Another Order in the Pipes

I'm such an undisciplined fool - I keep telling myself, this is the last one, I swear. But naturally every few months something I previously missed gets reissued... like say the Takara Masterpiece MP-01 Convoy from a couple of years ago. Hasbro released a version you may be familiar with - he even made an appearance on Robot Chicken for a prostate cancer clip... the 20th Anniversary Optimus Prime.

But that's not what I'm talking about today! With the Canadian dollar hovering at around 90 cents relative to the mighty US dollar, and Toy-Wave offering it at a sale price, and the planets realigning themselves, the time was right to place my order for the 1/48 scale set of GBP-1S pack.No, the actual robot toy doesn't come with it (I already have one), it's just the set of add-on parts. And yes, it does almost cost as much as the 'bot itself. I know - I'm a frickin' geek.
Paypal was sent this morning to my favourite overseas e-tailer. I can't frickin' wait.

Elitist DVD: Patlabor the Movie

Since I had mentioned it, I thought I would share some pictures of what made me think it was such a big deal. For one, it's a limited edition of 10 thousand (actually, realistically, this is still a fairly large number); mine is marked as 4346.

Firstly Patlabor the Movie is one of the first serious anime I've had the pleasure to watch - that was around 1994 when I stumbled on it while visiting my local HMV music store. In fact, HMV remains one of the driving forces in bringing anime to the masses (back then it was the domain of underground networks of fans trading VHS tapes by mail). I have a special love for this particular police drama because of that.

Secondly, this edition features the recent Dolby 5.1 remixed audio tracks (both in Japanese and a new English dub). But enough of that - let's get to the goodies of the LE edition!

It came in a heavy package with a resealable plastic wrapper like Japanese media usually does. My box was a little dented, but the card stock is about 1/8-inch thick, so it hardly bothers me...
Here's what came inside the slipcase: two books and a fancy dual-DVD digipak.
The first book is very cool for old-school fans like myself. It's a documentary-style look at behind-the-scenes of developing the movie including interviews and rare artwork by the designers.
The other book is a fan's dream: a complete set of the storyboards including translated dialogue. BTW, there you can also see the digipak opened up with the second documentary bonus disc that was not included in the regular edition.

It's all about the timing

There's always a time to buy - but some times are better than others. I just scored the Patlabor Movie LE DVD for just over $60 because I was tipped off late last night night that Best Buy was having their 24-hour-everything-on-sale deals. And since this wasn't a "web-only" item, I had them "ship" to an in-store pick-up location. The best about this situation? I originally planned to buy it today after work anyway. Oh, and I also get Canadian Tire money on my Mastercard for this purchase. ^_^;

Other fun stuff - I laugh in the face of financial uncertainty. Ha Ha Ha... ahem.

I picked up Karaoke Revolution Party this weekend... the face-mapping feature is hilarious. There's something just fun about seeing myself as a 3D polygonal model walking around on a virtaul stage. This must be what pro athletes feel like when they boot up games like the EA-Sports NHL or FIFA series and little versions of themselves...
The game itself is the usual par for course - several songs I know, several I don't know. A lot I thought I knew but realize after trying to sing them that I don't. And the DDR pad gives it a new twist. Very simple but still a very unsual sensation to be tracking two continuous streams of information on the screen with your eyes...

WinXP Tatoo

Well, I've been tatooed for being the victim of piracy... Microsoft has seen fit to brand my desktop with this in my system tray...Yeah - that little star thingy in the middle - it's a shortcut to Microsoft's web site that lets me purchase a legit copy of WinXP if I want it... too bad I've sworn of Internet Explorer and that site doesn't seem to like Firefox. Not that this is an excuse - I really don't particularly feel like paying for WinXP either way. I'm just pissed that the OS industry in general has become what it is as a by-product of the computer industry as a whole.

Flashback to 1999-2000 and I was buying my PC. I had Win95 I think at the time... it didn't support USB and that's the ONLY reason I wound up getting Win98SE at one point. And then the trouble started. You know, for the most part, Win3.1 was the most stable OS I'd ever had and Win95 had some decent upgrades. But for the most part, from 98 onward, I haven't had such a great time with Windows. 98SE was a little better, NT and ME weren't particularly thrilling (and had their share of crashes), 2000 was robust but didn't handle certain drivers very well, and finally I came around to *ahem* "stealing" XP... well I'm certainly not fond of paying for stuff that just plain doesn't seem to want to work right.

I think the trouble is in that there is more stuff inside Windows now that ever before to screw up. When it was a shell on DOS, there wasn't much to go wrong and if something went wrong, DOS was responsible more that anything (not that it mattered because in the end you had a GPF screen anyway). *sigh*

Oh well, at least I was able to turn off the "victim of piracy" warnings. I'll live with the tatoo. F*ck it.

Things I've been up to

If you keep up with my life blog over filed under alias FusionAce, you'll know The Legion has been a little bit strapped for cash lately... but that hasn't stopped me from wasting a lot of time. Here's where I stand with my hobbies:

I'm done priming pretty much everything on my current Warhammer stuff - including the goofy Ork bike I bought last Christmas... just need final paint on that, and on the Tau Sniper team I got last month.

I'm stuck on Tomb Raider Legend already. I put it down for about a week and a half (life sort of got in the way)... and last night I got back into it. I'm on the Japan level and stuck at the boss battle. It's way too frenetic for a keyboard mouse combination. I might give the gamepad a try later. Dunno. I mean I know the moves to make: climb up to the same platform as the boss and run around there. He makes attacks in three patterns: a vertical you can dodge, horizontal high (you can duck under this) or horizontal low (you can jump over this). But try coordinating Lara Croft with the traditional WASD-layout...

Picked up Winter Assault again. I decided to give the bad-guy campaign a go. I never really got into the Orks, but if I leave it, I'll always feel like I only got half my money's worth. Finished the first mission tonight on my first try... not bad considering I had no idea what I was doing.
(oh btw, everybody knows by now that Relic has yet another Dawn of War expansion in the works right?)

Oh and finally, despite my cash troubles, I purchased the second season of the new Battlestar Galactica series on impulse this afternoon. The price was just too damn good and it was the last copy on the shelf. I mean good like in I've already done my research - it's was cheaper than Futureshop.

Either way, I just gotta think that I'm relatively lucky all around. My cash "problem" is actually due to the fact that I'm setting it all aside for my house... which essentially means that I'm building equity more than anything. It's just a matter of timing my luxury expenses very carefully.