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< Piro >

"A ph33rbot Christmas"

Friday - December 22, 2006

Hey Folks,

Well, it looks like Sarah and I survived the holiday rush, and now we can take a few days and enjoy the holiday ourselves. In spite of all the work, we do manage to have a little fun here and there... like the following.

Back in November we picked up this funny little animatronic marching penguin christmas... thing. You know, one of those decorations that sing and dance and are used by children and morally challenged adults to torture and drive the sanity away from the rest of us (i believe that consumer robotics is one of the 14 deadly evils of the modern age). It was cute, it had three Penguins that spun and march and danced around while singing a rough and tough military-like tune. Sarah had an idea.

"hey, lets put ph33rbots over them and we can have dancing ph33rbots!"

So, after much experimentation and finally sitting down to assemble the thing (and changing the batteries) we completed our little project. We sorta turned it into a video christmas card and uploaded it to Youtube:

(You can view a larger version and whatnot overat the youtube site.)

We hope you enjoy it, it's kind of fun (especially when they start knocking things off of each other). It was a fun project and i admit that I spent some time working on this rather than the comic over the past two days. Hey, it's Christmas, i can goof off a little. :)

Sarah and I wish you and your friends and families a safe and happy holiday!

Holiday schedule - comic 947 should be up shortly, i'll have a DPD for Christmas that i'll post over the weekend, then we return to our regular schedule on Wednesday.

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< Dom >

"A little break"

Wednesday - January 3, 2007

[Dom] - 09:00:00 - [link here]

This is my first day of rest since my last rant, and so, while my laundry runs in the other room and the Major anime marathons on TV, I'll relate a few of the events. I'm a week behind, so I'll do as much as I can before I help my friend clean his place.

Dec. 29th was a day of wandering. Mikelurker and I were supposed to meet up with Rice Suki earlier, but he had to see a friend off at Narita airport first. Mikelurker is a giant Disney fan, so we changed our plans so that we could meet up with Rice Suki at Tokyo Disney Sea after 6. Rice Suki and I are pretty apathetic about Disney in general, so we mostly went with mikelurker because he asked - and in Rice's case, it's because Mike's "Chineseness" was stronger than his. Mike bought tickets for all of us before we even got there, so there was no way to refuse his offer to go to Disney Sea.

But first, I had to go and visit my past in Ikebukuro.

You see, a little over ten years ago, this cheesy little adventure game called Sakura Taisen was recommended to me by a couple of my second cousins. It had steam-powered robots, a lot of cheesy super moves, and cute girls. Given that I was a 15-year-old boy at the time, it hit every possible hormone. Best of all, it had Japanese text at the same time as it had voices, so I spent an entire summer playing it and teaching myself how to read Japanese.

Some time around the release of Sakura Taisen 3 in 2001, I stopped being such a fan of the series (Sakura Taisen 4 was horrid, so I was apparently ahead of my time in jumping ship). But as you may remember, my 2003-4 trip still included a trip to the Taishou Romandou.

This trip was less involved on my part, though Mikelurker did spend about a thousand dollars or so on Sakura Taisen DVD box sets (never ever get into Japanese DVDs, they're ludicrously expensive). I spent a ludicrously long time playing Sakura Taisen Columns on their arcade cabinet.

Then came one of my biggest mistakes of the trip: since the menu at the Taishou Romandou was largely unchanged since my last trip there, I bought a different drink from what I had gotten last time - and I forgot that the one I ordered had vodka in it. Not only was I drinking a really bad cocktail that tasted like mouthwash, but it was 11 AM and I was having alcohol. Note that I'm a giant lightweight when it comes to alcohol, so even with just a few sips of the drink, I felt a little light-headed.

The original plan had been to head over to Fakkin (First Kitchen) just to say that I'd had lunch at a place named Fakkin, but given the fact that there was alcohol in my belly and it was 11 AM, we stopped off at a place I don't even remember and grabbed lunch before I poisoned myself.

After that was Akihabara to make sure I didn't miss anything, then Disney Sea - I have to head off to lunch now, but I'll give more details later.