London Expo Haul part 2

The only Predacon in the pack is Dinobot, using the mold originally used for Armada Hoist, but retooled and/or repainted for Energon and Galaxy Force. While there has been a version released as Cybertron Longrack - referring to a Beast Wars character - this one has the original Armada Hoist head.


Last, but by no means least, my Tachikoma Plushie, picked up from the TokyoToys stand at the Expo:

London Expo Haul part 1

Yes, here they are... Photos of the BotCon 2006 'Dawn of Futures Past' Boxed Set, containing the Cybertronian forms of Maximals Rhinox, Rattrap, Optimus Primal and Cheetor, along with Predacon Dinobot. Now, if only someone could explain why they have animalistic names if they're in their pre-Beast Wars forms...


This is the boxed set in all its glory. Note the storytelling comic book at the side. The story is a bit of patchwork, explaining what happened before the first episode of the Beast Wars TV series.


From left to right, Rhinox, Rattrap, Optimus Primal and Cheetor, based on the molds first used for Galaxy Force Guardshell, Gasket, Land Bullet and Skids. For the most part, they're only recoloured, but Optimus Primal and Cheetor sport entirely new head molds.

London Expo

So I went to the London Expo today. It's a strange little show... Been to a few now. It happens maybe a couple of times a year, at the ExCeL Centre in London's Docklands, and each one tends to be very different.

The first one I went to with my sister and a friend a couple of years ago. It was hugely disappointing, in that the 'star' guests mostly weren't, and the retail side of things was decidedly spacious. And looked mostly like a jumble sale. None of us were particularly keen on visiting another, despite overhearing quite a few folks saying things like "The winter ones are much better" as we wandered around.

But I have a habit of changing my mind, and eventually decided to give the London Expo another try. The last one I went to was pretty good - it struck just about the right balance between retail and display, and introduced me to a fair few online retailers who've had quite a bit of business from me since ;) It also served as in introduction to the world of British Cosplay, as there was a competition run as part of the show. Even this, however, does not explain the presence of a skinny guy dressed as a bunny girl. What really made it weird was the sellotape used to keep it in place. Surely he could have kept it low-key and used double-sided?

This one... Was kind of back to being a disappointment. Far more by way of display stuff than retail, in particular taken over by a huge number of upcoming videogames, most of them MMORPGs. The sad thing was, while there was a lot to see, there wasn't a lot that interested me. I don't follow videogames as much as I used to (Next Generation consoles started killing games back when the original PlayStation came out), The star guests weren't that fabulous (Matt Frewer might have been interesting), and the displays were often missed opportunities. For example, Hasbro were there, but only to market their tabletop roleplaying games... Why none of the new TransFormers? Why nothing about the movie? Maybe I'm griping because there was so little in the way of TransFormers to buy, but one would think Hasbro would take any and all opportunities to push as many products as possible while they were there.

What retail there was had mostly been crowded down in one corner near the entrance (though there was a little more on the walls furthest from the entrance, and leading up to the main theatre). Gundam Mad were there (and had a Masterpiece Starscream on display) but I managed to not buy anything from them (which must be a first...), and the only purchase I ended up making was from Spacebridge, who had a couple of this year's BotCon boxed sets just calling out to me to be liberated. At £275, it was technically heavily overpriced - the set was sold for about $275 at BotCon, but such price translations are the norm in retail these days, so why should independent retailers be any different at conventions? - but the guy was at BotCon as a panellist and bought them himself, and I've been keen to get one ever since I saw the first images of Optimus Primal in the Land Bullet/Crumplezone mold. Needless to say, that was my only significant purchase in the show.

Tokyotoys (who, for once, were not ALL wearing sexy maid costumes) gave up one of their exceptionally cute plushie Tachikomas for a mere £20, and I'm debating whether I could safely take it to work, or whether it'd end up getting nicked... probably safest not to try, right?

I did manage to convince a friend who attended with me to buy a muppet Angel (as in the David Boreanaz character from the eponymous TV show spin-off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, specifically from the 'Smile Time' episode) for a friend of hers. There was a certain satisfaction in that.

Cosplay was very much on the menu for this one. It seems to be becoming exponentially more popular over here... but then, so do these conventions. Quite a few exceptionally good ones and, true to the last year's, at least one very disturbing one: There was a guy dressed as a female version of Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy:Advent Children. At first, it just looked like a Cloud costume... but when seen from behind, the stockings and suspenders were all too obvious. Since I occasionally pop over to cosplay websites, it was interesting to see one or two familiar faces.

And speaking of familiar faces, in one of the gaming areas, my friend ran into a friend of her husband's... who asked her to take photos of some of the cosplayers "because they'd slap me if I asked". This is actually probably not true, as most seem flattered if someone wants to take a photo, but who knows? Later there was much debate over the wearer of a pretty good Wonder Woman costume... who may actually have been male. I thought not... but apparently 'she' had a very deep voice for a woman.

When we left the convention finally - having spent quite a bit of time there, considering how little there was to see - we headed off to Brent Cross for more sensible forms of retail. One shop was offering free hand massages, and cards giving a 10% discount for today only... So I've picked up a housewarming gift for my sister's impending move to Swindon.

Back home, I'd received some post: A whole bunch of Megatokyo t-shirts and a plushie Boo, which was destined to become a surprise Christmas gift for the friend I'd been at the convention with... but I had to tell her about it when she mentioned them when telling me that she'd ordered the four Megatokyo books. Oh well.

I'll see about posting pictures of my London Expo haul tomorrow...

Birthday & Christmas Preparation

After work this evening, I met up with my sister for dinner. Also to pick up my mother's birthday present, which my sister has been looking after since Joust earlier in the year.

I'd actually forgotten all about it until she mentioned it in an email recently, suggesting that we meet up so I can take it back. That is, I dimly recalled purchasing a birthday present for my mother, but I couldn't remember what it was, where I'd got it, or where I'd hidden it. Just as well my sister hadn't lost it in her housemoving preparations. Phew.

This evening also served as a reminder that I've already got my sister's Christmas present. Not sure when my memory got this bad, but I guess I've had a lot of other stuff on my mind since the summer.

So anyway. We met up at Leicester Square, although she walked straight past me at first - I do have this awful habit of becoming invisible at all sorts of inopportune times - and we wandered around briefly - in the rain, neither of us with an umbrella between us - trying to find somewhere to eat. Chiquitos is the usual choice, but it was pretty full, with a half hour wait for a table. We were offered the run of the bar, with one of those "the lights flash when your table is ready" doohickies, but I didn't feel like visiting the bar... not least because I'm just getting over my umpteenth cold of the year. Next port of call was Bella Pasta, round the corner, which was also full. Wagamama presented itself, but I didn't fancy that when I got thinking about it... So we ended up traipsing off to the other nearby branch of Bella Pasta.

Aside from collecting the birthday present, it was a good opportunity to catch up on the progress of the move (not much), and whinge about my day at work (crap... Doing other people's work for them because they're lazy or stupid, getting frustrated by colleagues who don't know what they're doing, the usual), and tell her about the leaving do on Friday, and how it went terribly wrong.

The meal was good, even if the conversation was depressing.

Of course, now I have to be on the lookout for presents for the rest of the family to get me, but I'm off to the London Expo this coming weekend, and Memorabilia late next month, so I might pick something up there.

News from work, now I'm home, is that a few more of The Bints are officially leaving... though it's not officially official yet. Likewise unofficial is the impending departure of one of the biggest problems the company has, in terms of fucking up the money side of things. I don't think we've had one sad loss at work this year! That's saying something, considering the turnover of staff.

Torchwood

So, there's a spin-off series to the new Doctor Who.

Of course, it's unfair to describe it that way... It's a new series based around an organisation proposed within the new Doctor Who 'universe'. It features a character from the new Doctor Who 'universe', Captain Jack Harkness. It's set in Cardiff.

The BBC decided to chuck it out at 9pm on a Sunday, on their Digital channel BBC3. You can look at this as either an indication of their lack of confidence in the product (fringe channel, late timeslot, not the best day in the week), or an attempt to get more viewers on their Digital TV channels. At first glance, I'd say it can only be a mixture of both.

Visually, it seems to be trying to ape the orginal, Las Vegas-set CSI. Lots of sweeping fly-by camerawork, over colourfully-lit nighttime Cardiff streets, and the canny storytelling technique of showing something past from a character's perspective, rather than just having them tell about it. But there's something about the presentation that's somehow slower than the glitzy American forensics show... despite obvious efforts to improve the pacing of the show.

The characters work well... Kinda. It's another ensemble of misfits with a mysterious boss and a newbie to ease us into the organisation. The dialogue was generally quite snappy, and had an amusing tendency to take pot-shots at sci-fi and crime drama.

The opening story was interesting, though perhaps rendered a little pointless and improbable by the hasty denouement. The second really tried to be risqué, but fell a little flat. Thankfully they only screened one 'sex scene', but it was so poorly done they should have done without it, were it not such a critical plot point later on.

Overall, it's watchable, just a little two-dimensional. It's not so much a Doctor Who spin-off as 'The Harkness Files'. Far better than the BBC's Robin Hood, though. Don't get me started on THAT

Stereoscopic Photography

One of my recent whims was to create some 3D photographs. This all came about because of something that happened on the way home from work by train one night.

On this train was a mother with two kids - a very young girl and an older boy. The young girl had a colouring book which came with a set of those 'magic' colour-change pens and, bizarrely, a pair of red/blue 3D glasses (as recently made cool by David Tennant's interpretation of Doctor Who). Evidently, the book proclaimed that one could create 3D images with the pens included... but possibly didn't explain how one might accomplish this. The little girl repeatedly drew things out in all the different colours, then put on the glasses to see if the picture was 3D yet. Nothing seemed to work for her. Not even the 'magic' colour-changing pen could turn her drawings into 3D.

So her brother snatched it all away, proclaiming that he knew how to make a 3D drawing. He took the black pen, drew a cube in perspective, then coloured one face red, and another blue. Then he put on the 3D glasses.

It didn't work. I was biting my tongue by this point.

So, Stereoscopic Photography 101:
Human sight relies on two offset eyes to achieve perception of three dimensions. This is the first clue as to how to create a 3 Dimensional image on a flat surface. Each eye is seeing from a slightly different perspective, and the brain combines these two images into one. You can see this by looking at something, then closing one eye at a time.

Consider now the red/blue lenses. The red lens floods one eye, making red effectively imperceptible. Everything is red. Through the red lens, blue appears darker. The blue lens floods the other eye, making blue effectively imperceptible. Everything is blue. Through the blue lens, red appears darker.

Consider how these two concepts relate to each other. Each eye sees something different, and red/blue lenses make red/blue imperceptible respectively and blue/red more obvious respectively.

With me so far?

Take a greyscale photograph. It's flat. There is very little indication of depth. But now take another greyscale photograph of the same thing, from a slightly different horizontal position, and you have the beginnings of 3D.

At this point, you'll need some form of image manipulation software. If you're familiar with the likes of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, this is a doddle.

Assign a colour to each eye. These things tend to be Red/Left and Blue/Right but, hey, I cocked up and did it the other way round. It really doesn't matter, so long as you are consistent, and remember which way round you're doing things.

Using the time-honoured method of closing each eye alternately, determine which picture applies to which eye, thereby deciding which colour applies to which picture.

Initially, you'll need to create an RGB image with your 'red' image on the Red channel and the 'blue' image on the blue channel. This will work as it is, but lacks contrast. To regain your contrast and make a nice, monochromatic 3D image, you'll need to utilise the green channel.

The green channel needs to show both images but, once merged, they don't need to be as dark as either the red or blue channels. I tend to Multiply them together at about 50% opacity, varying one or the other to achieve a good balance.

Once your three channels are set up, view the final RGB image, and don your red/blue 3D glasses. If the image you're looking at doesn't look 3D, try wearing the glasses the other way round. Hopefully, you're looking at something like this (and remember that, as previously noted, you'll need Blue/Left and Red/Right to see these properly):




Through a process of fine-tuning, you'll figure out how best to take the photos and how best to combine them into a 3D image. The above images have a very well-defined 'mid-ground', and that is what I used as the point of focus (where the Red/Blue overlaps most perfectly). You can make things more dramatic (Red/Blue overlaps in the background) or deeper (Red/Blue overlaps in the foreground), but you will find that the difference in position when taking the photograph will have to be quite minimal.

Enjoy!

The End, and yet The Beginning

People have been telling me I should start a blog for ages. I used to have one - of sorts - within my website, but that got cut out for one reason or another. Of course, this didn't mean I suddenly had nothing to say, just that I was no longer throwing it up on the internet for any and all to see.

My 'Ramblings' pages were a bone of contention for some. Most thought they were great, tongue-in-cheek, occasionally laugh-out-loud stuff. Some took personal offense at some of my comments. Some said I was too 'open'... Some took to obsessively reading them over and over again, more often than I updated them.

That's one reason I stopped. Particularly since I worked with one such person.

Of course, I also needed more space to display my growing collection of toys, and I hadn't added to the Ramblings in a good couple of years, so it wasn't a great loss...

But now things have changed, and I feel freer to get back into the habit of writing. Of course, with all the crazy things that have been happening over the last few months, I wish I'd done this earlier in the year, but you can't have everything. Some of the more interesting stories may yet appear, depending on how much I actually have to write about, and how much time I have to write it. Whatever. This has been my first post. More follows...