Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

It's been entirely too long since my last post, and for that, I apologize, to both of you. Hopefully this will be the start of many more regular posts again, but no promises. What it is though, is a review of three separate things. First are the Mechanical Chain Base display sets from Kotobukiya's MSG line, we've also got Arcee from the Transformers Animated line, and Bludgeon from the TransformersL Revenge of the Fallen line. So, there you have it, the Chain Bases are a generic industrial backdrop to display your robots on, or to use as a playset if that's your thing. I've been interested in them for quite some time, since I found a review of them a year or so ago, but I'd never been able to find them anywhere for a reasonable price. Fifteen to twenty dollars just seems way too much for a couple unpainted squares of plastic, that are about six inches to a side. I managed to pick these up finally at Kicks Hobby Japan for $10 each, which isn't awful. Wh

Okay, so, "Battle Stags" really isn't all you need to know, the battle stags are robotic deer with life-like fur, side mounted missile batteries, rocket flight, and a hidden rectal artillery cannon. Who's still here after that sentence? Okay, what this movie is actually about, is a young science fiction writer, who is the spitting image of the high school nerd with extreme social dysfunction, if nothing else, this movie gets the feeling of being that outcast down better than anything else I have ever seen. So, our hero, Benjamin Purvis wants nothing more than to be great scifi writer, just like his idol, Chevalier. He attends a writer's workshop headlined by Chevalier, and submits one of his stories, Yeast Lords, into the writing contest. Chevalier is pretentious and sleazy to a tee, he's lost touch with what made him write in the first place, now just being about the money, and it's revealed throughout the movie that he hasn't written a story that

I was fairly confident from the title of the film that I knew what I was getting into, a martial arts flick with not a lot of effort wasted on the story. That statement is more or less true, but it really doesn't prepare you for the experience. Right with the first opening scene, you're treated to an overwhelming amount of gore, just as much as you'd find in the typical slasher horror flick. To further confuse you, the martial arts scenes are mostly "augmented" with CG weapons, blood, motion blur, and Matrix-esque slow motion segments. Truly the level of ridiculousness present is more akin to something you'd find in an anime. You've got people that move so fast that they disappear, can heal mortal wounds and throw throwing stars with the same rate of fire and velocity as submachine gun rounds. The story was ultimately bland and cliched, although the acting and writing weren't particularly terrible, just nothing we haven't seen in a hundred movie

First Lord's Fury, the last entry in the Codex Alera series was recently released. I've completed it now, and here are my thoughts on the series. My first exposure to Jim Butcher's work was with the Dresden Files, a series of urban fantasy novels starring the titular Harry Dresden, Chicago's only wizard listed in the Yellow Pages. In contrast, the Codex Alera series is a much more traditional fantasy world. The country of Alera exists on a fictional continent where humans are able to control the elements through what they call furycraft. Every human is able furycraft at at least some level, and it has shaped society, all lamps are fury lamps, and need to be lit through the use of a small amount of fire crafting, healing is all performed in tubs of water by watercrafters, messengers are all windcrafters, who fly through the skies. Blacksmith's are all metalcrafters who are able to sense just the right conditions for forging the metal. Not all furycrafters are cr

I purchased a Playstation 3 on Saturday, because White Knight Chronicles finally pushed me over the crucial "there are enough games on it to warrant ownership" threshold. The UI is essentially a blown up version of the same one used on the PSP, which is okay, I don't know the greater public opinion on the interface, but it works. There are a number of things about the console that just make it feel like Sony doesn't want you to actually play games on the damn thing. After bringing the console and game home, I set about getting it all hooked up, probably took about 45 minutes to an hour to get it all plugged in, which is just a testament to the awkwardness of my home theater setup than any difficulty with the console. Once it's finally fired up, it autodetects the resolution of my TV, and settles on 1080i, while my screen technically supports that resolution, it's really only a 720p screen with some fancy software to convert a 1080i signal. So I have to go i