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We Are Providence

Friday, May 13th, 2016

We drove to Providence today, on day one of our little getaway. I’d been considering such a trip for years, but after recently reading the newly reprinted Ramsey Campbell book ‘The Thing In The Lake’ the trigger had been pulled.

It was finally time to pay my respects to Lovecraft.

The first stop was a wonderful store downtown that promotes the memory and legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, an author (mostly) obscure in his life but now recognized as one of the most influential American authors to have ever lived. His contribution to the genres of fantasy and horror can hardly be underestimated, and I’ve been a fan for about 30 years.

The store had some remarkable items, and the lovely proprietress gave us a map of providence with all the Lovecraft sights on it. Afterwards we walked a few minutes to a local library to see this bust (which had been partially funded by Guillermo del Toro):

And then we headed to our primary destination, the Swan Point Cemetary. Specifically this small and somewhat unassuming tombstone:

Lovecraft was poor in his time, and upon his death didn’t even get his own gravestone (the above was erected over 50 years later). Initially he was only on the Phillips tombstone, behind me when I took the above shot. (Yes, I placed the tiny Cthulhu on top, but you can see offerings left by others – including foreign coins.)

Ironically he wrote about this very cemetary in his stories, as he did about many other sights in Ptovidence. He was a somber man, very poor and (as he believed) unsuccessful. If only he could have known how famous he would one day be, and how in a cemetary packed with incredible edifices the one that most people would come to visit was the tiny stone with his name on it.

Mr Lovecraft: your imagination was boundless, your stories timeless and I’ll always be a fan.

It was late in the day when we finally got to our B&B and we’re gobsmacked by how beautiful it is!

That’s the dining room we’ll eat breakfast in tomorrow! Everything in here is beautiful, and it’s probably much fancier than I deserve 🙂

Tomorrow we’re off to the zoo, only a hop and skip from here. Expect photos of animals!

Posted in Art, Books & Comics, Miscellaneous, Otaku, The Unknown, Trip | Comments Closed

More Plastic

Thursday, April 28th, 2016

I received a lot of model and craft kits – of several types – for Christmas. This past month I’ve spent weekends building a few of them.

KLS got me the above Gundam since I had told her I’d build any kit she bought me! I don’t know anything about it, and the design tends a bit too much toward the standard Gundam type for me but… this kit has a secret!

Here it is finished:

Flashy isn’t it? Almost all of it is metallic gold, and it’s quite garish under a bright light! It’s one of the small kits (1/144 scale) and was an easy build, only taking about two hours.

The above was from Joyce and Jim and at 1685 pieces is the biggest Tie Fighter Lego has ever made. I’d had my eye on this for a while and was very much looking forward to assembling it. Note the size of the box, photographed for scale next to one of the world’s largest silver sausages.

The kit was great fun to put together and took much less time than I expected. This is perhaps due to me having built only technic kits recently. Once completed, it looks great:

It’s massive! The mini figure on the base gives you an idea, but I’d say the panels are about 40 cm high. I had to make space to display this one, which meant the Lego Death Star II had to be put in storage (after about 9 years).

Lastly another model kit, this time of a girl:

This isn’t the first in the ‘Frame Arms Girl’ series, but I didn’t much like the previous. It’s by the same company that released the Etrian Odyssey kits I’ve blogged about previously, and features the same level of detail and wealth of options (such as weapons, armor pieces, hands and faces).

She was a slightly challenging build – I’d say harder than Gundam but easier than a Zoid – but I think I did a good job.

Amusingly I bought this from Japan, and it was shipped simply wrapped in transparent bubble wrap with an address label attached! Despite the lack of a shipping box, it arrived in perfect condition 🙂

Posted in Crafts, Miscellaneous, Models, Otaku | Comments Closed

Singles

Tuesday, April 19th, 2016

When I arrived in the USA almost 23 years ago, I was strip searched at LA airport. They had me down to my daks, going through my clothes and shoes looking for something that wasn’t there. Part of the process was a thorough luggage search, and I can only imagine how surprised the guy was when I opened my (only) suitcase to reveal this:

This isn’t a post about that experience, it’s a post about what a 21 year old man that emigrated to the US thought valuable enough to pack with him. My suitcase that day contained a tiny amount of clothes, one extra pair of shoes, a few important documents, and hundreds of CDs and 7″ vinyl singles. Looking back on it now I can’t imagine how heavy it was (I had to use a cart in the airport for a single large hard-case suitcase) or how I wasn’t charged extra baggage. Those were the days, I suppose.

I’d always loved singles, and bought them religiously for all the bands I followed. I treated them well, and still have almost all of them today. To get them here I bundled them up in bubble wrap (in other words, inadvertently made them look as much like drug packages as possible!) and packed them tightly in around the similarly packed CDs. I don’t recall any of them getting damaged, and ever since arriving here they have lived in the comic box shown in the above photo.

I’m reasonably sure the first 7″ single I ever purchased was this one, probably bought in 1982:

In those early days I owned very few since I didn’t have my own record player. I bought them every now and then (Homosapien by Pete Shelley, Rockit by Herbie Hancock) but mostly bought cassettes of new albums. It wasn’t until maybe 1983 that Bernard and I started buying vinyl like no tomorrow, and by 1986 I had my own record player in my room and bought new records (often singles) almost weekly it seemed.

Here’s another one from those early days:

I bought the above because of Michael Hutchence (!!) recommending Nick Cave in an interview. I remember liking it, and thinking he looked like Julian ‘Zzap64’ Rignall on the cover 🙂

But enough history, let’s look at some highlights from the big box of 7″ vinyl that lives, mostly ignored, in my house today:

That’s the first ever Mute records release! I was a fan of so many bands on the label, when I saw this guy for sale used at Rices it was an instant buy. To this day I can’t imagine how it got there (much less to Australia) given it was released it such limited quantities. A treasure of my collection to be sure.

That’s Depeche Mode’s first single Dreaming of Me (on top, released in 1981), and there last wide-released 7″ single from 2009. I remember having trouble finding it, but eventually did in Japan a couple of years later. In those days vinyl was almost completely dead, and 7″ singles in particular hadn’t been seen for years. You may be aware of the big vinyl resurgence in the last few years, but 7″ singles aren’t exactly coming back.

The box is about 40% Depeche Mode singles (including three copies of many – UK, USA, Australian), about 30% Erasure and the rest Nick Cave, Sisters of Mercy, Mission, Fields of the Nephilim and a few random ones thrown in. As you may imagine of a collector as crazed as myself, many of these collections are complete (for instance, I have all known Mode, Nephilim and Erasure 7″ vinyl). Getting them entailed many trips to the import stores in Sydney (I used to go monthly), as well a semi-regular purchases from UK shops for which I used ‘international money orders’ and would wait months for the package to arrive. I also had a penpal (!) in The Netherlands that helped me get some of the harder to find European releases during the early 90s; I even still have one of the ones he sent me still in the bag it was purchased in!

Here’s some of the attractively-designed Sisters singles:

And the Nephilim stuff, which includes multiples since KLS & I merged our collections:

There’s a large amount of limited editions in the box as well, and in fact towards the last years of the popularity of 7″ vinyl, many releases were only available in limited or unusual versions. For instance many singles are pressed in coloured vinyl:

Or transparent vinyl:

Or picture discs:

Or – and this one is quite special – silver vinyl:

I’ve also got quite a selection of bootleg singles (which were very popular with the ‘goth’ bands):

And even several flexi discs (pressed on acetate so they could be included with magazines):

I hadn’t looked through the box of singles for many, many years and it was a bit like opening a time capsule. While I still have a working record player, I didn’t actually play any of them yesterday since every song on every one of them has since been made available on CD or for download, so their more curios now than essential possessions for the diehard fan.

But I had fun buying them back in the day, and used to listen to them over and over again. I’m happy I’ve still got these things; they’re one of the few possessions from my youth I still own today.

Posted in Music, Otaku, Time | Comments Closed

Review: ‘Game Prince’

Monday, March 28th, 2016

I bought the above on Amazon for only $14. It’s a handheld self-contained gaming system that promised (as you can see) to contain ‘iPhone, PC and Android’ games.

Here’s the instructions:

That’s quite a screenshot to use for what I suspected it would be just a crappy X-in-1 system (albeit handheld). Let’s turn it on:

And I was correct! 152 games to be specific, and a quick glance through the list suggested this was essentially a handheld NES emulator featuring a small set of NES games repeated over and over as is usual for such devices:

I estimate there’s about 50 unique games on the device. Some (such as Silkworm and Adventure Island) have over ten versions, although they all seem to be simply ‘start at level X’ hacks.

I apologize for the quality of the photos; the screen has a coating that makes it difficult to photograph. It looks better than here, and is very vibrant with s good refresh rate. Since Mario seems to run at native NES resolution, I estimate the postage-stamp-sized screen to be about 256×240.

That’s of course Donkey Kong, Mario, Pac-Man and Ninja Gaiden III, all of which run well and have original sound effects. Based on these the quality of emulation seems to be good.

The buttons of the system however are awful, which makes actually playing the games almost impossible.

The worst offender is the 4 direction buttons which are not linked (and therefore not a d-pad). There is a notable delay when pushing one and holding two down at a time negates both, making diagonals impossible. The fire buttons aren’t much better, and rapidly pushing one seems to result in it not registering at all. It’s inexcusable the device was manufactured with such terrible controls.

What about the claim of iPhone or Android games? Check these out:

Aside from being quite literally criminal I doubt I need to tell you both are abysmally unplayable. Angry birds in particular only has 4 positions at which you can aim and the collision animations seem independent of where the bird hits. PvZ uses a pointer control (!) which on this system means almost no control at all. It’s also comically slow 🙂

Lastly there is this:

‘Fighter Street v1′ aka. ‘Crap Street Fighter’. The player select isn’t so bad:

Note there are only 6 playable characters; the claim of 12 includes palette swaps! So far so bad… but the gameplay:

Absolutely, unquestionably the worst version of SF2 I have ever ‘played’. Glacially slow, you don’t seem to have any actual control over your fighter who just does random kicks and punches as he jerks backwards and forwards. Utterly shameful.

So that’s the Game Prince. An impulse, one-for-the-collection buy that I thought may make a nice tournament device. But it won’t, because it’s awful and almost unplayable and I doubt I’d ever find a soul on this lonely planet with the patience to sit around for hours while I beat them on old NES games 😉

Avoid this trash like the plague!

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Tech | Comments Closed

‘Blessed vs Cursed’ Review

Saturday, March 26th, 2016

It’s time for another MTG duel deck review.

The release of this one surprised me, as did the inclusion of preview cards from the next expansion (Shadows Over Innistrad). The decks match ‘blessed’ humans against ‘cursed’ zombies and turned out to be great fun to play against each other.

The blessed deck is white/blue and heavy on creatures with ‘enter the battlefield’ triggers. Some are tailor made to kill zombies, and overall the deck plays quite quickly.

The cursed deck is blue/black, full of graveyard effects (self-mill, playable from, graveyard triggers) and is even faster than the white deck.

I played eight games in total and the final tally was a draw at 4 wins each! Almost every game was quick and few were easy wins. These are two of the best matched – and most fun to play – duel decks ever.

The pros will talk about the value of the cards as well, including an alternate art Geist (from the original Innistrad) as well as some notable rates. But what I found most charming was that while each deck contains Islands, the card art is unique to the decks they are in, so there are three pairs of the same islands in both cursed and blessed forms:

It’s a nice touch, and another plus in this overall great pair of decks. Highly recommended.

Posted in Art, Games, Miscellaneous, MTG, Otaku, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

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