Mix'n'Match Saber head!

As I posted previously, my absolute favourite selling point with the Saber Revoltech was that she's got a really awesome head. It's cute, has a relatively neutral expression good for a variety of "body language" poses, and it's got a great paint job... But the best is that its scale makes for a fun ani-manga "big-head" SD look when it's attached to a smaller Revoltech!! Enjoy the combinations I came up with. ^_^;



I can only hope that they do more "people" Revoltech models. I might be pursuaded to grab the "Evil Saber" repaint if only to get the alternate head...

Revoltech Saber

It's time for another weekend haul redux. (There's something to be said for getting more mileage by blogging it piecemeal!)

Tonight I'm showing off the "Generation 2" Revoltech Saber. Saber is a featured character in a story project known as Fate/Stay Night (originally just an interactive novel). I don't need to get into the details but Saber quickly warmed fans' hearts with her quirky (and anachronistic) mannerisms... besides which, she happens to be a rather cute in her own way. And that's before we get to her no-nonsense capacity with a sword.

As the story progresses we learn that she wields the legendary Excalibur. In Sabers hands, it's an invisible blade...

Appropriately, Kaiyodo saw fit to include a clear plastic version of the sword. But despite its inherent coolness, I had to get this picture of her inspired by the closing credit roll of the anime series..

.

If there's only 1 thing that bugs me about this set was that the optional sword was the only accessory in the box. Other than that, she's all there is to it. What makes for a Generation2 Revoltech, you ask?
Firstly, she's somewhat larger than the other Revoltech figures we've seen before. She stands nearly a head taller than the Type J-9 Griffon and as you can tell by her proportions, is somewhat bulkier. It's not just the armoured skirt that gives her bulk, either. Her legs are fully jointed allowing for much more dynamic poseability than the conventional Revoltechs. Same goes for the shoulders - replacing what was a cleverly angled swivel, it is now also a Revoltech-joint to simulate a ball-socket joint. Coincidentally, the introduction of ball-socket movement to the shoulder means that a revoltech-joint could be eliminated from the elbows... it's now a swivel joint and so the arm mimics actual human range of motion (prior to this, the upper arms acheived human-range by twisting the upper arm in odd contortions).

I think my absolute favourite feature turns out to be the sheer scale - which allows for a much more detailed face sculpt. Its perfection at a roughly 1/8 scale is stunning. Kaiyodo needs to do more of these Fate/Stay Night figures for the Revoltech line-up.

DL saga: final post (for real this time)

DL Conspiracy: Final Chapter

Two things... I'm going to go back and add a new "tag" type for this because when I started out documenting my troubles with Dual-Layer burning, I never imagined how many entries it would become. So, when you see those old blogs come up in your RSS, feel free to ignore them.

Anyway, I just wanted to report an addendum to the situation. Remember those Memorex DVD+R/DL that I bought? Yeah, the big 50-count spindle that I CANNOT use. Any ISO file imported to CloneDVD2 becomes a freezing, choppy, altogether irritating mess. And Nero makes a weird archive data disc that can only be read on the original burner.
You know what this reminds me of?...it reminds me of how Philips brand discs behave on my brother's laptop. It was completely incompatible. Could not burn to it at all (ISO file or otherwise).

But in an amazing turn, my brother successfully test-burned several ISO files this weekend using his laptop on the Memorex discs. Not only did they play back on his laptop, but they were readable in my two optical drives, and also in my living room DVD player. I gave them away to him.

So that about closes the book on this story. Memorex for him and Philips for me... I'm sure he will give the spindle a loving home.

Oni-Musume family reunion

This my lazy post for the week... I have no comments to say about her but that I'm just happy to have her finally home. Whatever the delay was, the local shop finally got some of the fourth Oni-Musume in stock. There really is no point to this post.

Reflections of Sunday

Trying to make something of the weekend in the city I brought
my family to the Dragon Boat races on Sunday morning after
breakfast. We didn't stay long - such is the reality of
dragging a senior citizen with you. But thankfully
porta-potties were aplenty and the weather was VERY
cooperative... The races themselves were... I don't know. I
only watched one and I thought it was interesting to know these
people trained hard to compete. But there was something
lackluster in the crowd - kind of hard to cheer for something
you have no stake in. Then we wandered around the park taking in the sights (the zoo folks were out with some crocs and snakes; that wasn't something you see every day).
Afterwards my brother and I went downtown to scour the shops
for goodies. And we ran head-long into the rib-fest. The weather was still cooperating. Sunny but a decent breeze and no humidity to speak of.We hit my usual haunts plus a special stop at the Running Room for my brother to grab his free T-shirt (we tore a coupon off a box of Vector cereal that morning). For my own treat, I found a Revoltech figure at Silver Snail and then we went off following our noses...
I suppose some vendors were worth waiting for, but really, I'm not a connoiseur, so I mostly ignored all the trophies the different teams had on display. I wanted to support the local team (local being a Canadian competitor) but they had a line-up of over 30 people! So I went "next-door" (I think they were from Florida) and I ordered a full rack for $20 plus a side of coleslaw and beans. I split it with my brother.
The only thing that bugs me is that the locals are obviously taking advantage of the situation because a convenience store sold me a bottle of Coke for $2.50... I must have been pretty high on something since I paid without complaining.

a non-update

Things coming this week.

A brief look at the UFS game system. I got into this CCG very recently and I'm loving it because every deck is playable out of the box (the catch is... you gotta have someone to play with). But it's reasonably easy to learn. I got new decks...

A photo-entry on Oni-Musume 4... Yes, I'm a sad fan-boy. But not as sad as that weirdo freak who totally lost it at the local EB while I was buying a used copy of Soul Calibur 3...

What's in the tubes... my plans for Amazon. Some observations on why I'm not supporting the locals as much any more.

A photo-entry for Saber from Fate/Stay Night in Revoltech form. No comments required.

General happenings around town this weekend.

Upcoming topics will not necessarily appear in that order. :p

Tooling Mozilla

OK, so this is old news but it's useful info because it still applies. After all this time, Firefox2.0 is still a memory-hog. And basically, the same problem seems to occur in all Mozilla-based products. If you do a Ctrl-Alt-Del, click the Processes tab and take a look at your heaviest memory users, firefox.exe and thunderbird.exe almost always place in the top 5... I've got a few tabs open as I put this post together so the browser is definitely on the heavy side at the moment. Check out the article at Computer World.com posted last spring. (Watch out, there are pop-ups, but if you're running Firefox, they'll be blocked of course).

The Firefox diet is pretty simple. The idea is to stuff as much of the memory to virtual memory on the hard drive as you can if the browser is not being used.

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

Now every time you minimize and then maximize the browser window, the system will refresh its memory requirements. It's well worth the effort, because on a clean-startup, Firefox takes just under 60Mb of RAM; almost twice the amount of juice required for Internet Explorer!

The article went on to mention that this trick also works in Thunderbird. Here things get a little bit trickier because you need to find the Config Editor. So instead of Step 1 above, in Thunderbird, click Tools then Options. Then click the "Advanced" icon. There's a button at the bottom right for "Config Editor."Thunderbird's default startup for me takes about 32Mb and then drops as far as 11Mb of RAM usage with this trick. Mind you, it will jump up and down as you work with your applications, but that's normal.

bargain bin DVDs

I'm a Trekkie at heart - been one for as long as I can remember. Even as far back as when I can remember that I didn't necessarily understand what was happening on the screen, I still liked to watch the colourful costumes and oddly-shaped space ships.

But I do have my favourites and my not-so-favourites. You know, the ones where I felt wasn't worth the effort (or money) to get on DVD. Well, I stumbled on a 3/$18 offer at Wal-mart today. And that's 3 of those 2-disc "special edition" releases. So that actually works out to $3 per disc (and in some circles, that's about the price of a single Dual-Layer disc). So, overall, if you ask me, it's not going to get much cheaper than this.

So I finally picked up Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Star Trek First Contact, and Star Trek Insurrection. They are, as far as I'm concerned, the "second-tier" installments of the franchise (don't debate me, this isn't the post for it).

What's interesting is that these sets have been discounted for a long time. In fact, I recall when Nemesis came out it wasn't much more than $14 brand new at Futureshop, IIRC. But I wonder if Wal-mart got its hands on some reprint releases or something. For one, I'm 90% sure the original releases (for the other films, I have anyway), all came with inserts featuring photos and stuff. Secondly, I noticed that this set of First Contact (and Undiscovered Country as well) did not have the silk-screened colour labels on the discs, instead getting the plain laser-cut matte grey treatment. I'm going to have to remember to ask mrbabou about this (because I'm pretty sure I recall him saying he'd bought a legit copy of First Contact before). Hmm...

But like I said, at $3 a disc, that's almost "Chinatown pricing" if you know what I mean.

getting a mouthful

This post is for everybody except Weirdguy (who is keeping an archive of our paintball photos already)...
And in case you're wondering: paint "fill" tastes a bit like a LOT of cornstarch mixed in water. It's bitter. But really, I couldn't actually taste much because my mouth was numb from the shock of the impact.

Oni-Musume 3 comes home

Here she is, Oni-Musume 3 by Monsier Bomé. It's a strange thing to look back at. Knowing the series of "demon-girls" would continue, I had decided to celebrate moving into my new house by finally busting out the X-acto knife and neatly freeing my Oni-Musume figures from their mint-in-package condition. I put them up in my cabinet and left an empty spot ready for the third in the series to join them. That was about 7 months ago.

I don't know what the real story is (someone even told me that it was a production problem. I don't know. Whatever it was, the January release dates came and went. E-tailers claimed they were "sold out" and my local comics specialty shop still after many months had the original Diamond Comics Distributors ad posted on their wall.

Well, here we are in June... and I brought her home at the earliest chance I had. I'm a little miffed by the way, that my "pimp shirt" for The Comic Book Shoppe does not extend to The Anime Stop. Had I known this, I would have gone ahead and asked at the downtown location to get one of these (which does not distinguish between their anime merchandise and the regular comics). But that's just a minor quibble. I'm just happy she's finally here.

Damage Toteboard

I played our June edition of the Weirdguy Invitational Series last night. It was hot and muggy out, sweaty and disgusting in, but we have lots of fun. So much fun that I didn't even take out my camera during the evening (didn't really have time to think about it). But here is the damage tally. LOL.

Here's a hit to my sternum (and an almost-third nipple):
I came out of one game where Kid asked me, "where did I get you?" To which I said, "everywhere, @$$hole!":Here's where I realize how much I've gotten used to wearing a long-sleeved shirt under my game jersey. I'm not even sure when this happened, but my forearm is swollen. What the heck?!
My new paintball pants performed great. I slid into bunkers, got at least a couple of lucky "bounces" where paint didn't break open. And unfortunately, because it doesn't hurt as much, I was unaware of just how often I was hit!
I will post again soon because one of my fellow players got a very entertaining shot of myself spitting out paint after I was hit directly in the mouth-area on my mask.

One not-so-funny bit of damage was that I found out after I got home and stripped down was that my convertible "camping" pants have taken another victim. I got these pants several years ago at MEC - they're a synthetic material that keeps me warm but reasonably cool on a hot day. And of course, they turn into shorts when it's really hot out. Well, I was wearing these yesterday for "casual Friday" but since it was paintball night, I was also wearing my Under Armor boxer-briefs... Well, there's a label sewn in the back-pocket area inside these pants and on anything else, it's not noticeable. But for microfiber-like materials...
I don't know what I was thinking wearing this combination. But suffice to say, the label snagged on my Under Armour shorts and has given it a worn-out rough patch... Ugh. I don't believe this. I have a love-hate relationship with these pants but right now I'm really hating them. ~_~;

Gaming Neophyte

I seem to have reverted in video gaming skill recently... What happened?

I tried playing Dawn of War after a little break (not counting team skills like Saturday night with mrbabou). I'm talking about 1-on-1 small maps against an AI. I suck. I set the AI to "Hard" to give myself a challenge. You can't improve if you keep playing easy modes. But I have gone 0 in 4 in the last few days. That's got to be a record for sucking at an RTS.

Last night I started to seriously tackle Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex on PS2. It's an old game I picked up some time ago for 10 bucks minus a discount for using my Edge card at EB-Games. Anybody remember Oni when PS2 launched? Well, the setup is almost identical but with slightly better graphics.
Sadly, I didn't make much progress before either: A) getting bored, and B) getting frustrated. And why couldn't I find any save points after a full 20 minutes of play? At least I've solved every puzzle up to the point where I quit (that is, there were little things like how to get past a certain obstacle that required multiple jumps, etc). So running through the same areas won't be such a chore the second time around.

But there was a time I'd have run right through that first level before deciding to quit.

PS: also doesn't help matters that the GitS game, is a third-person 3D shooter with a camera that moves even faster than a first-person shooter. I suffer from accute vertigo when I play these kinds of games so about 30 minutes is the absolute maximum I can handle anyway.

more gear

If you've been by the other blog today you'll know that I probably won't be buying miscellany for another little while. But as it stands, my latest paintball gear (paid for weeks ago) finally arrived and Weirdguy dropped off my stuff for me. Firstly is something I wanted because I reacted to the stock neck with "this can't be right, it's so tight it's not humanly possible to put on and take off the hopper." So I bought an adjustable one. Given the choice I went with the first-party "Q-Lock."

As shown above, it's almost half the size of the stock neck bringing the profile of my marker down almost a full inch. Here's a picture of what my marker looks like with the new neck installed. Hmm... maybe I should've put on the barrel to give it some context. My reaction to the neck: what was the point of the lever? I was under the mistaken impression that I'd be able to quickly flip the lever open and close to install the hopper. But not so, it's just there to give the neck a bit of additional clamping power. I still need to have an Alan wrench handy to tighten and loosen the clamp. Kind of defeats the purpose of the lever, if you ask me. There's nothing "quick" about this "quick-release" at all.

The other thing I was glad to finally get my hands on were my pants. I really wanted to take a shot of myself actually wearing the pants but nothing I took turned out so... here they are hanging off a stool in the kitchen.
The odyssey of the paintball pants is a strange one. I knew which design I wanted well before I made up my mind to actually get them. One too many slides in slimy paint-drenched turf convinced me to do so. The problem was that nobody seemed to be sure what size these things were. I read conflicting info about how Empire's sizes were "too large" and even the official product site at InvertPaintball.com is annoyingly ambiguous. I had to Google a sizing chart from a third-party retailer to find out that a 34-inch waist was a "Medium." Which, 90% of the time is correct... unless you're looking at Nike product, which seems to cater to very tall and very slim people.
Anyway, who to trust? I took a chance. And when I tried them on today, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief - they fit perfectly!

You know what gets me going tho? Inside the waist is a label... clearly marked "M - 32-34" which means there is an intended waist size for these! But why doesn't anyone advertise this fact?

new mistakes in the biz

It's not that I haven't been paying attention, but the headlines have been coming so damn fast in recent weeks I never even had time to gather my thoughts on Hello!Project getting turned upside down in the last month. I was actually due for another DOM j-pop idol post but... well, okay, let's see if I can make this a DOM post and an editorial all at the same time (I really need a life).

So yeah, a little while ago it seemed Kago was in the middle of working a desk job at Up Front Agency (UFA) and things were looking up - that she'd be back on stage if she earned her keep around the office. I suppose I can see the positive reinforcement theory there... but I can also see how humiliating this could be for a 19 year old. So it doesn't surprise me that she'd have run off and get caught hanging out with a man twice her age... leading to her permanent dismissal from UFA. And I'm thinking, what a waste...

Which left Tsuji Nozomi to finally get off her arse and get set up for a new group (which totally turned me off when I found out it'd be a "Ganguro" themed act. Which later was a moot point because she went and got herself pregnant! (and you thought Kago had made a big mistake). So she's out (not fired, miraculously) for the summer at least with plans to get married with some actor who plays Ultraman... and I'm like, Ultraman is my hero in more ways than one! ^_^;

Which left producer Tsunku in a pickle: what to do with that new project? So he goes ahead and replaces Tsuji with Abe Asami... sound familiar? She's Abe Natsumi's kid sister... I don't have a decent photo of Asami, so here's older sister Natsumi (who was originally going to be this month's DOM feature anyway).
But if you thought that was all crazy... then hang on to your hats because history has a tendency to repeat itself. Remember back when I posted about Yaguchi Mari many moons ago? Well to jog your memory, the short story is that Friday magazine published an exposé revealing that she'd been dating a prominent celebrity (and you know that's a strict no-no in the Japanese business of image control). She she quits, making her stint as team captain the shortest ever... a couple of months.

That was then...

...and this is now. Last week Friday (yes, the SAME magazine) broke the news that recently appointed "leader" Fujimoto Miki was seen on a 3-day romantic jaunt with this comedian friend. And had photographic evidence of her entering and leaving his apartment, etc... and all the while I'm thinking, "I'm a comedian; I make women laugh all the time... what could I be doing wrong?"

Anyway, so here's a Mikitty looking like there's absolutely nothing wrong (because there really shouldn't be). I guess what I'm trying to say is given the real-life ages of these girls, shouldn't the requirement to "graduate" Morning Musume be a little earlier, taking their civilian lives into account? It'd sure save on a lot of embarrassment for all parties concerned... I mean, really, Mikitty turns 22 this year... even if she hadn't been "Friday'ed" who wouldn't suspect she was looking for love (and possibly getting some)? No really, I mean it. Because coincidentally (or not) Yaguchi was also 22 when she was Friday'ed in 2005. In both cases their only true crime was getting caught.
I guess the saddest thing about that case, however, is the fact that Yaguchi and her boyfriend broke up a year and a bit later... which was probably just as well because she's started performing on stage again and was there at the 10th Anniversary concert.

But where does all this leave Morning Musume? Well for one thing, they have a new record: shortest tenure as team captain is now 25 days (Mikitty took over when Yossie officially graduated in early May). Oh, and of course, they get a new leader and subleader. That being Takahashi Ai (who I featured as the second ever DOM post) and Niigaki Risa... my how they've grown.

I'm just imagining both of them getting their butts fired in a year or two.