…Comic-Con.

Once again, Miss T and I headed SoCalward to brave the (not-so-)costumed crowds at San Diego Comic-Con International. For 2010 we only bought tickets for Thursday—which really wasn’t enough time to take in the sights—though Miss T finagled her way back in on Sunday for the end of the show.

For our single-day excursion we had to pick up our registration badges (1 1/2-mile walk over 30 minutes), and then attended a panel (stood in line for 45 minutes, sat in panel for 90 minutes), before spending the rest of the time perusing the exhibition floor (crisscrossed the 10 1/2-acre exhibit hall for 6 1/2 hours). By the end of the day my feet and back were screaming bloody murder.

Along the way we saw so many interesting examples of the “popular arts” that my brain glazed over and I forgot to take photos of things. Some items that did jar me out of my Comic-Con stupor:

Next year I’m hoping to spend an entire day in photo mode.

A few days later, Miss T and I finally made it out to the beach where we were confronted by washed-up piles of sea life.

Then, Miss T braved the Comic-Con Exhibition Hall for one more day while I cooled my heels (and the car) at Horton Plaza.

As always, the whole lot is over at maxpixpix on Picasa.

…a very small art chair.

In 1917, Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld created his Red Blue Chair. 90 years later, reac JAPAN made a 1/12 scale replica of Rietveld’s work. On Saturday, I bought one (of the reac JAPAN replicas).

Two more pics:

(At $8, the reac JAPAN Red Blue Chair is a lot more economical than a larger-than-life version made of Legos.)

…at San Francisco’s Japantown.

S.F.’s Nihonmachi (Japantown) had back-to-back weekend festivals this August: the Nihonmachi Street Fair and the J-POP SUMMIT Festival / NEW PEOPLE grand opening (their CAPS, not mine). Miss T and I trekked out to the Bay Area both weekends to see if a new niche-interest building can make a difference in a retail area that’s been struggling for over a decade. Also, I wanted to eat Japanese food.

This year’s Nihonmachi Street Fair (August 8th and 9th) seemed less attended by both exhibitors and fairgoers—could be that folks were holding off for the larger J-POP SUMMIT event the following weekend, or my perception may have just been off. Whatever the case, Miss T and I had little trouble making our way through the light crowds at the street fair booths and in the Japantown malls. We made our usual fair/shopping circuit, ate at Tanpopo Ramen, and called it a day.

A couple of photos from the Nihonmachi Street Fair:

The J-POP SUMMIT Festival / NEW PEOPLE grand opening (August 15th and 16th) made a much bigger splash, drew larger crowds, and possibly sucked some of the life out of the previous weekend’s festivities. The centerpiece of the event was the opening of the NEW PEOPLE building, a retail/entertainment venture dedicated to Japanese pop culture. The 20,000 square-foot building features an art gallery, apparel boutiques, a book and collectibles store, a cafe, and an underground (literally) IMAX THX theater.

Entry to NEW PEOPLE was limited to 250 people at a time, with a long queue stretched along Post Street hours before the ribbon-cutting. Since I’m well past the years of getting excited about these things… about anything… we spent the morning taking in J-music performances at the Harajuku Kawaii Experience stage, shopping (again) at the good-ole’ Japantown malls, perusing the exhibitor and food stalls, and marveling at how many girls were decked out in Lolita fashion. In the mid-afternoon we finally stood in line to make our way into NEW PEOPLE—by that time a 20-minute or so wait.

The first floor cafe, mezzanine store, and third floor art gallery were well attended, but the second floor Lolita clothing stores were packed. NEW PEOPLE’s draw might be J-pop culture in general, but on opening day Lolita fashion was definitely the focus of attention.

You can see the rest of our J-POP SUMMIT Festival / NEW PEOPLE grand opening photos—including some of the fun “STAIR123″ art and fire safety evidence that NEW PEOPLE was not quite ready to open—via the thumbnails below. (All of the 40 Nihonmachi weekends photos are at maxpixpix on Picasa, as usual.)

Miss T and I will be heading back to NEW PEOPLE to see if demand for the J-pop experience continues past the opening week. (Fingers crossed that it does.)

In case you were wondering if there are Lost fans in Spain—well, there must be. Otherwise, a DHARMA Initiative-themed bar like BHARMA would never have gotten off the ground.

I tried finding out more about the bar at bharma.com, but the site was in Spanish, so I settled on reading the description I originally came across at mandabear.com.

I have no idea how the economy is treating bars in Barcelona, but what are these folks going to do after Lost wraps up next year?

Photos from bharma.com.

…DHARMA Initiative Cubeecraft.

The fine folks at Cubeecraft have applied their paper-cutifying technology to the realm of DHARMA Initiative labels. The result, as downloaded, printed, cut out, and folded, is pictured above.

Three advantages of the DI Cubeecraft vs. Max Pictures’ DI product labels:

• Cubeecraft requires no tape or glue; everything tabs together
• Cubeecraft requires no product to attach to; Cubeecraft is its own self-labeling product
• Cubeecraft is DHARMA Initiative utilitarian AND cute

Head over to Cubeecraft for the DHARMA Initiative Cubeecraft and a ton of other pop-culture papercraft projects.

…but Picasa is cheaper.

Max Pictures has photos posted all over the place. Well, a couple of places. Okay, four places*, I think.

We started out with a self-hosted online gallery (using the open source program Gallery, of all things), but when Flickr came on the scene we quickly jumped (our own) ship and maxpixpix on Flickr was born. Actually, we double-posted for a while, but the features (especially geotagging) and ease-of-use that Flickr offered quickly bought our allegiance. Like Gallery, Flickr was free. All was good.

Then, we hit Flickr’s free account 200 image limit.

I cursed. I swore. I wrote angry emails (in my head) to Flickr’s management team. I couldn’t go back to free, cumbersome, and slowly-updated Gallery. I considered paying for a Flickr Pro account. Miss T reminded me that Max Pictures was already paying for web hosting with oodles and gigabyte oodles of server space. I searched for another free Flickr-like Web image service. Google’s Picasa Web Albums, oddly enough, was the top result from my Google search.

Picasa wasn’t (and still isn’t) as function-rich, widely-used, or just-plain-sexy as Flickr. But, it does have many of the same features as Flickr (specifically geotagging) and it is being (slowly) updated by Google. Most importantly, the free account storage limit of 1 gigabyte beats the pants off of Flickr’s 200 image photostream cap. Max Pictures’ photo gallery jumped ship again to maxpixpix on Picasaweb. All was good.

Today I discovered Flickr Enlarger. It’s a simple Web app that let’s you view Flickr images like this: Astro Boy promotes Tezuka.

Very simple. Very sexy. For Flickr. *sigh*

Okay, back to editing photos for posting to Picasa.

*The fourth way we’re posting images is via WordPress.

…but Happy Dharmaween!

And, iPumpkinween.

And, uh, Eyeballween.

In case you don’t recognize the first pumpkin, it’s sporting the “modernized” Dharma Initiative logo that is part of the Lost alternate reality game “Dharma Initiative Recruiting Project.” And, uh, Lost is a TV show on ABC.

Kamen Rider carved the iPumpkin. Miss T carved the eyeball. I’m pretty sure it’s just an eyeball and not the CBS logo.

Twelve more months ’til next Dharmaween. (Thankfully, Lost returns in February).

…at the mall.

Miss T and I happened to stop by Arden Fair Mall last Sunday—I wanted to see the new MacBook, MacBook Pro, and LED Cinema DIsplay at the Apple Store (they’re all very, very nice, by the way)—and we ended up wandering around for about three hours. We hadn’t been to Arden Fair (or any mall, for that matter) in a long while so we spent some time taking in the mall sights: roving bands of tween– and teenyboppers; fleets of parents and baby strollers; chain stores devoted entirely to ball caps or calendars or adjustable beds. Nothing particularly new; just the same strange mall stuff.

But, between marveling at KB Toys’ continued existence and wondering how Frederick’s of Hollywood pays their lease, a commotion in the mall’s atrium court caught my attention—some sort of LEGO® event was underway. An 8-foot-tall LEGO R2-D2 was at the center of the affair, and kids (and parents) waited in line to get LEGO t-shirts and have their picture taken with the giant R2. “That’s interesting,” I said. “I wonder why they’re having a LEGO Star Wars event here?” A few minutes later Miss T and I had our answer: a LEGO store had just opened at the mall.

I haven’t played with LEGOs in a decade or more (with the exception of LEGO Star Wars on PS3), but I was still excited to see this new shop. The store is done up as LEGO-ey as possible, with the brick and studs motif everywhere. There are tons of LEGO sets available for purchase (with a heavy emphasis on licensed sets: Star Wars®, Batman®, Indiana Jones®, Thomas the Tank Engine®) and a whole wall of bins with à la carte parts that you can buy by the pound. It’s almost enough to make me want to pull my old LEGO sets out storage. Almost.

Hmm… where did I put those old LEGOs?

…at Target®. For Halloween.

Do you know Domokun? (If not, here’s a brief article about him on Wikipedia.) For the purposes of this post, the most important thing to know about Domokun is that he’s from Japan.

Last week Autoteknik tipped us off (via iPhone photo, natch) that Domokun had “officially” landed in the U.S.—at Target. Miss T and I swung by our nearest red bullseye-festooned outlet this weekend to confirm for ourselves that Domokun was, yes, here on our foreign shore, and that we were not the victims of some elaborate photo fakery (like the moon landings).

You can see our non-faked photos at 5 Domo(kun) at Target photos.

Domokun says “Domo!”

…giant, cute microbes.

Some time ago, Miss T discovered the anime Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture (もやしもん). The show, set in Japan, follows a university ag-student with the ability to see microbes without aid of a microscope. The kicker—and what probably caught Miss T’s attention in the first place—is that the microorganisms our ag-student sees aren’t like this:

They’re like this:

You can see CG versions of the Moyashimon microbes in action in the show’s opening titles and closing credits.

And, you can see our own photos of three of Moyashimon’s star microbes—P. chrysogenum, A. oryzae, and E. coli O157—at 20 Microbe (Moyashimon) photos. (Once we saw the critters on the show we knew that they were a merchandising opportunity that couldn’t be passed up.)

Here’s to hoping they make more microbes!

Those of you familiar with the anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (GitS:SAC for short) will recognize the friendly, blue, soul-searching critter above as a Tachikoma. Those of you not familiar with the 26-episode series should rent and watch the whole thing right now, it’ll save me some explaining and will be more entertaining for you.

Miss T and I picked up our Tachikoma (Wave’s 1/24 scale W.H.A.M.! Tachikoma) at last year’s Anime Expo. The figure is one of four (yes, we eventually picked up the other three) and sits in one of our bookcases at the Hut.

You can view more of our Tachikoma photos at Picasa Web albums—including several with a 1/24 scale car so you can see how much room a Tachikoma would take up in your driveway.

Since a walkthrough of film scanning services and techniques followed by a tutorial on image editing and cataloging would be 2 parts long and 3 parts boring, allow me to point you to Max Pictures’ Flickr page (under the not-so-helpful moniker maxpixpix) where I’ve uploaded some 150 or so of the 4,400+ images currently floating around in my iPhoto ’08 library.

More on this later (unless my compulsion with the photography or the blog goes on the wane).

Slow on the heels of the last photos-posted-late post are a batch of pics from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. They are, of course, from a jaunt Miss T and I took last month.

So, the story goes like this: after a couple of false starts, one afternoon Miss T and I finally hiked out to the newishly-relocated Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. One exhibit—Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga—was the focus of our visit. Also of interest: Seeing how the Asian Art Museum had been adapted into the former San Francisco Public Library building.

You can see photos of the museum (including some of Tezuka’s works) on our gallery page, or at maxpixpix on Flickr.com. We’re playing around with Flickr right now and seeing how (and if) we can integrate Flickr’s capabilities with maxpictures.com.

Miss T and I pointed the xB away from Davis and Sacramento, drove about five miles, and stopped in the middle of some God-knows-what farmland. It wasn’t completely pitch black, but the city lights and occasional passing car were distant enough to let my little-used night vision adjust to pupils-as-big-as-saucers mode. Having been a city– and suburb-boy for the majority of my life, I’m still amazed by the sight of thousands of stars in a clear night sky.

In any event, we weren’t out in cornfield country just to get a clearer look at constellations, we were there for the start of the 2007 Perseid meteor shower. I saw five shooting stars in about 30 minutes. Miss T saw more.

Sometimes you gotta love country living.

Windows-only readers can skip this post.

For those of you wondering if Apple Inc. still makes computers, today’s special Apple Mac Event was a celebration of (almost*) all things Mac.

The first announcement was the new iMac form-factor. Thinner, sleeker, faster, shinier—the new, aluminimum-clad, 20– and 24-inch iMacs run Intel Core 2 Duo processors from 2.0 to 2.8GHz. Still no built-in Blu-ray burner, but I want one of these new iMacs almost as much as I want an iPhone. The keyboard alone is a thing of beauty.

Despite the new hardware offering, the bulk of the Mac Event time was devoted to iLife and iWork. iLife ’08 has significantly updated versions of iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD, and GarageBand (where’s the “i”?). iWork ’08 has revised apps Keynote (presentations) and Pages (word processing), and adds a new spreadsheet application, Numbers. I’ve never been excited about presentations, word processing, or spreadsheets, but I’m beginning to feel some tingling in the extremities.

Finally, .Mac (Apple’s e-mail and online tools service) got a storage and functionality bump (to integrate with iLife ’08), and the Mac mini got a silent processor upgrade.

*No Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, or Xserve news.