Here’s the cover of my upcoming novel:
I was going to call it Apotheosis Of The Machine-Brain but that name is apparently already taken 😛
Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
My New Novel!
Thursday, February 7th, 2013New Year’s Resolution?
Saturday, February 2nd, 2013When I returned from Australia, for some reason I started becoming very aware of the piles of stuff that filled my house. Books to be read. Games to be played. Media to be consumed.
When I was young there was so much I wanted but couldn’t have. Now I can have it all, but – especially in the last year – have been accumulating it faster than I can enjoy it. The reasons are varied (work, World of Warcraft, age), but I’ve never purchased anything I didn’t really want to read, watch or play and, by Jove, it was time to do just that!
So, my first ever (?) New Years resolution: Consume more media!
How much am I talking about here? I will preface by saying we all have little ‘to read’, ‘to watch’ and (some of us) ‘to play’ piles. For instance, I know for a fact quite a few of you – SFL, AW, BS – certainly do. But mine had gotten quite large. As in very large. And it’s time to climb them.
I’ll revisit this resolution at the end of this year, but here’s the scope of what I’m tackling. All of this just describes what is in the house right now, not anything I expect to obtain in the next few weeks or months…
Books
That’s the English version of Monster Hunter Illustrations, which came out over a year ago and is jam-packed with all sorts of fascinating MH art. It’s on my pile with two additional japanese MH books including the sequel (!) and a different art book on TCG art. These share a shelf with no less than four additional art books (including Genzoman, Queen’s Blade and the recently released Hyrule Historia Zelda art book). I could probably look through all these in a long afternoon.
But that’s hardly all. There are some 30+ volumes of manga (Bleach, Bakuman amongst others), 16 novels (including some purchased five years ago when a local bookstore went out of business), 2 academic texts (one, on cryptozoology, is almost 800 pages long), about 50 comics and 20 odd magazines. This list doesn’t even include the approximately 100+ gamebooks from a collection of over 200 that I haven’t played through.
How much of this can I read in one year?
Movies and TV
I got the above for Christmas. It’s the long-awaited (by me, for one) second full Ultraman series finally translated into English. And it’s 19 hours long. It sits on a shelf right now next to DVD collections of all 4 series of Lexx (over 40 hours in total) and the first three seasons of the Keroro Gunso TV anime (20+ hours). Add to this list 22 more anime DVDs or Blu-Rays adding to more than 35 hours (including the full series of Claymore) and about another 28 hours of UK TV series collections and 30 more hours of (sometimes untranslated) Japanese or Korean series and I start to wonder realistically how we could watch all this in a single year? I haven’t even considered the movies…
Games
I currently have, unplayed and in most cases still shrinkwrapped:
– 8 PS3 games (including Hyperdimension Neptunia 2 and Resonance Of Fate)
– 6 Nintendo DS games (including Pokemon Conquest and Shepherd’s Crossing 2)
– 17 (!) PSP games, almost all RPGs, many of which look great (including God Eater Burst and Ragnarok Tactics)
– 11 3DS games, many of which were Christmas gifts (including Theatrythym Final Fantasy and Paper Mario Sticker Star)
That’s 42 games on my ‘to play’ list. With some embarrassment I’ll reveal I have already preordered about 6 more online, and yet right now much of my gaming time is spent playing Warcraft. I think I’ll have to be more disciplined 🙂
Will I succeed? Can I possibly consume all this media before getting overrun? Also, will I stop buying more until what I have has been enjoyed? I’ll revisit this post at the end of the year, and it will be interesting to see how effective my resolution has been!
The Year In Regret
Monday, December 24th, 2012The blog is getting on 7 years old now, and I hope it’s still worth reading.
Alas, for various reasons topics that I plan on blogging about fall by the wayside. Here’s a list of some that I was regretfully unable to turn into posts during this past year:
– My Star Wars tin collection
– My flirtation with ‘breakdancing’ (including taking classes!) in the early 1980s!
– My three superpowers
– My sticker collection
– Laserdiscs
– The first installment of a series around my rather large game collection
– Mermaids
– Part 2 of my fanzine history, which covers the period I was paid to review games
– Postcards
– Lone Wolf computer games
Now I’ve written this list I must make it happen! So, dear readers, lets say the above is a checklist for Robot Claw 2013 🙂
I Boldly Went
Tuesday, December 4th, 2012Yes, my friends, from an equally mysterious source, I very recently managed to obtain this fine treasure:
OMG part 2! It’s a factory sealed box of Star Trek trading cards all the way from 1992! Look at the sheen of the pristine shrink-wrap! What fabulous treasures must be sealed inside?
Let’s find out:
Oh, alluring black and pink and blue! These packs just scream ‘Open me!‘ don’t they? Interesting how the divide between the TNG and OS packs is horizontal now compared to the series 1 box isn’t it?
Here’s a closer look at two of these little pouches of loot:
And here are the exact cards from the rightmost pack in the above photo:
A ‘Vulcan Lyrette‘?? It’s difficult, in English, to describe just how truly terrible most of the OS series cards in this set are. I loved looking at and reading each one of these marvelous cards! Here’s a shining example:
If we had a merciful God, I would be joking. Alas, I am not 🙂
Oh, but the TNG cards! They are wondrous! Doctor Leah Brahms! The last tragic moment of Tasha Yar’s life! Lwaxana Troi! Doctor Pulaski! Even the wonderful, wonderful Q! Surely a better card set couldn’t possibly exist?
And then there’s this work of art:
Yes my friends, resistance to the charm of these cards is positively futile!
So, my original offer stands. I purchased these not only for myself, but for each of you as well. I just know you want some of these, and my condition is trifling.
Simply, in 100 words or less, complete the following sentence in a comment:
“Excluding the obvious choice of Reginald Barkley, the Star Trek: TNG character I most identify with is _____________ because ____________ “
Serious answers only please! Let’s join the United Federation of Planets together 🙂
Retro Comic Advertisements (part 2)
Wednesday, November 21st, 2012I recently came into possession of, well, lets say many old comics. A good chunk of these will end up being Christmas gifts, so I’m not going to discuss the comics themselves here. But, as I did once before, let’s look at some of the advertisements for a trip down memory lane 🙂
Here’s one from a 1978 comic, and as far as nostalgia goes this one is high up on the scale:
Very cute, isn’t it. What with the fan club being based on Yavin, and “prices slightly higher outside the solar system”! And, the inclusion of an iron-on transfer gives me another blog idea…
Here’s another period SW advertisement, this time from 1984:
A few Christmas’s ago I believe I gave out some of these kits as gifts? Adverts for model kits are very common in 198X comics by the way. As I said to KLS: “That’s what kids did before video games!”
Or maybe they did this:
So much cringe-worthy content in the above ad. And that’s even before you realize what it is actually for! Go on, read it and weep 🙂
Here’s another in a similar vein, this time from 1989:
Ignoring for a moment how ludicrously verbose this ad is (Was it written by someone on their first day of work?), let’s consider this is for a handheld LCD game in 1989! That’s years after consoles had caught on, and in fact even the same year the Gameboy was released. Hard to believe this was money well spent.
Let’s switch gears, and revisit an ad which I suspect was targeted at girls (based on the comic it was in) from 1978:
OMG! Witchcraft?!?! Go ahead and read it! Amongst other things, this ad claims to teach you telepathy, mind control, ‘inhaling cosmic energy’ and THE ABLILITY TO CONTROL TIME (on page 126, no less). Holy smokes I wish they were still in business because I could make things happen if I had those powers!
Speaking of making things happen, here’s another way to make money, again from 1978:
I really have no comment, except to say that younger readers perhaps don’t understand the appeal of the above ad since they didn’t live through stuff like this:
What’s that you ask? More fanclubs? How about this one:
“Alf’s favourite menu”? The mind boggles…
Oh, here’s an ad for…
… a cardboard box! I wonder how many could they have possibly sold?
The early 1980s are when action figures started in a big way (1977 actually, with Kenner’s 3.75″ Star Wars figures). Of course this led to Masters Of The Universe, and the many knockoffs by other companies. Such as these guys:
They look so much worse than I remember. And yes I do remember ladies and gentleman, and if I ever find my sticker collection I’ll explain all in that post 😉
Speaking of Masters Of The Universe, check this gem out:
I had a rage attack when I saw this one, gibbering on about how there was no way the screenshots could have possibly looked like those obviously painted images on the bottom right. So I did some snooping, and let’s see if I was correct…
I rest my case!
I end with one last ad. In comics of the 80s, it is quite common for ads to contain superheroes, probably to get kids attention even better. This is a classic example of one such ad:
Let’s ignore for a second the fact that Superman apparently can move at sublight speeds and has a computer-brain and consider what is being sold here. A Magic Snake is a piece of plastic that can be folded into 23 trillion shapes and looks about as much fun as, well, reading the comic this was printed in. Even with the assistance of Superman, it’s hard to believe what sort of child would have found this product interesting…
Yes, I’ve had it for 30 years 🙂