Miskatonic Valley!

Hey all. So it's been a dog's age since I've been in here, but I've been busy with silly little things like marriages and such. But that's all complete now.

Anywho, this isn't a normal blog. I've been fiddling with another CUUSOO project [I believe I've mentioned the site before]. This one's more complicated, though, because it's a board game. And board games usually have rules. So here they are.

Almost looks real, don't it?

Fan Expo 2012, or, I forgot I had a Blog

Hey! Remember that I had a blog? I didn't. Hey, I was busy over the last little while, so I have an excuse. But I was reminded, and so I figure, hey, why not get back on the horse or off the wagon or whatever it is, and do up a good ol' fashioned long-winded recap of the biggest event yet this year, the Fan Expo.

As I said at the end of my last blog on the subject, my costume this year was to be Cthulhu for President. And while maybe I coulda spent the last year recounting the great amount of work that went into making the mask itself [which might have been... two entries on here], you'll just have to trust me that it was a lot of thought combined with a few minutes of work. But the mask isn't until Saturday, and this is a four day affair. So we have to pace ourselves.

Despite what I just said, I'm not gonna go over things day by day. Instead, I will discuss things in chapters and headings, using charts and graphs. Or perhaps instead of that, I'll use unflattering pictures of minor celebrities taken at a sub-convention last February.

John Connor is waiting for the actual content of this blog to begin.

Crowdsourcing will be the death of me

It's apparently February, and I have no idea where I've been for the past month. Christmas happened, and that was what it was, and then Dree and I entered the rabbit hole that is LOST and after about 3 weeks we're about to start Season 5, which is the point where the episodes become ones we haven't seen before. It's a pretty intense time to be alive, I'm not gonna lie to you.

So yeah, Jack and Kate and everyone sort of dominate my brain, but I'm gonna try and focus on the important things in life for a few minutes. Like asking random people to vote for my crap on the internet.

Merry Merry Christmastime

Hey yo!

So there's lots to gab about in the nerd world, although I'm not going to bother. Your time is probably better spent shopping for gift cards or basting a turkey. So I'm gonna skip all the regular business and boil it down to this:

Go watch The Hobbit trailer. Soak it all up. Actually, to make your life easier, I'm gonna jam it right in here.

So that's, like, the bomb, right? I know.

And yeah, that'll be all there is this blog.

Happy Christmas and Merry New Years and all good things to you and yours. Read that to anyone important sitting near you, because it's serving as the Christmas Card from Dree and I this year.

'Till next year!

I call it Special Drink

Hello again.

So I was gonna go on about this, or blather about that. It was gonna have something to do with being sad that Comminuty is being killed off, and how we've been trying other sitcoms to fill the void, but how Happy Endings is trying too hard to be funny, Modern Family is trying too hard to be not funny, and Whitney is crap in a hat. Parks and Recreation is still a beacon in the dark times, so we're sorta clinging to that. I had a real good analogy as to why Parks and Rec works and why I find Modern Family confounding and befuddling, but, again, I sorta feel a little too lazy to type it out. You'll just have to trust me when I tell you that it was so compelling an argument that you'd definitely change your mind. Oh, and Louis! Mondays are the new Thursday.

And before I forget, Lego Advent day 24, just 'cause I should really complete things.

Six Seasons and a Movie: A week and a half of Melons and Collies.

In today's exciting episode:

It'll all make sense in the end.

Movie Review MADNESS!

Advent Calender recap WEEK THREE!

The fastest Kijiji Transaction of all time!




 All that and even more bad news! Stay tuned.

Advember Week Two

Another week has passed, so I should probably keep on top of charting the exciting progress that is the toy calendar this year. So I will do that.

I think normally I'd relate to you some manner of anecdote about something interesting I did in the past week, but it's been a pretty mellow time. Which is sort of ironic, in that me and the D actually went over to peoples' houses and did things, which is weird for borderline hermits like us, so arguably I'd have more to talk about. But that's sorta not the case. For the record: I'm still a big fan of guacamole, and my opinion on fake cheese remains the same.

Vacation's over! Back to WORK!

Hi, everyone! How are you? I'm awaiting the TV repairman to come and replace the screen on my TV [apparently they still repair things?] so I've got a few moments to, you know, get back in the business. If you haven't noticed, I've been gone for about 2 months. I guess I just sorta had other things going on. Like laziness. Lots and lots of laziness.

Well that's not true. Dree and I went to Boston, the saddle of America [or whatever], which is a lovely town, rich in history and ankle-busting sidewalks. I'll get photos up here soon, but they were done with my old black and white film camera, which, besides costing around 38 hundred dollars to develop, also leaves you with these weird pieces of paper that I can't figure out how to insert into the computer. Give me some time and I'll get those done right. But it may take a while.

That's sorta all of that, really. Anyway, to celebrate year 2 of the blog, I've renamed it yet again. This one feels better. At least for the next 6 months or so, till I change it again.

And with no segue at all, let us transition into the real reason I dusted off the blogspot: 

LEGO Advent Calendar 2011.

Fan Expo 2011: Recapitulation

The Fan Expo is kind of a big deal. If you don't know what it is, look it up. It's sort of Nerd Christmas and Nerd New Years rolled into one weekend for all the basement dwellers in the area, in that it's super exciting and awesome and also frustrating and terrible. Or not, as the case may be?

Last year was legendary in its awfulness. The thing was moved to a smaller hall due to bad scheduling, which combined with the unexpected astronomical growth of attendance, and the generally mishandled entry/re-entry system, made it a festival of waiting in line more than anything else. And people bitched. Oh... did they bitch. But even at the best of times, people at this thing are gonna bitch. It's the Bitch Expo. Waiting in line, you can sorta tell who's a veteran and who isn't by the relative amount of bitching they're doing.

Regardless, this year's entry system was vastly superior to last year's. Yeah, there were lines. Of course there's gonna be, but hey, sometimes if you're in the line at the right time you get this happening to you:

Freddy is easily distracted, and Bishop is easily confused.

Yeah, there's me and my brother in line behind the ribbon-cutting ceremony. So that's sorta rad. It might also be the only official photo we have with celebrities. On account of, you know, our general overall cheapness.

Learn to waste time like me: Kre-O Prowl Instructions

So per popular request [I actually had a comment], I've done what I could to document how to build your less-than-stellar Prowl into my perhaps-better-than-official Prowl.

I've never tried to take photos of this nature before, so forgive me if the whole thing is a confusing, jumbled mess. You may also note, if you're super-observant, that I put a sticker in a different place, which helps sell the somewhat unconvincing junk-gun a bit more than it might otherwise. And, by all means, feel free to free-ball and change this up at any point. I won't be insulted.

More Kre-O: Prowlin' Around

I'm not gonna turn this into some sort of toy review blog or whatever. There are plenty of others that do it better, if you're really after that sort of thing.

But I was out and about and I saw another Kre-O set on the shelf, and, well, being the hopeless addict I am, I snapped it up. I did say I'd keep giving this line a try, right? I think I did.

Anyway, so the set is Prowl, who is this guy:

That's a quote from the show.

He's the resident Transformo-cop, and all-around swell dude. I guess. For a fan of this stuff, I know remarkably little.

Anyway, so here's what the Kre-O set looks like, more or less, as officially built:

Tall drink o' water, ain't ye?

And right there you can see some of the major issues with the robot. Let's start at the start, however.

Kre-O: The Perfect Storm?

I've heard that the last two toys boys stop playing with as they grow up, at least in North America, are LEGO and Transformers. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because each are more technically advanced and interactive than most other toys you could come across, and are therefor slightly more rewarding for the kid. Maybe it's because LEGO has that special European mystique and Transformers has a movie with boobs and guns in it. Either way, they both stick around, and have stuck around, and continue to stick around for large portions of adults. I myself suffer from this two-headed addiction, appealing simultaneously to my unceasing need to fidget and my happy memories of youth.

This review will be aided by Warpath and Jimmy the Squid.

So when I saw that Kre-Os were a thing, I sorta plotzed. LEGO and Transformers blended into a single heady broth of plastic meaning? Too good to be true. [Yeah, it's happened before, but Built-To-Rule was, as far as toys go, barf-inducing.] These things had all the weight of the years of TF character and history piled up on top of them, on a foundation of LEGO-like constructible fiddliness.

Let's get some things out of the way first: Is this, I dunno, unfair of Hasbro to be doing? Are they making themselves into a lowly clone brand by ripping off LEGO engineering? Will the quality ever be able to compare to the impossibly high standards that LEGO and its fans have set [standards that LEGO itself doesn't seem to meet all that often anymore]? And do the damn things transform?

Simple answers: no on all counts. Sort of. The parts are made by Oxford, which, sure, is a not-LEGO company and has that taint about it, but it's certainly one of the higher-regarded brands among those able to acknowledge such things. And, really, there's a surprising number of elements that are not standard LEGO designs. [Some definitely are, and some that aren't probably shouldn't be, but take it as it is.] The quality is fine. Not perfect, not even great. I'll go with good. And they don't easily switch from vehicle to robot, although, really, technically they do transform. It just takes a long time.

Wanna read a good comic book? Me too, sometimes.

So the whole process of creating a comic out of pictures of LEGO is proving to be far more work than I planned [especially when I haven't had the time to, you know, actually try to even start]. I still want to do it, don't you know. It just... may be on indefinite hiatus. So, yeah.

Anywho, Dree and I started watching Freaks and Geeks again, and it makes me sad and happy and sad, because it's such a good show that, with each joyful minute, is one minute closer to being over, again. Only 18 episodes is a travesty, man. But hey! Speaking of stuff that never got a chance to develop, I've decided to go ahead and post the colouring book edition of the first book of my epic,  loved-by-few and known-by-fewer graphic opus, ALMA: Jumbo the Elephant. Click to see nicer, bigger versions. If you have the inclination, try your hand at colouring, but I'm only allowing the use of crayon.

 

The start of something I'm unlikely to finish!

I had the pleasure of working on Nightmare on Elm Street 3 yesterday, and an episode of Community today. So I've been both busy and in a good mood, neither of which really move me to write anything down in the interweb. So here I was without anything much to be angry about and only one childish photo to post. And that's no good. No good at all.

Endlessly clever.

Aside: See Hanna if you get the chance. Honestly, it's friggin' fantastic. And don't take my word for it; the three old ladies behind us loved it too.


Anyway, back to this: I got inspired by the last thing I blogged about, the whole comic book I'm still somewhat gray on whether I can talk about or not. So I thought.... hows about I make an entirely new comic, on here? I mean, I got, like, three other corkers in the vault, ready to be thrust upon the unexpecting public. I could, you know, use one of those, and my LEGO photo thing, and, you know... meld 'em or whatever. How much work, really, would it take?

So hey, remember that comic I wrote?

"Nah, there's nothing back there."

Yeah, I wrote a comic a while ago, and was thinking about it lately. It was published through Zeros2Heroes.com, which was an exciting little think-tank sorta deal, that in the heady winter of 2007 ran a sequence of contests [if you can call them that], whereby those pitches vetted by the community got produced as real life [cyber]comics. Above is a pin-up, I guess you'd call it, by the artist assigned to the project, Miguel Lopez.

It was all pretty rad, really. Only the first part of the four-part story was made, but it was made better than I thought it could have been made, so that's cool. If you can navigate the viewer and haven't been badgered by me into reading the finished book already at some point in the last 3 years, you can see it here:

ALMA: Jumbo the Elephant, Chapter One

Sweet Legitimization

As I wait for work to download, as well as twiddle my thumbs until the FedEx guy delivers a wonderful shipment of LEGO I recently purchased in a small fit of madness, I got an email from my dad that I'm taking as a sign that he has now officially blessed this current infantile obsession as an A-OK thing. So, hey, that's neat!

He sent this, from an as-yet-unidentified magazine:

It's, like, a commentary, man.

 

 

 

I looked up Jan Vormann on the internets, and here's another, better and more mature blog from almost exactly a year ago talking about the same dude, and if you're super-psyched about this sorta thing, here's his project's official website.

Dree and I are planning to go to New York again, and one of the main things I was concerned about [if I had to invent something to be concerned about] is that this trip didn't as yet really have a hook. We went mad with pop culture last time, hunting down locations and such. Would we just do that again? No, no we won't. I will now go hunting for LEGO in nature. Expect a full report on it in... about five months.

I mutter like a Hobo

I don't really want you to think I only come on here and bitch and moan about stuff. I'm sure, some day, I'll have something super-positive to tell you, that'll just brighten the hell outta your day.

But not yet. For now I'm MAD! Grraaaaaggh!

My opinion is the monster and the criminal is popular culture.

I think for, like, my 6 readers [if I can call you that], I'm sorta your source for a very narrow, nichey band of nerdliness. But you need to know this stuff. It's important.

Something to think about!

Winter's more or less over. Weather's getting nicer. I saw the Summerhill Market guy cooking burgers for the first time this season. They are, and I'll go on record with this, one of the better and cheaper burgers you're gonna find in this town. I get fat in the summer.

But it reminded me of something better demonstrated through the following photoplay.

 A Cautionary Tale

There's a reason Dree won't have street meat anymore.

Happy Spring, everybody.

New York and Movies and such and such.

So yeah, I haven't been doing this blog thing much lately. Like I said back at some other time, my productivity here is inversely proportionate to my workload. It's like math, in a way. Each blog I've posted represent hundreds of dollars I wasn't making. So if you've been hoping and praying for more nuggets of my slightly inaccessible wisdom, thanks for wishing poverty on me. Jerkbag.


Now, unless my understanding of the point of, like, everything is off, working is good because you get some money and you can use that money to get stuff and do things. And we [being Dree and myself] are in the pre-prep stages of another trip to New York, because, and not to sound like a fanboy or anything, New York is better than anything ever. Best jerky coffee, best ridiculously huge bagels. And that's just breakfast. I'm sure there's other stuff too. I dunno. That's why we're going back. For lunch.

If you don't recognize these buildings, watch better TV.

Sidebar: a while ago, while I had time and was bored, I downloaded a thing that lets you make virtual LEGO. It's equal parts awesome and existentially depressing. I think I already talked about it. Anyway, I wanted to make a big fancy playset for LEGO men based on the above locations. I think it's as done as it's ever gonna get within the restrictions of the program. I never finished making little beds and other obsessive doll house stuff for the inside, so you just get to see the outside.

Wanna buy me the above set? $200!

Patting myself on the back for a job well done!

This is gonna be a good ol' fashioned grownup blog with absolutely no LEGO pictures in it. Can you imagine? I'm nervous, I'm not gonna lie to ya. But I'm gonna steam ahead.

Mostly, see, I was watching the THOR trailer, which looks pretty badass, right up until that "In 3D!" fart to the face at the end. I'm not a fan of 3D, if you'd missed that. You can look here if it pleases you.

And that sorta stuff just dries my gravy!

So I went looking, and it seems there are people, real smartie-pantses, who seem to be on my side. Have a look for yourself if you want at Ebert's article from January 23rd, featuring a real couple of zingers about why my brain isn't dumb for rejecting 3D, even if the glasses make my look like that awesome chick who served me a coffee with a snarl.