Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Birthday Aquisitions #4: Figures

Thursday, March 16th, 2017

I’m a sucker for a good figure, as you probably know, and in that regard the birthday didn’t disappoint. They were a common gift item from a few people.

I haven’t opened any of these yet. I’ve still got some work to do with a new curio cabinet before I’m ready to populate it, so all these photos are boxed.

I had thought the chance of new Guyver figures was about zero for years now, so when Max Factory announced Figmas a couple of years back I was pretty happy! Female Guyver is the second in the line and pretty snazzy. There’s actually two versions, with the other being purple and based on the anime appearance.

I’ve posted about Aegis before, and she’s still a favourite of mine! This incredibly cute not-a-Nendroid (also from Good Smile) was a gift from JF! I’m looking forward to getting this one out and putting her next to her twin sisters 🙂

Now this is amazing. It’s my first Tamashii Nations figure, plus it’s a cute goth girl and she’s wearing dress/armor based on Gore Magala from Monster Hunter. Basically this is an ubër-otaku figure right up my alley. Also… it needs some construction! When I open and make her, she’ll get a dedicated post.

Florence got me this! She knows I’m a bit disturbed by René Auberjonois famous changeling from DS9, but not so much that I’m not proud of my very own! So now I have two, and this one even has legs!

I’ll never open this one by the way. I wouldn’t want to ruin the value 😉

Birthday Aquisitions #3: Films

Wednesday, March 15th, 2017

We’ve got a massive collection of DVDs and Blu-rays, and I’d estimate easily 95% of them are genre films (sci-fi, fantasy, horror). They run the gamut from classics to trash but I’ve watched them all, and now we no longer have cable find ourselves watching DVDs far more than ever!

It’s a good thing therefore there’s always something new, like this haul I got for my birthday…

The Dr Who serial is the last release for original series material and I have to say I enjoyed it quite a lot. Sherlock season 4 we haven’t watched yet, but I think it’ll be good. Florry gave me pause though…

Street Fighter is a terrible film and we saw it at the movies (!) when it came out. I wanted to rewatch it though and KLS found it for dirt cheap! The 4-pack on the right was bought for Kull (which we also saw at the movies and is just a wretched film…) but for the low cost and both Conan films included who can resist?

And the Argento? Another film I’ve been curious about for years that hasn’t been on Hulu, Netflix or (free) Prime. It’s apparently not great, but I think I may like it. Besides, I’m this || close to going on a full-on euro-vampire movie bender and just spending a fortune on Jean Rollin and Jess Franco stuff so the Argento is maybe to scratch that itch.

I still watch a lot of anime and since I’m too stubborn to use Crunchyroll that means I do my bit to keep the DVD collection market alive! Gantz should be fun if it’s anything like the recent film. Desert Punk I know nothing about but was cheap and Highschool DxD is the third collection of the funny harem comedy.

The top two are no surprise to anyone that knows me. I’ll just say thank god Chinese Odyssey finally got a western release! The bottom two are because I can no longer ignore those that claim these two are better than Chows films. We shall see…

So I’m on a little Hammer high. At the risk of sounding old, ‘they don’t make horror like they used to’ and I’ve always been a bigger fan of the (literally) theatric  and creepy Hammer style than US horror (like Halloween or Friday the 13th). I’ve watched loads of Hammer already on streaming, but the best ones (from the 70s) are unavailable free do it was time to step to the next level. Hammer House Of Horror is the anthology TV show from 1980 that I remember watching as a kid. It’s creepy and the plots are unpredictable and we’re really enjoying it!

Now that I’m making these posts and documenting the stuff I got it seems like too much doesn’t it? Remember I bought much of this myself (or put it on a list) so it may be a stretch to call them birthday gifts. But I did get some surprises, which you’ll start seeing tomorrow…

Birthday Aquisitions #1: Books

Monday, March 13th, 2017

I used to semi-regularly post about stuff I’d recently bought (or received as gifts) but haven’t for a very long time.

But I watch a lot of streaming on YouTube (and that’s a blog post right there…) and I enjoy when the streamers show off new loot they’ve obtained and how proud and happy they are to have it.

So, for one week only (?), a return to those types of posts! It was my birthday recently and I pulled in quite a haul! I’ll go over much of it this week in five posts starting today with the books.

And even though I bought much of this stuff for myself, I’m still calling them birthday gifts 🙂

There’s the ‘normal’ books. An eclectic selection perhaps. Sin-A-Rama is the updated and reprinted version of a book I bought two years ago and haven’t read yet (it’s an art book of pulp covers essentially). The book on the bottom is an anthology of lurid men’s adventure magazines from post-WW2. 

The manga. Obviously I’m a big fan of Fairy Tail (yes I own 57 volumes…) but of this pile the Junjo Ito books would be my favourites. He’s a master of horror manga and almost everything he has done is a classic.

Two art books and an RPG monster manual. The Fire Emblem book was surprisingly inexpensive (<$20) and will be worth owning for Tharja alone! Thanks to AJW for informing me of Tome Of Beasts (which now has entered my siseable ‘monster manual’ collection).

An unusual gift (from KLS) you may think? It’s an art book of women from Hammer Horror films. I’ll get back to this on Wednesday…

Loads of pulp! Almost all of the above cost only $0.01 (plus $3.99 P&H) from Amazon and after buying a few like this in Oz I’m now on a ‘1970s Conan ripoff’ binge! Keen-eyed observers may note the Kothar and Brak series are both incomplete in this photo… but I already had the other volumes 🙂

Speaking of Conan, and possibly stretching the ‘book’ definition, I got this old AD&D module as well. If anyone is interested, I’ll review this on the blog. 

And last but not least some Guy N Smith books. I’ve wanted to read The Sucking Pit for years and now I am I can reveal it most certainly wasn’t worth the wait. From the same author of the ‘crab series’ books, this is about as pulpy a horror novel as you can imagine and was probably written faster than most would read it! The Walking Dead is the sequel from ten years later (1985) and will likely be equally trashy. But you don’t read Smith expecting high literature, so I’m satisfied.

The above are all now put into my sorted-by-category ‘to read’ pile, which has now grown to fill five shelves of a bookcase. When will I read them all? Who knows!

But read them I will, one day. And I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy them all 🙂

Like A Champ

Tuesday, February 28th, 2017

Last Saturday we took a drive up north. It was unseasonably warm in Albany, and my birthday is approaching so I wanted to do something fun. Besides, for aeons I have lived here and ignored something significant that has been calling me. From up north.

The drive took us through the Adirondacks and up into higher elevations where the snow was still everywhere, and where Albany with its 70F temperatures seemed a world away. I had dressed for warmth, and keenly felt the freeze. We pressed on.

About two hours after leaving home we were close to our destination, but the final leg took us along what must have been an old logging or mining road. Eleven-plus miles through an ancient pine forest on a very poor road full of blind turns, icy surfaces and near-zero visibility fog. It was hair-raising in the daylight and would have been a nightmare at night. Would the trip be worth it after completing this trial? We would soon find out…

That’s Lake Champlain, taken from a (literally) frozen beach in the town of Port Henry. The lake was massive and quiet and still. The air was cold and the water colder. It was too early in the season for boats, and too early in the day for fishermen. Aside from a few gulls, there wasn’t much life around.

We came here to see a monster.

Lake Champlain is world-famous for its resident: Champ, the lake monster. Second only to Nessie (of Loch Ness) with regards to fame, the first verifiable sighting of Champ was almost exactly 200 years ago (1819) though legends of a monster in this lake date back further still. Over the years there have been hundreds of sightings and even a few photographs, most notable the ‘Sansi’ photograph of 1977 (or was it 1981?). He’s America’s own monster, famous throughout the world.

I’ve known about Champ forever. I should be ashamed it had taken me so many years to come up and see him.

The town of Port Henry, on the southwest shore of the lake, adopted Champ as it’s official mascot in 1981. For a time America went Champ-mad, and there were more than one conferences debating his origin (and existence). Champ souvenirs were a-plenty, and both Vermont and New York (the lake is the border) signed bills protecting Champ as an endangered species. Even today – as you can see above – there is evidence of Champ in tiny Port Henry, including on the Chamber of Commerce sign.

That’s an impressively large sign posted just on the side of the main road into Port Henry. It lists every Champ sighting up until 1990, when apparently they stopped updating it. We drove past this sign on our way to cross the Lake Champlain bridge into Vermont, continuing our hunt for Champ souvenirs.

We found a cute gift shop in Vermont (called ‘Champs’) but it was closed so we headed back. Had we the motivation we could have continued all the way to Burlington where they built a Champ statue some years back and (apparently) there’s a few other monuments to him. Even though they can see New York across the lake, to them I’m sure Champ lives in Vermont.

It was easy, as I stood on the lake shore and looked out, to imagine something deep under that still, cold surface. Lake Champlaign is a massive lake – over 250 km in length and 250 meters deep at it’s deepest. It is (much!) longer, wider and deeper than Loch Ness, and if Nessie can survive there?

As I turned to leave, with Kristin watching me from afar, I heard a splash and a roar some distance away very close to the shore. I quickly turned, and had time enough to snap only a single photo before whatever it was disappeared below the surface. I still can hardly believe what I saw, but as they say, the camera doesn’t lie:

It’s Time To Address The Paranormal

Thursday, February 23rd, 2017

I’ve had a lot of discussions recently with my students and coworkers on the topic of the paranormal, and I’m intrigued by how many of them believe in the existence of such matters. While most people are skeptical, others have simultaneously expressed belief in very specific things (mermaids, psychics) and a small few don’t deny anything. One student yesterday told me “I believe in everything!”

For the most part I simply ask and am happy to hear their responses without commenting. I think they know I don’t believe in any most of it, since often they pose questions asking me why ‘things’ can’t exist (as opposed to whether I believe them or not). But enough people have asked me about these topics I thought it was time to address it all here.

So here we go, in no particular order…

Ghosts aren’t real, period. There is absolutely no evidence for them, there never has been, and there never will be. There is no theoretical basis for their existence, and they occupy no part of the world that we don’t understand. Ghosts are – have always been – a figment created by human fear of death and the afterlife. Wouldn’t it be nice if our dearly departed weren’t gone after all? Of all the topics in this blog, ghosts are the most widely believed with about a third of westerners thinking they are real (and about a fifth of believers claiming to have seen one).

So if ghosts aren’t real but millions of people believe they have seen (or felt) one – including an intelligent, well-educated coworker of mine – what is the explanation? There are a few, but my favourite is the tendency for the brain to find patterns where none exist. Very few people have ever reported seeing ghosts clearly in broad daylight when they were wide awake and calm. They are more likely seen at night or in very poor light, when the viewer is alone and in a state of heightened tension. Suggestible if you will, like the haunted card deck.

Cryptids (excluding bigfoot) might be real. A cryptid is an unknown animal (although some expand the definition to include sentient creatures) and while the most famous examples include lake monsters, bigfoot (see next), chupacabra and ‘Beasts of Exmoor’ there are also much more fantastic (not to mention unlikely) examples such as Ningen, Bunyips and the Congo river dinosaur Mokele-mbembe (allegedly filmed by a Japanese expedition in 1988).

Though it pains me to say it, most of these don’t exist. I say this because as a youth I was slightly obsessed with cryptids, and to this day have several volumes on the topic on a shelf in this very room. My particular forte was ‘sea monsters’ but despite sightings going back centuries none have ever been found, nor has any real evidence been located. Likewise for the other famous cryptids, most of which have been ‘seen’ far less than lake monsters.

And yet this is not a topic that can be easily dismissed. For years gigantic squids were the stuff of legend, but we now know they absolutely exist. These are the largest examples of ‘unknown’ creatures being recently discovered, but every year we find more and more hiding in dark corners of the world. Might there be a colony of large cats living in the wilds of England? Possibly.

The weird ones though, such as werewolves, unicorns, dragons and ‘cloud creatures’ that live permanently in the upper atmosphere are exactly as they seem: creatures of myth and legend. The most open-minded (some may say optimistic) cryptozoologists may entertain the possibilities of some of these being real (or at least based on real animals) but I remain firmly skeptical.

Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch, Yowie, Yeti, Yeren etc.) isn’t real. Centuries of searching for these man-apes has produced no actual evidence short of dubious footprint casts and hair swatches that when tested have always been identified as known animals (such as elk or bears).

Most belief in bigfoot stems from the famous 1967 ‘Patterson-Gimlim’ film that has now been exposed as a hoax. In the years since there have been a few other notable claims of bigfoot’s authenticity, but none held up under scrutiny and all have since been confirmed as hoaxes. In fact almost ever single ‘sighting’ is quickly determined to be fake, and the very few that may have involved someone seeing an unidentified creature are almost always bears or other large woodland creatures.

And yet the myth continues. ‘Bigfoot hunters’ exist, sightings continue and (some) people believe. There is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence and theory contradicting the existence of this guy, but as long as money can be made on hoaxes or TV shows about searching the legend will continue.

After all, aren’t we now living in a ‘post truth’ world?

UFOs and Aliens are a tricky subject. One certainly exists, the other probably doesn’t.

It’s been about 60 years since UFOs entered the public consciousness, but reports of unidentified objects in the sky have been around for centuries, long predating the invention of manned flight. It was in the middle of the 20th century that the mania took off though, and for a while there it must have seemed possible that an actual alien landing on Earth was imminent.

I’ve written about UFOs before since I find the topic intriguing, I’ve never seen one, and I believe those that have are experiencing the same sort of phenomenon that explains ghost sightings, and yet I think the possibility exists that they could exist. Here’s why:

  1. There’s nothing supernatural about them. If we put our minds to it, we humans could build a craft that could traverse interstellar distances.
  2. If we could build such a craft and survive the journey to another planet I’m convinced we would.
  3. This is the most compelling proof: Aliens certainly exist

I’ll get to that last point in a bit, but first more on the second. Just this week NASA announced the possible existence of life-supporting planets about 40 light-years from Earth. Suppose we built a craft that could safely traverse that distance. Using the known laws of physics – in particular with regards to energy  and relativity – it is very, very unlikely we could get to that planet in anything less than thousands of years (and likely far longer). So if we wanted to send our own UFOs to them, no-one could survive the trip. ‘Generational’ craft (that support communities that breed in space) are hardly a possibility given the social and technological obstacles, and suspended animation is science fantasy.

And yet, I am 100% sure that life on other planets exists. The universe is so impossibly – possibly infinitely! – large that Earth is just one tiny planet in one tiny corner of one tiny room. There are trillions upon trillions of other planets like ours out there and it is absurd to think that life evolved only on this one. It is equally ridiculous to suppose we are the most advanced life in the universe, which is to say if we ever could build interstellar craft than ‘someone’ else already has.

But those distances! Those energy requirements! The light speed constraint!

Yes aliens exist. Yes they may be able to build spaceships so advanced we perceive them as magical. But can they actually get here and have people actually seen them? I won’t say for sure, but it seems extremely unlikely.

I could go on, and discuss topics such as time travel, espers, fairies, crop circles and many more but I’ve covered the big ones and I think you could anticipate my thoughts on the others.

While it’s fun to believe – and in fact I want to believe – I’ve become a very rational man and simply don’t. What I do enjoy is the belief of others, so if you are convinced your home is haunted or you saw an alien on a windswept beach one evening then please, please, don’t let anyone tell you it didn’t happen. Memories like this are what makes us unique, and it would be a shame for anyone to ever take them away.