Fortunately it is a leap year...
....so you have one extra day to order a lot of things from Colleen Doran.
Due to a very high work load, we regret to announce that the
shop will shut down all art and custom book orders on March 1st. A
selection of signed books will remain available.
1
Glad to hear that things are slightly less insane.
Also, be sure to hold the baby at a safe distance to avoid getting gooped. Babies contain more goop than a naive calculation of their volume and mass would lead you to believe.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Feb 26 04:22:26 2012 (PiXy!)
Well This Looks Exciting
People keep telling me to look at this trailer, saying things like...
"Oh my! Yes please!"
"It's...Squidtacular!"
"I am SO ready..I've got my Wave Motion Goggles and everything!"
So I figured I ought to at least look at it...
It's in Hi-def so you can embigulate it!
Oh my stars and garters! That looks really..really nice!
Yamato 2199 looks to be a straight-up remake of the 1974 series, and aside from the character designs and a few added female crewmembers, it looks astoundingly faithful. This is obviously a labor of love for Enagio.
Interestingly, although it will be a 26 episode series, it's going to be released in theaters as seven full length features!
I'm very curious as to whether this will be brought over eventually (given the state of the market) and if so if it will be released as SCY or Star Blazers. Star Blazers was actually quite successful and aside from "That Knox thing" was as faithful as 1979 Standards and practices would allow, in some ways improving on the original.
I'd be quite pleasantly surprised if there were to be a Star Blazers revival, but whatever form the US release takes (If it does so at all) I am seriously looking forward to this.
1
Yeah, a big government social conservative is better than a nanny-state near-socialist, in the way that mud with whipped cream tastes better than just mud.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Feb 21 20:12:13 2012 (PiXy!)
I'm not particularly concerned about this. The phrase "the pursuit of happiness" comes from the Declaration of Independence.
And the only legal significance of the Declaration is that it represents the point where we ceased to be part of the British Empire. Aside from that, legally speaking, nothing in the Declaration of Independence matters.
That phrase never appears in the Constitution, or in the Bill of Rights, or in any other Amendment. So what Santorum thinks it means doesn't really make any difference.
Right now I see Santorum as the least of the evils. He certainly didn't foist an early version of Obamacare on any state, so even if he's a big-government conservative he ain't as big-government as Romney. And he sure as hell isn't as big as Obama the socialist.
It is the nature of our system that we never get exactly the candidates we want. The only time I've ever been wholeheartedly happy to cast a vote for President was when I voted for Gerry Ford -- and he lost.
Well, I'm back on my feet, but I was not fully prepared for how much I've missed. I'm almost 2 weeks behind in my classes. The Japanese class in particular changed the syllabus shortly after I stopped coming. I've got much cramming to do.
I'm just about tapped out thanks to hospital/doctor bills. I've missed 10 days of work in 3 weeks and as a result I haven't been paid in over a week. I have to come up with summer and fall tuition in 3-4 months...so the kidney stone treatment will have to wait until the summer. (That's actually no real biggie).
Anyhoo...I'll be occupied with non blog matters until at least sometime this weekend.
In the meantime :
When the girls aren't intact
And they break your impact
That's..ballistics.
When they make people stare
But send you through the air
That's ballistics
If there's one thing that those
In student councils oppose
It's ballistics
But you should still try
To go "Hnnng!" in the sky
Wiiiith...Baliiistiics.
1
Total Distance: 42089.60
Maximum Height: 504.99
Maximum Speed: 104.20
Objects Struck: 25
Special Events: 10
Took about ten minutes to finally stop bouncing...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sat Feb 18 03:35:08 2012 (PiXy!)
If ultrasound isn't an option, they can dissolve the stones slowly with drugs. That's what they did with mine. It took many weeks to get rid of a bullet-sized stone (and a stent in my ureter while it was happening), but it worked.
Heh. Never thought I'ld hear anyone going "Yay" for kidney stones. Just shows what's possible under the right circumstances.
Posted by: EdwardM at Mon Feb 13 23:15:55 2012 (p0Xwo)
The Pachinko Effect
History is neither preordained nor a straight line. It is a fiendishly complex game of billiards or perhaps a massive pachinko machine. The cascade effect of screwing with a few variables is inherently unpredictable as the tapestry of history is bound together with a collection of seemingly insignificant threads, the removal or reordering of which will unravel said tapestry in unknown ways.
Pondering such things is often dismissed as silly fantasy or mental masturbation, but our future will soon be history, and it behooves us to remember what a near run thing our existence is. Such reflection might, for instance, have made a great deal of difference in the August
of 1914.
A short, glorious endeavor...sure to be finished by Christmas.
As we look upon the uncharted, unlit highway that is our future, it is, perhaps, wise to reflect upon how
surprising our history was to those that made it. We should take great
care to learn as much as we can from their astonishment, for the road we
travel has as many forks and is at least as precarious as theirs.
1
Obviously, I've never found What If...? scenarios to be wastes of time. Just as obviously, quite a few (if not most) "legitimate historians" do... which makes me feel quite superior to them, actually.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sun Feb 12 18:46:50 2012 (K/dx0)
2
Without what-if you'd never get yes-but, which can introduce you to things that don't fit into the canned narrative of a history textbook (like Japan's nuclear weapons program, or submersible aircraft carriers). I once had someone try to shout down my political opinions with the words "I was a history major, I know", and yet it was obvious that there was no real depth to his knowledge, particularly when he lectured me about American Imperialism.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Mon Feb 13 12:39:01 2012 (2XtN5)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sat Feb 11 23:55:16 2012 (K/dx0)
3
Oh, yeah. The Crossovers Line has been going since '06, and includes Star Wars (http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Star_Wars#Crossovers.2FStar_Wars_Transformers) and Marvel (http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Crossovers) properties.
Posted by: JP Gibb at Sun Feb 12 13:35:52 2012 (VSD03)
Anyone in the DC Area From the 15th to the 25th of February
...might be interested in going to the Studio Theater which will be featuring the show Astro Boy and the God of Comics. It tells the fictional story of Astro Boy, and the historical tale of his creator Osamu Tezuka.
2
You know what? I bet it's a reskin of a WWII fighter game. Possibly it permits players to load their own meshes for fighter planes, and someone came up with SW girl meshes for it instead.
It was on an image board, the only associated text being "I can't wait!" Others agreed that they were looking forward to it, but there were no links and I've heard nothing about a SW flight sim.
Still, I thought I'd ask.
It's odd looking... the spinning 'props' don't look like what I'd expect from a game. They don't even look CG, but I thought it might be due to the single frame.
For now I'm sticking with cruel troll or your theory about a reskinned fighter sim.
Thanks.
Posted by: Brickmuppet at Tue Feb 7 17:44:04 2012 (Omb+U)
4
Fake, unfortunately. Made by this guy.
Shame because I'd play it.
I recognize the HUD from the Ace Combat series of flight games. They're all on consoles, though, so I'm pretty sure this is just fanart with some 3D modelling and/or image editing.
Posted by: KT at Wed Feb 8 00:56:54 2012 (sSaPh)
6
Yoshika really doesn't look like she's rendered. That looks like a drawing. (I really should have noticed that to begin with.)
Romance At the Crossroads of "Awww" and "Ewww"
A few days ago, I received in the mail a parcel from some place called Duckford. It contained about 5 feet of bubble wrap and this....
..which in turn contained 18 inches of bubble wrap and a flash drive loaded with the Mac version of Katawa Shoujo,... you know...THAT game: The dating-sim/visual novel in which the young ladies of interest posses
various disabilities. Put together by a group of US fans, it is based on
a joke
sketch by a Japanese Doujinshi artist. Despite the cringe worthy subject matter, I have, as mentioned previously, been looking forward to this, albeit with some trepidation.
I've been quite sick lately and for a few days couldn't leave the house so...
umm...
I...
Well, I went ahead and played through all the paths.
I found the game to be quite uneven, but it's rather better than it ought to have been. In some places it was tedious or just aggravating, in other places it was absolutely superb.
If Any Stray Sled Dogs Are Found In the VicinityBURN 'EM!
A TEAM of Russian scientists has mysteriously lost contact with
colleagues in the U.S. as they drill into a lake buried beneath the
Antarctic ice for 20 million years.
Keep in mind that while this could have been a mishap it's actually more likely that simply a communication glitch, as an accident would be unlikely to take out all 6 team members. None of the news stories seem to be taking it TOO seriously as I haven't seen one that failed to mention THE THING.
Of course it's also possible that they found something really distracting.
3
Ah, something that belongs in the Moe-Moe Cthulu Encyclopedia
Moe-Moe Cthulhu Mythos
Encyclopedia! The Amazon preview doesn't include my favorite; I'll
have to scan in the Shoggoth sometime.
Perhaps those Russians are now starring in the Living with Monster Girls comics
Living
with Monster Girls ... (and I hadn't known until just now
that they're being turned into games)
-j
Posted by: J.Greely at Sun Feb 5 13:51:09 2012 (EJaOX)
6
We don't.
I copied and pasted it into the next comment along with his signature,
added the tags then deleted the original. It defaulted back to #3 just
like if a spam had been deleted. This is clumsy and runs the risk of
people comment on the comment one deletes before one reposts it.
I didn't want to delete his comment but the links went to pages that
would cause some of my readers nosehairs to curl which would no doubt
precipitate a fit of sneezing which could conceivably cause a lamp to
get knocked over, thereby starting a fire which, if the reader is in an
apartment complex could kill lots of innocents and precipitate a gas
explosion thereby raining debris onto a nearby interstate thus causing a
multi-car pile up that could conceivably include a truck carrying numerous prototype kill bots that due to damage to their programing might slaughter thousands and then make their way to the CDC in Atlanta where they no doubt would unleash smallpox, marburg, Spanish influenza and airborne Ebola, starting a worldwide series of terrible pandemics killing millions and destroying civilization and ushering in a new Hobbesian dark age for the few scattered survivors.
...and I just didn't want to have to deal with that.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Feb 6 11:58:16 2012 (EJaOX)
7
Had I known that I was going to destroy civilization, I'd have added some creepy overspecialized Tumblr-porn links just to finish the survivors off in style.
(his editing technique was revealed by the hash at the end of the comment)
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Mon Feb 6 12:15:49 2012 (2XtN5)
8
I saw a picture recently, that I wish I could find again.
It was purportedly of the Lake Vostok drilling site, and prominently featured a large red transporter or crane or something with the words "Natural Environment Research Council" (a UK group that seems to be involved in the project) stenciled in white.
Only, somebody had 'shopped the last word into "Venture", instead.
Posted by: BigD at Wed Feb 8 19:34:48 2012 (qLkdZ)
9
BigD,
eath_C0015_wings-of-light.jpg">this was pretty much what I though of when the news broke that they lost contact with the team.
Posted by: JP Gibb at Wed Feb 8 20:53:49 2012 (VSD03)
10
The hell? I swear that worked when I previewed it.
Posted by: JP Gibb at Wed Feb 8 20:55:00 2012 (VSD03)
13
That's the weird part, I was trying to link to the image, not display it (which is rude not only to the host, but often screws with the formatting in the comments too).
Posted by: JP Gibb at Thu Feb 9 21:37:03 2012 (VSD03)
One of The Great Ones Has Passed
Peter Decker Jr., one of Virginia's outstanding citizens has passed away at 76. He came from nothing, growing up in a small house in Lambert's Point (If you're not familiar with Norfolk that area is "the docks"; a cargo terminal).Decker founded a law firm which became one of the most respected in the state. He was also instrumental in the revival of Norfolk's downtown. 30 years ago there were rats running down Granby Street, now there are cafes, malls, shops and...mermaids, which were actually his idea.
He was a remarkable philanthropist who gave millions to causes ranging from children's hospitals to saving the Chrysler Museum. His flamboyant voice was a fixture on local radio extolling any number of charities.
This morning the local talk station pretty much suspended their programming from 6-10 and filled the entire time with callers and e-mailers telling stories about how the great 'Petuh Deckuh' had impacted their livers either through his many charities or directly.
There are very few men like him and we are all diminished by his passing.
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