Harry Potter?! Harry Potter??!

I was in a shop the other day, and by shop I mean Target or something and by other day I mean before Christmas, and I saw this Harry Potter figure for $3.00 and bought it in order to post about.

If you can read you can see it says it’s from the order of the phoenix movie and contains a wand and a base! If you can’t read then you can’t read this anyway, so learn to read then come back. Done that? Good. I can’t remember what number this one is in the series (of books not toys) probably in the middle somewhere. I think the books started off entertaining, just chillaxing at school casting magic at junk, then got progressively longer and more dull. The later books pretty much went “Oh no the bad guy is around, oh wait now he is defeated by Harry” but for some reason they took 6000 pages to do that, rather than 20 words.

I hate clamshell packaging, so hard to open!

 

Here he is, in his whatever school uniform (I don’t know). He can barely move at all, just to kind of lift his arms slightly and twist at the waist. I can move more than that and I don’t have a billion dollar franchise based around me. I’m pretty sure I should tho. Whoever made this (Neca is what it says on the packet) defiantly didn’t skimp on the extras. The base perfectly captures the part in the movie where Harry stood on the vortex of total blackness and it is not a piece of black plastic to compensate for the inability of the figure to stand. Actually that is a lie and now I feel bad, he can stand by himself. I don’t know if you can see in the pictures but it looks like he’s doing a pursed lips, Angelina Jolie impression.

Fun times.

Star Wars: Where Science meets Imagination Episode V: The Robots Strike Back

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away...


   It is a dark time for the attendees of the “Where Science meets Imagination” exhibit. Although the first floor has been looked at, the thought of no more Star Wars junk will drive the attendees forces from the museum and negative thoughts will pursue them across the galaxy.
   Evading the dreaded Imperial Starfleet, a group of people who set up the exhibits led by Luke Skywalker has established a whole floor of robot stuff with nothing from the remote ice world of Hoth, as the stuff from Hoth was on the first floor.
   The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker,
has dispatched thousands of remote probes into the far reaches of
space...

One of those probe droids apparently landed in Sydney.

The second floor was full of robots. It was better than the first because it was full of robots. I don’t seem to have as many pictures as the first floor but I think we were looking at robots for longer than not looking at robots. The floor started with some animatronics show about robots.

I always find animatronics amusing. I don’t really know why, but animatronics plus anything equals entertainment. Perhaps it’s all the out of synch, stilted movements Add in Star Wars as well and you have the foundations for a pretty good recipe.

 

 

The show was about some lady, who doesn’t get a picture cause she wasn’t even in any of the Star Wars movies (including the prequels), arguing with C3P0 that R2 was a great robot. C3P0 had a sassy comeback for everything about how R2 was always causing mischief and the like. I should have paid more attention to what he said, but it was all great, trust me. I looked on youtube to see if someone had put up a video of it, but apparently not. The lady was saying how much better than our robots R2 is, which is true. In the movies R2 serves drinks and shocks people. I have one that gives me pez and nothing else.

Here is some other stuff they had there:

Look out it’s Darth Vader! And he has bought along a Storm Trooper.

And the Storm Trooper has bought along a toy of a Clone Trooper. I think there should have been more scenes in the movie of characters playing with toys. Think about it, what’s more exciting? Laser shooty battles or carefully arranging things into little scenes and then slightly altering them. The second one for sure.

Leia, R2 and goldman.

 

Medical droid and robo-arm. This guy has other guys in just underpants hanging around in tanks, which is pretty good if you are into that kind of thing.

Destroyer droid or droideka. They call them both of those names in the movies. I think these are one of the best things in the new movies. Rolling about with force fields and lasers. The model or whatever was pretty big, it was taller than me so must have been like 2 meters tall, but you can’t really see that in the picture.

AT-ST and AT-AT, not to scale I assume.

Footprint on floor. Why is there a photo of this? It’s not very exciting. Why am I bothering to post it here?

 

 

I think that’s it from the Star Wars thing. There was a whole bunch of other junk on the robot floor as well, but I suspect it was trying to teach me stuff about the real world. To learn anything new I’d have to forget something I know now, unlucky new information, you are nothing to me.

Star Wars: Where Science meets Imagination Episode IV: The First Floor

 

About four days ago, in a museum that is like two and a half hours drive from my house...

 

A vast sea of stars serves as the backdrop for the main title. War drums echo through the heavens as a rollup slowly crawls into infinity.

 

It is a period of time during the school holidays, when the amount of kids visiting Stars Wars related exhibitions is at a minimum. A small car, striking from my house, have travelled to a museum to view, among other things, models of ships from an evil Galactic Empire.

 

It is freaking hard to alter the script of A New Hope to fit with my trip to a star wars exhibition so I am going to stop now.

 

Ha! A wookie. The first floor the exhibition had all sorts of costumes and models from the Star Wars movie series. It was mostly stuff from the first three movies (i.e. the good ones) as the later movies had all the cool junk done by computers. The exhibition generally presented something from the movies, then tried to teach or show related stuff from real life. For example, here are some real life space ships.

Because real life is boring, I won't show you anything else from it. Seriously, just look outside. Until real life has star ships and lightsabers it is going to be boring. Here is some of the models they had there.

 

Either you know what they are, or you don't care so I won't bother naming them. I quite like models in general, for some reason "things that are smaller than the thing they are meant to be" is something I find amusing. These were no exception. The models were all behind glass so I didn't get to run around with them making pew-pew noises, which was really a great disappointment. Chipping the paintwork wouldn't bother me, as they are not even mine.

Now this things was awesome, it's the landspeeder used in the first movie, that is number four. It was made from some three wheeled English car, probably the type that followed Mr Bean around in the TV show 'Mr Bean'. They should have let me drive it around, that would have great. I would have done some shopping then complained about the lack of boot space. Even X-wings had space for your R2 unit.

Well isn't that rude... Luke has no pants and Obi Wan and C3PO have no legs. This was used to take distance shots, were apparently everyone had decided to rid themselves of pants or legs. I don't remember that part.

 

Here are some costumes:

Han and Chewie

Wampa ice creature and Snowtrooper (I went to check the internets to make sure I had the name correct and it seems someone has written 7500 words about Wampas)

Polar Explorer Steve

Mr and Mrs Tusken Raider

Jawa! I don't know wether this guy or Chewie were the best costumes on the first floor.

Darth Vader and Obi Wan

Sorry if I just spoilt the movie for you then...

Non-chewie Wookies, I don't know what their names are. Face it Wookies, if you ain't Chewie you ain't nothing!

Yoda! In puppet form I guess.

 

I had a picture of Mace Windu, but when I clicked rotate the picture disappeared so you miss out. Actually, all the Star Wars-ness has put me in a good mood.

How cool are purple light sabers? They are like blue and red combined!

There was some other junk on the first floor, but it is not as good as the stuff above. We were pretty unimpressed at the conclusion of the first floor as we didn't realise that there was a whole other floor beneath our very feet.

 

I have no idea when I first watched Star Wars, I wasn't born when the originals came out at the movies (or maybe I was for the last one). I assume it was when they were on TV sometime in the early 90's. The first time I can remember was on a rainy day at primary school, but I had seen them sometime before that. My something-th birthday party (7th? 8th?) was Star Wars themed and I came as Boba Fett. My mum helped me make a helmet, but I probably complained that it wasn't authentic to the movie. The movie one wasn't made from a tube of cardboard and Papier-mâché. Yes I looked up the pretentious spelling.

Stuff I hate

i.e. When people replace the 's' in company names with a '$'. For example, Micro$oft, $ony. See also, a small, brown panted, lemur.

 

How clever is it when people do this? I mean to move your finger slightly above the 's' key and hold the shift button, well that just deserves a gold star by itself! But to couple it with the startling insight that a company wants money in exchange for goods and services, that's just... well I'm lost for words*. I thought the menus and price lists everywhere we just joking when they asked for money. Surely $5.00 really means 5 loving hugs not 5 real dollars. What? It doesn't? Well sir I tip my bonnet to you. You have aped more from the situation then I could, deducing the when people ask for money what they really want is money! For this you will get 3 gold stars.

 

Mental note to self: Add three gold stars to moron who thinks it is witty to replace the 's' in company name's with '$' gold star tally.

 

*Not really, I can think some words. Such as the ones I just wrote. And the word hippopotamus because it is my favourite word. I could probably write the names of more animals if I wanted to. But I won't**.

**Fox, goat, cat, melon, dinosaur, dog.

nxe

NXE! That's 'New Xbox Experience' not 'Naughty Extraterrestrials Everywhere', which would really be NEE not NXE, but I couldn't think of another X word. I can't think of any way to describe the NXE excepted as an updated UI. (That's User Interface for all you non-nerds. I took an e-commerce course at uni last year and at least half of the content was just learning acronyms. What's with that? I don't think it's that hard to just write stuff out in full or perhaps IDTITHTJWTOIF.) As it was updating I decided to take some pictures in order to write this entry that you are reading now, but I am typing now.

I'll call this the 'Update in Progress Screen'. The 'Update in Progress Screen' informs you the approximate time remaining for the update to be applied. The green bar at the bottom displays graphically the approximate fraction completed. Exciting stuff! When the green bar gets to the end a new screen displays.

Looking at the time at the top right it is exactly 5 minutes since the last picture, which is the time the Xbox guessed was remaining. Lucky guess Mr/Mrs Xbox. Pressing 'A' to continue makes the following video play.

I did try to take photos while the video was playing, but of the 10 or so I took none were in focus. Don't bother actually watching the video, it is boring. Trust me, I watched it. Actually, I could have just linked to a video of the whole process, which makes this entry pretty redundant. After the video you have to make an 'Avatar', which is a digital representation of you that lives in your Xbox. I've you've seen the Wii's Miis, then Avatars are pretty much the same thing, only not as good. Here's me:

I don't think it looks much like me at all, especially when compared with my Mii. Looking around at other peoples creations, they all look pretty much the same and are all just very bland. It's not there is only a few choices when you are making them, it's more that all the choices are pretty much the same. For example, there is like 20 different noses but they are all very similar. I did give myself elf ears tho. The clothes were disappointing as well, you can't even change any of the colours which has really been the most basic part of character customisation from the time it began, way back whenever that was. Once your avatar is made you exit into the main screen, which is called the 'dashboard' for some reason.

I may have lied there, I might have seen this screen first but I can't really remember. I guess you need to know what the old version looked like but this is significantly different.

Well wasn't that fun?

I have a riddle...

What do you get when you capture a bat and a chicken, put them both in a box and shake the box? Some weird little bat-chicken babies, that's what. Flying around clucking in frequencies I can't hear and somehow using them to see with. Now suppose that one of the baby bat-chickens fell into a pile of batter you had sitting there, then bounced into a conveniently placed cauldron of boiling oil. After ricocheting around the cauldron for just the precise amount of time it takes to deep fry baby bat-chickens, it flies into you mouth and you think "Hey, this tastes pretty good but I can't be bothered to construct a Goldberg-esque machine for unnatural cross breeding and baby killing". Which is the same thought that I had, so I just bought batman shaped chicken nuggets instead.

There is the front, or possibly the back as I'm not sure which is which. I guess that it has something to do with the recently released 'the dark knight' batman movie. Was it all that recent tho? I mean were these sitting around in a truck for a couple of months before they were released? Or did they just decided that multiple months after the movies has left cinemas is the best time to put out chicken nuggets based of said movie? Or maybe I'm just trying to avoid thinking of a hilarious caption for the picture of batman? Probably the third option. Anyway... here is the back or maybe front.

Front? Back? Who knows? I think this side is more appealing as batman is swinging on a rope. I'm sure he is playing Spiderman. 'Alfred, you have to be Dr Octopus and I get to beat you'. You'd think that being a billionaire and all he'd be able to afford a Spiderman costume and not just have to wear his work clothes. Hmm... I bought these with the ulterior motive of writing about them and I can't think of anything decent to say. And I've had these pictures taken for three weeks so it's not like I haven't had time. I think I would be easier if they put more interesting pictures and the like on them. They'd be better with a campy sixties batman or being called 'bat-nuggets' or something.

Here is a bunch of them after sitting in the over for an appropriate length of time. The shapes aren't nearly as well defined as the ones on the box and by 'aren't nearly as defined' I mean they look like three lumps joined together by slightly smaller lumps. There should be a law stating that all pictures of food must be taken of the actual product, not one that has been airbrushed and photoshoped to look perfect. It doesn't send a healthy message to teenage food if they think they have to look like that to succeed. Although I guess close-up pictures of processed food are not very appetising.

Comic