April Paintball quicknotes

Well, the April edition came and went (ok, so it's actually March for another 24 hours or so). No photos in this entry because it's early Saturday and I'm busy packing up for a week of down-time.

Let's see, I need to play more aggressively. I think about half-way through the evening, I figured out that if I was going to get hit eventually anyway, I should just down mach-2 with my hair on fire (you win 2 points if you can tell me where that expression comes from). So at that point, seeing as I had already split the cost of an extra bag of ammo with a friend and he was using more of the extra than I was... I started shooting more often and charging the field earlier. And quite honestly, besides the fact that I was vaguely aware of spending more balls, I was having a lot more fun.

Sadly however, despite attempting to lead a sweeping advance on the opposite team, I did not "christen" my new gear. Weirdguy's brother-in-law showed up with our box of goodies that had arrived just that morning. So decked out in my olive-drab VForce Pofiler and matching Empire Invert (07) gloves, I was hoping to get a photo-worth splatter on me... which never happened. I also wore my JT neck-protector which is kind of an odd thing for me.

In my previous game I was struck in the throat and I figured either I look like a wimp and wear this little maxi-pad thing on my neck, or I risk getting hit there again. And of course, the odds are against being hit there again... but who'd take that chance, right? Naturally I wasn't hit in my face, hands, or neck last night. So no glory-photos of me were taken. *sigh*.

Anywho, I'm definitely looking forward to the next outing.... I'm in pain all over right now, but it's a good pain.

Some more useless stuff

You know I don't know whether to be pleased this week or just frustrated. Weirdguy finally got word that our paintball equipment had finally shipped but everyone's sort of in a foul mood because they took so long to send out our stuff that we're not even sure if we'll have our gear for tomorrow evening's activities.

But I did finally get my camera (which I keep telling everyone, is an upgrade no matter how cheap it was). And I'm only sad to report that to date (2 days later) I still haven't figured out if the driver is not set up right or what because I can't seem to browse the internal memory as a drive (is this even possible? or do I have to have a separate memory card in there?) All I know is that the Kodak software is just a tad on the "for dummies" side and I hate that sort of thing. I prefer to feel like I'm in control. When I software suite doesn't even let me drag and drop my own files, I don't feel like I'm in control.

Went to Best Buy this afternoon looking to purchase an SD card. On mrbabou's advice however, I ended up deciding not to splurge on the cheapest card I could find. I've decided to save up and get a hi-speed one to take advantage of the fact that my camera can take video as well.

Wandered next door to Futureshop and then splurged... because flash memory there was even more expensive. I did find that games and DVDs were cheaper. Never understood that about these two stores in direct competition with each other - and they're both run by the same parent company. I picked up Afterburner for the PSP and the final DVD set of Justice League Unlimited. I'll tell you about the game some time but for now I'm sort of on the fence about whether or not it was a good buy or not.

Anyway, I have the rest of the evening to veg out so I'll go watch a couple of episodes of Ghost in the Shell. It's a strange feeling to realize that maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was. Think of Stand Alone Complex as a police-drama with political-thriller added in plus a little bit of sci-fi cyber-punk action thrown in. But I can't get over how many layers the plot piles on over the span of how many episodes. This'll be my third time going through the set of DVDs I own and I'm still discovering new story points and clues that I didn't see the first two times. I'm loving it.

Photo-blogging

Yup - the courier delivered my new camera yesterday (but I wasn't home, so I went to pick it up at the depot today; I wish they'd default to a location a little closer tho - I drove across town because my postal code happens to be considered Gloucester even tho I live closer to Nepean.

So here I am playing with the hi-res shots... too hi-res, in fact. I've shrunken the image size down to 25% in order to be more web-friendly. Click on them to take a look at the actual images. First up, the big 18-inch Ultraman I got very recently (my old 1.3mp camera would never have been able to capture this close-up).


Now some of those mini "Revoltech" series figures I got a few months back...

The shelves... - I've posted this sort of thing before, but never with close-ups with this kind of resolution.

Nike-ranger?!

I have no words for this... just... watch it.

Tube Mysteries

Besides things still on the wait list from Amazon I have 2 orders in the tubes and both have been behaving strangely.

Firstly, WeirdGuy tells me he hasn't heard any news about the last batch of paintball equipment. Order was placed over a week ago but there's been no shipping confirmation. I was hoping to get my stuff before next Friday when we booked the local arena for another night of speed-ball games.

Secondly, I hadn't known (but I should've guessed) Dell is using Purolator for their shipping. Which, had I known, I would've told them my shipping address was my office. But as it stands, I'm going to have to call them to tell them to redirect my digital camera to the local depot for me to pick up on my way home from work. I hate these kinds of detours. On the bright side, the depot isn't far from the comics shop. ^_^;
As for it being in the Tubes - I never got a shipping confirmation by email. But when I checked on-line this morning, it apparently went out yesterday afternoon from Toronto... so I'm kinda hoping that the Paintball supplier did the same - sent out the stuff without notifying anyone.

Firefox add-on: Imagebot

Somebody once asked me indirectly about posting images on a blog. But Blogger is one of those ones that is nice enough to host pictures too so I don't have to rely on an external hosting service. I do run another blog that isn't so handy (actually this happens a lot on web forums too).

You could go with Photobuckey or Imageshack (I like Imageshack myself; no particular reason). But the catch is when you're in the middle of posting an entry, you need another browser window open to upload and view the HMTL link for each picture you might want to add.

Enter Imagebot - a plug-in for Firefox (they call them "add-ons") ...come to think of it, why am I even explaining this? If you're not using Firefox, you should be. In fact, the ONLY downside I've ever experienced is that the find bar (CTRL+F) has trouble with searching text boxes (like the one I'm typing in for this blog at right now); but I'm getting off-tangent.

Imagebot can be accessed either as a seperate floating window or as a browser tab. The easiest way to use it is to drag'n'drop picture files from your desktop (or wherever) right into the "Upload centre" and it does all the work for you. And if there's ever an error status, just right-click on it and choose "reupload" to try again.

So far there's only 1 catch I've found with this system - it appears to start a brand new album for you so if you were already a regular user of said image-host services, you're previously uploaded images won't appear in the Imagebot's collection of images. Too bad.

So anyway, I give Imagebot a thumbs up. Check it out!

Reaction: "Lonely Soldier Boy"

Out of the tubes came Michael Bradley's new CD, "Lonely Soldier Boy" today! If you've been following the craziness, you can appreciate that it's a miracle that this album actually made it out to the public. Fate must have a sense of humour because she would deliver the album shortly after the release of the Shadow Chronicles. For my part, I ordered my copy the moment as soon as it was available. So what does my curiosity get me?

Lonely Soldier Boy is an odd little curio in terms of musical history. It's a remix album ...sort of. Michael Bradley was the mind behind much of the music in Robotech from about half-way through the original run. In this project he's gone back to the source material and rerecorded pretty much everything from the ground up and provided new studio arrangements. For the most part, it turns out rather well too. It doesn't stray too far from source and you basically wind up with a adult-contemporary pop-rock album... I could easily imagine Michael Bradley's ensemble covering the likes of Sting or Savage Garden.

It does however stumble on a few points. Unfortunately no matter how you look at it, the fact remains that these are songs that were written for a cartoon in the 80's. The lyrics and subject matter all point to its origins as a show soundtrack ...almost an opera in its own way. I never really did like the lyrics to We Will Win even back then (Bradley should've left well enough alone; particularly since this wasn't one of his). "In My Heart" and "Lonely Soldier Boy" (the title track) however nails both nostalgia and timelessness. I'd kill to hear these performed live.

On a related note, Michael Bradley takes a risk on the edge of cheesiness with a "live" recording of "It Don't Get Any Better." This had always been an anthem for Robotech and was also "performed live" by his character Lancer in the show. Unfortunately, it feels rather artificial and forced. I think it feels so because this album is a Michael Bradley album and not a Robotech album... You could probably get away with this if you were to believe this was Lancer performing the song for us. But we're 20 years removed and well, it didn't really work for me.

Having well established that we are indeed decades removed from the source however, the decision was thankfully made to include a few of the original demo tapes as bonus tracks. These are the raw pre-production recordings Michael Bradley brought to the execs before they were recorded in their final form as heard on the show. It's a wonderful look back as "what could have been" (for "what actually was" you'd need to track down the Robotech soundtrack, of course). I'm pleased to be able to say that the demos are remarkably well preserved and still sound pretty good as far as a recording from 1985 goes. I'm even more surprised to report that the demos included a few sound-effects dubbed in here and there - a cute touch.

Anyway, enough of me rambling on. Order it for yourself; it's not like it's particularly expensive. Come on now.

Weekend haul

Doing the layouts for this post would be a bitch so I'm going to just drop some notes for this week and then post a bunch of covers... As it stands, I've realized that more often than not, I'm at the comics shop to pick up just 2 or 3 issues every time so instead, I waited a few weeks since my last "weekend haul" (not counting last week when I got into that beautiful hardbound copy of Annihilation; oh right, I still owe you a review, don't I?).

So here we go in no particular order:

Wonder Woman #5: Wow - after lengthy delays between each bi-monthly issue, the stand-alone side-story about a women's shelter hits the shelves only a month early! It's jarring - I'm not sure what DC meant accomplish by releasing this because there's another month to go before the final issue of the ongoing "Who is Wonder Woman?" story would have been scheduled. A nice diversion but ends up opening a door for more questions than answers.

Wetworks #6: For some reason I keep getting this title even tho it's one of the more forgettable stories. I'm sorry, but Portacio's art just isn't cutting it anymore. It used to be that he fit right in with the Marvel style of the early 90's (he had a VERY successful run on Uncanny X-Men back then but for some reason, his emphasis on extreme line-work is getting on my nerves. Maybe it's the inker he's working with, I'm not sure. And the plot has been so fragmented lately even this issue started with a narration from the supporting cast to recap what had gone on before. Now that's really dragging things out.

Worldstorm #2: Yeah, another one of those damn "promo" specials. At least this time they did away with the stupid pin-ups and gave us 2 solid short-stories. I haven't kept up to speed with the Wildstorm comics leading up to the Worldstorm event so I'm a little out of the loop. When did Voodoo become a cold-blooded killer? I mean... huh? This does not seem to be the same one we met post reboot in the new Wildcats series - speaking of which, where the hell is issue 2 of that? It's been like 5 months already. The second story cameos Savant and reintroduces several classic Stormwatch members.

Stormwatch PHD #5: Cool - a flashback episodes! Not a recap, but it does go back and fill in the blank spaces in the WSU we've been expected to "just roll with" - like why several dead characters from pre-reboot appear alive and well post-reboot. Some reviewers hated the fill-in artist. I liked it.

WS Finearts Spotlight J.Scott Campbell: Heh ... yes, one of those "promo" specials I hate so much. But it's a guilty pleasure. My favourite comment is from Campbell himself who refers to Fairchild's thong costume as a "wedgy" and "cringe-worthy." Then he very breifly admits that back in the 90's, such character designs were very acceptable and expected. Hey, I might be stuck in a time loop because I still think sexy women in comics is okay. ^_^;

The Authority #2: hooray, we finally actually meet the Authority in the second issue (did I mention how weird it was to have the entirety of the first issue act like a prologue and nothing more?)... And that was at least 3 months ago... I'm surprised it picked up so easily. Alternate universe and all that stuff is okay if you add in a little nod to the fans - members of the Authority stop by a local comics shop and pick up some collected trades of themselves... ^o^

Midnighter vs. Grifter #1: another "prologue" type issue 1. At least it gave us some brutal action to start with... And revealed that Grifter is a telepath? What the heck? Another "did I miss something?" plot device.

Gen13 #6: Ah the prologue story is done. It's like Gail Simone (a great scripter by the way) decided to take her sweet time with her version of the Gen13 origin. Took 6 issue to do what the original did in 4. It's actually very creepy in a horror sci-fi kind of way but the pay off in this issue was so damn satisfying.

The 8thGen revisted

As I posted earlier, Producer Tsunku has dropped a bombshell on the JPop world by adding two foreigners to his Hello!Project headliners Morning Musume. Well, at the time I was still getting over the shock when I made my post so I didn't really have it in me to look up some pictures... so without further ado may I present the two "exchange student" members:

Li-Chun (aka: Jun-Jun)

And Qian-Lin (aka: Lin-Lin)

As a bonus - something I found floating on the RSS feed from Hello!Online: a link to a Youtube clip from this past weekend's episode of Hello!Morning. It shows how the girls reacted when they there told they'd be joining one of Japan's most successful pop groups and the reaction from the current members... They've even provided a translation of the clip! Link HERE!!

Reaction: 300

Well, I'm sitting in my house snowed in (yes, folks, in mid March and it's snowing out if you can believe it). So I figure to drop off some notes about a movie mrbabou and I went to see last night.

300 is about Spartans kicking ass. And this movie will kick your ass too. In fact, this review (spoiler free) actually nails it fairly succinctly. Gave me a good laugh while he was at it too. No really, it's basically about guys fighting. And man, they look good doing it. Frank Miller's works are very cinematic to begin with - but it remains strangely surreal to see it brought to life on the screen. In a backwards kind of way, it's actually a bit like watching a book unfold on the screen. If you've seen Sin City (another movie based on Frank Miller's work) then you know what I mean.

I should probably point out however that I haven't actually read 300 in its graphic-novel form. So I might nitpick a few things that readers have already simply come to accept. Firstly, the most obvious thing is that the story is told from the Ancient Greek's point of view. A lot of mysticism is portrayed in a life-like fashion. Beastly animals appear larger than life (elephants, rhinos, wolves). The "Oracle" literally floats in the air as if swimming underwater. An unstoppable berserker rips weapons lodged in his wounds out and continues to fight...
...but then strangely, there are plenty of moments when we are torn out of that world into modern day because some other elements are seen from our point of view. Leonides assures his wife that he's not distracted by the beautiful Oracle who he refers to as a "drunken teen." When the narration tells us the Persian army resorted to "magics" we see that they've been lobbing explosives. It's as though the story couldn't decide how to present the material.

Speaking of which, I'd also like to touch on the fighting itself. I've heard people ask, "was it really just 300 troops holding back the Persians?" Well, it's important to understand that these were 300 professional soldiers and in those times, a single pro was like 10 regular brawlers. And they even touch on that during the course of the film (other Greeks join the battle but Leonides tells them, "I brought more soldiers than you did." I also can't stand people who complain who don't pay attention when they watch movies...

One thing that did bug me a little was that the first part of the story focussed a lot on tactics. In fact, it's an important plot point as to why a certain character is rejected from the front-line. However, as story progressed, the fight scenes seem to depict the individual soldiers as solo brawlers just like the other Greeks (highly skillful fighters at that, but solo nonetheless).

Still, it's quite a masterful cinema experience. I only regret not arriving in time to get tickets for the IMAX presentation of the film.

The William F*cking Shatner Incident

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8th gen was incomplete?!

I don't know whether or not this is some kind of joke but it'd be amazing if it's true. Hello!Online reports that Tsunku has pulled a fast one on everyone and has decided to include a talent-search in Beigjing, China that running concurrent to the 8th Gen Morning Musume auditions in Japan!! That is, Mitsui Aika (who debuted on February's Egao YES! Nude single) will be joined by two new members ...Chinese members at that!!

One's the winner of the Chinese talent search and the other has already been recruited to the HEllo!Project Eggs development project. Read about it all here!!

Reaction: Breach

I went to see Breach last night. As I posted on my RSVP to meetup.com I'm not one to go out of my way to find a historical spy drama. But I was pleasantly surprised at how this film unfolded. There was none of the expected Hollywood "we must add a twist here" garbage we've all become accustomed to. The narrative follows a young aspiring FBI-Agent candidate as he gets embroiled in the biggest sp-counter-spy operation in American history. And just as suddenly, as the criminal is caught red-handed and arrested, the film draws to its conclusion. It rather felt like a dramatized documentary than anything else - something I'd watch on History Channel or perhaps even Discovery. For that, I liked it.

As for the meetup.com folks this event, it was a fairly engaging bunch. We walked over to a local grillhouse afterwards and chatted about other recent (or not so recent films) we'd seen and what we were looking forward to. Coming out of a spy-movie, it was also very convenient that one of us was an Iranian, and another a Pakistani - which allowed for some very interesting conversation about the state of world affairs. I appreciate a chance to have a half-decent conversation about something a little more cerebral... but I did get my chance to spew a little about comics what with the new Spider-man film coming this year.

Overall, a lot of fun. But I wouldn't do it too often in the future (not on a weeknight anyway). I didn't get to bed until midnight and well, I paid for it this morning.

My great big Tiga!

Well, there he came out of a big'ol cardboard box. These suckers retailed for a hundred bucks when they were released but I lucked out on a liquidation sale somewhere on-line for only $30; Sweatness! I don't think I'll keep him there, but for now Ultraman Tiga stands guard over Zero Prime. He's actually kinda creepy - I don't think I've ever had a toy figure quite this big before - he's easily 18 inches tall (give or take) and will not fit in my glass cabinet with my other robot toys...

Sadly, tonight also reminds me that I still need a new digital camera because all I had available to me for this was my cellphone. Eewww... I slapped some freshly charged batteries into my camera and it told me they were dead. Something is very wrong here.

BitLord out, utorrent in

It was fun while it lasted, but I have just confirmed that my ISP at home is throttling torrent traffic. Which ironically helps somewhat because I can indescriminently leave my torrents running and not worry about paying for over-limit bandwidth I might have used. But then, I'd just as easily prefer saving on my electricity bill by not having my PC on so much...

To that end, BitLord, which although has a very pretty GUI which is both powerful and intuitive (it was my first ratio-controllable torrent client), does not support data encryption.

utorrent however, does support encryption. By hiding the relevant information, the encryption fools the ISP into not recognizing torrent traffic when it sees it. The throttling isn't applied and presto: speeds increase dramatically. And I moved at least a couple of Gb last night (at a glance anyway).

A note to others who are considering switching over to utorrent: DHT tracking is on by default in this client. Some trackers don't like DHT, particularly community-site trackers where you are keeping score of you transfer ratios. DHT tends to screw with their tracker statistics so turn it off if you frequent these kinds of trackers.

where's my box?

Looks like I won't get my stuff until Tuesday evening after work. It seems that if a package arrives at Sorting around 4am, then it'll be out for delivery that day. If it arrives by 6:40am, then no, it's too late for that day. Anyway, as you can see by the Options, it'll take a signature, meaning the delivery will knock on my door on Monday while I'm at work, leave a notice, and then drop it off at the local mail office. And I, will arrive home on Monday, get my notice card, and then finally pick it up on the way home on Tuesday (assuming the office isn't open that early when I'm on my way to work).

On the bright side, I've been thoroughly entertained this weekend. A buddy from work loaned me his DVD of last year's big hit, "Bon Cop Bad Cop." As an "outsider" neither purely Anglophone nor anything resembling a Francophone, but being fluently bilingual, I couldn't help laughing at the blatant racism depicted in the movie - because it's so real. Unless you've lived in the parts of Quebec I have, you wouldn't believe how ignorant people can be when it comes to the language tensions. There ARE Anglophone "pocket" populations in Quebec and they somehow survive and remain incredibly heated about the issue... so it's not just the French who dislike the English. Trust me, it's more complicated than you think. But what a damn good film it makes.

I also spent about 4 hours playing Dawn of War last night. Not with the same people all night but still I was almost getting swamp-ass for it. mrbabou got his router troubles solved with some firmware upgrades. My brother showed up later. And surprisingly, WeirdGuy made it too... I had my doubts, between computer troubles and an insane loading time (for a little while, I thought he'd crashed and caused our game to go down with him), the scenario finally started up and we had a blast (I did anyway). It's not often I play with someone even less competent than me... LOL.

Found: Revenge of the Cold Machines

Never know what you wind up running into. I was over in Orleans looking for that hobby shop that carries "a little bit of everything" called Entertainment Ink. At a first glance it's a shop selling hockey memorabilia but in the back they've Warhammer stuff, comics, and manga... weird combination, but I won't argue if I got to knock another item off my want-list and add it to my reading backlog.

Anyway, to revisit my older post about finding "White Maze" (which was pretty good by the way; the author really captures the feel and pacing of a typical Ghost in the Shell adventure), I should point out that these novels are published by Dark Horse Press - an arm of Dark Horse Comics and not Tokyopop, sorry for the confusion. It's just that they're the biggest name in English-translated manga these days. Call me an old fart, but I remember when Tokyopop was busy stirring up controversy among hardcore anime/manga fans by "mirror-flipping" manga into western format and blowing up up in size so that they resembled western comic magazines. I can't believe that was 10 years ago.

Anyway, as usual, this will go to the bottom of the backlog stack because I also "Lost Memory" a while ago (did I mention that? It's the first release from before this one)... I will start that shortly; I'm still not done Dawn of War by CS Goto. Oh? Am I jumping all over? Sorry, I tend to do that when I'm excited about books I'm on... At least now I have something to read while I wait for Amazon to track down a copy of Ascension for me. It's frustrating to have a copy of Book 3: Tempest sitting on my shelf and to not be able to read it.

In the Tubes

For those interested in a relic of Robotech, Michael Bradley (the man behind a lot of the music from the second half of the original series) has finally announced his remix album. And in typical big-faceless-corporate fashion, Harmony Gold has placed a restraint on him using the name "Robotech" either on the cover or to promote the album (even though Tommy Yune, the head of the creative department at HG has been endorsing the project from the start). Bradley goes into exhaustive detail on his Myspace blog but at the same time is restrained in giving reasons why (probably for legal reasons). All we know is that after delaying the album, titled "Lonely Soldier Boy" for the most popular of the Robotech songs, is finally availble (currently exclusive on his web-site at www.michaelbradleymusic.com - and what a wait it's been. I placed my order this morning.

Also in the Tubes is my latest order at Amazon. It's odd that everything I order from there has a wait time associated with it. If it's not a DVD that's out of print, then it's a book that is just out of stock and takes a month to get in. But shipping is free and I'm getting my loyalty program points on my credit card so it beats running around town looking for stuff.

Since when did USPS tracking numbers work in Canada? My order from Matrix Collectibles (aka "Image Anime") shipped on Monday and I got an email telling me my order was shipped. It had a tracking number that I ignored because in my experience, a package from New York enters Canada in only a day or two and then USPS can no longer track the box (of course). Anyway, on a whim I checked the Canada Post tracking site and it seems they had a complete record for when the package shipped on Monday up to its arrival in town here. Maybe it'll get to my door today. Hooray.

Something about to go into the tubes is my order with Weirdguy who offered to take care of a bulk order of paintball equipment. Admittedly I am a paintball neophyte, but I most definitely am already sick of wearing a rented mask which has previously soaked countless others' sweat. Speaking of which, I should go pay him for the stuff now.

DoW textures revisited

Neat! Thanks go out to babou for this tip. By doing the usual Alt+PrintScr not only copies an image to the clipboard, but also generates a JPG to a "Screenshots" directory. Nice - makes my job a lot easier. I also discovered that I can remain rather stable even after turning up the textures setting - so my graphics wind up being a lot sharper than they were before. So here's a second look at my custom banners and (shoulder) badges.

Ottawa Senators army:
Montreal Canadiens army (they don't win that often!):
And my "Marines from Ultramar who are not to be mistaken for the Ultramarines" army:

What will $5 get me?

So I got another refund to my Paypal account again.

And it's only 5 bucks. I mean, what the heck? I just placed an order somewhere just to kill of $30USD? I'm not even sure why they did that... perhaps they recalculated my shipping or something. I'm thankful for that but still, talk about an exercise in futility.

On the other hand, I am glad to hear these guys shipped all my stuff. Among my goodies this time are another one of those out-of-print hard-to-find DVDs. And I lucked out to find a large 2-foot-tall statue of Ultraman Tiga for only $30! (They originally retailed for over $100, I'm told). Hooray for bargain hunting.

Gamenight afterglow

I wish there were an in-game facility to take screen shots. You know, something where you click a button and the game would automatically capture a screen and output it to a JPG picture file or something. Nothing as involved as copying to the Windows clipboard and then exiting the game to an image editing software to paste and save - I want something I can reasonably do on the fly in the midst of a game when I see something cool happening.

Ah well.

Last night babou, my brother, and I logged into the Cadian Gate to play a few skirmishes of Dawn of War (Dark Crusade expansions, naturally). I went with my Montreal Canadiens regalia (I lost... just like the real Habs!). Actually, we weren't having much luck in more ways than one.

Firstly, we decided since we were three players of varying degrees of experience (and ability), we went with a setup of cooperative play against some computer opponents. And since we were 3, we thought we'd ramp up the difficulty on the AI but start out outnumbering them 3 human players to 2 AIs. And anyone with experience knows that game AIs are usually hit-or-miss affairs. It did however turn out very difficult indeed (to a point where my brother confided to me, "it's like I haven't even had the chance to play yet.")

Secondly, mrbabou's ISP seemed to be acting up. In three attempts to play, he was dropped from the game all 3 times. And for myself, I'd be in the middle of an IM conversation and get dropped from there too. Weird. We'd never had that many technical problems before - this was highly unusual.

My brother and I stayed on to continue playing after babou gave up in frustration (I don't blame him, really, if it were me, I'd have probably wandered off to watch television or something too). Maybe I should write babou an email or something. Hopefully next time we'll be a little more stable.

On a side note, my brother reminded me that the Ultramarines chapter of the Adeptus Astartes hail from a planet called "Ultramar." And that's particularly funny because Ultramar also happens to be the name a gas station chain (and oil refiner) in Quebec and most of Eastern Canada where he subcontracts as a cleaner. So this is what I came up with this morning when I had some free time on my hands...

"We're Alive MY ASIA" single

I haven't blogged this single because it was sort of passé when it finally arrived in the mail. That, plus I wasn't immediately taken by the material itself either. I had sort of hoped that the 10^th Anniversary unit would've released a disco-flavoured pop blend in the vein of "Love Machine' (arguably their most successful single, if not their most popular or well-known single, ever). But instead we got Bokura ga Ikiru My Asia, soft-rock pop ballad.

For the record, the disco-pop came of the last single Egao YES Nude by headliners Morning Musume a month later.

But you know, this single did wind up growing on me. And the cover did too... (yeah, I got the limited edition issue):

Something most people haven't seen though, is the insert. The interior of the cover folded out to show 5 portraits of the Morning Musume members past and present chosen for this 10^th Anniversary project. I wanted to share this with you...

Knee in my Package

Yup, it's that time of year. Thanks, Rick Mercer.