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Day Four

Sunday, October 12th, 2014

Today was the final day of the con. We had about five hours to fill before we’d have to leave for our train. So fill them we did!

That’s my usual ’empty con floor shot taken before the doors open from the VIP room’. Twenty minutes later it would be hell 🙂

So as mentioned my #1 goal today was to get an autograph from esteemed thespian Patrick Stewart, arguably best-known for his performance of Gurney Halleck in Dune. I’d made all sorts of boastful claims to a certain person that I could get his autograph for them and by Jove I was going to get it!

Then he canceled yesterday. No worries, I said, there’s always tomorrow!

And then he canceled today as well…

To paraphrase KLS: “The only possible excuse for this sleight of his fans was if the next thing I read about him was his obituary! Either way, he’s dead to me!”

I hastily put ‘Plan B’ into action, and joined the line for an autograph from John de Lancie, arguably best known for his unforgettable portrayal of ‘Fish Halman’ in Crank 2. The certain person who shall remain nameless (cough, bear, cough) had recently waxed lyrical about the sensuality of de Lancie and I knew she needed his mark 🙂

At the risk of spoiling a gift, let’s end there for now…

Oh btw here’s a stealth shot I took while waiting (seemingly forever!) in line. I got neither of these guys autographs, but almost wish I had!

That’s Riker and Data, both in civilian attire. Riker was quite a fellow!

And what of the remainder of our final day at NYCC? Well we spent much of it shopping and looking at countless booths and just enjoying the spectacle of it all. Even though we’d spent dozens of hours already, the size of the con means there’s always something new to see!

Such as more retro toys:

More cosplayers:

Nifty Star Trek jewelry (the saucer section detaches!):

A comic vendor with a sense of humour:

Some nifty figure prototypes:

And even fine art:

As with all good things though the four days of madness had to eventually end and we waved goodbye once again.

After a quick lunch in a city deli…

…we were on our train back to Albany. Which is where I am right now as I type this.

Thanks for the fun NYCC; see you in 2015!

Posted in Art, Books & Comics, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys | 1 Comment »

(Even more) Comic Ads! (Plus a bonus quiz!)

Thursday, October 2nd, 2014

As often happens, I recently acquired 15 old comics from the early 1980s. They cost me only $3 in total, which is a hell of a deal for that much entertainment. I read them all. I laughed, I cheered and I wept. I won’t say what series they are from, since you’re going to guess that at the end of this post!

But first, since you love them, let’s get to the advertisements from days gone past.

The above is from 1983, and it shows a product I didn’t know existed. That was in my D&D/Gamebook heyday (actually, maybe those days are now) so I would have been all over this. I bet it looked dreadful unpainted though…

Here’s a truly awful video game ad from the same year:

Could that have really sold cartridges? I find it amusing today, since games have gotten so much easier than they once were and I imagine advertising the difficulty of your game now would be a certain way to ensure failure!

Speaking of games…

I’d love to see a word game based on Phoenix!

The above half-page ad skirts as close as possible to the Transformers appearances and trademarks without infringing. I wonder if the marketing department at Marvel had any qualms about running ads (seemingly) for bootleg merchandise?

What about ‘Spacetubes’??! Who even knew these things even had names? They are still available today, sold under all sorts of names (‘Wonder Wand’, ‘Glitter Rod’ etc.) but ‘Spacetube’ is coolest don’t you think?

Enough with the professional big-budget (?) ads. Let’s get to the weird stuff found in the classifieds. How’s this for a start:

As my only comment, I’ll direct you here.

Speaking of ads that would have appealed to 12-year-old me:

As an ex-professional breakdancer, I must admit that I didn’t even know half of the moves named in that advert even existed!

Now I’m no exobiologist, but I reckon that looks more like a helium balloon with some paper taped to it than an actual alien. I will admit though that the ‘obeys your commands’ line intrigues me. I suspect fishing line and a hook in the ceiling!

The tiny ads in these comics can be divided broadly into categories. The vast majority of them are for comic stores selling back issues, and then we have the ‘selling weird stuff’ ads, the ‘pyramid scheme’ ads (sell 20 boxes of cards and get free toys!) and the ‘selling a dream’ ads. All these next examples are from the last category…

The Dream: You buy the plans and end up with an awesome tree fort in your own backyard!
The Reality: You show the plans to your dad and he throws them away in terror.

The Dream: You become a poultry magnate, world-renowned for the quality of your guineas.
The Reality: Your dad takes you to KFC for dinner, and discards the brochure when you are asleep.

The Dream: You develop awesome powers to defend yourself against the dark arts.
The Reality: The only magic here was the speed at which you were conned.

The Dream: You get a girlfriend. Finally!
The Reality: Actually this one’s good. How could love advice obtained from a shady advert in a comic book possibly be bad?

So in what series did these ads run? Well I’m not going to tell you, but I’m going to give you the change to guess. The books span 3 years and are drawn by a range of artists. If I posted scans of the main character wearing his iconic outfit you’d know immediately what the comic was, so here’s three shots of him in civilian dress. From these, can you guess the series?

First to guess the series gets all fifteen books for Christmas 🙂

Posted in Art, Books & Comics, Otaku, Time, Toys | 3 Comments »

My Very Own Opera House

Tuesday, September 16th, 2014

That’s the Sydney Opera House. It’s world famous. You all know it. Everyone knows it!

Thanks to the support of JBF and JAF, it was time to build my own. Here’s what it looked like in the box:

And what was inside:

The real Opera House is constructed of millions of kilograms of steel and glass and concrete, not to mention (exactly) 1,056,006 ceramic tiles. My version is a bit smaller, composed of only 2989 pieces of plastic. It won’t be less grand though!

The original Opera House was built in three distinct stages: The base/podium, then the roof, then the interiors. My version was build in four stages: Stage 1, 2, 3 and 4. Here’s a shot of the beginning of construction of Stage 1:

Here’s what Stage 1 looked like upon completion:

It may look simple enough, but there is some radical and unprecedented construction innovations in that piece of the podium, much like in the version in Sydney.

Here’s some in-progress shots:

Construction of the real Opera House took 15 years and ended up horribly behind schedule (by ten years in fact) and over budget (by more than 14x the original estimate of $7 million). Construction of my opera house had it’s ups and downs as well, not the least of which being a lack of necessary parts. A quick call to a supplier (otherwise known as ‘LEGO customer service’) remedied that problem but resulted in a delay of over two weeks inserted into the middle of construction. All told, I’d estimate about 20-25 hours were needed to finish it.

The original Opera House is 180 meters long and 65 meters high. My version is about 60 cm long and 25 cm high! In fact, it’s about as long and tall as Yossie and weighs about as much as well!

I loved making this kit, probably the most of any Lego kit I have ever made. Given my love for the original building, I can’t imagine how Lego may top this one. Unless they make the Sydney Harbour Bridge!

So how do I display such a massive piece? Well for now, like this:

Posted in Blog, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Tech, Toys | 5 Comments »

(Long Live) The Playstation Vita (Is Dead)

Monday, August 11th, 2014

Earlier this year I purchased one of these:

It’s the Playstation Vita, which is their followup game system to the PSP. It actually came out quite some time ago (December 2011), but I held off buying one simply because there was nothing on it that tickled my fancy. The game that eventually lured me enough was TKX by Jeff Minter:

There’s a lot to like about the Vita. It’s solidly built, has very nice controls (especially the dual sticks), is solid state only (which means no silly discs like the PSP) and has a beautiful screen. And when I say beautiful, I mean beautiful. To save costs Sony has actually downgraded the screen in newer models to an LED, but the first version (and the one I have) includes an OLED screen which is simply the brightest and highest resolution screen on anything I own. Yes it means the battery life is abysmal (maybe 2 hours) and the unit is quite heavy but I’d say the tradeoff is worth it for the great screen.

The problem with the Vita is, well it’s that it’s pretty much a dead system.

What does that mean? It means that here in America retail support for the system has floundered, and interest amongst consumers is at an all-time low. Few games are released for the system and those that are don’t have any sort of wide appeal. Furthermore, there are no games at all scheduled after November this year and Sony themselves have said they will release no games themselves. By this time next year I very much doubt this system will be in stores, if produced at all.

And yet these past few weeks I’ve been having more fun with my Vita than any of my other game systems! These ‘no wide appeal’ games infrequently coming out are mostly niche Japanese RPGs which mean they’re my game of choice and I’ve been snapping them up! Games like…

Demon Gaze, an awesome Wizardry clone featuring a complex game system and fabulous graphics…

Toukiden, the closest game every to capture the magic of Monster Hunter. The screenshot above shows how impressive the graphics of the Vita can be in an AAA game…

Persona 4 Golden which I haven’t played yet (it’s next on my list) but if it’s anywhere near as good as Persona 3 on the PSP will be a gem!

There’s many more, and most of the remaining games are of this genre as well. Even if nothing else is released after November, I’ll still have a library that will take me a year or more to finish (assuming I ever stop playing Toukiden). For a dead system, that’s not so bad!

So what killed the Vita? It was an also-ran outside of Japan, where it seemed to immediately inherit the niche market from the PSP. Western exclusives were nonexistent and ports from PS3 games (such as Borderlands 2) were flawed. Obviously competition from the 3DS (especially Capcom’s choice to move Monster Hunter to 3DS) and tablets/phones hurt as well. But ultimately the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of Sony, who for many many years now have demonstrated they have no idea how to market a handheld outside of Japan.

Rest in Peace Vita. You may be a dead system and simply not know it yet, but I’m going to be playing you for a long time yet!

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

Liger Zero!

Tuesday, July 8th, 2014

Over a month ago, I started building this:

It’s my first ‘ZOIDS’ model kit, and was easily the most expensive kit I have ever bought. I knew getting into it that this was no toy, and that assembly may prove challenging, but then I’ve made challenging kits before and looked forward to it.

Here’s what the contents looked like before I started putting it together:

That’s a lot of pieces! In total there were 28 sprues in 6 colours. Much like the advanced Gundam kits, some of the plastic was flexible (mostly used for joints) and the kit is designed to be assembled without glue. There are 13 pages of instructions with 77 unique steps, and the kit is assembled in 4 distinct sections (head, body, legs, tail).

I started with the head and immediately noted a problem: the instructions are printed quite small. My eyesight is changing, and I’m finding I don’t need my glasses anymore for near vision. However I’m stubborn and don’t want to take them off so I struggled with working on this since I found it quickly hurt my eyes. (Many of you now I know are saying “Why didn’t he just remove his glasses???“)

So construction was completed in many steps of perhaps 2 hours each, spread over an entire month. It was challenging, but a lot of fun.

First to be completed was the head:

The complexity of this kit is staggering. The head alone has 38 pieces in it, and 5 points of articulation. The mouth and cockpit open, and the jets on the side and frill on the top can be positioned. By the time I had finished this piece it was clear I was building a kit with an incredible level of detail.

The two tools you see above were indispensable. The cutters to remove pieces from the plastic, and the file to smooth them down. Such is the precision in this kit that even submillimeter bumps are significant. If you make a Zoid, be sure to have the right tools.

For a month or so my work table looked like this:

You can see by the above point I had also finished the body:

That’s not a rigid piece. It can bend and elongate, and all the joints are articulated as well. Many dozens of pieces went into it, including the smallest one in the entire kit:

That’s just absurd!

The legs took the most time of all the sections:

Each leg contains a whopping 78 pieces! They are even more articulated than the rest of the kit and there are significant differences between the front and rear legs. Compared to all this the tail was simple, and then it was time to put it all together:

Or, in a rather more dramatic pose:

Looks great doesn’t he? The finished kit is about 20 cm long and stands 12 cm at the shoulder. According to the instructions, the actual Liger Zero is a mighty 84 meters in length and weighs 85 tonnes!

Such is the engineering of this model that painting is hardly required, and in fact the instructions seem to mention it only as an afterthought (they give the paint codes for the plastic used, rather than show a repainted version). However the armor is detachable and Kotobukiya actually sells (not inexpensive!) armor upgrade kits if you want to convert your Liger Zero into Liger Zero Panzer (green, with a back-mounted cannon) or other variants. Fascinating.

My next kit will be another Musha Gundam that I purchased in Japan last year. It will be another time consuming and precise build that may wait until next Summer. After that, who knows?

Posted in Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys | 2 Comments »

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