LEon の话

It was a weekend and I was packing my toys. Come across some of my Kubrick toys and decided to play with it. Here are some the Kubrick I had.






Above are 3 of the Matrix Kubrick which I have. I got them as they really look cute.
PS: The yellow car (Bumble Bee animated) is not a Kubrick toy. Special guest appearance only.




Batman and Robin were given to me as a gift from a friend who collect Kubrick as well.

Jin-Rô on the other hand was quite a hard find and I bought it from my friend who has an extra.










In the past, buying Kubrick is like "Tikam  Tikam". You have to try your luck to get those rare ones. Nowadays most of the figure already shown on the art work of the boxes. Some shop also sell it loose for a price of course. I didn't collect much Kubrick. Only those I find it cute and within my budget.

I came across this pieces of news at Wizard website that the co-creator and artist of Witchblade, Michael Turner dies of cancer last Friday, 27th June 2008 . After battling Cancer for 8 years... At 37... that's a young age. I collected Witchblade comic when in was serving my national service. I remember heading down to Serene Centre with my one of my army friend who was into English comics. Witchblade was one of those rare English comic I collected. The style of  Michael's drawing appeal to me and I remember his name. Since I was there when the first book was out, I started collecting it. As you like the artist, you will likely to follow his works. I found some of his press release during his battle with cancer and working toward his dreams. “ I want to express my apologies to the fans and retailers who’ve stuck by me throughout this arduous Soulfire run and the many delays on the book’s release. The past several months have honestly been incredibly painful to me not only physically, but also mentally trying to finish up the last few issues in the series and meet our return ship date. Towards the end of last year after completing my commitment to Marvel for a run of their covers, I dove right back into the Soulfire work, completely ready to get everything finished up in time for the big return and finale. At the time we announced the books return date, I had believed many of my health issues to be behind me, but unfortunately the pain in my leg and hip came back strong and fast. It became time again for me to address the situation before something worse happened. I’m closing in on an 8 year battle with my cancer and I know I’ll beat this eventually, I’m just backed into a corner right now and need to fight my way back out again. Unfortunately, the Soulfire schedule takes the hits too.” “I’m going as fast as my body lets me,” says Turner. “My goal is to go at a steady pace and try to get a couple of pages done each week. Some days are good for me, and some are not. I’ll just need to deal with those as they come and stay on track. Thankfully, the pages are turning out well and I’m excited for everyone to check out all of the new things I’ve been putting into the book. I want to make sure it’s worth the wait for everyone.” Read more here.

Art by Michael Turner

It's inspiring  to see how Michael kept going in life and battle cancer head on for 8 years from setting up his own comic company to continue with his art with his fans. He fought a good fight. May he now find peace.

More about Micheal Turner
More about Michael's Artworks

Jazz is the only Autobot that went "Offline" in the Transformers movie. The vehicle was cool but the toy does not justified Jazz as the body was never properly painted or should I said never painted at all. Rather than looking like silver metallic, it look plastic. Finally the Premium version does SOME justice to Jazz. I use the word SOME as the Quality Control of the painting was not consistent with each toys. Here are the my review.

Package
The package layout remain the same, the only different was the label of the "Premium Series" and the name of Jazz is in chrome Silver. Have a closer look.



Vehicle Mode
The car design of Jazz look really Sleek. It is a Pontiac Solstice GXP.


I just love the car design! You can see the numbers of photo I took for Jazz in his vehicle mode.


Did you notice that some spots were not painted properly? It's pretty obvious right? Here is a picture of every angle of Jazz in vehicle mode.


A view from the top. You can't really go wrong with a good car mold.


Let's mount the gun up. Wicked!


Transformation Mode
The transformation is pretty easy and the joints are steady and firm.


Does this mode look similar to you?



Robot Mode
Here is Jazz in full Robot mode.


Jazz was armed with a gun and shield which look great. However this toy Jazz do look a little stout. I guess the legs were a little too short, that's why.

I choose not to answer that question of yours Jazz.

So how this deluxe class Jazz fair with the rest of his counter part? Let's take a look.


Compare to Leader class Optimus Prime, Jazz do look in scale as he is suppose to be shorter than Prime anyway.


What about with other Deluxe class? We have Bumble Bee in Camero 1974 with us today.
In Robot mode...


But when in Vehicle mode...


Seems like scaling problem once again... Anyway the toys are targeting more to kids and to kids, scale does not really matters.

Overall Premium Jazz is still the way to go for those who wanted a movie Jazz. For the same price, I would rather pay for Premium than a normal plastic looking ones. Of course the QC of the paint job have yet to be improve. However the toy is fun to transform and a good looker in car mode. Way to go Jazz.


Erm...Jazz. Do you remember what happen the last time you said that? Tthat was your final word in the movie anyway.  Maybe we have not see the last of you. You may return in the coming movie. :)

I was going through some of my stuff the other day and I happened to find out another homepage of mine. Beside having a homepage in Geocities, I remember that I had another one in Fortunecity. The birth of my homepage was in 1997 when I was picking up HTML by myself  Back then they are couples of popular free web spaces that allow anyone to create their homepage. Some of the more popular one that I know of were Geocities and Fortunecity. However the web space provided was rather limited. I ended up signing for both web spaces to try it out. With the demand of people wanting more web spaces, some of this web space providers had to fight the demand of web users. Due to the unstably of some of this web space, I hop between them from time to time. Eventually I settled down to Geocities to stay focus. Geocities used to allow FTP where I can directly upload my own created pages. When Geocities go with Yahoo!  it really gets unfriendly. By then, most of my content were already up and thus I stayed on. Everything that I did back then, I have to take bandwidth as my first consideration. No point having a full graphical web page when visitor were put to wait to see the whole website. I know to some who read this may find it rather alien to you. But before the millennium, majority of home users were still using 56K connection.We are talking about World-Wide-Web. Some people on other part of the world maybe in lower bandwidth then that. 800 x 600 was a rather standard resolution. With all that in mind, I started doing my homepage. Doing web pages in frame was the way to go due to bandwidth constrain. All pictures had to be optimized in JPG or Gif for easy loading and also because of the limited web space given by the web spaces providers. You should see email capacity given then but that will be another blog entry for another time.  Javascript was fun as you can ask for visitor's to enter their names and a pop-up box will follow greeting the visitor with his/her name in customized message. In any homepage,  Email contact of the owner, Guestbook and counters were found almost every homepages. Some even have survey and feedback options Having music in pages was a IN thing too. Instead of having MP3, Midi was a good choice (maybe an only choice) as it is small and some midi ain't that bad at that time. In the new millennium, I included CSS and started to change the layout of my homepage. Removing the frame, I started to get my hands on learning Flash and put up some plug-in in the web pages.

I realized that what really make homepage work was that you got to have a theme or something that you are passionate about to share. In my case, was my artworks. You also have to be willing to learn the related programing languages. Of course you have to have some creative juice as well. As I look back, creating that home page was really a fun learning experience and it was monumental as well.

Read about Geocities history.

Chipmunk's cutie power is still going strong in the new millennium.



They have done a great job in CG for this movie. I don't know if you have notice but each chipmunks have different color eyes in sync with their signature colors. Alvin for red, Simon for blue and Theodore for green.

The soundtrack was equally great too. The cover version of "Bad day" took me totally by surprised in the beginning of the movie. It is good that the Chipmunks stay relevant to times.

My wife instantly fell in love with them after watching the movie. Her favorite is Theodore. I guess Theodore's chubby cuteness during the scene where he asked to sleep with Dave really rub off. Guess Theodore is more popular with gals rather than Alvin huh?



Too bad I didn't really get to see any toys of them in retails. Did they ever reached Singapore? Maybe I missed it.

Flashback a little to the Chipmunk cartoon that I watched in 80s. I still can remember the song in the intro of the cartoons. It was really catchy.

Watch out, cause here we come
It's been a while but we're back with style
So get set to have some fun
We'll bring you action and satisfaction

We're the chipmunks
C-H-I-P-M-U-N-K
We're the chipmunks
Guaranteed to brighten your day

When you feel like a laugh
Give us a call we'll give you a roll
And if you feel like a song
Tune in to us and sing right along

We're the chipmunks
Coming on stronger than ever before
We're the chipmunks
Alvin, Simon, Theodore
Do-Do, Do-Do-Do Do!

The 1980's cartoon intro video can be found here.

Somehow I had a feeling there will be another movie. Guess we will be seeing more of you guys in time to come.

Above is a piece of my "Art" (more than a decade ago) which I drew it on the column of my parent's house. Inspired by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel drawings on the walls and ceilings, I decided take on a personal project to do a wall drawing at my home. My dad graciously allowed me to do at one corner of my house which is my study area (which was my drawing area as well). With the limited space, I decided to draw the Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (Only the hands). Instead of drawing Michelangelo's version of the outreached hands, I took my own hands as reference. Must be original, else it is a copy right? 

I drew it in pencil and after drawing the outline, I took a rest and thought of painting it later. However it remain in that way since. I think it look better in Black & White. To be really honest, I allowed laziness and contentment to set in. I am unsure how it will look after painting in color either. The process of coloring and getting the tone right are hard work! If I did it wrongly, it will destroy what I have done so far too.

It is a "Milestone" artwork to me personally as my late father continue to allow the drawing to remain on the wall. Guess it look "Presentable" and true enough many of my guest did asked about it and gave some praises. 

The drawing remain for more than a decade and I took a picture of it before I moved out. Today the walls are repainted but the fond memories of the process of making the art piece stays with me.