I swear, I’m going to redo the site soon! Promise! I am probably lying.

I have this project I’m working on that should get me out of debt with people, like Edward_K. No, it doesn’t involve ‘faking my own death’ and ‘moving to Mars’.

I’ve been not-drawing. I’ve also been not not-wasting-time playing arcade games. Honestly, I’m so goddamned lazy, I still haven’t RMA’d my monitor yet after it shit itself and died. D:

For about a week now I’ve had my desk cleared off enough to draw, but I’ve got artist’s block or something. Luckily it didn’t coincide with writer’s block, because I was able to write out event outlines for 7+ volumes of Gaijin Samurai manga.

Okay, so, first of all, this site is getting replaced by a new Wordpress blog when I have the opportunity, and the posts will be restored with the original timestamps and everything.

Secondly, the care and feeding of my arcade cabinet has been very fulfilling so far, both for me, and for the cabinet’s coin box.

I’m launching the first of several arcade-related projects, all of which will eventually be found at a new site I made to keep it separate.

Remember the clock design I modeled? I finally got one to call my own out of the small batch Jason von Nieda built.

I must say, it’s absolutely exquisite. :D

Pic 1 — Pic 2 — Pic 3 — Pic 4 — VFD Detail

He’s also auctioning off the only one he didn’t make for any particular person. Complete with really nifty laser-cut wood box. :D

Trust me, it’s worth it.

A story of how Baka grows old, eats too much pizza, acquires the holy grail AND the lost ark of his NEO-GEO collection, and almost dies! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO READ MORE!!!

Next: Part 1, In which Baka encounters the first plot twist.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Well, it’s that time of year again. I was going to make a joke where I write— at length —about an ‘extraordinary individual whose birthday is quickly approaching’, saying “What? Did you think I was talking about Mozart?"… But as Lewis Black would say, “I’m just not that fucking funny.”

Yes, for those who don’t know, my birthday— January 27th —is also the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who would be 254 this year if he was, well, a vampire…or something…I guess…ANYWAY! That’s all irrelevant because I couldn’t be bothered to write the joke which I have now explained anyway, in far too much detail, PUTTING THAT ASIDE, I just thought I’d write about what it is I’ve been doing.

Among other things, I’ve had an extensive e-mail conversation with Jason von Nieda, the guy who built a clock based on my design. We talked a bit about what it would take to make more. Right now, I’m waiting on a new drillpress so I can finish my CNC machine, as I might be able to make the clock enclosures and stuff.

I’ve been doing a bit more drawing lately, but I’ve been trying not to get too involved as there are things I really need to be doing…and am still not, even when I don’t draw… So really, I need to quit fucking up.

Speaking of fucking up, last night, our camera took a header off the top of my computer case for no discernible reason, landing on my foot, and then the floor… I call bullshit. It gets to fall on my foot, OR break. Not both. NEVER BOTH!!! Anyway, it broke the UV filter (That’s what it’s there for.) and jammed my 35mm lens. Luckily the camera is okay, and the lens seems like it will work correctly once I pop the moving bits back into the right position. So if I’m real lucky, I’m only out a $7.99 UV filter which fulfilled its destiny and took one for my glass.

I’ve started collecting the original Graphic-sha published How To Draw Manga books for my birthday. I already had a couple, but I managed to scrape together enough to buy another ~25 of the books in various states of ‘used’ condition. (Nine of which have arrived so far.) I even managed to snag an OOP book that some assholes are trying to sell for $280 and up, when someone put one on the Amazon Marketplace for $12.99 (I bought it within like 10 minutes of it being posted.)

I’ve seen people trying to sell some of these books for as much as $900~1200, and that really pisses me off. Someone should take action to undercut these assholes, like releasing PDFs of the OOP books. No one should have to pay that much, and the publisher doesn’t get any money either, since they’re all used copies! Given that a lot of the unavailable and ridiculously priced books are both fairly new, and very good/useful, it really is a frustrating situation and people who try and charge that much are basically human garbage. This isn’t commerce, it’s taking advantage of people. Don’t ask me why, but it seems harder to buy a How to Draw Manga book from ~2007 than it is to buy one from ~2000. And things like the ‘How to Draw Manga: Sketching Manga-Style’ series are very recent and up-to-date in art style and seem to be better written as well.

Anyway, enough about that, I’m not really doing anything special for my birthday but hopefully I’ll have some projects gaining momentum come the end of February. And on the off chance that anyone wants to help me complete my collection of HTDM books, there’s still quite a few cheap ones on my Amazon wishlist. (I only ask that they not be ‘ex-library’ copies and that they still have their dust jackets.)

So, on Atheist-kids-get-presents-day Eve, I got an e-mail from someone named Jason von Nieda saying that he really loved the design I had for my vacuum tube clock, and that he used it as inspiration to machine a similar enclosure of his own. He included pictures of the finished device. I know a bit about obsessing over things you think are cool and working your ass off to imitate them, so I can sympathize. And the end result is really great. (The inner workings are as nice as the enclosure, too.)

I have to admit that, while really flattered that someone would like my design so much, I’m also kinda embarrassed and more than a little pissed at myself for having spent all this time struggling to make even one. Especially given how much attention it seems to be getting… (Of course, I already had some idea about that, since everyone I showed the design to thought it was incredibly cool.)

Now, don’t get me wrong, internet. It’s all good, so put all your sharp-pointy things away. Jason was very up-front on the matter and made sure I was cool with him using the design, and he did a smashing good job of making it, too! (Especially considering he was working from a single rendering I had posted.) It’s still just a bit shocking to say the least. :)

Anyway, here’s the original conceptual rendering I did.

Here’s the flickr photoset he posted of the finished clock and various prototype PCBs.

Here’s the post on his blog about it.

Here’s the post about it on Hack-A-Day with an insanely great post title.

Here’s the source of the Hack-A-Day post, an article on MAKE.

I guess I’d better get my ass in gear then, eh? I sure have enough tubes.

So, I’m building a mahjong playing surface using materials like pooltable felt and stuff. So far I have the surface attached to the plywood base, now I just need to add feet (It’s meant to sit on tabletops) and the outer frame. I’ve got a bitchin picture of it!

So, with the help of my re-discovered Ultimate Power Source, Ritalin, an old obsession has become something real.

For years I’ve wanted to learn how to play Mahjong. Even before anime like Akagi aired. I couldn’t wrap my head around it though, it took too long to figure out, so all I ended up doing was trying to make a hand that looked like it matched enough to be worth something. (I am not kidding.) This usually ended in disaster. This interest in Mahjong would keep resurfacing…with Fullani…with Akagi…with Saki… But I could never figure it out. Last week, I sat down, and dove head-long into learning how to play, and the information actually STUCK this time.

I know the difference between Itsuu, Honitsuu, and Chinitsuu. I can gauge the likelihood that a tile will come up. I can remember all the Japanese names for the tiles. (Which are based on the Chinese names, and thus don’t use Japanese numbering) I can count the fu and han of my hand with little help from reference materials. And, although almost entirely unnecessary, I know how to set up and play with real tiles.

I felt it most fitting (Not to mention most satisfying for my tactile fixation) to celebrate this small victory by purchasing a set of tiles. First of all, it was difficult finding a set of Japanese-style tiles, with red dora tiles, blank Haku tiles, and no arabic numerals in the corners. There’s this one site, where the guy charges twice what a given set of tiles costs AND charges you ridiculous EMS shipping charges from Japan. (I mean, wtf? I would expect to pay twice as much…if it were ALREADY IN THE COUNTRY.) And eBay which had a couple sets that looked promising. And finally, the last option was buying a set from Rakuten…which would let me get exactly what I wanted, at a fair price…though it was still out of my current price range.

Then I spotted a particular gem on eBay. (Well, okay. This was the second ‘gem’. The first one was a new-looking Japanese bone and bamboo set, with 1 part bamboo and three parts bone, i.e. the high quality kind as opposed to the other way around. But despite its low starting price, it quickly became out of my pricerange.) I e-mailed back and forth with the guy, and it turned out that he had sold the set I wanted (I wanted a set with yellow backs.) but still had another set. So I eventually got that worked out, and several days later it arrived…

What does it say about the influence of anime on me that when I got the package the first thing I did was stack some tiles and see if I could flip over the dora indicator with one finger like they do in Akagi? Well, it turns out you can, but it takes practice to do it consistently.

Anyway, a beautiful set of high quality tiles. They just look damn good. Oh, and the company that made them, they’ve been pretty big in the gaming industry since the 1880s, perhaps you’ve heard of them.

So, it’s been a while since my last post. I’m going to take this opportunity to tell you a little story…

From kindergarten through second grade, no one could figure out why I couldn’t do any class work well, if at all, despite scoring in the 99th percentile almost across the board in standardized testing. A few psychological evaluations later it was determined that I have ADHD, really really bad.

So, starting in third grade, I was put on Ritalin, and like my father says “It was like a lightswitch". Together with a school program where I would be provided whatever grade level of work I could handle in an effort to let me excel where I could, get help where I needed it, but above all else keep me engaged. It worked. By the end of that year, I was working out of seventh grade English books, and not too long after that I was hitting some high school level curriculum. I remained in this program through ninth grade (Which was a special exception, as the program was normally only K-8, though now, along with their massively expanded facilities, they do K-12)

My family moved further south, and I started attending a regular high school. It was problematic, but I was starting to get used to it…then we had to move again, this time, to Vermont. Once here, I had to get re-evaluated to get a new prescription for my Ritalin, and the doctor said I was ‘too smart to have ADHD’. A diagnosis that for a decade afterwords would be met with horror and derision by counselors, doctors, and psychologists…but never rectified. I couldn’t deal with school. Moving to a new school in the middle of the year was bad enough, not having Ritalin to keep my head on straight was worse, but combined with the fact that the schools here were THREE YEARS behind what I was doing in New Jersey, making it at least FOUR-TO-SIX YEARS behind what I was doing in the special program, it was like spending six hours a day rubbing broken glass and salt into my scalp. A good example of my problem with the difference between reality and schoolwork is flunking Algebra for doing it all in my head and getting the right answers every time, never mind the fact that I completed Algebra when I was in the FIFTH GRADE.

On the last day of school that year, I was riding home on my bike and some asshats in the back of a pickup threw a waterballoon at me while I was going into the turn and I wiped out. Having to drag my broken bike half-way across town while I was cut-up and bleeding did a good job of capping my half a year at Middlebury Union High School, I don’t actually remember if I attended next year at all, but I know it wasn’t long before I said fuck it and never set foot in the school again. Truth be told, I could have shown up for every class for the next two years, done absolutely fuck-all, and still graduated like the majority of the local meatrock population, but I’m not so nearly masochistic as that. And what’s a piece of paper anyway? I’ve known since the age of twelve that I was going to be self-employed, and I at least care about results.

Of course, I failed to take into account the effect of being isolated from my peer-group combined with being a new kid in town. Oh well, fuck it. A little social retardation never killed anyone…that I know of.

With all that more than ten years behind me, I’ve now been trying to get back on Ritalin for several years. First, trying to get re-diagnosed by the very same people who fucked me to begin with, the Counseling Service of Addison County…because they’re basically the only show in town. After years that wasn’t working, they wanted me to get my bloodpressure and other factors under control first but then still wanted to ‘wait and see’. My physician, however, is a bit more understanding. He also wanted me to get my bloodpressure under control, and he also wanted me to at least try one more time to get CSAC to prescribe it because they can ‘provide more complete care’, but he eventually realized that wasn’t going to pan out.

Several weeks ago, he wrote me a new prescription for Ritalin.

It’s one thing to have nothing in particular to do, it’s another thing entirely to be completely at the mercy of your own brain’s rather flighty and whimsical nature. I had almost forgotten what it was like to have my head screwed on straight beyond the vague notion of ‘I used to be able to do shit’.

I would have to say it feels like my brain is wound tight, like the mainspring in a pocket watch. The ADHD, unregulated, basically precludes the completion of any task that takes more than a certain amount of time to complete, due to what I call ‘brain-wander’. With the Ritalin, my brain has achieved a certain amount of tension, it doesn’t wander as much, and when I try to do something, the energy stored in the spring is released and it just gets done.

Now I just need to work on assigning priority to tasks… You’ll see why in my next post.

Wherein no internet and no games makes Baka something-something. See how close humanity came to destruction, after the jump.

Read more! »

People often hassle me about all the random shit I acquire despite no clear need or desire. I continue to prove the necessity of such hoarding any time an unforeseen obstacle pops up.

Today, I finally received the EPROM programmer I bought from Hong Kong last month. Nothing fancy just a ‘Willem’ type parallel port burner that cost me all of $16…but it should be enough to burn BIOS ROMs for my NEO-GEO boards and things like that. I also bought a USB->Parallel adapter on the off chance that it would actually allow it to work, since none of my computers have Parallel Ports. (My older machine and my father’s machine, which have the same motherboard, have a header for a parallel port at least)

Well, the adapter doesn’t work, of course. So I knew I needed a DB25 at the end of a 26-pin IDC ribbon cable. That isn’t a terribly common thing, except for this exact purpose. I went into the storage room where all my electronic junk will continue to stew down into a mulch for the next thousand years. There, sitting atop a box, is the stripped carcass of an old VTech IBM XT knockoff that someone offered me and I didn’t see any reason not to take it. (And then they also gave me a hugef00k dotmatrix printer and a little CGA monitor) I had recently gutted it for a couple reasons; for one, I wanted to get some steppers and stuff from the floppy drives. I also wanted some random boards to work on with my soldering station.

Sitting in the middle of the mostly gutted skeletal remains of the computer, was an expansion card slot DB25 port with a 26-pin ribbon cable. However, when I removed it, it turned out the DB25 was male, and not female. This struck me as still being rather lucky, since a male DB25 suggests it was a Serial port, and DB25 serial ports hardly ever have all their pins hooked up… (In fact, only the same 9 pins as a DB9 serial port and an additional ground are needed.) Nonetheless, I needed a female connector for the parallel port. I have a DB25 F-F gender changer somewhere, but I haven’t seen it in years… F-to-F cables? Don’t think I have any. Hmm… That’s when I remembered a lot of connectors I purchased off eBay several months ago. Mostly I jumped on it because it had nearly every conceivable type of USB board and cable connector (And lots of them) but it also had DB25 and DB9 male and female ports, both PCB connectors and solder-cup style with bolt-together housings. (Not bad for $25, since that’s what a couple DB15s with housings cost me a while back from Digi-Key)

Now, all I need to do is snip the ribbon cable, and solder the wires to one of my solder-cup DB25 connectors to create the correct header cable for my ASUS M2N32 SLI mobo, and I’m up and running. (But first, breakfast!)

And there you have it, whenever something like this comes up, chances are I will find everything I need amongst the things I have collected with no particular need in mind.