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31st May , 2009
07:06 pm - Panoramaramaramarama
Whee. Hugin is fun! Only one or two malformed multi-headed people XD
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27th May , 2009
05:05 pm - Rest of the Expo photos
http://www.manylemons.co.uk/gallery/nertcam/LondonExpo/may09/
That link again, for now it contains a Sunday's worth of pikatures also.
and even going this fast I'm still way behind most of the other photographers, what's up with that? :P
Also:
LQ Team Rocket skit
LQ Saint Seiya skit
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26th May , 2009
02:58 am - Expo Photos - Saturday
I took some photos; I thought I might share some.
http://www.manylemons.co.uk/gallery/nertcam/LondonExpo/may09/
Saturday's are up, Sunday's pending still.
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25th May , 2009
04:50 pm - DeExpo
Back
Copying photos across now.. 20gb o.o including the masq videos, many of which FAIL.
Most of the photos involve exposure fail of some sort or another
My lovely new 8gb sd card died a horrible death. But I rescued all the photos off it just in time, I think.
Saw peoples, helped out, was awesome. We had a lovely layout for the desk (and, well, had a desk!) and we were generally well organised and efficient. further details later.
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4th May , 2009
02:01 pm - How random
'Video Game Cosplay Yearbook' - http://www.pwnordie.com/blog/posts/15464
The Tentacle returns!
Poor thing's been shoved in the attic now, still in one piece though. Bub apparently fared less well and probably won't make another appearance XD
Expo, expo, go AWAY. Or rather, be later on and on a less rubbish weekend. Distinct lack of DLR and not having anyone to share a room with is going to make this trip 'interesting'.. Plus by the sounds of it, from what I keep hearing barely anyone is bothering at all XD
I have a Mifune wig! Well actually I've had it for a while, just need to bother with the rest, and make infinite swords. Hm.
I really need a motivational kick up the backside, I've done zilch on cosplay since Chase, and Tomitake only just about counts for some of the details, and AMV editing? sheesh it's been like two years? two and a half? LAZY. ASS.
Photography at least I'm doing a little bit.. Tried out playing with my polarising filter in Westgate Gardens yesterday and did some tester HDR shots too.. Fun but haven't got much of the hang of either yet.. though the filter should be awesome for shooting through glass. Would've been handy to realise that during the Soul Eater shoot :P
Still, it's hard to practice without anyone to practice on XD So it's all flowers, riverbeds and cathedrals for now.
I'm coding my own camera-downloady VBS script, because I'm tired of all the software I can find being lousy. However even with scripty goodness there seems to be no way to alter EXIF data, I can read but not write, so I can't auto-rotate and reset the orientation flag, nor add copyright info or any of that fancy lark without putting in several calls to other software.. ImageMagick has a COM+ object but that doesn't deal with EXIF and can't losslessly rotate either -_- So I can script resizing and watermarking, but the downloading part is still issueful, and without rotating properly before watermarking it would get very silly.
Short of coding my own, which looks hideous, it's going to have to settle just for copying/renaming and sorting for now. Which it does do wonderfully. The NertCam-12345.jpg scheme can return! It can sort by camera, add the fifth digit automatically.. sort videos and raws separately.. Even has a progress bar. It's beautiful *sniff*
On the downside all the testing seems to have knackered my multi-card reader, gah.
I.. decorated a camera strap? Can that count? Not fond of the red stripey I HAVE A CANON CAMERA EVERYBODY WOOO! default I nabbed a black neoprene generic one from Jessops and duly made it my own. Mixing modpodge, acrylic paint and nightlite paint does indeed work on neoprene, stretchy stretchy! and glowy-in-darky. Yay. Though the new strap is a bit on the xbox side of things so it hangs a little low, and the viewfinder cover doesn't fit on it.. I don't really expect to use that anyway.
On Eli's advice also nabbed a tiny stick-on strap for the lens cap so no losing that hopefully, though it does mean it dangles.
DAMMIT FALLOUT3 DLC #3 COME OUT TODAY NOT TOMORROW.. I have work tomorrow T_T
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26th April , 2009
03:45 am - TTGL Movie
Soo, they took the most epic high-adrenaline show ever, cut out all the rubbish eps, condensed the first half (1-14), and then....! made it less epic.
I'm not sure quite what they've done, whether they remixed the audio or if parts are needlessly redubbed, but some very memorable moments sound slower spoken, with a lot less emotion, the music has less impact and the pacing is just off.. weak. ass. Not to mention there's barely any new animation in there for the most part. As an OAV recap/summary show it'd be great, but advertised as a movie... no.
The battle near the end is all that's really new/worth watching, where more or less everyone gets involved, and we get some actual melee combat from Adiane (!) before it flicks back to Shimon-o-vision, reruns one of the iconic moments with more elaborate but not necessarily better animation, again weaker voicing, and then just goes silly.
I have little problem with it being a clipshow largely, again OAV-shaped preferred, but when they mix in clips from the show with the new animation telling a different story it really glitches in my mind.. some of the same animation is used but fighting different guys.. it makes perfect sense to do, but just breaks the flow if you know the series that well XD
I wouldn't go so far as to say it was terrible by any means, they haven't trashed the characters like the DVD ep6 did, or lamed it up ala the OAV.. You could use it to force on people who refuse to watch a full series for whatever reason, but... they could've done so, so much better than this.
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25th April , 2009
12:25 pm - Squee.
Ebay alerts finally paid off somewhat, with a Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou postcard artbook popping up.. SOLD!
On an entirely separate note, anyone have any experience with getting promotional items printed/made?
Our soc's looking at maybe getting some 4gb USB sticks with our logo on to sell to members, or failing that finding somewhere that'll print high quality stickers to then stick on aforementioned drives without looking like.. well.. like we just put a sticker on something :P Benefit there being cheaper, full colour, and we can pick any old USB stick design rather than the generic ones.. I've got some stickers Kate got from an ebay seller - One Piece ones with "Nert" on, so they're semi-custom printed, but they're really tough and last well, just no idea where to get them from ;)
I was also possibly looking at the custom PVC keyrings or metal pin badges like Ame/Minami have but without even looking I can guess they're probably waaay out of our price range ;) At least if it's something useful we might be able to get away with deposits to go toward the min.quantity payment..
They're going to be sold at-cost anyway, it's a "people want trinkets" venture rather than wanting to make any money.. We've got the acrylic keyrings but MORE! MORE! XD
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23rd April , 2009
15th April , 2009
12:16 am - In which I spend several minutes remembering how to spell corrugated.
Weekend of deathly quietness followed by an Easter Monday of sushi, arcades, ginger beer in a park, getting lost in a bar, and dinner in a restaurant designed to kill me. It also had toilets straight out of Lazer Quest or something.
Met up with Tom, Annette, Phil, Nia, Kat, Perrin, P-Chan, Dez and Ben early in the day for general lounging around the Londinium. Managed to neatly fit my foot into my mouth within the first 10 minutes :P but otherwise a lovely chilled out afternoon mostly spent on the grass in Green Park.
Then later called for the Main Event. In honour of ex-housemate Phil Lovell's birtheryday met up with Ian, Phil & Katie et al in a bizarrely huge, dark and twisty bar with a tree in, before we descended on a Belgian foody place somewhere around Covent Garden. The menu consisted of mussels (not a seafood fan, me) and things cooked in beer. Mostly both. Allergies are typically unforgiving things so it was something of a menu of death ;) I ended up managing to get a lamb shank without the doomsday sauce and thus survived the encounter, well fed at that.
The other downside was I didn't get to try all the speciality drinks in fancy glasses. That is until during a visit to the futuristic toilets of corrugated metal they managed to get one of the fancy drinking vessels filled with water for me XD
Minami report still due, I know. Effort :P
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1st April , 2009
6th March , 2009
07:36 pm - Bleeeeeh
So now I'm on codeine linctus just to calm down the raging cough of yuck and it means I can occasionally SLEEP! Yay. it's a stronger dose of codeine than I was on for the chest pains so I'm not looking forward to stopping -_- but that'll be then. for now, breathing is easier and makes fewer silly noises.
Generally been housebound, I'm out of games that I want to play, and I'm lacking in cosplay materials and motivation -_- I'm sick of being sick :P
Actually got bored enough to upgrade the stats engine on the gallery and get around to tweaking the regexps to filter out all the comment spam engines constantly harassing the site and I'm finally getting sensible results.. Top searches are now things like "minamicon" and "amecon" rather than "items" and "comments" o.O
The US has gone from being 60-70% of the hits to about 23% XD Spamzors.
Most popular pictures of the last 100 days appear to be of Zineb holding a flash, followed by Lex as Padme, and then Perrin having his hat stolen, I think we have Donna to blame for that last one ;)
( pointless statty stats )
I've learnt even more accurately how ludicrously expensive dslrs are.. and that on ebay bits go for even more than new most of the time, so yeowch. I always knew lenses were pricey, especially the big ones, but never realised even the tiny ones cost nearly as much as the camera itself T_T Especially if I want a camera that can do some of the things I'm used to with my ixus, that is apparently asking the earth ;) Still, I now feel learned on the subject and have a pretty solid idea of what I'll go for.. Then comes the years of beans on toast afterwards.
Only show I'm really watching at the moment is Toradora, which is a reasonably standard love..trapezoid type show, except polished to a mirror sheen. It's highly addictive, I actually like *all* of the characters, every single one develops nicely some way or another, the style is nice, the voice acting is great, it's nothing amazingly new, it's just solidly good. It's also doing the much harshness thing.
So yeah, this is currently as exciting as my life gets.
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16th February , 2009
07:16 pm - What Oz said..
AyaCon registrations be of the open.
Now to figure out how to make those room prices less painful..
Okay, hold that thought, the demand is crippling the site! There's plenty of spaces so hold off for a little while if you can.
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17th January , 2009
12:48 pm - VCA 2007 Prizes arrived \o/
Girliest. prizes. ever. XD
Space Thunder Kids is definitely a winner there.
The badge is neat though.
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1st January , 2009
03:28 am - One year. Boxed. Unopened.
Hello 2009, how goes?
Edit:
So yeah, happy leap second to everyone 'n all that.. but WHAT THE HELL IS ALL THIS GIBBERISH ON MY SCREEN?
I'm going to blame Angela. It's got Tom's name on it but I sense darker forces are at work here.
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29th December , 2008
11:18 pm - KEYBOARD!
Canterbury, I hath returned!
Writing on a tablet is fine and all but not being able to hold conversations at a normal pace does get a little frustrating.. So I'm glad to be back at a full keyboard again ;)
More Twiglet photos thrown at the gallery but I'm sure few care ;) I miss her anyway.
Christmas was quiet, very quiet.. TV is still pretty meh, although through channel jumping we managed a pretty steady stream of Have I Got News For You and a couple of other comedy quiz type things so it wasn't so bad.. What was up with the film schedules though? American Psycho and Saw? The hell?
I have a new Tote scarf. I'm in awe of its ingenuity, it's got a loophole sewn in. This actually impressed me. I need to get out more..
Now I'm back and I can load Steam without it trying to display animated snowflakes which horribly kill my remote session I took full advantage of the huge-ass sale they're having at the moment (many thanks to Oz for pointing this out). I was planning on picking up Bioshock at some point anyway, but for £3.50? I'll take it now, please.
Also Left 4 Dead. We got it for Ian's birthday and it sounds like a couple of other people I know either have it or are considering becoming owners of said software, so saleysaleygoodness!
So hey, guess what? They downloaded and installed at lightning speed and BOTH RUN PERFECTLY FINE, another kick at the corpse of GTA4.
Also picked up I-Fluid because it was pittance cheap and actually looked amusing. Good thing it was cheap, but it's not bad. You control a droplet of water and roll around tracks in desktop environments not entirely unlike Micro Machines with added physics. Your dreaded enemies? FLOUR! BREAD! and PAPER! Apples are cool though. They're your friend.
Acquired a USB charger for my phone for an entire 99p, this amuses me greatly and will save a plug socket when travelling..
Hibiscus is an odd flavour of drink. Kind of like a weak elderflower flavour.
..so right now my desk is a mishmash of emptied boxes of medication of all sorts of colours, a couple of empty cans of bizarrely labelled drinks, random offcuts of sparkly bits from christmas cards, and a crumpled silhouette of a drugged out smiley face. (template from Chase's shirt)
I don't feel like I've come home to my own desk somehow..
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27th December , 2008
10:28 pm - Moggie revisited
Christmas festivities done and dusted and it's clearly time for taking pictures of the family cat, Twiglet. Lazy lump that she is, she's dearly loved and is still healthy 13 years on since we took her in!
things otherwise have been quiet, practising a bit with handwriting on the tablet, like this, watching rubbish TV.. Pretty bored :p
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14th December , 2008
10:51 pm - On the brighter side
There, finally! Can't get THAT in GTA4 can ya, huh? HUH?
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09:30 pm - GTA4 FAIL
So after 24 hours of Steam downloading and installing the beast, followed by more installs.. a sign up.. some harassment about signing up.. more install, more harassing about signing up to something else, but claiming it's not needed, then claiming it's needed, then demanding i quit and go sign up, then signing up, then it proudly announcing 404 errors in the game menu.. then finally logging in to the (2nd) signed up account, after going and verifying the email, it did more downloading, installing.. more installing.. then asked to sign in again, then wanted me to sign up to an offline account too.. it installed a useless application to permanently sit in the system tray, then popped up an irritating 'click here to start the game' box, then died in a single, uninformative error message.
One updating graphics drivers session later, and my screen resolution is forced down - as in suddenly my monitor mysteriously can't do the resolutions it could on the old drivers. sigh. tried game anyway, it loads! black screen with audio. funs. give it some time and the graphics stutter into view eventually, way behind. finally fight to the menu (which should be the first bloody thing you get to) and turn everything to minimum. 800x600 and every single option turned off or to level 1 or whatever.
13fps.
Smooth.
Well there's money wasted, I'm not upgrading a perfectly good machine that can play pretty much any other game just fine. That on top of the ridiculous amount of hassle, and, well, no game's worth this, even if I was really looking forward to it after loving the previous iterations. Bleh.
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10th December , 2008
02:52 am - Furthermore!
Ball vidyahs.
We arrived a little late so only caught the last part of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) chococat & ai_honey's duet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4soQpu9NLkg
The incredibly awesome fire performance, it's missing large chunks because I switched to taking stills a lot but it's got the opening
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJN0OsZE1kI
The last dance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwcaNzQP3zM
Edit: and now official YayaApproved (tm) photos up too.
( aaaaaand the report. )
One image to sum it up:
Win.
A most enjoyably relaxing weekend, with a Ball thrown in for a nominal fee.
...
Only for Tuesday to be wracked with chest pains and difficulty walking. Go me. Unrelated to the Ball at least..
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