A whole new level of Geek

My eldest daughter Zoe, loves herself some anime. As Loyal Cruft Readers may recall, we dressed as Naruto characters for Halloween. This weekend was the Anime Los Angeles convention. After gathering the approval of our family cosplay/anime expert Rachel, I decided to take Zoe to her first anime con.
Now, I’m been to sci-fi cons, gaming cons, all kinds of cons, but I had never been to a anime convention in costume to be part of the cosplay. Cosplay takes things to a whole new level of geek. I mean, I’m a corporate exec type, not a crazy cosplayer right?
Before I knew it, it was Saturday morning around 9AM and I was standing my kitchen dressed as Kakashi, drinking my coffee wondering if I was really up for this. Zoe was nervous in her Hinata costume and beyond excited to go. There was no backing out now.
Once we got there, I knew it would a different kind of convention as we walked in the door and someone yelled out “Yay! Hintata!” runs up and give Zoe a big hug. Zoe had to explain that the other girl was dressed as an older Hinata.
Within about 30 minutes, we were in the groove and I had been asked to pose with other people a few times. I was a bit perplexed by a girl wearing what appeared to be a bikini made of cotton puffs, wearing a mask like mine, and nothing else. She and her girlfriends were laughing up a storm. Zoe informed me that she was dressed as Sexy Jutsu Kakashi. It took me until the next day to actually find out what Sexy No Jutsu was.
Soon enough Zoe made friends with another group of Naruto cosplay kids and the rest of the day was spent following them around like some sort of ninja bodyguard.


We had a great time at the convention. I was a little bored at some times when Zoe was watching other kids play a Naruto video game while she waited for her turn to play. The highlight of the day was the Naruto gathering at 3PM.

Some of the costumes were fantastic in their detail and match to the ‘real’ anime designs. People put their hearts into this.
There are a lot of rules and procedures for the gathering and the immense amount of photos that are taken. More than once a teenager ordered me in and out of pictures and I simply obeyed. Who am I to mess with the system? 😉
You can view my set of photos on Flickr, if you want to see more of the gathering.
Overall the people were nice and inviting to newcomers. For many of the people there, the con is a place where they can enjoy their passion and noone thinks they are strange. Zoe is hooked and didn’t want to leave even after 9 hours. The next day she begged me to go back all day long.
The next big anime convention is Anime Expo in June (or ‘AX’ as we cosplayers call it…). We’ll be there, in fact I better go make our reservations now.

Halloween 2006

Having had a good experience with it last year, we again gave away full size candies for Halloween.


This year, Zoe and I got our costumes from China. The world is truly flat that we can reach to the other side of the world to get a specific costume.

Zoe is dressed as Hinata Hyuga, I’m dressed as Kakashi Hatake , both from the Naruto TV show, and Mira is dressed as a 1920s Flapper Dancer.
As has become tradition, we kept a detailed record of all the costumes that appeared at Cruft Manor.
Kids Costume
9 Witch
8 Scream Mask
6 Monster Mask
5 Jason Voorhees
5 Nothing (lame…)
5 Power Ranger
4 Baby
4 Bee
4 Cat
4 Little Red Riding Hood
4 Ninja
4 Samurai
4 Spiderman
4 Superman
3 Devil
3 Evil Jester
3 Fairy
3 Knight
3 Snow White
3 The Devil
3 Trash Bag Head
3 Vampire
2 Darth Vader
2 Fireman
2 Girl Fairy
2 Half Angel/Half Devil
2 Normal Kid
2 Penguin
2 Skeleton
2 Spa Lady
2 Zorro
1 A Girl
1 A Guy
1 Adeliene
1 Alien
1 Angel
1 Barney & Betty Rubble
1 Baseball
1 Batgirl
1 Batman
1 Bee from Mexican TV Show
1 Belle
1 Bionicle
1 Buzz Lightyear
1 Chewbacca
1 Clown
1 Confused
1 Corpse Bride
1 Counter Strike Guy
1 Cousin It
1 Cow
1 Cowgirl
1 Crazy Girl
1 Crybaby
1 Dalmatian
1 Dead Fairy
1 Doctor
1 Dog
1 Dora the Explorer
1 Dorothy Gale
1 Eeyore
1 Egyptian Dancer
1 Executive Lady
1 Extreme Sports Dirt Bike Guy
1 Farmer
1 Female Cop
1 Freddie Kruger
1 Gandolf
1 Gangster
1 Ghost
1 Ghoul
1 GI Joe
1 Gothic Fairy
1 Graduate
1 Grecian Goddess
1 Halloween Business Man
1 Harry Potter
1 He doesn’t know
1 Heavenly Devil
1 Hobo
1 Hula Girl
1 Ice Princess
1 Incredible Hulk
1 Jailbird
1 Jasmine
1 Johnny Storm
1 Ladybug
1 Laker Cheerleader
1 Leatherface & two victims
1 Mad Hatter
1 Mafioso
1 Mark
1 Mexican
1 Mexican Jedi
1 Military Ninja
1 Mom of cat
1 Monkey
1 Monster
1 Mulan
1 Newspaper
1 Not Scared Girl
1 Nurse
1 Nurse walking dogs dressed as witch and dinosaur
1 Old Lady
1 Osama Bin Laden
1 Pajamas
1 Patrick from Spongebob
1 Pebbles & Bam Bam
1 Pierre the Frenchman
1 Pirate
1 Princess
1 Pumpkin
1 Punk Skull Diva
1 Purple Cow
1 Ragdoll
1 Robot
1 Rocker
1 Sally from Nightmare Before Xmas
1 Singer
1 Skeleton Bride
1 Skull Mother
1 Skull Warrior
1 Sleepover Girl
1 Sleepy Girl
1 Snake Handler
1 Solider
1 Stormtrooper
1 Student
1 Superwoman
1 The Black Knight
1 The Reaper
1 The Tooth Fairy
1 Tiger
1 Tinkerbell
1 Tomato
1 Undead Hobo
1 Undertaker
1 Urkel
1 White haired old chinese guy
1 Wings
1 Winnie the Pooh
1 Wolf
1 Woody
1 Zombie
That’s 225 different people that came to our door this year. Compared to 163 last year, that’s a significant increase.
The traditional scary costumes still top the list, but as you can see, pretty much every genre is represented. I found it quite fun to ask each child what they were dressed as and hear their response. That baffled look on their face as I hold a full size candy in front of them, waiting for their answer is great.

Jones Soda Limted Edition

A few weeks ago, I was at Target with the girls when we saw these sodas.


Obviously, I bought a four pack of each. It was until this weekend that I had some time to test them out. Jones Soda does of lot of interesting things like letting customers submit photos for printing on bottles to creating limitied edition sodas of various flavors.
This year’s Halloween set includes Gruesome Grape, Berried Alive, Candy Corn, and Spider Cider.

Gruesome Grape
Color: Greyish-black
Flavor: Just like grape soda
Comments: Besides the black color, nothing special here

Berried Alive
Color: light whitish-blue
Flavor: blueberry flavor, very sweet with a hint of citrus tang
Comments: Zoe & Mira’s favorite of the set

Candy Corn
Color: bright, almost flourescent yellow
Flavor: amazingly like candy corn
Comments: The flavor was dead on and I expected the waxy aftertaste from the real thing. Subtle, not overpowering flavor.

Spider Cider
Color: pale yellowish-orange, almost like iced tea
Flavor: Noticeable apple flavor, but a little overpowered by the sweetness
Comments: While still very sweet, less than the others. Michele and Michael’s favorite.

While I was testing and taking pictures, Mira insisted that we ‘experiment’ with the soda. The experiment was to mix the Candy Corn with Berried Alive.
Experiment Flavor
Color: khahki greenish
Flavor: horrid
Comments: Made Mira happy to see the new color, made me queasy drinking it
Overall, I feel that Jones Soda is making an effort here to do something different than Coke and Pepsi, taking chances with new ideas and flavors in soda pop. We’ll continue to buy and try the limited editions as they come out.
So if you want to have some fun this Halloween with the kids and need to give them a little more sugar, head down to Target and pick up four pack or two.

Control-Alt-Children – Cheese Pie

I have been watching several podcasts, including Ctrl-Alt-Chicken. Recently they did a short segment on making Cheese Pie. Go ahead and watch it. This entry won’t make a ton of sense if you don’t watch it first.
The girls love cheese, so I thought it might be fun to make the Cheese Pie per the Ctrl-Alt-Chicken recipe.
Enjoy the first episode of Control-Alt-Children:


And yes, our video camera really did break during filming. I think the CCD itself blew…

How to cook bacon

Bacon is favorite in Cruft Manor. Typically, bacon is cooked in the microwave here. It is quite a production with separating the strips on a plate and careful placement.
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Infected, and Martin, Joey, and the Gator were discussing how to cook bacon. Gator suggested that you cook bacon “like a man” and toss the slab in without separating anything.
Now Gator ain’t a man to steer me wrong, so I gave it a try.


I tossed about a quater of the slab in the pan. The pan was nice and hot.

Sure enough, the bottom slice started to cook and it peeled off the slab quite easily. I simply moved the slab off with no trouble and the bacon continued to cook.

Quite rapidly, the bottom slices each began to cook and shrink down, peeling themselves off the slab. It was trivial to seperate them now.

The bacon cooked up just great. I cooked a second slab to test again with the same results.

Of course the final test was if the girls liked it. As you can see, they both rated Gator’s bacon cooking method and superb.

So the next time to cook bacon, cook it “like a man” and just toss that slab in.

Only in LA: a free over-the-air Anime TV Channel 24/7

Thanks to a tip from Art at the office, Cruft Manor is now a viewer of Funimation Channel, a free 24 hour a day anime channel.


Here you see a typical anime scene with a father, ready for work in tie and sunglasses, talking to his daughter in bed while the kimono-wearing mother drives by in a mini-car.
Anime has become quite popular with young Zoe and this is viewed as a huge step forward in increasing the amount of TV watched.
With the transition to digital television, many new channels are enabled. The Funimation Channel is channel 18.3 with a digital tuner if you live in Los Angeles.
Don’t know about digital TV? The government’s explanation ain’t exactly clear.
Here’s the basics:
Our beloved FCC decided to move us all to digital over the air television. What that means is that local TV stations are given a new, digital channel to use to prepare for the turn off on analog TV in 2009.

Right now, a TV broadcast uses up 6MHz of bandwidth, what you think of as a channel, to distribute the signal. We don’t use adjacent channels to help avoid interference. That’s why there is usually (but not always) a gap between channel numbers on the dial.

With digital TV, a station gets the same 6MHz of bandwidth, but due to digital magic, 19.3 Mb/s of data can be transmitted. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly the same as 10 broadband DSL lines at the same time.
The TV station can break up that bandwidth any way they want with different channels. Here in LA, KSCI puts their main Asian TV broadcast on 18.1 and the Funimation Channel on 18.3. Other stations do similar things. In Los Angeles, KABC puts their High Defintion (HD) broadcast on 7.1, a news feed called ABC News Now on 7.2, and a 24/7 weather radar map on 7.3.

What most people don’t realize is that you don’t need a HDTV to get digital television.
All you need is an ATSC digital tuner to receive the new digital TV signals. They are much cheaper now, going for under $100 for a set-top type or for the computer saavy, an ATSC tuner for your computer.
Makes sense?

On a lighter note

A few other things I have been remiss in not posting:
Mister P. writes about a Doonesberry comic that involves my alma mater, RPI
My cousin Richard is now blogging at Otigoji.com
If you want a visual display of what’s on your hard drive, try SequoiaView Windows software (via dl.tv)
Strenghting my geek cred, I had a story I submitted to Slashdot approved.
I am now a writer for the Metroblogging Azeroth site, focused on World of Warcraft news and issues.
A good article on HDTV standards, focusing on 1080p in next gen DVD and gaming displays. (via digg)
Sean “Internet Mogul” Bonner doesn’t get Second Life either.
And finally, 30+ years into my readership, Legion of Superheroes is coming to television in 2007 on the WB.
Sidenote: I really do need to get around to making a linkblog thingie for this site…

Podcast Ethics

I’ve been a reader of PC Gamer magazine for years, ever since the death of my beloved PC Accelerator magazine. Recently, they started a podcast about PC game news and discussion and I’ve been listening.

Several shows ago, the initial host of the show Dan Morris left and was abruptly replaced by Greg ‘theVede’ Vederman to lead the discussion. I wondered what had happened, but didn’t think much more about it. After three or four shows, the issue was finally addressed.

What happened was the Dan became Associate Publisher of PC Gamer, formally moving to the business side of the magazine. In the world of journalism, the wall between the business side and the editorial side is significant. There is a real concern about the influence of ad sales money and business relationships with the journalists to not taint the news with concern over the business impact.

Taking over the podcast reins was Greg Vederman, new Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer, who felt that ethically it would be wrong to have Dan on the podcast, on the journalism side, now that he worked on the business side. So in the most recent podcast, they openly discuss the issue. Talking about both sides and weighing the impact. Even if you aren’t a gamer, give it a listen, it’s the first thing they talk about, so you don’t have to sit through the gaming chat. Although if you are a PC gamer, listen to the whole thing.

I called my father-in-law Tony, an editor at a major midwestern newspaper, to get his take. He felt that the ‘firewall’ between the business side and the journalism side had eroded over the last several decades. He said that as the internet and new technologies enable things like weblogs and podcasts, the guidelines are unclear on how to deal with them. He mentioned that as newspapers embrace weblogs and citzen journalism, it’s not easy. He said it’s demonstrated in the recent controversy over a “Grandma In Iraq” weblog that the paper was running.

Back at PC Gamer, they have take an interesting approach on how to resolve the issue of whether Dan Morris will contribute to the podcast or not. They are leaving it up to the readers and listeners. On the front page of the PC Gamer Podcast site is a poll to let Dan’s fate be decided.

I’ve read a number of discussions about these kind of ethics regarding weblogs, but not much in the realm of podcasts. With many podcasts vying for the almighty dollar of advertising these days there are bound to be issues raised since podcast advertising is not as firewalled as placing Google or Yahoo ads on a web page. With podcast advertising, there is a direct relationship between the performer/journalist and the buyer of advertising. Who knows what the future holds in this area, controversy is for sure…

Halloween 2005

We had a little Halloween get-together at Cruft Manor tonight. Besides the normal events, I tried a few new things.


Mira, Kate and Zoe carved up pumpkins while waiting for the sun to go down.

This year I decided to buy full size Hershey bars to give out rather than deal with the handfuls of cheap candy. My brother Matt was first to try this a few years ago and I wanted to give it a try.

The kids were impressed with the full size candy bars and I think it can be counted as a success. I also wanted to keep track of the various costumes that came to the house. Our friend Monique did a great job of keeping track while I was out trick or treating with the kids. When I got home I took over. We went through over 180 Hershey Bars (5 boxes of 36 each) and had to resort to the back up candy.
# Kids Costume
8 Darth Vader
7 Pirate
5 Jason Voorhees
5 Monster Mask
5 Spiderman
5 Vampire
4 Batman
4 Butterfly
4 Cinderella
4 Scream
3 Black Ninja
3 Detective
3 Leopard
3 Princess
3 Red Power Ranger
3 Snow White
3 Tinkerbell
2 50’s Girl
2 Angel
2 Belle
2 Doctor
2 Grim Reaper
2 Red Ninja
2 Solider
2 Stormtrooper
2 Teenager
2 Tiger
2 Wicked Girl
2 Witch
2 Zombie
1 70’s Girl
1 80’s Girl
1 Alien
1 Anne of Green Gables
1 baby is home sick’
1 Baby Pig
1 Bank Robber
1 Barbie Swan Lake
1 Beautiful Angel
1 Being eaten by shark
1 Big Kahuna
1 Boogieman
1 Bunny
1 Camo Girl
1 Cat
1 Cheerleader
1 Daphne
1 Death
1 Dentist
1 Dinosaur
1 Dorothy Gale
1 Duck
1 Dumb Blonde
1 Evil Jester
1 Fairy
1 Farmer
1 Flower
1 Freddie Kruger
1 Ghost
1 Gothic Fairy
1 Grave Robber
1 Guy w/mask
1 Happy Gilmore
1 Hello Kitty
1 House Burglar
1 Jack Skeleton
1 Japanese Girl
1 Ladybug
1 Little Boy
1 Minnie Mouse
1 Monk
1 Monkey
1 Mouse
1 Mr. Darkness
1 Mulan
1 Neo (Matrix)
1 Padme Amidala
1 Pagan
1 Phantom
1 Pimp
1 Pink Princess
1 Pocahontas
1 Pregnant Boy
1 Robin
1 Spider Witch
1 Sugar Plum Fairy
1 Superman
1 SWAT Girl
1 Sylvester
1 The Only Princess
1 Unicorn
1 Vampire Girl
1 Victim
1 Woody
1 Zorro
That list totals up to 163. We had more than that, but the list is reasonable accurate as to what we saw. Darth Vader is obviously the most popular costume this year. When the kids woudl come to the door, if the costume wasn’t clear to me, I’d ask them what they were. I think it was much more interesting to hear the kids explain who they are than simply guess at it.