What's the blog about anyways?

This blog is about the various hobbies I have and my efforts to sustain them despite my low income:

Toys: I collect Transformers, bishoujo figures, Busou Shinki, and maybe the occasional Gundam model.
Video games: My current active consoles are the Wii, DS, and iPod Touch. I also have Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, and Sega CDX that are currently collecting dust.
Manga: Anything goes as long as it doesn't get too melodramatic and drawn out. I also read plenty of eromanga. ^^;
Anime: Like manga, anything goes. Don't watch much ero stuff though.
Eroge: AKA bishoujo games. I'm big on this as well however I can never find enough time to play what I want. :(
Smartphones, PDA, & other portable tech toys: I've been using Palms for a long time before finally switching to iPod Touch since Palm ditched their stand-alone PDA platform. I currently use a Nokia N95 as my phone.

I go under the alias of Yanachan on Hongfire. Currently in Houston, TX. Mainly collects Transformers toys but started collecting figures as well as various other import toys from mid-2009 onwards. Need to re-arrange room to fit all the new toys & figures that are now crowding around the living space. Knows some Japanese and uses that knowledge to read, watch, and play raw manga, anime, and eroge.

Forgot to mention favorite genres: Robots, gender benders, and yuri. Also like ecchi stuff as well. XD I especially like trap eroge like Otoboku and Sweet Legacy.

Amazon links

An Amazon widget I've been trying to use hadn't worked too well on Blogger so I'm testing widgets at the moment. Don't mind the mess.

PS: Yes, I know there are repeats in both widgets. I'll eventually sort it out and reserve specific categories for each one.

What camera do I want?

I've decided I'm going to get one of two Canons: either a PowerShot SD1200IS or a PowerShot SD780IS. The SD1200 is the cheaper one and the one in more colors but the SD780 is the overall better camera and smaller as well (although the SD1200 is fairly pocketable as well). The difference is $50 and I'm trying to decide if it's worth it. On top of having slightly better performance, the SD780 also features HD video recording and color accent mode (which allows you to take mostly black & white but with one other color sticking out), both of which are nice bonus to the mix. Ultimately though, both of those are just luxuries that I don't really need. What would decide this is whether the SD1200 has a comparable performanceto the SD780 where low light is involved and this is not an answer I can easily find online (or I just suck at it).

Xmas Eve...

I deleted the ecchi blog. I felt there's no point having a separate ecchi blog. I don't write enough as it is.

Lately, I've noticed I've been using my Nokia N95 to take pictures more than my real camera, a Lumix DMC-LZ3. The main problem stems from the battery usage. I'm not sure if it's particular to the camera series or just to the one I have but if the batteries aren't fresh off the charger, the Lumix will refuse to use it on account of "battery too low" which is fresh full of BS. I'm definitely out to get a new camera but not sure what to get. While I do take pictures once in a while, it's not like I take a lot or even frequently so I'm worried about the battery life and hope I don't have a repeat of my current Lumix.

Too much shopping

Been doing too much shopping as of late both online and off. Bought anime DVDs, figures, and games. Shops been having good prices on those so plenty I bought.

HLJ had their 3rd free shipping sale just over a week ago. One annoying thing is they reserved a specific quantity of an item for the sale rather than the entire stock of said item. It wasn't a nice thing to do and I don't think they won any fans over with that move. I did buy some stuff though.

Logitech V550

I've been searching for a wireless mouse for the past week and bought and returned 3 mouses before setting on a Logitech V550. I've found that for me, someone with really big hands, a small mouse is no good as well as a mouse with a thumb grip on both sides (a dedicated right-hand mouse would be fine, OTOH). I went with this mouse becasue it was somewhat normal shaped and it happened to be on sale at Fry's for $30. I kinda wanted a mouse with extra buttons but I think the hyper scroll wheel was a decent tradeoff. It's also nice that it has a micro-sized receiver which can be stored inside the mouse, a super-long battery life, an optional docking clip to hook the mouse onto, and an actual on/off button. I had to download the drivers to get it working with my PC but this seems to be unique to my PC as all the wireless mouse I've tried needed the dedicated driver software to work on it. OTOH, my netbook seems to be able to use them straight out of the box which is apparently how they're supposed to work. Hopefully the mouse will work out for me.

A reason I like my iPod Touch: potentially one of many?

I'm driving my mother today and she wants to visit Super H Mart, a Korean supermarket in Houston. Unfortunately, she forgot exactly where it is and I've only been there a couple times and couldn't be bothered to remember where either. So we make a quick stop at a library which happens to be in the general direction the supermarket should be and I whip out the iPod. It instantly connects to the library's wifi network and I launch the Maps app and type "super h-mart". It instantly brings up the map with the location marked; I tap on it and up comes the address info including ph # and website even. 1 tap saves it to Contacts and another couple of taps draws up a potential route from where we're at to the supermarket. If this had been an iPhone, we wouldn't even need to make that stop at the library since there's 3G connection. It's like straight out of the Apple commercials. They've really made a great PDA/smartphone product.

Where I Don't like to shop :p

J-List sucks. Shopping there is a fairly shitty experience if you're trying to browse for very specific items. On top of that, they'll rape you on the prices if they think they can get away with it. I'll say it again: J-List sucks.

The Resurrection of my DS Lite

For the longest time, I've ignored my DS Lite while I've been playing games on my iPod Touch. But recently, my brother got a DS Lite of his own. He got his DS mainly for his son but being a former gamer, he wants to try some games too. So he requested some games from me which in turn caused me to look at my DS library and hence resurrected my DS playing. That hasn't stopped me from playing games on my iPod however. :p

Asus Eee 100HD

I got a netbook a week ago from Target for $250. It's an Asus Eee 1000HD; specs are 10" screen, 900mhz Celeron, 1GB RAM, and 160GB hard drive. It runs faster than my oldest XP PC which I now plan to give away since it's now obsolete. My mother is trying to learn to use it but her biggest problem is double-clicking. She has trouble with it whether she's using a mouse or a touchpad. I think she might do better on a trackball.

iPod Touch

I have a DS and GB Micro but I haven't touched either for a long time since getting a iPod Touch. Too many good, cheap, and innovative games on the Touch platform. It's more lightweight than both DS and PSP, have more innovative games than the DS, and games cost cell phone game prices (IOW very cheap). You can even play bishoujo games on it. Try that on any other smartphone outside of Japan (yes, they have bishoujo games on cell phones in Japan).

New PC and other things...

Last week was a busy week. I got sick, built a new PC, bought a netbook, and I got sick. I'm still sick. It seems to be a possible cold/allergy hybrid. My family has a history of allergies on my father's side so I'm extremely worried. I've been pretty much allergy free up until now so I'd hate for anything to start happening now.

I built a PC to replace my current one which is roughly 5-6 years old. It's an Athlon 2400 on 2 gigs on non dual channel RAM. The new setup is an AMD 7750 dual-core with 4GB dual-channel RAM so it's a bit of a step up in various ways. I was a bit worried about putting on the heatsink & fan since my last experience had me using a blade screwdriver to carefully latch one of those things onto the motherboard but this time was a lot different since the heatsink & fan setup has a built-in lever that you use to tighten the heatsink in place once you place the latches onto the hooks on the motherboard. It made the process so much easier and safer (for the mobo!). It's a good time to build PCs. :)

I also got a netbook, an ASUS EEE 1000HD that I got from Target for $250, a very nice price for a netbook with a 10" screen. So far I'm liking it a lot.

Yeah, the Transformers movie sucked

I was at Fry's and they had Transformers (the live action movie) showing on DVD on a theater setup. I started watching from the point where Sam & co. enters Hoover Dam. While watching it, the numerous ridiculous things about the film came flying back in my face especially after they entered the city for the last battle. The army guys taking the AllSpark into the city and NOT GETTING THE CIVILIANS EVACUATED until way after the fighting has started. The guys playing sitting duck for Starscream to blast their asses instead of running for cover. Sam for some reason keeps making damaged Bumblebee crawl around after him instead of standing still so he can give him the Allspark. Sam running to the tower on foot instead of GETTING A CAR AND DRIVING THERE. The numerous "nice shot taken just because it looks nice" moments. I couldn't stand it anymore and moved on with my shopping without watching it to the end.

PS: One more thing that annoyed me about the movie: I'm not a pro-life or anything but they had a scene where they gave life to a Nokia Transformer and then killed it. I mean sure it was kinda dangerous to let it live but they could have at least tried to communicate with it or tried some kind of peaceful resolution instead of just zapping it dead. What bothered me even more was that nobody batted an eye when it got killed.

Anyways, for all the reasons above, if Revenge of the Fallen is anything like the dreck that was the first movie, it definitely won't be anywhere near as good as Star Trek. Nevertheless, I'll still catch it in the theaters so I can see the giant robots and cool effects on the big screen.

PPS: Yeah the title is in reference to Bay's first TF movie. So sue me. :p

Star Trek was teh awesome :D

Yeah, the movie rocked. Excellent stuff. Not to say it's perfect. There were a couple of things that kinda bugged me. First was the Deux ex Machina moments. There's been plenty of those throughout the various TV series and movies but that doesn't excuse its use. The second was the potential romance between certain key characters. That one kinda came way out of left field. Still, it was a great movie and deserves watching on the big screen! While the movie use modern day special effects, the look both inside and outside the spaceships have this feeling I can only define as "old school". I don't know if anyone knows what I'm talking about.

On a related note, I caught this Yahoo article about some guy's rant about "fake" IMAX which in turn got me interested in watching the Star Trek IMAX. The one "true" IMAX in Houston would be the Edwards MarqE on I-10. This seems to be the last week of airing so I'll need to be quick if I'm going to catch the IMAX version.

Lately I realized I'm spending too much time playing games on my iPod Touch. There's just too many good games that are either free or cheap. My latest addiction is Soldier Ants which is a Worms/Snails clone. It's pretty fun but unfortunately crashes sometimes. I'm also trying to play through Gift, a port of the classic bishoujo game. This is based on the PS2 port and as such has no nudity. At a little over 1GB, it's also one of the biggest apps on iTunes and the software suffers a little bit as a result with long startup time and occasional music skip.

Taking over the world with lemons...

I discovered Lemonade Tycoon for iPhone and it's free too. Good stuff but the only bad thing is the occasional demographic info collecting or ad. Can't be all good, right? :P

I'm also hooked on Leaf Trombone World Stage. This is crack. This is what Wii Music should have been. The big difference is that you have music that you can follow along with as well as the ability to compose original stuff. I bet Miyamoto's smacking himself over the head over this one.

Speaking of Nintendo, Defend Your Castle is also on iPhone and graphics are ported from the Wii version. It's just much easier flicking the stick enemies with your fingers than the Wii Remote plus easier to play in short bursts.

Score? Apple: 2, Nintendo: 0.