Category: The Unknown

The New Addiction

June 23, 2013

Meet Zoffy, of Nebulon, my avatar in the new Animal Crossing for 3DS:

The game is all sorts of awesome, especially if you’ve been hooked by any past game in the series. It’s wonderful to get back to village maintenance and chatting with your animal buddies:

Although I’ve only been playing a week (since returning from Japan), it’s obvious the game is much more expansive than ever, with a mind-boggling array of stuff to do. This is no longer just a game you play for half an hour a day!

One new addition is ‘Club Tortimer’, which is an island excursion where you can play with people from all over the world. Yesterday I did this, and found myself on an island at night with two Japanese girls:

The one on the left was called Mari, and was very talkative and spoke great English. She is a secretary in Kobe that likes Ultraman! (This came up because my character, Zoffy, is named after one of the Ultramen):

The girl in the middle (with the pink hair) works as a secretary in a Tokyo Hospital. She is a hardcore player, and even had this award:

Anyway while we were chatting, we were just standing in a line like in the first picture. They were asking me about America and what I like about Japan and all sorts of stuff when I said “Do you know Rilakkuma?”. Their reaction was immediate and astounding:

As soon as the famous bear’s name was mentioned, both girls started running about the island excitedly just saying things like “love”, “cute”, “gyu~~~!” etc. They were maniacal about Kuma to the extent that even the mention of his name sent them into paroxysms! It was very funny 🙂

Later in the day, I also met Audrey, who lives in Paris. She told me it was sunny and hot:

So I showed her a fish:

These occurrences and much, much more are what await you should you enter the world of Animal Crossing 😉

Jokes aside, the online component (random matchmaking) is somewhat restricted as you may expect from Nintendo. Also, with no way to friend these people or even interact much with them outside of one-line chats, it will probably be something I don’t do very often. But my first experiences of it were very amusing!

Now back to catching bugs…

We Live With Animals!

May 12, 2013

Ok fellows, time again for some candid camera backyard snaps! This entry is a good one…

Firstly, I set the camera up leaning against our house looking directly in the backyard onto the grass. I left it there for a few days and… almost no animal photos! However, by sheer coincidence our backyard neighbour was having a tree removed during this period and the entire process was captured in about 300 photos 🙂

Interesting… but not furry! However this next one – one of the very few animal shots captured during that period, is most definitely interesting:

Now I’m no zoologist, but that to me looks like either:
a) A bear
b) A cougar
c) A thylacine
Sadly, with no further photos of the mysterious beast, accurate identification may remain elusive.

I then moved the camera, placing it on the patio angled toward the tree you see in the right side of the above pictures. Here was the new vista when moved:

This was a good spot! It seems this little tree sits atop a backyard highway, since over the next few days many types of beast wandered into shot. I’ll not show the usual suspects (squirrels, birds) and focus on two visitors.

Here’s a rabbit hopping into view:

And here, my friends, is an up-until-now elusive opossum:

Look at that ratty tail and pointed snout. Could this be the same guy I saw with my own eyes years ago?

Now we cut to about a week later (ignore the date stamp on the photos; I never bother to set it when). For Christmas we received a brand new squirrel feeder. It is a wheel on an axel that rotates freely and has place to put three corn cobs. In addition, I purchased a different feeder myself, which hangs a food block off a spring. About two weeks ago we installed these and set a camera on them. Here’s an establishing shot:

300 photos would be captured in this spot, about 90% of them containing squirrels making use of their feeders. Here’s two examples:

The photos not containing squirrels fall into two categories:
1) Night photos, that almost always contain only deer, and
2) Photos of birds

Here is a night example:

And here is a bird example:

That’s a bluejay. We have yet to see any squirrels attempt to feed from the new hanging feeder (as opposed to the corncob feeder hanging behind it). I think it may be too far from the branch.

By the way, compare the lushness of the greenery in the above shot to the establishing shot above. Only six days separate the two. Next year I should do a timelapse in early spring to show the growth of the trees and ferns.

Now we get to the good stuff, as in the really good stuff. I also moved the camera to look directly at the rotating feeder, and switched it over to video mode. It was set to record 30 second clips, and during the very first night hit the jackpot. Here are four such clips edited together:

Yes, that’s a raccoon! Possibly the same guy we captured in a photo a few weeks back. According to the timestamps, he was there for about 14 minutes in total. Cute little bugger, isn’t he? 🙂

So the list is squirrels, chipmunks, deer, birds, cats, rabbits, opossum and raccoons that we have caught on our cameras over the years. We know of three other mammals we know to visit our backyard that have still not been captured on film. Will I ever see them? Can you guess what they are?

To Infinity And Beyond

May 2, 2013

This past Tuesday, Florence was in town! Since she lives in the desert now, we don’t get to hang out much, so the most had to be made of it.

The decision of what to do was easy: it was time to launch model rockets!

“What, what?!” you ask? Well, I had kept it a cunning secret that Florence had purchased me model rocket supplies for Christmas, knowing this day would eventually come. Here’s a rare shot of me assembling one of the rockets a few weeks ago:

There were three in total. Before her trip I built everything and made sure it was all ready to go. A scouted out a location and bought a few extra engines. Very soon, I was to send an emissary into the cold, dark depths of space! And the very first said emissary would be no less than ‘KUMA 01‘, the bear-rocket:

We launched in Delmar park, near my house. The weather, as you can see, was perfect. KUMA is a little rocket, and it had a B-4 engine in it. What does that mean? Who knows! We certainly didn’t. I think you can gauge from this launch video how high we expected this rocket to go:

It went so high! And there was apparently a wind up there, since it traveled quite a distance (via the parachute) before touching down. In the future, remind me to snip a hole in the parachute prior to launch. Happily, KUMA survived the trip intact:

Giddy with success, it was time to move on to the big rocket, LOADSTAR. This guy is designed to carry a payload, and has a (frankly ludicrous) dual-stage that requires two engines. It was also a total bastard to assemble, and I had less than 1% confidence it would survive a landing. Here it is ready to be launched:

The launch was spectacular… ly bad! As I half-expected, the second stage failed to ignite, and therefore the re-entry mechanism did not deploy. LOADSTAR fell like a stone, nose first, into dirt:

Although it failed, I was amazed it survived intact. Kudos to gorilla glue, I suppose! I will tinker with LOADSTAR and try launching him again one day.

And then we moved onto what was perhaps the craziest of the three rockets, ATOMOS. And yes, I just made up that name one second ago. At any rate, here’s a few shots of the pre-launch procedure:

This rocket carries two shuttles, which detach at the zenith, and then glide to earth (probably bearing messages from God). This rocket kit had existed in my car for a millenia, and was actually damaged when I built it. If LOADSTAR was expected to fail, ATOMOS was expected to explode!

What’s that? The thing in the top left of the above shot? Here’s a closeup:

OMG it’s Florry, hiding behind a plastic lid because she was scared after the LOADSTAR tragedy 🙂

I had put a stronger engine into this guy, a C-5. What does that mean?? Who knows! Let’s launch:

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD IT WENT HIGH! You can see from that photo (taken on my phone…), this rocket had purpose. It raced up, screaming through the troposphere, writing “Goodbye fair Earth” with its exhaust. Maybe. At any rate, it was an amazing launch, one of the shuttles even worked correctly (the other fell like Icarus) and both the rocket and both shuttles were recovered intact.

There was only one engine left. A strong one; a C-5. It made sense to put it in the smallest, lightest rocket. KUMA 01 was on a one-way trip to infinity and beyond!

The final launch was so momentous it required two people. This may have been because the launch device had two buttons, and we both wanted to photograph the rocket as it was taking off. We hid behind our plastic shield, said a quick prayer, and pushed the button. This happened:

Look at that power! Look at it:

It was like all the angels got beneath this little bear-rocket and lifted to heaven at faster than light speed! It just went so fast, and so high, and penetrated the atmosphere and we never ever saw little KUMA again…

…at least not until he touched down safely a minute or so later 🙂

As you may be able to tell this was big fun. I already have some ideas for my second round of rocketry later this summer.

Thank you Florence, both for the rockets and for helping me launch them. 🙂

Robot Claw