I woke up today at 1 PM (the ONLY time to wake up in my book) and found that it was snowing outside. This is Dallas, snow is like spraying a can of Raid all over the city to these people. At first it wasn’t sticking and people were simply driving slow and terrible for no reason, but once five rolled around the snow was sticking pretty well to the ground. I got back to my place around six and snapped some pictures of the snow around the complex.

Then after pictures I kicked my shoes off in a fit of wet-cold rage, fixed my back door, rolled up my wet pant legs and put on one of the Dethklok albums that I got for Christmas from my awesome girlfriend. I don’t know if this is a common problem, but Dethalbum is very very quiet, I have to gain it all the way and it still doesn’t hit the 0 on my mixer. Dethalbum II is fine, but not quite sure why Dethalbum is so quiet.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, all of that. If you need something to listen to while you sip on a warm or alcoholic beverage this Christmas Eve then check out the GoodGroove Podcast #3, included below for your listening enjoyment.

Goodgroove Records Podcast Vol.3 by GoodgrooveRecords

After going three straight years without dressing up for Halloween, I decided that I was long overdue for dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a weekend. Anyone following me on Twitter or connected to me on Facebook or Flickr has seen pictures for months of my build of Thomas Bangalter’s helmet. Thomas is one of the two members of the house sensation Daft Punk. You’ve heard them even if you think you haven’t.

Ingredients needed to become Thomas for a weekend:
1 Pair Black Leather Pants
1 Black Single Row Grommet Belt
1 Black Leather Jacket
1 Black Mask
1 Pair Leather Gloves
1 Pair Black Shoes
1 Skateboard Helmet
6 Sheets Cardstock
1 LED Belt Buckle
1 Pad Metallic Silver Origami Foil
1 Can Fiberglass Resin Jelly
2 Cans Bondo Body Filler
6 Sheets 80 Grit Sandpaper
3 Sheets 120 Grit Sandpaper
300 Screw-backed Studs
1 Safety Visor
3 Square Ft. Window Tint
1 Can Spray Primer
1 Can Metallic Silver Spray Paint
4 Tubes Super Glue

The three things that require manually labor to create are the helmet, the jacket, and the gloves. We’ll start at the top and work our way down.

To make the helmet I followed the instructions on the “Make a Daft Punk Helmet” Instructable available here. I substituted spray-on tint for a roll of tint and also added an LED display in the visor which was accomplished by taping a programmable display from an LED belt buckle into the helmet just above eye level. The entire helmet-building process took around 25 hours (not counting the time waiting for things to dry or cure) put in on weekends.

Cardstock and Helmet	Layer of Fiberglass Jelly

Ears Attached	Full Layer of Bondo

Sanded for Painting	Almost Fully Painted

Moving on to the jacket, I had ordered a jacket from eBay that was to be the jacket for the costume, but by Thursday it hadn’t yet come. In a last-minute frenzy I used my lunch break last Thursday to scramble a jacket locally and found one that was good enough to work at Buckle. A week before I had the jacket I printed out the Daft Punk logo at a width of 12 inches and placed studs along the logo to create a dot-pattern to tape to the back of the jacket to know where to puncture the jacket for the studs. Using a knitting needle I sat down for five straight hours Thursday night and studded the entire pattern before passing out with a sever case of numb hands and exhaustion.

Stud Pattern	Completed Jacket

The gloves were fairly simple to accomplish after I found some metallic silver origami foil at a craft store. Before this project I was unaware of the existence of origami foil. It worked great and is much less prone to wrinkling and tearing like tinfoil is. With my hand in the glove, I measured where my fingers bent inside the glove and made segments of glove treatments cut out of cardstock. Those cardstock pieces I then traced onto sheets of the origami foil, cut out, glued the foil to the cardstock counterpart, and glued the back of the cardstock to the glove. The entire glove process took about two hours.

Cardstock Base	Completed Gloves

That brings us to the completed costume which I wish I had more pictures of. Plenty of people I didn’t know took pictures with me in my costume so I hope to find them somewhere on Facebook in the coming week. Make the jump over to my Flickr set dedicated to the project to check out all the pictures from the project as well as any more pictures of the entire costume I come across.

Wandering Through Akihabara

When I first heard about Akihabara, long before visiting Japan, I was told it was a huge technology district. That is a gross understatement. Since there isn’t anything that truly comes close to this in the US I was under the impression that Akihabara was like the strip in Las Vegas, but instead of gambling there were towers of anime and video games. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Waiting at the Crosswalk	Wandering Around

 
The sheer size of Akihabara exceeds any preconceptions I had about it. There really is no end to the sky-scraper arcades and department stores complimented by the innumerable smaller arcades and specialty shops. If we had all of the time we wanted then I’m sure we would have stopped into every arcade along our journey for a few rounds of Street Fighter IV against the locals… a slaughter basically. However, we did visit a few staples including Club Sega and the huge Taito Game Station. Both arcades are packed with games on every floor and each floor represents a different genre of game. Floors of racing games, fighting games, redemption games, and sports games are all present here. What wasn’t present were the youth. The arcades seemed to have mostly over-20′s there with a few younger patrons here and there. Arcades seem like a more adult friendly affair in Japan, especially with the smoking friendly environment and smaller arcade machines which allow players to sit while enjoying their favorite game.

Tech Shops	Club Sega Building

 
Moving back outside along the busier parts of Akihabara you’re field of view is filled with at least 10 advertisements at once. Buildings are used as billboards, billboards are used as billboards, people are used as billboards, and there are even some shops with people on loudspeakers to attract patrons through rhyme. I can only assume they were rapping about the amazing deals that could be found in the store since my Japanese knowledge is very limited and was practically non-existent during my visit. Not only were the billboards in place, but I received so many handouts about video games, anime, club events, and in-store sales that I filled the display on my arcade cabinet up with them instead of getting a piece of art commissioned to fill the void. Even after filling that display up I’m left with a stack of flyers in a binder that serve as memories of the trip.

GAME (huge arcade)	Huge adverts

 
As we wandered from tech-heavy Akihabara to anime-heavy, game-heavy, and fetish-porn-heavy Akihabara we came across the gaming store of gaming stores. A store you hear legends about on gaming forums. Super Potato. Arranged by category per floor you start at one end of the gaming spectrum and work your way to the other. From the NES and other early systems up through the last generation of consoles almost everything you can think of is accounted for, plus more. The top story of Super Potato is an arcade with candy cabs running games from the past. We couldn’t pass up this opportunity to play some Street Fighter II or take our picture with the life-size mannequin of Snake. Just so I can sound like everyone else who has visited Tokyo and been into Super Potato, if you go to Akihabara you must track this place down. It’s a great store to just wander through and browse even if you don’t end up purchasing anything in the end. I picked up Mother 3 while I was there to remind me of the concentrated awesome that is Super Potato.

Super Potato!	Me and Snake

About two weeks ago I moved from my old place in Denton to a new place much closer to work. How much closer? The commute used to be 35+ minutes, now I’m hard pressed to make it to work in anything over 3 minutes. Yes, being walking distance (although I haven’t walked yet…) from work is awesome.

It has taken me the last couple of weeks to get everything unpacked and situated into the current state.  As you can tell by the lack of a TV in the living room and the record crates on the floor I am not finished yet, but it is in an orderly state at least.  Check out some pictures below of the new pad, I’m really liking it!

The Megalo 410 has moved in with me as well, but the rear projection monitor took some knocks on the move over.  So instead of seeing Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike in all of its magnificent glory, I am presented with this piece of art:

The reason behind this is that the vertical and horizontal potentiometers were broken off of their PCB during transit, but don’t worry too much! I’ve ordered replacement potentiometers for them and they will be soldered on once they arrive! Current damage presented below (Oh! The humanity!):

I’m hoping that replacing those two broken potentiometers will do the trick.  I don’t see why it won’t fix the issue, but if it doesn’t there is a plan B.  Plan B will be revealed if it comes down to that being my only viable option.  However, fingers are crossed that by this weekend or next the machine will live once again.

Ryokans and Department Stores!
During our week in Tokyo my friends and I stayed in a ryokan, or a hostel, in Asakusa, Tokyo. The name of the ryokan we stayed in is the Toukaisou (http://www.toukaisou.com), and if you’re planning a trip to Tokyo I definitely recommend this place. The staff speaks English and the location can’t be beat. You can choose to stay in the commons area, where there are bunk beds and a common kitchen and bathroom, or in a private room, where you get a private bathroom and roll out beds. We stayed in both during our trip and I preferred the private room over the commons area, but both are great places to stay.

Justin in front of the ryokan	Me eating in our room

 
Right down the street form the Toukaisou is a sushi place that is open 24/7 as well as a 24-hour grocery store. Behind the grocery store, which is the basement to a giant department store called ROX, is a soccer field, two arcades, and a great bar. We stopped by the famous Kaminarimon as well since it is located in Asakusa. The Kaminarimon has a history of being rebuilt and destroyed and the current version was built back in the 1960′s. Not only do you have historic destinations and entertainment at your disposal within a short walk, but the stations are easily accessible as well and no destination is too far from the stations in Asakusa.

Grocery shopping at ROX	Kaminarimon in Asakusa

 
On day three of our trip we made it to Akihabara. I’ll dedicate an entire post to the insanity and sensory-overload that is Akihabara soon, but for now I’m going to focus on the department store right across the street from Akihabara station called Yodobashi-Akiba. The first few floors are your generic electronics, with each floor having its contents clearly spelled out on the escalator ride up to the floor. Televisions, cameras, home applicances, video games, and toys are all here on dedicated floors. What I’ve only heard of and never seen I first came in contact with on the toy floor, rows and rows of capsule toy machines. In the USA a restaurant of business may have a few machines in the front selling candy or small toys, but the Japanese are light years ahead of us in the capsule toy department. Capsule toys aren’t just for kids in Japan, they’re for everyone and they’re actually fun to collect.

Yodobashi-Akiba entrance	Capsule toys!

 
I had to buy some capsule toys of course and I left Japan with several Street Fighter (Chun-Li, Sakura, Ibuki, and Cammy) and Evangelion (Shinji and Rei) capsule toys. These six now reside on my desk at work as a constant reminder that I need to go back for a second trip to Japan next year. The remainder of the toy floor houses things similar to those which you would expect to find here in the US: action figures, collectables, puzzles, board games, and more. Anyone into technology and Japanese entertainment like I am could easily spend an entire day in this department store alone, but we needed to get out and see the rest of Akihabara! On our way back to the escalators we found signs that pointed us up a few more floors to the food court and we headed there for lunch.

Lunch in the food court	Yodobashi-Akiba

 
As we approached the food court floor I had the thoughts of an American mall’s food court in my head. When we reached the food court it was obvious that things here were not just a little different, but completely different. The floor should have been called “Restaurants” because that is what it was, a floor full of restaurants. From the escalator we wandered to the back of the food court to a soba place that all of us agreed on. This soba restaurant was the first place we encountered that did not have an English version of the menu so we used Justin’s Japanese to English (and the other way around) translator to poke our way through the menu. I’m going to take a quick detour here and talk about the translator Justin owns. I don’t know the exact model, but Justin owns an older Seiko translator which came in handy several times throughout the trip. It was frustrating that many “common” kanji were beyond the Seiko’s scope, but it made things like menus and directions more accessible to us. Looking now, Seiko has several newer models of their Japanese<>English electronic dictionary and I can only assume that these newer models cover much more material than the version we had on our trip. Either way, one of these is a worthy investment if no one in your travel party is fluent in Japanese. Back on topic! The food was great, as was all of the food I ate during my stay in Japan, and lunch was just what we needed to give our feet a break and rest up for the rest of the day in Akihabara. I didn’t take any pictures of the food court so I don’t know the name of the restaurant we ate at. As far as I can remember, it was simply straight to the back from the escalator and was the only soba place at the back.

More pictures from the trip are in my Japan flickr set here.

Coming up soon – The rest of our day out in Akihabara!