Last weekend I got to go to Tampa Bay ComicCon with a few friends. The line was short on Sunday and I think the rain kept people away until later in the afternoon — the crowds started to pick up around lunch time. I managed to pick up a few trade paperbacks, got a autograph copy of Brat Pack from Rick Veitch, and some comic artwork from a local artist, Brian Reedy.
Here’s some images from my trip to Tampa Bay ComicCon:
We got an opportunity to visit Legoland Billund in Denmark — the original Legoland park — this past summer. The park is very old school. I have LEGO magazines from the late 80’s with pictures highlighting new rides at Legoland Billund… Honestly, not much had changed.
Needless to say, to a fan of LEGO, this was really fun to experience. My only complaint would have been the cold weather — it still felt like early spring with temps in the low 50’s. And my only regret is not getting in contact with local AFOLs for a meet up.
The prices were expensive, because of the exchange rate, so we only picked up a few LEGO items.
The room was amazing! It overlooked the theme park. Compared to our room in Copenhagen, it was spacious. The floors in the bathroom were heated (which I totally get), the towel rack was heated. The beds were very Scandinavian both in design and comfort. We really enjoyed watching Big Bang Theory in English, with Danish subtitles. The internet was free in the hotel. And the food (although expensive) was enjoyable — we ended up discovering a new cheese that we like from breakfast. And I wish we could get the whole grain breads here in the US, that we did at breakfast in the hotel.
This past May, my wife and I added a new Disney theme park to our list of places we’ve visited.
Pictures from our trip to Disneyland Paris. You can see the full album over on Flickr.
From my Flickr album 2015.05 – Paris, France
I’ve been watching a lot of Anime this past year; partly it was due to a renewed interest from a co-worker. And partly because I needed something new to watch. Right now I’m watching Bodacious Space Pirates…
A side note, first. I try to stay away from “trendy” anime shows. Or ones that tend to be over-hyped. I avoid the whole “mecha” genre as a rule of thumb. I don’t classify myself as an otaku. And if I’ve seen more cos-play characters from one particular anime at a comic convention, I tend to avoid it as being over-hyped… Although, I do like/seen Trigun and I’ve known about it for over 10 years now; so it’s one of my few exceptions.
What I like about BSP so far is the Firefly-like narrative. I won’t bore you with a review just yet, since I’m only about 10 episodes in, but so far I like it. I like the artwork and spaceship designs, although the story drags a bit. More to come later…
Earlier this year, I went to the Splunk .conf2014 in Las Vegas. To be honest, it’s my first professional conference in Vegas that I’ve been to, so it was a lot to take in all at once — new city, business travel, company rules & regs, etc. And it was a lot of great information.
In honor of Shark week, I changed my FB profile page to a shark I caught a few years ago off the coast of North Carolina. 🙂
For the past few years, I’ve been immersing myself in Japanese anime, trying to understand the shifts in geek culture — what use to be just sci-fi/comic books and sci-fi tv shows/movies, has exploded to incorporate video games, Japanese manga/anime, and cos-play. Even at a local level, the explosion includes droid/robotic builders and those of us who create worlds with LEGO… but I digress.
I’ve been watching two different slice-of-life anime shows — Genshiken and Welcome to the NHK — both exploring elements of the otaku culture. They’re like two sides of a coin; and it was by accident that I’ve watched them within a few weeks apart.
Genshiken is centered around the members of a college club called The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture. They meet, talk about anime/manga, go to summer & winter comic shows, dress up in cos-play, build mech models, play video games, etc. Over the course of 3 seasons, members prepare for graduation, look for jobs, form romantic relationships, have their preconceived notions of what it means to be otaku challenged, grow up, grow apart, etc. but still maintain strong bonds of friendships, even after graduations. Each season replaces some character with new faces, showing the progress of time; which is a refreshing change. The stories becomes more and more complex over time as characters find their way in the world.
In Welcome to the NHK, it focuses on the main character who is a college drop-out and hikikomori, or recluse. Over time, the main character builds a few friendships that involves one person that wants to rescue him from his condition, and his next door neighbor, a high school friend. At first, the main character lies, claiming that he is a video game script writer (working with his next door neighbor), in order to justify his apparent lack of job, and reclusive behaviour. But what started out as a lie, eventually leads the main character into exploring otaku culture, and attempting to write a script and produce a video game with his high school friend. Eventually, the main character comes to grips with his condition — sometimes slipping deeper into reclusive behaviour — and copes with his existential life, even though life seems to throw one road block after another, but occasionally helping out others (with similar conditions) along the way.
Genshiken is filled with characters that somewhat lack life direction, they are at least motivated to complete college and find work. NHK is more of the darker side of the 20-something life, with dropping out of college, living off a allowance, using otaku culture as an escape (or a better life dream fulfilment fantasy), with deeply psychological overtones. In NHK, there is some light use of alcohol, and cigarette dependency, but I’m really surprised there’s no stronger recreational drug use, considering the depths of despair the main character slips into. Genshiken felt life-affirming, whereas NHK felt like whatever you did in life, made no difference.
In the back of my head, I’m wondering if there was a cultural shift or a short time period between the two shows; either when they were conceived, or in the creators of the manga themselves, or a very small generation gap, or an economic shift, maybe. The technology in both animes seems similar, but in NHK, character design for the video game was being done on the computer; the manga the Genshiken group produced, even though most of the post production work was done off screen, it seemed like it was done with technology a few years prior to NHK… Which also may play into the difference in the general attitude of the characters… maybe years of living in economic downturn give creators a very different world view.
I’ve binge watched both shows, couldn’t stop watching either one. You quickly become wrapped up in the lives of the characters of both shows. I’d recommend them both.
At the Orange County Regional History Center, here in Orlando, the staff has been hosting a Galactic Encounters day, celebrating all things Star Wars. This year, our Lego club (OrangeLUG) asked to participate, with a LEGO Star Wars display. Here are some of the pictures from that display.
I’ve thought about writing a short Steampunk story; sort of a Commander Jake and his squadron of Zeppelins. He’d have a girl named Betty Lindbergh and a mechanic side-kick named Ito. All the classic elements to a good pre-World War pulp fiction, action hero. But first I wanted to create a worthy villain.
Drawing upon The Time Machine for inspiration, I thought what if someone did build a time machine, went into the future, saw the wonderful advances and decided that he wanted to live forever. Let’s say he’s in his 50’s when he discovers the key to time, hatches a plan to give his younger self the technology (to travel through time) & future-knowledge to plan his future with — gaining power & wealth. However, the younger (and maybe smarter) self, upon hearing the older self’s plan & collecting his future-knowledge, formulates his own plan.
For the older-self (or future-self) to exists, and for the younger-self to be able to talk with him, can only exists for a short time. For once the younger-self makes any decisions, the future-self’s memory will become very fluid to reflect those decisions; and for both selfs to still be able to exist in the same point in time. You could use that to your advantage, make decisions then query your future-self on how it turned out… Then what if you could trap your future-self in time pocket; using wireless communication to you future-self in the time-pocket. After a point, the future-self would become insane, but still useful.
But then there are other questions like, if by trapping your future-self in a time-pocket or time-loop, can you prevent yourself from becoming older?
There are other things to consider the idea of choice could lead to the infinite possible futures or worlds… However, like AI, after exploring all the different choices, some branch-worlds would be eliminated because of bad-decision trees… so this idea of a governing force, or counter-balancing force, would guide most worlds down very similar paths (ie. most humanoid life found on most of these worlds would most likely all breath oxygen & speak english; there might be a counter-balancing reason why silicon based life could and would never exists, in this world or any other).
So, not only would this time machine need to travel through this world’s time, but be able to jump into the time-stream of other worlds.
What if, a time bubble could be made to wrap an individual human, say through a ring… or a pocket watch. Then that person wouldn’t grow old. And it would protect him from time anomalies.
It seems a little Dr. Who in nature… and since we’re talking about a criminal master-mind, more like the Master… but this wouldn’t be some Moriarty type of character, but he’d be a ruthless killer… with motives that are not easily seen, until certain future events unfold.
He’d have other things to consider as well, processing the watch would keep him young, but what would protect him from accidental death & if he did accidentally die, could he transfer his soul to another vessel and continue living? And to what end?
So the villain wouldn’t believe in an after-life, once he’s dead, he’s dead. To cheat time is one thing, but how do you cheat death? And maybe that is the questions our villain is tackling when our clueless hero crosses his path.
