The few who notice things going on around here probably noticed a tremendous silence that followed extremely sporadic blogging the past year.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned it at the time, but in the Spring of 2016 I left what had been my career/life for 15 years and entered a long period of unemployment. While my wife and I were making ends meet (almost), it was becoming increasingly clear that we weren't quite able to live off the income we had at the time (disregarding paying on any debts owed). I fortuitously was offered a job right up my alley last Fall, and have now been in that job for a year. Unfortunately, it's a return to a 9 to 5 type thing in the slow times, but gets more interesting at certain times of the year when I'll go week after week of 12 to 13 hour days, 6 days a week.

This has been a bit of a trial. Knowing you're not getting any younger is one thing, but finally reaching the point where your body is actively rebelling against you doing the things you need to do to get your job done is...a bit of drag, to put it mildly.

Many have it worse than me; I don't want to try to claim any title; but Forties, Fat, and unFit is no way to go through life, son. I told a younger employee who was helping me install some equipment on top of a vehicle I had no business trying to be on top of "I could have jumped down from here, too...ten years ago. If I do it now, I'll pull every muscle in my groin, cry like a constipated baby, and have to walk like a man who's had an unfortunate experience with a randy bull while stuck in a fence for the rest of the day."

But...

I may finally be turning a bit of a corner. Not physically...the body may be irreedable. But mentally I finally have started seeking out new challenges to keep my mind and fingers occupied with things other than watching Yuri Romance Anime, writing about baseball, and sleeping.

Some of you may remember that while I was unemployed I made a strong go at doing Let's Play videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, I started doing that about 3 months before YouTube decided they didn't like Let's Play videos, or other general nerd content. I had steadily growing ad revenue...not much, but it WAS steadily growing. Then YouTube pulled the plug. Completely. You've heard this from other people, I'm sure.

So, I'll never get rich on YouTube, but I had a lot of fun. And now I'm going to combine a new hobby with YouTube videos. I'm going to the Lego thing I've talked to people about, that's still coming...but I'm going to start building models again. I haven't done this for decades, and I was shit at it even then. Mainly because I didn't understand the point of plastic models. I do now, but I'm not doing that.

I've two models in the house right now, both by DeAgostini USA. No, it's not the Millennium Falcon or the R2-D2 or the X-Wing. The Falcon looks fun, and the R2-D2 kit is technically interesting (the electronics, the build seems iffy) and the X-Wing, from the videos I've watched, is VERY poor build quality. Not what I would want in a kit like that.

No, I'm going to be building a simple wooden boat model to starting with the United States Marine Revenue Cutter Virginia:


Or at least, that's what they say it is. The little bit of research I was able to do shows that there was more than one USMR cutter named Virginia, but that none of them were *this exact boat*. But as a type, this certainly seems to be an accurate depiction of a schooner from the period.

I'm building this because I always wanted to build wooden boat models, but I noticed something that REALLY got me hot and bothered:



That's a HUGE model of the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi. But it's REALLY DAMNED BIG, and expensive, and involves doing all sorts of model-building things I've never done before. So in order to feel more comfortable doing Akagi, I got the Virginia, to learn some of the basics of frame and hull building. Because even though it doesn't look like it, that Akagi model is made almost entirely of WOOD.

Then, just to do something a bit different, I'll also be building this:



That's a 1963 Jaguar XK-E, or E-Type as we colonists called it. It's another huge and expensive model, but it involves things I've done before. Plus, it's made from a lot of metal and and screws and real rubber and cloth.

Unfortunately, before I start on any of this, I'll be in Illinois for a week for training. Weather and rental cars depending, I may be able to chance a visit to the intrepid fan of cute anime girls and F1 racing, Wonderduck. But as we go into the holiday season, look forward to classic old man hobby-ing!

DAMMIT CITRUS ENDED AND I WANT TO POST A CERTAIN IMAGE BUT THAT GIVES EVERYTHING AWAY AND BECAUSE I'M READING THE SCANLATION AND NOT THE OFFICIAL RELEASE WHICH WON'T BE OUT FOR LIKE ANOTHER YEAR OR SOMETHING I HAVE TO JUST SIT ON IT.

...comes out next month, and I haven't even talked to you guys about Overlord 2 yet. Which just completed about 8 weeks ago. And no one expected to ever even happen, because promotional anime for light novel series just don't get sequel after sequel.


Unless the anime is uncharacteristically deep with interesting characters and a world you really sink your teeth into, I guess.


Kind of like Crest/Banner of the Stars, if anybody remembers that gem anymore.


Anyway, Series 2 ended right at the point where I stopped reading the light novels, so I honestly have no idea what happens next.


Thus giving me a serious impetus to maybe write up Series 2 like I did Series 1.

Maybe.

If anyone figures out who made it, let me know (UPDATE: there are several links to the artist's work provided in the comments. They appear to go by "Nuri" or some variation thereof, and the image can be found at all of the provided links):


Kaga, Akagi, Hiryuu, Souryuu

I also found this one, but haven't really figured out if it's pure fantasy or connected to the game somehow:

My overall impression:



There's a ton of stuff I can nitpick. The Imperial Star Destroyers on Corellia, for instance. The "yes/but/kindof/sortof" barge pusher/escape pod thing. But what can you do? They actually tried with a lot of that stuff. AT LEAST they actually tried. They didn't just hand wave it or try to BS it.

There are a lot of really, really dumb dialogue choices; made more obvious by the inconsistency. A lot of the dialogue is NOT dumb. It's almost like some producer or bad script doctor went through and picked several things as "this isn't obvious enough. Make it MORE obvious. Our audience is REALLY STUPID for the most part." But mostly the dialogue is...OK.

The music is NOT GOOD. The effects are OK. I didn't like how muddy dark some of the movie was.

Han "Solo" (I DID NOT LIKE THIS CHOICE) is actually quite good, I thought. I mean, SURE he's not Harrison Ford, but you weren't gonna get Harrison Ford. Whats-his-name does JUST FINE. I bought it. Not necessarily all of the back story worked well for me, but it's FINE. Chewbacca was great. Han WITH Chewbacca was almost always fantastic. Lando was good, and sadly underused, really.

In the end...hey, what can I say? It's fine. It could have been better, but it didn't shit all over itself like The Last Jedi and it wasn't quite as pointless and canon-spinning as Rogue One.

It's fine.

Hey, guys! I was a special* guest on The Godzilla Podcast! We talked about Godzilla! I'll link the actual show when it gets posted. I want to thank Drew and Joe for putting on a great show about everyone's favorite King of Monsters, and deigning to have me appear with them to discuss the Big Guy! We talked about so much, and even then we didn't get into some amazing things like the Godzilla/Nagato theory, or the motivations behind why different movies were made the way they were.




*I bribed them

UPDATE: The podcast is now live at The Godzilla Podcast!

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