Can anyone identify this logo? It's on the back of a German Anniversary clock I got for $4 at the Goodwill store.



Yes, I traced it over badly, but it kinda needed that to be readable. The letters appear to possibly be "BE".

We're selling a Xerox Phaser 8560 printer... I think the price was $600? These run new for $850. It's a Damn Fast solid ink printer that produces great text, graphics, and photo output that will never, ever, not in a million years bleed, fade, or run, even if you were to put your printouts down at the bottom of the bay for fishies to read.

Local pickup only please, for the love of Eris... this thing is heavy!!!

The latest firmware has been loaded. It connects via either Ethernet or USB, and will make the room smell like warm Crayola crayons! :3

It works perfectly.. we're just selling it because we don't use it enough. It gets bored and lonely.

I don't understand you.

I would apparently need to change the PSU in the Power Mac G4 tower I've got here to get it running. The PSU failed the voltage test and has Bad Caps in it.

If you read that Voltage Test page, you'll notice something odd. Well, at least it'll seem odd to you if you're used to the industry standard ATX platform like I am.

+24 volt standby power!

On an ATX, this is +5.

Needless to say, this makes drop-in replacement with a standard ATX PSU a no-go. Interestingly, the G3s do NOT use this +24 nonsense, so one could convert an atx psu to work with only minor mechanical work (pin swapping/splicing).

The +24 rail is rated for a mighty 4.05 amps of load! I think this was to power some LCD monitors through the weird and wacky roundish DVI/WTF port these machines have.

Ah well. I've got a source for more, at least. What a weird machine.

Speaking of weird machines, I need some +24 to play with my cubes. They're not very powerful, but they're a stunningly awesome work of modern industrial design. The modern Mac Mini is the more powerful but terribly nerfed version! For instance, getting inside requires Scary Prying and stuff. For these, see that crossbar on the bottom? It's a handle. Flip the cube upside down, press down on that bar, and it pops up, releasing two latches that hold the core of the cube in place. Lift the core out by that handle, and you have immediate access to *everything*. The large ovalish hole in the top is the upper end of a convection cooling duct running top to bottom through the cube, allowing air to flow through the system and over the heatsinks without the use of a fan. The same sort of cooling design was used on the iMac G3 slotload, using the CRT monitor's convection to pull cool air over the computery bits.

Sure, the blowers Apple uses nowadays may be quiet... but I'd prefer they not be there at all. :3

Good times. Serious good times.

I was shocked and incredibly pleased with the number of preorders I recieved for my graphic novel, La Macchina Bellica! 29 preorders total, mostly from the US (and strangely, many of them from Texas - a good 1/4), but I did recieve several international orders: Canada, the UK, Germany, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands! 

I'm overwhelmed with joy and a feeling that maybe I can make my dream of becoming a well-known comic artist come true! 

I'm going to be taking additional orders at Otakon, at my Artist Alley table L12! I made several new silkscreen prints this weekend to sell, though I didn't really get any shirts done. I'm looking forward to more silkscreens in the future! I thought I might be a little rusty, but it all came right back to me while working on it this weekend!

Also, I'll be heading over to Small Press Expo in Bethesda in late September, though not with a table. I'm going to bring some copies of my graphic novel to hand out to small publishers, like First Second, to see if maybe I can get a chance of getting my name out there more! 


Overall, things are looking up!

List of Conventions I want to attend/get tables at for next year:
Katsucon (DC area)
Anime Expo (LA, CA)
Anime Weekend Atlanta
Otakon (Baltimore)
NY Comic Con
MoCCA (NY)
Akon (Dallas, TX)
Anime Central (Rosemont, IL)
Yaoi-Con (San Mateo, CA)
Small Press Expo

Of course, not all of them are possible, but I shall see. I'm trying to hit all the big cons in the US to get the biggest chance for exposure! Living in DC makes it so much easier to travel, since I'm very close to 3 major airports.

This past weekend was Yasumicon, an anime convention I've been a regular staff member at since about 2006. Since the con itself only ran Saturday and Sunday and Friday is pretty unimpressive (I worked until 6 then went over to Tom's house to finish the snack packs meant to be handed out at our first panel Saturday. The end.) I'll start with Saturday:

Saturday:
Got to FIU around 8 am. Tom had to help with a lot of set up in main events. I should also mention that I have a midterm this week so my time was very much divided between studying and enjoying the con. Our first panel was Japanese snacks. The way we run this every year is by handing out snacks (mostly provided by Tate's Comics), show funny commercials, and hand out prizes for trivia. I found out the hard way this year that Vista is quite glitchy with allowing videos embedded into powerpoint presentations to play (I still have Office 2003). Apparently if its set up to allow the presentation to display on projector and on my laptop screen at once, the videos will have sound but will not on projector, just on my laptop. Not knowing this at the time, we figured the videos wouldn't work from powerpoint period and ended up playing them all off VLC. We found out in time for Bad Anime this was not the case.

Snacks given out at snack panel:
Chocolate Pocky
Meiji Marbe Chocolate
Coconut Sable Cookies
Melon Apollo
Mentaiko (pollock roe) toast

Had a lot of fun explaining what the last one was to people ;)

I was completely surprised at the showing we had for Bad Anime. It was the first time we did this panel so we had one of the smaller panel rooms reserved. We walked in 15 minutes before start time and the room was already packed. Moments after it started people were overflowing out the door. It was maddness

For this panel we showed clips from terrible anime, tried to offer some explanation of how they came to be, and where they could be obtained. People think I"m joking when I say I'm proud of the fact that I own most of the stuff we showed. People who know me well know that I have more fun watching bad movies than the best ones. Was an awesome turnout and we've been guaranteed to get a bigger room for it next year.

Sunday:
I didn't have any panels so there was considerably less for me to do overall. Bought some stuff in the dealer's room. To keep my bad anime streak going I bought Sailor Victory, Garaga, Gregory Horror Picture Show and one of the volumes of SD Gundam Force. They cost me $2.50 each. I also bought a grab bag (as always) which included an L phone decall, a couple of One Piece and Inu Yasha buttons, a Naruto figure (I don't know which character this is as I don't care much for Naruto and my knowledge of it is seriously lacking) and a few other things. I also helped clean up main events after but had to miss most of after-party, being 2 hours away and not wanting to drive home in the dark and all.

In between we met some friends, had some laughs, did some things. Fuck you, I'm tired, I don't need to explain myself.

The con went exceedingly well this year, and the only real drama that I know of was between us and a certain vendor who was being uncoooperative.

Yasumicon's under way. I've been here since 8 AM... A/V wharrgarbl. I was genuinely terrified all morning of what it was going to turn out like and... arrrgh. The guy who's helping us out set things up in massive overkill so he's got like a kilowatt of sound and 48 mixer channels and five mics on the drums and ten miles of duct tape on the floor and DESU.

I do have a number of other volunteers to help out with A/V this year, thank Eris.

Also, that old Maxtor I was fighting with earlier, that's back in its rightful owner's home along with a 1 terrabyte Seagate'd iMac.

Our snack panel and bad anime panel were awesome. The bad anime panel overflowed the room... massively.

wtf is this thing DOING? attacking by singing?

testing [16 May 2004|08:50pm]

Lulu is offering a sale on bulk orders of comic sized books that is just too good for me to not try to hit, and it's only going on until July 14th, so I thought I would see if maybe I can get enough preorders for me to do this!

I've recently created a PDF for my graphic novel La Macchina Bellica and have sent it off to Lulu to get a proof copy.

( Here are more details! )
So tell your mom! Tell your friends! Buy my shit. :P

I think I have it all figured out. I'm gonna say the differences between the Blue Neon universe and the one we live in are a result of someone having gone back in time via FnordTran and having played a funky groove on a Tenori-On in front of the creature that has been recently discovered as the missing link between ape and man.

Yep. One more mystery of pseudoscience solved.

I'm charging the battery on my Icom IC-R3. I'll miss being able to watch TV on that little frobnitz... ah well, it makes a great VHF/UHF receiver, and a somewhat, uh, acceptable one for HF as well.

Any word on when portable TVs that grok the horrible 8vsb / MPEG2 will become reasonably affordable? urrrrrk.

Kinda complicated partying going on for tonite.
Let's see how all that goes...