Category: Blog

Tokyo Brothers

January 22, 2019

Those of you that follow me on Twitter would have seen a series of daily collages featuring the two of us in Japan. This post features those photos with description.

This was the first, taken at Adores arcade in Ikebukuro. I took the snap of Bernard first, then as we were leaving posed myself with the intention of reproducing the pose of the girl on the right, forgetting Bernard had done the same thing. When I reviewed my snaps later that night I noticed the similarity and a blog series was born!

These were taken outside Tokyo Tower. We’re both standing in front of a large poster put there undoubtedly for selfie purposes. Making these photos daily required scaling and occasionally rotation of the base images so they were best when taken from a distance.

This was taken at the very top of Skytree, which had a special Kingdom Hearts 3 exhibit. We’re both holding the keyblade in a diorama once again installed for photo purposes. I very much like the lighting on Bernard in his shot.

At Akihabara out on the street. This was a window display outside one of the first big game centers near the station. When we returned several days later these posters had been replaced!

Taken at Tokyo Disney, specifically in the Cinderella walk-through exhibit in the castle. The back of the seat has LED lights built into it that animate through a pattern, so we had to time the shots to get similar lighting. I like my pose 🙂

Taken at Nakano mall, posing at the photo-op board featuring their mascot Pipi. It was for kids and we had to contort ourselves to get low enough to put our heads through. Bypassers looked at us curiously…

Once again in Akihabara, standing before a giant poster advertising the new Hatsune Miku cosmetics line. It was very pretty art, but she’s devilishly holding a lipstick with ‘Eat Me’ written on it!

Looking through my snaps, in the 600 or so photos I kept from Japan there’s only 4 that feature the two of us. Three of them were already shown in my blog posts during the trip but I particularly like this last one of us taken on the final full day:

Japan was a nonstop and fantastic end to an overall amazing 25-day vacation. Australia and Japan in one trip?!? How am I going to ever top that??

2018 in Photos

December 20, 2018

Distilling a year into ten photos is never easy, but this year was particularly tough. Furthermore whilst this post tends to prioritize vacation shots, that’s only because I’ve sorted them way better than the normal day-to-day photos, so there’s probably a few gems that should have been here that aren’t.

The year began, as it usually does, in Oz:

Bernard and I went on a lengthy road trip from the Southern Ocean all the way up to Newcastle and had a blast on the way. We even ran into notorious Australian terrorist Ned Kelly at one point:

In March KLS and I went to the city for the first of three trips this year. It was cold but fun, and we lived like the urbanites we are for a few days:

Our first international vacation was to Scotland, otherwise known as the prettiest country on Earth. This was one of those dream vacations we’ll never forget, and in our little car we saw the length and breadth of the highlands and hebrides islands and enjoyed one amazing day after another, like the puffins on Staffa:

Or the standing stones on Orkney:

Or even just eating fish’n’chips at the northernmost town in Great Britain:

During the summer Bernard and Lakshmi visited! Here we are deep in a dungeon:

We went on another vacation too. After a brief stop in Portland for Florence’s wedding (insert heart emoji here) we jetted off to Hawaii for fun in the sun… and a hurricane!

The first four days were beautiful and warm and sunny and we spent a lot of time at or on the beaches. But then this happened:

And next thing you know the beaches emptied and people wrote SOS in the sand:

As you know we were lucky and the storm dissolved before reaching us. But that was certainly an interesting and memorable experience, and one I don’t want to soon repeat!

I’ll end with a shot of my lovely friend Yossie, which just shows you don’t have to go to exotic places to take photos you’ll treasure forever:

So thats the year in a nutshell. A good one; a memorable one. I hope you enjoyed the blog in 2018.

What’s next? Well in a week I’ll be in Oz once again, and mid January I’ll be flying from Sydney to Tokyo where I’ll meet Bernard for a week of otaku madness. I think it’s safe to say there’ll certainly be some photos worth seeing here in the next few weeks…

Gun Sniper Leena Special

April 15, 2018

I got it into my head that there were too many ‘model assembly’ posts here so cut back on them intentionally. But here I break my own rule because:

1) It’s been a while since I’ve made a ZOID.
2) This kit was a gift from JF.

The kit I refer to is this:

And here are all the pieces before I started assembly:

As usual with these kits, it seemed a bit over engineered, with 3 or 4 pieces going together to form what could have been one. But the quality control was fantastic and although more difficult than your average Gundam everything went together nicely:

Those are the legs and arms, just before I attached them to the rest of the body. It’s ridiculously articulated and I was amazed how well balanced it was:

Here’s the cockpit, complete with tiny pilot:

Yes the orange ‘glass’ canopy opens.

Now I’m no Z.O.I.D. fan (says the guy with 6 pricey kits…) so I can’t give many details about this robot but I can reveal that Gun Snipers are (apparently) semi-autonomous ‘Helic’ ZOIDs created using the ‘Organoid’ system. I’ve no idea who Leena is, but I’m guessing the ‘special’ thing about her ZOID is the ludicrous amount of weaponry it carries.

You see the above shot was only half way through. It took me at least as long again (several hours) to assemble all of the weapons:

Attaching them all to the ZOID itself was no easy task but I managed after a little bit of cursing…

It’s pretty great isn’t it! Here’s an overly-treated scale shot with a LEGO minifig:

Overall a fun build and a spectacular looking kit once complete! Thanks JF!

Robot Claw