Category: Otaku

Stamp Otaku

April 30, 2015

I like postage stamps. Always have, always will. I still buy them a lot, especially when I’m in Australia. They are also one of the reasons I love sending postcards, and I enjoy sending (or receiving!) cards with exotic or particularly pretty stamps on them. I wonder if any of my recipients notice?

That’s a screen grab from yesterdays lecture, which was about the atomic structure. Rutherford is a real character, and I’ve always found it humorous that he’s been on so many postage stamps considering his (in)famous quote about science. Other slides in yesterdays lecture were peppered with stamps as well, and it’s actually quite easy to find stamps to use as illustrations in physics lectures.

In searching for such examples, I couldn’t help but notice that the masters of honoring their scientists on postage stamps are unquestionably the Germans. There are many and varied examples of beautiful stamps showcasing very famous scientists from German history.

Take for example this one:

What a beautiful stamp! Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves, and this stamp displays the oscillations of the electric force due to a magnetic dipole (ie. EM waves) in the background. I love that the lines are superimposed over Hertz’s portrait, as if to put the science before the man.

This stamp of Bessel is magnificent! The portrait is wonderful, and the fact the stamp prominently displays a plot of a ‘Bessel function’ (important mathematical tools required to solve complex partial differential equations) is just icing on the cake! How I’d love to stick this on a postcard!

Here are some other wonderful examples of Germany’s science stamps:

That last one (Gauss) is sublime! Gauss is one of the titans of mathematics, and is one of the few men to have multiple identities or equations named after him. One may imagine that they would have shown a Gaussian distribution on the stamp, but whoever designed it chose the 17-sided polygon that he created using compass and straightedge when he was only 19. I love it!

Lovely stamps these all are. The woodcut portraits add to the appeal, and the fact the stamps embrace the science only make them more appealing.

Of course Germany isn’t alone in recognizing science in their stamps. Here are a few other wonderful examples I found (and in some cases have inserted into lectures):

From the top, we have Roentgen (x-ray), Babbage (computers), Fermi (atomic physics), Bohr (atomic structure), Mendelev (chemistry), Democritus (coined the word ‘atom’ in 450BC) and Ramanujan (Indian mathematics prodigy). I love them all. I wish I had them all in a big frame. I’d display it proudly in my office.

You’re all wondering “What about Einstein?” He’s on more stamps than any other scientist, and they run the entire range of design and theme, since his fame moved into celebrity as well. I think this is perhaps my favourite Einstein stamp of all those I found:

It’s simple, subtle (note the background) and a lovely portrait of Einstein when he wasn’t much older than when he presented his most important theories. This stamp would look beautiful on the back of a postcard of a surfing koala or kangaroo drinking a beer 😉

Sniper Girl

April 26, 2015

I’m a big fan of the Etrian Odyssey game series. Not only are the games fine examples of the first-person dungeon crawl genre, but they have wonderful graphics, due in no small part to the character designs of artist Yuji Himukai.

Here is his design for the female ‘sniper’ character from the first game in the series:

Therefore you can imagine my delight when Kotobukiya released this model kit:

Figure kits are rare, so I eagerly bought this one when it came out. Last week I assembled it. Here’s what was in the box:

So many colors of plastic! So much detail on the pieces! Even before I pulled the runners out of the bags I was impressed.

Very quickly it was clear this was a god-tier kit. The engineering of the pieces was superb, and almost no trimming or sanding was required. Everything snapped together tightly, but articulation of the joints was perfect. The balance was also incredible, quite an achievement considering her tiny feet!

She was very easy to put together, and on top of the ease was a lot of fun. It took me maybe 2 hours only to finish her. Although she’s on the base in these shots, she can actually stand unsupported:

There is some customization decisions to be made. She can have her goggles on or around her neck, she can hold the bow by her side or in a firing position with arrow cocked, and she can have one of four faces:

Here’s the face I chose:

She looks a little tsundere 🙂

Another shot of my finished ‘sniper girl’:

And here she is in her new home on the shelf:

This is a very impressive kit. It’s inexpensive (about $30), easy and fun to make, and she looks great. Highly recommended.

(She also has a sister kit – the ‘Imperial Girl’ – which I also bought and will make one day)

My Collection: Pokemon Mini

April 23, 2015

It’s been over a year since the last post of this type showcasing a part of my game collection, so I thought it was about time I returned to this topic. Today I’ll introduce a game system many of you have likely never heard of: Pokemon Mini!

The Pokemon Mini was released by Nintendo back in 2001. It’s one of the smallest game systems ever released that uses cartridges. All the games were Pokemon themed, simplistic and somewhat ugly due to the 96×64 LCD display (which is not backlit). The device includes a startling amount of features, such as an accelerometer, IR communication, force feedback (via an internal motor), an internal clock and battery backup. It only weighs about 50g (!!) excluding the single AAA battery used for power.

It was released in the US first, then Japan and eventually Europe, and while specific details are hard to find, it seems to have been a collossal failure. 2001 wasn’t exactly the game dark ages, so it didn’t compete too well against other devices of the time for serious gamers, and was probably a bit too niche for children, who were presumably the intended audience.

There’s a lot to like about the device. It’s smartly designed, doesn’t feel at all like a toy, and the screen is very sharp with a fast refresh rate. The speakers are tiny but the sound is good, and the controls (d-pad, 2 buttons, right trigger and shake function) all work well. I also like that the cartridges are so tiny, and that they have the name of the system written directly on the back of the PCB!

The games though… well they aren’t good. Incredible simplistic, most of them are versions of traditional parlour games (such as tangrams seen above) or sub-NES quality arcade games. The other problem was that there were only four released in the USA (including the pack-in)! There were a total of 0 games released after launch, which shows this device was pretty much DOA. I few additional games were released in Japan and Europe, but in it’s lifetime the system saw under 10 games in total.

Of course this means that my collection is complete (as far as the US version is concerned):

According to my records, I purchased the handheld and the three additional games on May 25, 2003 – about 18 months after it had been released. I pid $29.99 for the system and $9.99 for each additional game. These days it’s worth quite a bit more – especially the games. Were I to sell it on ebay I could expect to easily triple what I paid, and perhaps make even more (since listings for the games are scant).

But I won’t sell it. It’s a tiny but curious part of my collection, and happily sits in a box with the other two unusual handhelds I have… both of which I’ll feature here within the next few weeks 😉

Robot Claw