Yesterday marks one of my favorite times of year. Halloween.

Its one of those instances where I really like to go all out. Normally I keep my costume a big a secret and work on it for months ahead of time. Now that Brenna is here, I figured we should do a group/couples costume and I already had an idea that I had been percolating for the past couple months. Figuring that we were both pretty obstinate people and that we would be stepping on each others’ shoes if we worked on the same parts of the costume, I divided the task up. Brenna took the costumes and I took the ‘accessories’. The costumes themselves are fairly simplistic, though, I admit, I underestimated how much attention to detail she was going to pay. The accessories were incredibly ambitious and I wanted the challenge of learning a new skill. As far as I’m concerned, unlearned skills are obstacles waiting to be overcome.

In case you haven’t guessed by the post banner image at the top, we decided to go as two of the Voltron pilots. I went as Keith, pilot of the black lion and Brenna went as Lance, pilot of the red lion. The accessories that I was to work on were plushie versions of our respective lions. The project turned out to be so ambitious that I only completed the black lion. I say completed, but it didn’t have any hind legs. I just ran out of time, so I referred to him as a sea lion the entire night.

More on the lion another day.

Just before the AnimeBoston/Botcon combo hit me, I ran out of checks to pay bills.

This might be the first time in roughly five years or more that I’ve run out of checks. I think the second time ever. Last time, there was a little slip at the back of the last checkbook to order a new set of checks. No such luck this time around. I went online to check my account and as I suspected there was an option there to order more checks. I went through the motions and soon I was at the part where I selected the background of the check. They didn’t have the same amazingly bland and boring background I had before, so I looked through each design set. There were maybe 50 different sets. Naturally as soon as I saw the design below, I knew which set to choose. The landlady is going to love these.

Recently, I had two different friends (Joe and Christy) send me invites to GoodReads.com. I found it curious how two people who are from completely different circles from my life sent me invites to the same site within a week or so of each other. Curious enough that I joined. The timing was impeccable since I was ensconced reading Dune and completely in the book mentality. I’ve come to really like this site and its interface. Everything is very simple and straightforward. It allows you to organize your books using tags, which are also cleverly called shelves. It doesn’t force any sort of order on your shelves and allows you complete freedom to use or not use shelves.

If any one likes to read, they should definitely check out this book-focused social networking site. I’ve already sent invites to my mom and sister.

This is most likely staged, but its still outstanding. Go Celtics!

[Edit - Crazy]
Ok I didn’t know that thing was going to autoplay. If you want to see the guy on the jumbotron, click the link below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since I moved into this apartment and set up my Wii, I’ve only had one game in the console.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

I have been working tirelessly trying to complete all the challenges and unlock all of the characters. For the past couple weeks I had finished unlocking everyone but Wolf O’Donnell. To unlock him, I needed to do one of a few things.
1. Play 450 brawls total.
2. Complete the Subspace Emmisary. Then complete Boss Battles with Fox or Falco.
3. Complete the Subspace Emmisary. Then go back into the SSE and go to a hidden door or something or other.

I wasn’t going back into the Subspace Emmisary. I was done with that and I had no desire to go back in. 450 Brawls is a tall order and I had no idea how many Brawls had been played since I got the game since there is no meter. So I played Boss Battles. and played and played and played. I continued to die at the final boss for about a week because I just wasn’t as successful with Fox or Falco. Well I beat it yesterday with Fox. Then I got the alert a new adversary was approaching. Finally. You are supposed to then defeat the challenger to unlock the character, but I died. So what did I do? I said screw it and played Brawl after Brawl after Brawl until I hit the magic 450 number. In case anyone was curious, I had to play 121 Brawls before I got to unlock Wolf, but I did it. And here’s my proof:

IDW has done many variant covers for quite a few of their published (comic) books. One in particular has gained quite a bit of fanfare over its creativity

Seen above on the left is a variant cover for All Hail Megatron #1. It was drawn by Casey Coller and is an exclusive to a UK comic book store called Apocalypse Comics. Apparently the brilliant idea for this homage to the classic ‘The Killing Joke’ cover (above, right) came straight from Apocalypse Comics themselves. Casey got the opportunity for this after winning a TF fan-artist contest on IDW’s message board. He has since done work on both covers and interior pages for some Transformers books. Casey was apparently going through some stuff when he was commissioned for this piece. You can read more about that here, if you so desire. It should be noted for non-Transformers fans, that the camera is actually a Decepticon named Reflector. He is comprised of three different robots; Viewfinder, Spyglass, and Spectro.

All that aside, it appears that IDW is taking another stab at a classic cover homage with one of their Star Trek books. I believe this book is an alternate reality (a sort of ‘What if?’ style of book). This one seems a lot less creative and on the money, as it were, as The Killing Joke cover, but judge for yourself. Click to enlarge.

 

The original cover (on the right) is, of course, the classic Uncanny X-Men 141. This issue marked the Days of Future Past storyline. Here is a blurb on the book:

In November, we’re kicking off an all-new STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION series. This one is set in the Myriad Universe, Pocket Books’ new line of “what-if?” tales. The comic is called STAR TREK TNG: THE LAST GENERATION. Details will be forthcoming, but for now, here’s J.K. Woodward’s variant cover for the issue, and his inspiration for the image. Full art and colors by JK.

While writing out my rent and utility checks, my girlfriend, whom I was on the phone with at the time, instant messaged me this article. It details the email correspondence between a bill collector and someone she is tasked with to pursue on a late bill. I rarely laugh out loud while staring at this monitor by myself, but in this case, I had more trouble stopping myself from laughing.

Thanks to Brenna for the link!

[Edit - Crazy: I posted a bad link. Fixed it.]

[Edit 2 - Crazy: Looks like News.com.au got an interview with this guy. Link.]

I was surfing around and came upon this article at Wired.com. Basically it is the video posted above, which is an interview with Neil Gaiman. A book he wrote, Coraline, is being made into a stop-motion animated movie. Not only that, but its being filmed in 3-D by the director from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. It looks interesting and I’m pretty much game for anything by Neil Gaiman. I recently finished an excellent novel written by him called American Gods. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in fantasy, sci-fi, or mythology.

I’m also a huge fan of stop-motion animation, so this movie looks to be right up my alley. It looks like Coraline will be released in February of 2009. I’ll be checking it out for sure.

Another year, another celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. Our annual Halloween party took place at The Point, a bar just behind the Bell in Hand in Fanuel Hall. It was a much more intimate venue and worked much better for us this year than the huge hall we had last year. If it had been just slightly larger and just been our friends, I think it would have been perfect. That being said, it was a blast. There were unsurprisingly several Sarah Palin costumes and only one Joker costume. There were certainly some creative costumes like the hot air balloonist, the pedophile, Roger and Jessica Rabbit and the Powerpuff Girls. Two larger groups had themes. Dave, Max, Nate, Jamie, Amy, and several others went with a monopoly theme. Dave was the monopoly guy. Amy was Chance. Jamie was Community Chest. Nate was Go. And Max, well, Max was a thimble. I think he would have had an easier time selling himself as humpty dumpty.

The other group costume was using the Celtics theme. Davidson and I were Brian Scalabrine and Scott Pollard, respectively, the only two white guys on the Celtics this past year, both of whom sat on the bench throughout the playoffs. Some of the girls dressed up as Celtics dancers and Duke dressed up as Gino because everybody was a winner.

It was a challenge to have a costume with no pockets, but it made things interesting. And yes, I brought my own coozie for my beer bottles. I’m just that awesome.

I have amazingly already posted my pictures here.

Happy Halloween!

My wonderful girlfriend linked me to a couple of pieces of art on DeviantArt. The artist took Transformers and tried to draw them as they would look if they were actually human. Some of them are spot on, others are just too generic to get who they are, but overall its a fun idea and neat to see the interpretations that translate really well.

Animated Characters in Color

G1 Decepticons in Color

G1 Character sketches in black and white

This actually reminds me of one of the episodes from the original series where Ultra Magnus, Arcee, Springer and I think one other had their minds switched with humans or something along those lines and the bodies they were put into were great human interpretations of the robots’ personalities.