image test

Just testing out the image thing, really.

Oh hey - that seems to work quite well. In theory, clicking the above should bring up a larger image, but I can't test that till it's published, so here goes.

Oh - the above is a vector of Kei from Dirty Pair Flash I'm working on.

hostage

Watched a film called hostage last night. It was okay, but it did feel like it sorta lacked something. I dunno, it was like it lacked twists--as if there were parts that were meant to be twists, but they didn't quite have the punch to be proper twists.

The film starred Bruce Willis. I'm not sure if I quite like Bruce Willis--I mean, he seems to end up in a lot of poor films, but has also been in some really rather good ones. In terms of him as a person, though, every interview or thing I've heard about him has kinda made him sound like a bit of a dick-head.

Most recently I read the Kevin Smith collected blog book thing and he was in that (Smith is in Die Hard 4). And even though Smith professes his adoration for the man, what he writes in terms of what happened when he was there shooting kinda underlined the impression I have that Willis is a bit of bell-end.

My TV is on the fritz a bit. I got digital a little while back and have been nothing but impressed. However, the other day the reception seemed to go on the fritz, and I dunno if you've ever seen digital when the reception is poor, but it's outright unwatchable.

That's its big disadvantage. For normal telly if the reception is poor, you can still kinda watch it, it'll just have more 'snow' or the sound will be crackly. For digital if the reception is poor it stutters and the picture breaks up to such an extent you just cannot watch it. And it tends to be a threshold thing as well--perfectly fine down to a given strength, and then *bam* unwatchable.

Hopefully this fritzyness is due to a poor connection that I know about. I've asked my landlord to take a look see if it's come loose. Otherwise I'm kinda knackered. The worst thing is it's primarily the BBC channels that are affected, and it's those I watch the most :(.

Just got e-mails saying animedia, animage and newtype are on the way--so I should have them next week :).

suddenly, from out of nowhere... next week

Wow - it's been a week since I last posted an entry on the old blogo. Here's why:

Thursday was absolutely manic at work. There was a sudden decision to bid for something and I was roped in to do the legwork. Really, this was an impossible task, because the PQQ in question was some 40-50 pages in length. There would have been no way I could have done it if it hadn't been for an interesting discovery.

The PQQ was a direct copy (and I mean literally copy-and-paste) of an old PQQ we'd done for another contract. I won't go into details, but basically I was able to rip all the answers out, dust them down and re-use them. It still meant we had about 6 hours to do an entire 40-odd page PQQ, but it meant it got done.

Friday through Monday I was on holiday (more on that later), but since I only do the bloggage at work, that meant no posts.

Then yesterday, Tuesday, we went to Warminister to meet some guys from a company we may be teaming with on another opportunity. Meeting went well, but it did mean we were basically out of the office all day, so no post.

---

So, about the weekend.

It kinda went well, but on the other hand I didn't really get done what I really wanted to, namely the implementation of the new version of scan-city. This wasn't really for any other reason than I couldn't be arsed--I could have got it done, but instead I did other stuff :/.

Some of the highlights for the other stuff:

Watched Ai Yori Aoshi Enishi. It wasn't awful, like I was dreading, but then equally it wasn't anything special. I mean, it was basically just more of the same, but this time focusing a little more on some of the other characters. There was no real progress with Aoi and Kaoru's relationship and it ended in that typical "maintaing the status quo is best" ending you (unfortunately) get in these shows. Look for a review of both this and the main series in future.

I also cracked into GUNxSWORD. It's one of those shows that I've collected and have left sat on the shelf unwatched for years. I seem to remember watching the first DVD at some point before, but I never got any further. Why I'm not sure, as it's really good. Perhaps it's because the start is quite slow--the 'big' plot doesn't really kick in until the second/third disk, which is kinda late. Character design is by my fave guy, Takahiro Kimura. Animation is uniformly very good, which is almost a surprise in and of itself for a Gonzo show. Quite a few extras on the disks to boot.

The only real problem I'm having is with the subtitles--they're really quick and can be a little difficult to result. I'll have to re-watch in dub I think, which is no great shakes as it's got a 5.1 mix. Another one I'll be reviewing in future, I think.

My site update this w/end was a wall of LuLu I did a while ago. It's been on mt for ages and has become my second most popular wall on there. I also uploaded it to AP, where it's been fairly well received--it is quite old, after all. I also uploaded a png version of the LuLu vector to AP, which is actually a site update in a couple of weeks (in psd and jpg formats).

Lastly on the walling front, I uploaded one version of my dragonaut wall to mt. That's not proven so popular, but I was kinda expecting that. It's a fairly plain wall, for one thing (there's another version with a planet behind her, but I can't claim to be entirely happy with how that turned out, tbh). But also, dragonaut wasn't a brilliant series from what I saw of it and I know it wasn't very popular. Also, the chara designs are a little, well... extreme, shall we say? They aren't to everybody's tastes anyway.

I'm feeling a bit of a walling bug at the moment--this is again where I lament my doing too many hobbies, as it'll probably have passed before I get back up to speed on things I've given more priority like scan-city :/.

The new megami turned up on Monday, so I'll get that scanned. I didn't do any of the scanning I was hoping too over the w/end either :(. What the heck was I doing? Well, actually I was playing a bit of life catchup. You know I've been banging on about a lack of cash and needing a debt-consolidation loan? Well that all came through and so I spent a lot of the w/end getting in all the essentials I've been doing without--like electricity (the meter had dropped to less than £5.00!) and petrol (I'd been running on vapours the last week) and cleaning products (my bathroom has not been cleaned in weeks and mould is starting to grow :/), and it all sucked up a lot of time, but I'm pretty much sorted now.

Plus, last night I got two new artbooks through. Geass Rebellions, which is absolutely beautiful. I'm going to buy a second one of those for when I trash this one for scans. And Mine Blue, which has got some lovely stuff in, but it's only about A5 size--not sure if it's worth scanning it, tbh. I've got the Nia artbook on the way too.