño 2015. Dressing as a climatological phenomenon is meta as hell, but you ought to be able to get the message across by somehow dressing as an ocean teeming with sea snakes and hammerhead sharks. Bonus points if anybody actually gets it without explanation.

Kim Kardashian’s “Internetbreaking” Magazine Cover. The key is the huge, glistening buttocks. They have to glisten. If they don’t, you’re just Kim Kardashian pre-2015, and that won’t do. Bonus points for having someone in shutter shades and $2500 sweatpants follow you around and tell everyone how great you are all night.

Diane Porter. Carry around a laundry bag with “DAVE ROBERTS” written on it. Great costume for the lazy and/or time-crunched.

The Lion-Killing Dentist. Should be clearly conveyed by a toy bow and arrow, camo vest, smug expression, and a stuffed lion with X’d out eyes. Bonus points for getting attacked by PETA volunteers.

July 19th, 2015. There’s an engineer out there somewhere who can rig a battery-powered pump to circulate water into a showerhead so that it rains down forever and ever and ever and ever, thus memorializing that one July Sunday where more than three inches of rain fell on Ramona. Bonus points for doing it and managing to stay more or less dry all night.

I’m personally itching to see a few of these come to fruition, so send photos of yourself in these or other great costumes to hipster@sandiegoreader.com and I’ll send you a token of my hipster appreciation. I’ll pass it on to the Reader photos team, because I’m gracious like that.