BLOGTASTIC

26/June/2008

Puchi Carat shrine finished before the end of the month? My ass. Original Story Mode is boring as hell and completely unrewarding, and I can't even hack my way to get the alternate endings. I miss the days when my updates didn't suck. =(

It's a good thing Galvatron is here to give the place a sense of sophistication and actually effort put into things! Because, uh, I'm off to York for a while tomorrow, so all the inappropriate things I have to say will go unheard until the sixth of July. Have fun without me, everyone!

I thought my "see ya soon" speeches were so much better. =(

21/June/2008

Longest day of the year, and it hasn't stopped being grey, miserable, and raining something fierce. Thank you straight to hell, global warming!

So I made myself an omelette for lunch. This is nothing new at all whatsoever. What is new, though, is that I made it in my TYRANNOSAURUS REX APRON.

Judging by the fact it's kind of tiny, I imagine it's meant to be a children's apron, but come on, it's a fantastic apron regardless of target audience. Never mind that my hand-eye coordination completely fails me regarding the very simple task of putting an egg in a goddamned bowl, wearing an apron emanates a vibe of professionalism.

While out getting said apron, I popped into GAME and was reminded of how little I care about that industry nowadays. Admittedly, it's primarily because the prices in-store are jokes. £15 for a century-old licensed Game Boy Advance game? I laugh in a mocking manner! Also, people buy preowned games because they're cheaper. Selling a manhandled New Super Mario Bros. for the exact same price as the RRP doesn't give one reason to actually bother with it.

And after a long, long wait, I saw Super Smash Bros. Brawl. In person.

And I didn't give a damn.

You'd think the only game I actually gave a vague hoot about all the previews, announcements, release dates and all I'd be screaming Bulgarian ecstatically in excitement at seeing it. Instead, all I thought was "took them long enough," "I wonder how much this will be scalped for," and "£40 for a Wii game? Why bother." Well, it was a fair amount of varied thought that otherwise would've been "OGMBASMMMM" but I just didn't really care, y'know. I'm pretty content with Taito Legends 2.

I feel like such a lazy bum working on a measly Puchi Carat shrine (which mostly consists of dialogue transcribing) while Galvatron is slaving over a totally rock-awesome Annet series shrine. =(

18/June/2008

I remembered why I don't watch Wife Swap.

"MY OPINION YOUR OPINION OH THAT'S YOUR OPINION OH OH OH THATS YOUR OPINION THIS IS MINE YOU SHUT UP THIS IS MY OPINION TALKING"

And what sounds like it a rational discussion will immediately skip to "OH THAT'S YOUR OPINION YOU SHUT YO FACE" and arrrrgh.

My blood pressure should not go up that high. Negative energy pulsating.

"Shut up, my opinion is talking" does sound like a good t-shirt slogan, though.

Aside from getting a buttload of new figures that, needless to say, have been costing me out the ass, nothing much is new. My attempts to nab a bus have continuously been futile. It seems fate is damning me for life to be a leeching bum! And considering I don't even run this webspace, only more proof. My life is pain.

I am working on a new game shrine, though, that'll actually be more of a shrine and less of a wonkily written walkthrough; mainly because it's a bit hard to accurately describe hassle-free ways to completely win puzzle games all the time. Can't imagine how long it'll take to finish, but here's a hint as to what it is.

I didn't say it was a good hint, but I just wanted a GIF of this, really.

14/June/2008

Ragey's Super Bus Time Adventure to Tesco to pick up some toffee ice cream!!!

... didn't actually start because I read the bus time tables wrong. See, I thought it went to Tesco, but...

Me: "How much would it cost to go to Tesco?"

Bus man: "We don't go anywhere near Tesco."

So, yeah. I'm not exactly faring well at coming to appreciate public transport!

An hour or two later, I attempted Ragey's Super Bus Time Adventure to Tesco to pick up some toffee ice cream for reals this time!!!

... but the bus never came. I waited fifteen minutes; five minutes before, ten minutes after it should've been, but no sighting. There was one that would've gotten me to where I wanted  if I'd waited another ten minutes, but a bunch of yobbos stopped by and begin spitting every two seconds, burning each others' hands with lighters and throwing more "fucks" into a sentence than the whole of Pulp Fiction.

So I walked.

After arriving at Tesco, nabbing my toffee ice cream and somehow not buying anything in the toys department (considering I've got like eighteen items arriving, almost understandable!), I thought it'd make sense to get the bus home again via Ragey's Super Bus Time Adventure to get home before this goddamned ice cream melts!!!

... but I missed the bus by four minutes, and the next one wouldn't be there for half an hour. And considering it'd spend another twenty minutes probably stopping at every bus stop located roughly twenty feet away from each other (estimate!), then it'd be beneficial to just walk.

I once considered public transport to be transport for non-lazy people. With a car, you walk onto the driveway and away you go! Whereas with a bus, you've got to leave the driveway, get to the bus stop and go from there. Maybe on a train you'll have to swap trains! But it wasn't until coming home from Belfast that I realised how many bus stops were in close range. Seemed a bit pointless, but my knowledge of public transport is very strained, as should be very evident.

So, ultimately, I got my toffee ice cream, but my faith in public transport is only becoming increasingly strained. Alas.

The toffee ice cream is great, though, and better than plain ol' toffee. I give it 8 out of 10, with two points deducted for making you feel kind of barf afterwards. Check it out.

In other news, I read "get six free issues" on some magazine subscription as "get free sex issues."

10/June/2008
Ragey's Super Bus Time Adventure into Belfast!!!
... was brought to a good start by the bus breaking down five minutes after getting on.

The receipt still allowed me to nab a bus into town and back again, but it didn't exactly set a good mood for the rest of my usage of public transport.

And the adventure wasn't exactly super since it was just to figure out how the bloody public transport system works and also to nab me some paints for my bootleg Machine Wars Hoist repaint. Which is more or less finished. Pictures and severe rambling now if anyone cares!

I'd like to just cut to the chase by saying "as you're already aware, I like to collect cheap, crappy knockoff action figures," but I never actually talk about it on the site much. So now you know! I like to collect cheap, crappy knockoff action figures, and with my very basic painting skills, decided to combine the two.

And I made Generation 1 Hoist! The mould's been used a bunch of times, first as Machine Wars Hoist, but also Robots in Disguise Tow-Line, Robot Masters Wrecker Hook and probably more. It's never actually gotten the chance to look like Hoist, which is understandable, only having a vague resemblance and a totally different vehicle mode and all, but I set about solving that. With some liberties, the fact I needed to buy some orange paint and how terrible I am at properly painting things, here we are!

Hoist went through a frustrating creation. It was a £2 bootleg I got, and I began painting straight onto it, not with an undercoat, so naturally there was lots of red and yellow peeping out from underneath, which looked mightily ungainly. That didn't go well since I had no orange, and the colours I could've made an orange out of simply weren't suitable for making that right orange. So then my bud says "an undercoat would actually be handy you doofus," though he's a very polite individual so I just added those last two words in my mind. So I started again! I'd say it took about six hours spread out over today and yesterday, by estimate. It's always embarrassing saying how long you spent on something when you always feel it could've been better, but meehhhh.

The original figure had translucent blue windows, but thanks to me having no idea how to protect them from the spray can, they got blackened, sadly. The spray also kind of tightened up the tire joints to near inoperable status, though it did tighten up the previously loose and easy-to-disconnect arms. Painting wasn't too much of a hassle, just the small, finicky details, the structure rods, the gears and whatnot proved a hassle, since the rest could effectively be ignored.

The towing hook, though. Dear God the towing hook. It doesn't show up well in these photos, but it's a horribly uneven clashing of black, black-orange and orange. It was originally grey, but it was painted green, then sprayed black, and then painted orange again, and the plastic must've decided it didn't want any more crap coating it, as it simply refused to consistently stick. So I tried looking up images of tow trucks to see what weathering effects their hooks go under, but to my dismay, no towing truck's hook is any colour but black. Woe! So I couldn't half-ass my way out of it with some weathering details. Which I slapped on the front and sides, but don't appear to have actually remained at all. Lame!

One of the arms had a similar problem where one side of it had grown crusty and demanded several coats to actually change hue at all, but I could just determinate my way past it. The hook was such a pain that I couldn't. Alas.

Aside from that, it was pretty simple. The face required a few coats of blue to get the visor right, and the knees ended up a bit sloppy, and thanks to the spray-on black, one of them can't even bend. Good times!

I kinda wish the truck mode had a bit more orange, but the robot mode is what I focused on, and I'm pleased with it for what I want to consider my first finished figure, even though there's several before it. Ah well. I've learnt things!

[more photos] [like this one] [and this one] [yet another] [that's it!]

02/June/2008
I was originally going to rant about books and how I'm shallow and find them harder to pick up and read than the likes of movies, but yeah, I didn't know where I was going with it. Not to mention that I'm reading Cranes at Dusk by Misako Matsubara and finding it pretty enjoyable, so my whine's rather flawed. But it's a genuine complaint of mine! It's just hard to put into word format without sound really, really stupid. Not that that's anything new for me.
But yeah, there's a new General Writing in the works. One of those ones about obscure games. The ones that usually result in lots of complaining from me midway through after attempting to be enthusiastic for the first half? One of those, yeah. There's a hint in one of my older writings of this style, but for those who don't want to scour them again (can't blame you!), here's a more blunt preview.

It was either that or writing about a packet of crisps known as Space Raiders and rambling several paragraphs on why a potato snack product needs such an unnecessary gimmick. Which I may get around to sometime.