Ghost Train

Rewatching the ME3 trailer I hope the Clock Tower Sniper is a playable character. That guy just has bada$$ written all over. Edit: Playable character = part of Team-Shepard

Regarding 08th MS Team - I've always felt uncomfortable with the idea of "Grunt Gundams" facing off against Zaku's on what was portrayed to be more or less equal footing (I'm aware that RX-79G was somewhat of a downgrade from Amuro's machine), seems like many things were done for dramatic effect for the purpose of just portraying a 'Nam style jungle fight with mobile suits. In other news, I also started mahou shoujo madoka magica... thus far love the art and design!

Didn't know there was also a Death Note movie in the works... Biebernator as Light?

The Moe Apocalypse K-On! movie has a release date now: 12.3.2011 . This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

I took a 3 month long break from my NCC-1701 Refit project, but now getting back on track. Have some areas in the saucer that I need to touch up and fix but I love how it's turning out. I'm also trying some pre-shading, as you can see from the engineering hull, they have a stunning effect on model planes, but not sure how they would turn out on ~300m Heavy Cruiser... but I think it looks ok .

I stand by my original suggestion that the only acceptable A.I. voice for Watson would be Sean Connery.

I read both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged almost 12 years ago now, and loved it back then (was 18), but a subsequent reread a few years ago packed much less of a punch for me - in fact, I felt that the "harsh" situations Rand's heroes & heroines found themselves in were rather contrived in both books. I hope to read Anthem one day though.

I've had a love / hate relationship with Dark Tower. The final book was being written when I first read the Gun Slinger. It was released by the time I finished The Waste Lands - at which point I was completely hooked. I fought very very very very hard the urge to read spoilers on what happens at the end of the saga, but broke, and found out about what seemed to me like a complete cop-out ending . I took a long break but decided to finish the series anyways, and finished Wizard & Glass.

Reminds me of the CornerShot :

Apparently there is a 3D version of Never Say Never.

On mine: Battle Hymm of the Tiger Mother (10%) Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (90%) The Post-American World (90%) Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (10%) Wolves of the Calla (50%)

Lady Gaga trying too hard to be circa late 80's/early 90's Madonna ... ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4a8QtvOkBQ

I have a strong dislike towards the word: power-cycling, which applies to a wide variety of technology. because words like restart, or just turn off then on, are not sufficient! To one who has never heard the term before, it sounds like Scotty rerouting the Enterprise's power through the EPS conduit to prevent the warp core from going critical.

Robotech is an example of N*ga Synthesis:

Just to add a bit more to romanization, in actuality I feel that it has only been somewhat recently that Western governments have adopted a more formalized system presumably based on Pinyin to translate family names. As a personal example, mine is 岑 (observed with higher frequency in Guanzhou & HK), which like most things is pronounced differently in "native" Cantonese vs the official Mandarin. In Canto, it is pronounced something akin to Shum, whereas in Mandarin it's more like Cen. (Not using formal pinyin here, apologies) There is only a very subtle phonetic difference with 陈, a popular last name, which is often romanized as Chen. So when my dad migrated to the US in the early 90's we used Chen, and the name stuck, and that is what I go by today. But my dad's relatives, who came almost 2 decades earlier go by Shum as their official English last name. As another example, the name for Bruce Lee's teacher, Ip Man (叶问), is pronounced Ye Wen in Mandarin, but he is of course better known as the Cantonese pronunciation of his name (granted he never immigrated out of HK). In conclusion... an English last name of a certain spelling or pronounciation predisposition is only weakly correlated to an actual Chinese last name.

Also Chinese then: General Robert E. Lee Long live teh confederathh!

The kid has no father, Anakin "Vader" Skywalker was conceived by the force!

There has been talk about a 3rd game for quite some time. Hopes were up when MGS4 was released - as it was supposed to be the end of at least Solid Snake's story... but then they probably realized that the Metal Gear Cow was still lactating heavily.

Not a fan of Chryslers, but this commercial which aired in the superbowl was so f'ing epic that even detroit haters be like: SPARTAAAA!

Riobot? To be honest, I was really excited at first, but the more I look at the sculpt the more I realize that it suffers from the same problems as other Revoltechs, sacrificing sleekness for joint mobility and extreme posability - which is why I've traditionally avoided the Revy Macross toys.

Black Eye Peas really sucked during the Superbowl 1/2 time... Slash sort of rescued the show, then Fergie started singing Sweet Child Of Mine ... absolute fracking trainwreck.

More goodness to come? Vic Viper, yes please!

Eminem Doctor ... surprisingly good:

So I just got a nice little memo saying that I'll be getting a nice bonus this year ... part of which will definitely go into gaming. My X360 is currently on its last legs.... average 2 disc read errors per play session. I think the RR of Doom (which would be the second time) is not far behind. Instead of sending it back to MS and get a refurbished one back, is it worth upgrading to an Elite? From what I've seen the differences are hardly noticeable - but I'm just looking for a machine that does not have to be sent back every year

I threw this article on the table http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-23/apple-iphone-captures-72-of-japan-smartphone-market-update3-.html a few posts back. Other than being more current than say I dunno... 2008, it shows a nice bump in the sales of the iphone in Japan. Also observed was a sizeable increase in Droid phones sales. Man... it's so hard to find up to date data >_< ... Furthermore: Softbank Corp., the exclusive iPhone carrier in Japan, and bigger rivals NTT DoCoMo Inc. and KDDI Corp. are expanding their smartphone lineups with handsets running Google Inc.’s Android software to bolster revenue from data services. Although this doesn't necessarily mean that the Smart slice of the pie is growing in relation to traditional mobiles, it does show that at least the carriers are investing money to bring them to market. I'm sure someone, somewhere, perhaps with a Wharton MBA in charge of billions, working on some of these carriers disagree that it's a not a worthwhile market. At the end of the day, profitability is king, who cares about the market % of smart vs dumb phones. Do you think Ferrari has a huge automobile market share? ... obviously no (it depends on how you draw the pie but whatever), but they're obviously still profitable. It's nice to get opinions from real people, but said discussions don't necessarily reflect the whole market, as these phones are indeed being sold, and apparently well. I can easily go to a nice blue-collar pub in my neck of the woods and find a table of people fairly content with their phone's ability to do whatever it is they need and not give a crap about Droids and iPhones - this doesn't mean that the smart phone market is doomed (which at least here it's not). Also, per the 1st Wired Article's Analysis on why the iPhone would have problems in Japan, consider that one of the reasons stated was just a generic catch all of "western brands don't typically do well" in this department. This is true, as Nokia, Motorola, etc have made very week inroads into the Japanese market in the past. In contrast, Smart Devices have penetrated much further than older generation phones, so there is more hope that they're there to stay.