Life of a Lemon

Tyler Hill Fireworks - 2009

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:47:39 GMT

http://www.manylemons.co.uk/gallery/nertcam/Canterbury/TylerHillFireworks/tylerhill09/

First time trying out ye olde tripod + remote shutter cable + bulb mode method.

London MCM Expo - October 2009 - Pictures

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:27:14 GMT

http://www.manylemons.co.uk/gallery/nertcam/LondonExpo/oct09/

1286 out of 5728 survived The Trials (tm)

Minami 16

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:23:36 GMT

http://www.minamicon.org.uk/

Minami regs open

GOOO! Time is of the essence!

Disregard that. Yet another record selling out :P

Continued

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:26:24 GMT

http://www.manylemons.co.uk/gallery/nertcam/cosplay/3D/

Couple more I managed to salvage - there's plenty of others that didn't quite work :P

I managed to order a batch of cheapy cardboard glasses for this stuff, as I'm enjoying it far more than should be allowed, and feel kinda bad barely anyone can actually view them ;) Anyone want a pair? They'll easily fit in an envelope, or if there's a chance I'll run into you in futures near, yell and I shall equip some upon my person for such times.

For some reason they all have Ford logos on...

Cosplaying in the THIRD DIMENSION

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:52:56 GMT

Hunted through recent cons to see if by any chance my snaphappyness led to me getting any two identical parallel shots which could then be put to much experimentation. As chances would have it, it did! So without further ado, grab your red/cyan glasses (what do you mean you haven't gotten any yet? You've had like a couple of days now...) and witness the awe and randomness that is, 3D cosplay!

or something.

Bigger and better versions in the gallery nyah or on dA nyah.

Now in 3D

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:30:21 GMT

In which two monkeys experiment with Python, photos, and some coloured plastic.

Acquire thyself some red/cyan 3D glasses. Clearly you all have these handy, Al does:

Next bolt two cameras side by side with a handy bracket! On the left here we have Al's resurrected IXUS 65, complete with oil spot on the ccd T_T and on the right is my dearest IXUS 70

Take simultaneous photos, and script in a bit of image fudgery.

Don the fashionable glasses, and awe at the spack.

If you don't have any, well.. that just shows your worth as a human being, doesn't it really?

(...yeah so I don't have any.. YET!)

So instead you can stare at some oddly coloured images of random things and wonder what on earth we were thinking.

I may try my hand at taking these manually with the dslr but it's going to take a steady yet mobile hand XD Luckily as long as the two photos are level the rest can be tweaked. Probably.

Keep those 3D glasses around, there may be another project in the works now...

Edit: because I could.

AyaCon vids

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:39:17 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/user/ManyLemons

Couple of AyaCon vids uploaded, and mostly filmed by the takuropop so I could be free to ninja with the still camera (and make a bloody racket with the shutter..)

Aya Revolution - AyaCon 2009 - Gallery is live

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:25:47 GMT

http://www.manylemons.co.uk/gallery/nertcam/AyaCon/2009/

Go forth and browse!

This gallery was brought to you by the word coffee and the time 3:50am.

First blood..

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:31:17 GMT

A small collection of signatures to add to the pile XD As per request, and because it's the smallest directory and needs no further editing, it goes up first.

A number.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:22:05 GMT

10,141

You heard me.

Today's lesson

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:10:56 GMT

(Laptop + gravity) / foot = ow

One of the dodgier laptop bags we have only has one working zip, I wasn't paying attention and picked the wrong one. Hoisted the bag by the shoulder strap, it went vertical, the laptop backflipped out and crunched corner-down onto something soft and squishy: me.

The laptop is fine.

It's quite disconcerting watching your big toenail turn dark grey..

Sphericalness

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:09:03 GMT

Them there that Grand International Cosplay Ball type thing be on again this year, 'seems.

Most of my friendslist no doubt all knew this already from a dozen other sources, but there you go :P

Punch to face.

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:32:39 GMT

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/dead-fantasy-monty-oum/52656

Dead Fantasy 3 online!

I so need to convince people to cosplay from this for an epic fighty shoot. Seriously if I can do some Kasumi/Yuna or Hitomi/Tifa action shots I will die happy.

This is me actually wanting to take photos of Final Fantasy costumes here, everyday happenings this is not ;)

Panoramaramaramarama

Sun, 31 May 2009 18:06:34 GMT

Whee. Hugin is fun! Only one or two malformed multi-headed people XD

Rest of the Expo photos

Wed, 27 May 2009 16:05:17 GMT

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

Expo Photos - Saturday

Tue, 26 May 2009 01:58:27 GMT

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.

DeExpo

Mon, 25 May 2009 15:50:27 GMT

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.

How random

Mon, 04 May 2009 13:01:21 GMT

'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

TTGL Movie

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:45:09 GMT

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.

Squee.

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:25:47 GMT

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

World domination, step by step..

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:13:13 GMT

Double page spread in Neo, all mine, bwahaha.

In which I spend several minutes remembering how to spell corrugated.

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:16:13 GMT

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

Wall of pretties.

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:31:44 GMT

Shiny camera is shiny and versatile, it would appear.

Choco, you scare me greatly.

MinamiCon 15 visual representations

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:29:25 GMT

http://www.manylemons.co.uk/gallery/nertcam/MinamiCon/15/

Pretty camera means little to no post processing \o/

Bleeeeeh

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:36:22 GMT

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 ;)

# UNITED KINGDOM 57.19%
# UNITED STATES 22.91%
# GERMANY 7.11%
# SWEDEN 4.56%
# JAPAN 1.45%
# UKRAINE 1.34%
# CANADA 0.63%
# NETHERLANDS 0.62%
# RUSSIAN FEDERATION 0.54%
# SINGAPORE 0.39%

and about 30 others, it even gives me pretty flags.

Mozilla Firefox 53.9%
Internet Explorer 41.1%
Others 3.0%
Opera Mini 2.0%

Windows 94.9%
Windows Vista 45.7%
Windows XP 44.9%
Windows Server 2003 2.3%
Windows 2000 0.9%
Windows NT 0.7%
Windows 98 0.4%
Mac OS 2.7%
Others 2.4%

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.