Mobile Suit Biker Sinanju

No new projects involving cards or guns. I did however finally buy something that I always wanted to have in my collection: a Master Grade MSN-06S Sinanju. Just liked the design and the color scheme. It'll make a good addition to my desk, having vacated some slots. Also, it'll finally make use of those Gundam Action Bases I've bought a while back.

No review of the kit here, since there's plenty around. I did end up breaking two parts during construction, and the fuel tank caps ruptured due to thermal expansion during painting with thinner. Had to make some repairs, but they're not noticeable. I haven't gotten around to the decals yet. Waiting for my topcoat to arrive first. In case you're interested, I opted to hand paint all the gold after painting the parts black. No stickers or water slide decals were used, nor will they be used. Going to build this with the default stuff they give me.

I found that the kit was larger than I was expecting, and the scale was a tad under 1:6. I could make Sinanju hold some 1:6 scale weapons to some extent. I did have something lying around that was much better than a 1:6 scale weapon. Something that fit perfectly.

Lego Technic set 8422! Managed to finally get some more use out of it. Color scheme matches somewhat as well. I'm rather fond of this motorcycle's styling and overall design. I could get one of the newer mototcycles, but none of them have the same appeal as this one.

Agile in space, and on the ground.

 I also had the time to buy some more Obitsu stands. Somewhat wobbly for trying to do a wheelie pose.

Unfortunately, Sinanju doesn't quite fit on Fenrir. The color scheme didn't fit anyways. At least now I can have mounted combat. 

J.Norad Attempts Resuming Useless Projects

It's about time I set my sights on a big target again. The past month has been spent doing retrofit work on the girls, and before that, custom jobs. Actually, most of it was spent playing older games. Finished STALKER: Call of Pripyat and working on Hitman: Contracts. Haven't found anything from those two games that I'd want to replicate so far. They were a nice change of pace from manufacturing rifles in a small dark room.

Going to start drafting plans for a 1:6 scale horse. May decide to skin the horse like the camel and have it visibly be made of Magic cards. Seems like a 1:6 scale horse runs about $200-$300 for a good one. Since this is the Vortex of Suck, I'm going to try to make an articulated 1:6 scale horse for under 300 Magic cards. With a common being about $0.10-0.25, that should put my budget (including prototpying and development work) at $30-$75. Tenth of the cost and maybe a tenth of the quality! How will this endeavor turn out? Probably with massive failure!

I'll be trying my best to post updates for once and track the total costs incurred so far. However, Agent 47 may derailing my plans.


This week's expenditures:
4 Magic cards used (development work on the neck mechanism)

Enough Walking!

Well, it's been a while. Haven't built anything because there isn't anything worth building. That, and the fact that I am attempting to enslave critters so they can brutally crush the lives of innocent creatures that I deem unworthy of enslavement. AKA Pokemon.

For the uninitiated, the latest Pokemon game comes with a pedometer that you can use/abuse to unlock extra stuff on your game. Calculations have put full unlock requirements at around 2 million steps. I was wondering for a while how awesome it would be if you could somehow put that thing on the Team Fortress 2 scout and just let him go. Bugger runs around way more than I ever will in a day. This very mediocre comic was the end result of thinking of other means of having the TF2 guys manipulate the pokewalker. Most of us probably have done method #3 since #1 simply doesn't cut it.

"It involves WALKING? I don't follow."

Not Quite The Meaning Of "A Little Pissed"

If you thought you had bladder issues...

I've realized I've wasted quite a bit of time idling for jars of piss to spell out a message of discontent to enjoy other games and explore new avenues of exotic weaponry to build. Games like Quake. And Doom. And S.T.A.L.K.E.R. And Borderlands. With that said, I'm likely not going to pursue any more TF2 related weapon models. All the fun ones are done, leaving boring junk like SWORD and a SHIELD to make. If you've been following this blog (haha, even that notion is silly) for the intents of seeing what other TF2 related junk I'll make, you can probably stop now.

On that note, while I outsource my idling and jarate farming, I'm going to enjoy the wonderful world of "A Bajillion Guns", a world that has a lot of 1:6 scale weapon making potential (quite a lot, actually). Of course, it'll take some time for me to stop playing Borderlands and start drafting up some schematics.

I'll still be making random photos with the TF2 cast. I haven't reached the stage where I'm going to start cannibalizing them for custom fodder. I'll still need some test subjects for the new arsenal of weapons anyways! Sledge need stupid mercenaries to shoot!

Happy Eat Like a Heavy Weapons Guy Day

It's so tiny! OM NOM NOM NOM NOM...

Would You Like A Second Opinion? You Are Also Ugly!

Sometimes, you get unexpected things that make you laugh. Sometimes, you get this while eating gummy bears:

Figure 1: Regular healthy gummy bear on the left, and what appears to be a cancerous blob on the right.

I brought the specimen to the resident doctor and game warden. Hopefully, they can shed some light on the mysterious specimen. By the time I transported the specimen, I had found that there were some other abnormal bears being analyzed at the sample room.

The red bear on the left was likely formed prematurely. The one on the right lost a limb and had lots of red discoloration on the region. None of them seemed to interact with the green blob.

Medic: I haf never seen anyzing like zat in my life.
Sniper: I wonder if it's hostile to humans. Mind if I take a closer look?


Sniper: It's quite squishy, mate. I can't tell which side is the head. Or what it's supposed to be. Is Norad sure that this originally was supposed to be a gummy bear?

The specimen was agitated and grew hostile. Defensive action was needed.

I think I'm looking at its bum...

You can tell by the subtle shifting of mass towards the Sniper that the blob was acting aggressive. There was no other means of subduing the organism peacefully. The Sniper took aim and put it down. After that, it was dissected and sacrificed for a few bits of health.

I'll be back to normal posts once I procure the proper materials needed for this week's project.

About The Vortex: The Circle of Suck

I normally try to keep day-to-day issues off this blog, but I'll take an exception for today.

"Wow! You're on Kotaku!"

"Wow. They used the worst picture ever."

If you've managed to find this blog/page, I thank you for visiting. Seems that I've been linked on kotaku.com, and with the most unsightly progress image ever. Fugly medic with a sad looking pyro and with a demoman with Michael Jackson issues. At least they got a shot of my minigun.

About this Blog:
I originally intended this blog to document random things I built. More for me than you, actually. Seems like it's leaning towards you now. The main intent was to:

1. Highlight some building techniques I discovered or learned or found useful
   
2. Show off what those techniques could build
   

As a result, I don't have a gallery. Just a long pile of posts that show what went into making things. Best you'll have to work with is my DeviantArt page, which I actually reluctantly created.

About me:
This blog's about what I make. I don't care for drama, nor should you be subjected to it. Jacob Norad's not even my real name, if you're wondering.

About the Goods:
You probably have come here looking for my Team Fortress 2 related crafts. I don't blame you, I've been making them for a year. I do make other things, but they're not as popular. If you're wondering, I have no intent of selling them, simply because I feel that they could be a lot better in quality. I'm never happy with what I have and always feel that I could have done better. And also, it's a pain in the ass to build this:

I primarily use Magic: the Gathering cards to make my stuff, simply because I have a lot of them and they're quite easy to work with. And you kinda need some sort of shtick these days...

About the Fugly Medic
The Medic was my first doll head attempt. Really bad. So bad I made a new one and mailed the old one to Canada. Unfortunately, I'll forever be known as the guy who sucks at sculpting the "Medic with the giant nose." I don't mind nor care about criticism. Shows that, just like me, YOU will not settle for any old crap. I like people who know what they want. It also shows me that I really need to get better at doing this sort of thing.

I could easily edit all my old posts and photos so they all look nice and presentable, but that's like lying. Lying about your past, and what you could do. Doesn't show people that your early work sucked hard. I'd rather keep those around to remind myself that I'm getting a lot better, and to never settle for crap.

Other issues:
Demoman's racial identity crisis has since been fixed. Pyro's in a state where my technology is too subpar to make better. Going to stay horrible for a while longer. I'm trying to shift off TF2 for a bit and try other things, so it'll be some time before I fix the lingering problems. The main reason is that by doing other things, I'll pick up some more techniques that I can use. You can't get better if you're afraid to try doing other things.

Anyways, thanks again for visiting. If you've at least laughed your ass off at my past failures, or liked my better works, then I think it was worth the click.

J.Norad Is The Worst Doctor Ever

You've probably seen enough Team Fortress 2 Medic Etiquette posts on miscellaneous blogs. You've seen the usual stuff like:

• Don't spam for "medic!" over and over and over...
• Don't steal a burning medic's health kit
• Don't monopolize the medic's time
• Don't lead the medic to certain death and expect him to come after you
• Don't microphone spam because J.Norad's too busy listening to Bee Gees to hear you, etc. etc.
  

Someone's got to teach your team some manners.

But you probably weren't warned about this happening to you if you violated those rules:

Medic is traitor to team!

For those of you who are staring at this pic for five minutes not seeing what's wrong, here's a summary:

(Medic + enemy spy + voice chat teamwork + assisted backstab on same teammate)x4 = domination on your own teammate.

(Yes, dominations also work on your own team. They'll be VERY unhappy 0nce they find out what you're doing.)

That'll teach that heavy to steal your medkit. And as a bonus, healing your spy friend makes him look more legitimate, thereby making it easier to lead him to your target. Remember kids, just because you and your friend are on opposite teams, it doesn't mean you can't help each other out.

J.Norad will be back with the regular post content next week. Until then, happy griefing!

Miscellaneous updates

Hip joint is holding up well. The new design does have problems with softened spheres but it maintains poses better than the first two iterations. No scanner or camera access, so it's going to be a bit before documentation can be posted. Might use CAD to illustrate it.

As an aside, came back home to find my model F-18 broken. Not sure what happened, but it's beyond repair value. I've noticed that I really did a crappy job on it, with decals warped and misaligned. The paint job was poor and spotty, and I already ruined the movable tail section during the initial construction job. Rather than buy a new set of rubber cement and fix it, I've trashed it. This only solidifies my stance against any new purchases with fewer than 10 movable parts. (F-18 would have had 3, if I made it right)

JNorad reviews Infinite Ryvius!

Infinite Rih rih ree ree ruh bow! "We are ok!" Ryvius; (Eps reviewed: 1-12? Maybe 1-9?)
Genre: infinite boredom. Infinite pain. Infinite still frames of stuff not moving. And space. There's also a ship in there somewhere.
OP/ED, music: the Op is the most exciting part of the series. There's movement in the credits sequence! people do things! The creators decided the series would work best with some "urban beats" stuck in the series, and good lord yawgmoth almighty, making fun of the freestyle beatbox commercial interludes was the only source of entertainment we derived from the entire series. (Bee beeeou bow bow boo buh! Reee vi us!)
Plot: I feel that watching the lively OP cheated me out of what this series could have been. For a disaster-to-recovery escapade of the crew of a doomed space station and their recovery and rescue of the mysterious spaceship, the Ryvius, they sure made it bland. First ep, they throw in some nice and odd names for units of measurement which are assumed to measure pressure outside the station or your decreasing blood pressure. Nothing seemed to happen for another three eps, except chunks of the station fell off. Some time later after we grew a beard and got it snagged on the cd-rom tray, we realized we were only on ep 5 and decided to watch some more. My friend died of chronic yawning and carpal tunnel from doing other meaningful things while watching and was reincarnated several times, just in time to witness ep 6 or 8 or whatever when they finally got the damn ship. For the almighty Ryvius, it sure came in late as hell. There were some space "assaults" or skirmishes, or "yawn-fare" as you please. I think someone died, or I wished the crew would all die. Either way, the plot is supposed to be a "lord of the flies" done in space with the crew working together... which leads us to our next category, the characters.
Characters: These little buggers were in some plot to be stranded in the doomed sinking station and at the rate they do things, it's a miracle they even got anything done. Since I wanted the crew to all die for any reason that I could think of, ship rupture, mutiny, cannibalism, I didn't bother getting to know any names. There was a Faina S. Shirozaki, a name we only remember because of how ridiculously many times it appeared and how pompous it sounded. Could have been eaten by graboids for all I care. Then there was this guy who looked like Vincent from FFVII, with the attitude of a mad biker on depressants. As the underdog character that we hoped would deal some ownage (or something for that matter), he did some light beatings (or his pussy crew did). The only action that happened at all throughout the eps we viewed was the fat kid getting some kisses from the slightly skanky girl (or we wished she was a skanky girl, which would have given us a reason not to kill ourselves). And then there's this weird ass girl who is dressed like the Dark magician Girl from Yu-Gi-Oh! who appears when shit happens (which isn't very often and by shit happening, I mean somehting like minor gas leak or fistfight) and says one random line, which is usually the last scene of the ep.
Highlights: Whenever your children misbehave, you now have an anime to make them watch "Clockwork orange" style until they bend to your will. Reee reee reee-uh! Ryvius.
Notes: Ryvius must in some language, mean "suicide motivator" or "hemorrhoids" or "call the Kevorkian". The people who managed to watch this all in one sitting must either have died or become mentally unstable. We still cannot figure out how this series was rated an 8/10 or any reason why. We barely made it to ep 9 in three weeks, finding other things to do to keep it off our to-do-list. If this series actually gets better by ep 14 or so, I'll probably never watch it for the fact that the series progresses like molasses leaking out of a pinhole sieve.
If you liked this, you may also like: stabbing yourself in the face with a rusty spork, or reading legal notices with lots of small print.

JNorad Reviews Full Metal Alchemist

FullMetal Alchemist, FullMetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa movie (2006);
Genre: action, comedy, alchemy, making gold out of household objects, and did I mention alchemy?
OP/ED, music: There's one haunting track used as background for depressing/dramatic moments that stands out . The op/ed's didn't attract too much attention. Shamballa’s OP sounds like Tomokazu Seki’s singing which was nice if it was… Shamballa’s music is still pretty standard for the FMA series, nothing notable.
Plot: Elric Bros. go on a mission to get their bodies back after failing human transmutation, and lots of emotionally scarring things change their ideology. Rushes at the end with their plot resolution, and accounts for how alchemy works with a mild plot-hole. Series works on developing the world and laws for the first set, then moving on to focus on the issue of “is this right” while dealing with the philosopher’s stone’s creation. From there, it degenerates into a pace of revenge, alliance, resurrection of character thought dead, revenge again, then formation of new characters to replace the ones they killed. Not surprisingly, they manage to sneak Nazis in there along with someone who looks like Gordon Freeman. At least this series didn’t suffer from Trinity Blood’s apparent “let’s make up some new plot to replace the lack thereof created from the lackluster mini-plot we just ended” problem.
If the main series’ start of the Nazi integration into the plot wasn’t apparent, the movie Conquerors of Shamballa slaps Nazis in your face. First of all, the movie is not standalone. Watching this without the main series will leave some elements lost to you and will be more confusing than the first quarter is already. The settings alternate between the world of alchemy and our dimension of science without a clear idea which is which for some time. The plot in a sentence: Nazis want to enter Shamballa to build up the Nazi forces as they try to take over Germany and Edward simultaneously is seeking a way back home. However, the plot has some issues that make it weaker than most OVAs or movies. The main villain is not too clear (seriously, I don’t know her name) and her motives require a “face off with the hero where I explain the plot” to make things clear. And did I mention this movie requires you to accept the shaky explanations given by the end of the series? Overall, Shamballa appears to be the start of the FMA movies/OVAs and leaves something to be desired.
Characters: The series really likes to kill characters and revive them. Luckily, in the movie Conqueror of Shamballa, the dead get a new life again using the shaky logic of the alternate world. Problem with this series is that the Homunculus are fighting to obtain the power to be human so they can die. Why wish to be capable of dying when you can already die? Other issues with characters include the dad’s feelings of love: if he really loved Trisha, wouldn’t he have been honest than hide the fact that he’s been plagued by a plot element created in the time span of the last ten eps? Character motives for Shamballa are murky at times and invoke the almighty “explain my motives at the last minute” deal. It was nice to see some dead characters alive again in the movie, if at all to spook Edward. Wrath’s character seems to have turned around completely without any idea why… blame “plot convenience”.
Highlights: Holy crap, for an anime dealing with junk science, it actually tries to sound smart using actual science in their attack descriptions. I doubt most viewers know what an adiabatic compression is. Ep 37 is the single random filler ep dealing with the State Alchemists, and worth the watch. Shamballa has Hitler’s appearance, but left me more curious if they would have made him speak in German or Japanese.
Notes: This series was fun to watch. Although there was a lot of death, character attachment was strong. The ending doesn’t seem to have much merit or a fully thought plan going about, and the movie helps resolve the problems created by that. However, don’t expect the movie to give a definite conclusion. The movie at best left me aching for some Nazi vs. Alchemist action and Hitler doing something other than starting the Nazi movement. And don’t mind how a biplane wing can stay aloft after being cut off from the main body (you’ll understand when you watch the movie)
Deals with "equivalent trade", and what a human life is equivalent to, best explained by "don't transmute people if you're going to do alchemy". Oh, and don't make gold from lead or create interdimensional portals to help the Nazi movement.

Fun with colors

Flavors from dark red:
Cranberry lemonade
cranberry lemonade+HI C orange
HI C Orange
HI C Orange + water
Orange juice
Orange Juice + Powerade
Powerade(blue)
Powerade+Cranberry lemonade+water
Powerade+Cranberry lemonade

Center: Sprite+Powerade+Cranberry lemonade+Orange Juice (actually tasted good)

Don't ask why.