This past weekend I attended Anime LA to do a little video work as it's been quite a long time since my last project. I was only present for a couple days but still had a good time meeting some really cool people, checking out awesome cosplays, and discovering YouTube celebrities. It was a pretty wild event to say the least, with people partying round-the-clock and lots of interesting sights around every turn.
I went to the event pretty ambitious with lots of ideas and goals and while I wasn't able to achieve most of them I tried to make the most of my time. The convention was confined to a very small-area packed full of people with the general surroundings being somewhat unfit for extensive varied video work. I wasn't able to shoot video with everyone I'd hoped and there were those that I wanted to shoot with but could not find them / they would disappear in an instant. As a result, I didn't get much footage from the event which I'm regretful over. I mostly seemed to shoot video of friends or friends of friends and a few people that were already being singled out by photographers. My goal is to try and be more proactive in capturing more people.
I collected footage for at least 1 video, maybe 2 but that may be pushing it we'll see. The embed is below:
I'm finally back from an extended vacation in Arizona where I didn't really do much so it may prove to be difficult to get back into the swing of things. Everything is pretty much as was left (I was gone only 2 weeks after all). Arizona was very dry and a bit warmer than Seattle. Tucson was pretty much unchanged which isn't necessarily a good thing because everything was the same, just more weathered, deteriorated, and foreclosed--a pretty stark contrast to Seattle which especially in the university area is seeing lots of new growth, building, and renovations. I met some new people and saw a few movies and chilled for the most part. Upon coming back, the transition from life in Tucson to life in Seattle brought back some horrid memories of my first year in Seattle in 2007 which causes me to cringe each time I think about what I had to deal with. Why don't I relate to you this graphic story in detail.
It's a pretty interesting tale of disgust, naivety, and warning--so stay a while and listen... The story begins in the Summer of 2007, I had just recently graduated from university with a bachelors in chemistry and possessed an air of optimism after accepting an invitation to attend grad school in Seattle. Maybe I was a bit too optimistic at the time, regardless, the plan was to find an apartment and then drive from Tucson to Seattle to begin my "new life" as a grad student. Finding an apartment in an expensive city isn't the easiest thing to do when on a limited budget, especially when you're searching from out of state.
The search began and ended on Craigslist (after ages of fruitless searching for units that would rent "sight unseen"--which is a smart decision on the part of the landlord). I had to expand my search to basement / MIL units in which the homeowner is typically the landlord and use this flexibility to find a unit. In a perfect world, I would have flown out to Seattle and apartment hunted like mad, however, this method doesn't guarantee results unless you have deep pockets and I had no such luxury. Regardless, I eventually found a basement unit with a landlord that was willing to rent to me, I requested lots of pictures to ensure I wouldn't be moving into a total dump when I arrived.
I was sent a couple pictures (see above) and after seeing them at the time I thought, "hmm, this isn't so bad... the lease is only a year anyway, I can use this place as a temporary gateway to somewhere better after I learn the city better." And so the start of a year long horror story began.
I embarked on the 24 hour drive from Tucson to Seattle split between two days and arrived in Seattle ready to move into my new place. I ring the landlord and for whatever reason they aren't expecting me yet and I can't move in because they're letting their friend stay in my space so I have to wait a few days for this random guy to vacate... Awesome-strike number 1. I'm forced to burn money on a hotel for a while. A few days later I'm allowed to move in and I'd finally get to see the cave where I'd be spending the next year. Suffice to say, much like the pictures revealed, the unit wasn't the nicest place in the world. But like any corrupted salesman, there were things hidden from view in the original pictures. I took a few pictures of my own to give a small sampling of what I had to deal with initially. I further reiterated the earlier notion that, "...the lease is only a year anyway, I can use this place as a temporary gateway to somewhere better after I learn the city better." and I just dealt with it. Red flags were going off everywhere but I tried to suppress them and determined that this would be a learning experience and after all, it's only a year. To say this would be just a learning experience would be the understatement of the century--it would shortly become a nightmare of the century.
To provide a feel for the place and to reveal a few of it's many shortcomings, here are a few shots I took after looking at the place and before moving in. The main door (main is key here) was trash and didn't seal at all which you can see in the first picture sent from the landlord above. You could also probably smash your leg through the door should you desire to give it a loving kick.
It's nice having windows in an apartment and you'd think it would be normal for windows to be able to open, right? Well these don't. In fact none of the windows could open because both the hinges and opening mechanisms were slathered with disgustingly thick paint in an attempt to polish a white turd. I don't know what they were thinking.
I'll talk about why this highlight is important shortly, but this bit was located in the small corridor / hallway between the kitchen and bedroom area and comprised of a gaping hole that was much larger than it looks in the photo. Additionally, the hole "breathed" and air from some unknown location flowed through this hole. That would be fine if it was just a light draft, however, the air flowing from this pit between the floors of the house was absolutely RANK--more on this later.
See those water-stained wooden planks making up the stairs to the unit for the landlords above? Yeah, they reeked of cat piss, I'm pretty sure those were cat-piss stained planks. Because the unit was a basement "apartment" there was a door connecting my unit to the landlord's house on the inside with the lock on the landlord's side (funny that). They were nice enough to put the litter box on the other side of this door so I could breathe scat and piss fumes 24/7. I later installed a latch on my side of the door to prevent the landlords from entering my unit.
This photo is shown to highlight the small grey bit that's cut-off. That's the panel for the circuit breaker... for the entire house. The house was seemingly never renovated / updated since sometime around the 1920s so the wiring in the house is garbage. The landlords told me that if they run the toaster and the microwave or some combination of two different appliances, the breaker will trip. But they said they know this and there shouldn't be a problem--otherwise they said they would call me and ask me to reset the breaker switches for them. Surely if this were to happen they would call me and ask for my permission right? Right?!
I should've just walked away after seeing how trashy this place looked and smelled. I mean, I was actually in Seattle now, I could've gone and actually checked out different places in person instead of sight-unseen--but nope, I didn't for whatever reason. I guess I was too much of a nice guy or rather too much of a pushover at the time to jump-ship after verbally stating prior that I'd take the apartment. So I dealt with it, ALL of it; the smells, the drafts, the filth, the screaming babies (oh, did I forget to mention the landlords above me had not one but two screaming babies?), and the deafeningly loud sound of articles being dropped onto the floor.
I would go about my daily routine, waking up, going to school, coming home, dealing with the disgusting-ness of the apartment, trying to sleep, etc. when I started to notice something. It was a strange sound emanating from the walls but I couldn't really pinpoint it to a single location. The walls of this place were paper thin so I wasn't sure if it was something I was hearing from above or elsewhere. The sounds continued for a while--an eery scratch-like sound that was intermittent and moved. The source eluded me for a while, until I noticed another clue under the pipes running through the ceiling (3 pictures above), there were flecks of poop under the opening of that hole. I put two and two together and determine the place was infested with rats. I told the landlords and they said they'd deal with it later. I got my confirmation a little while later when I caught a whiff of something foul and acrid like death. I followed my nose and it led me to the opening in the ceiling which had a giant tentacle hanging from it. I jumped back and noticed the fat hairy body of a rat that was connected to it. I blew at it to see if it was sleeping and would run off but it didn't--it was dead and rotting for who knows how long as I had noticed a smell for a while before spotting the rat's corpse (you can imagine how bad the place smelled if the faint smell of death was considered tolerable).
I immediately ran over to my landlords' above to complain about the fact that their "home" was infested with rats and that there was a dead rat hanging from the hole in my ceiling. The wife was home and I was expecting her to be shocked and disgusted but there was almost no reaction, she just asked me to show her. So she follows me with one baby in grasp and the other in tow at her side. Still no reaction when she sees the dead rat and she just grabs one of my chairs and asks me for some gloves, so I give her my rubber dish-washing gloves and she tries to dislodge the rat... but it's stuck. Then she asks for a pen--I should have known better than to give her anything of mine but I obliged and she uses it like a crowbar trying to pry it out all with one hand (remember, all of this is going on with one child in her arms and the other being a derp around the chair she's standing on). She finally dislodges the rat a bit and hands me the pen (which I want nothing to do with at this point) and begins pulling the rat free. I don't know what she was expecting or what she was thinking during this whole process but as the decomposing rat breaks free, festering rat juice gushes out of the rat and the ceiling opening onto my chair and the floor. I'm speechless after witnessing this spectacle and I'm massively disgusted. She takes the rat and leaves and says she'll have pest control set traps, leaving me to deal with the rotting rat juices. Awesome-strike number 2 (but who's counting).
The next nightmarish scenario woke me up from a nightmare. Remember the circuit breaker in the last photo above? The one that controls power to the entire house? It was during a weekend morning, my bed lies opposite the wall containing the circuit breaker panel, and I'm woken up to the loud clacking sound of SOMEONE INSIDE MY ROOM WHILE I'M SLEEPING flipping random breaker switches. I'm pretending to be asleep at this point and I notice it's the landlord-wife again flipping all the switches like an idiot and actually resets my computer during the process. Each time I think back to this event I'm baffled as to how absolutely insane my landlords were. They made no attempt to contact me by either first knocking the door or second calling my phone but instead choosing to break and enter my apartment WHILE I'M STILL INSIDE. I constantly think about what would've happened if I'd have sprung up out of bed suddenly and confronted her. I don't know how many times this has happened while I wasn't home and it disgusts me to think about it. It's illegal for a landlord in Seattle (and probably everywhere) to enter any unit without getting the permission of the tenant at least 24hrs in advance and the landlord must pay a fine to the tenant each time it happens. The fact that the landlord never called me for permission to enter tells me that this has probably happened many times previously and that the landlord would rather pretend it never happened if she can get away with it.
The final straw that broke the camel's back occurred shortly after all these events. It was early spring and Seattle was experiencing fairly heavy and saturating rainfall. I'm walking from my room to the kitchen while wearing socks and I step in something wet and cold. I look at the bottom of my sock and its stained dark brown and smells like diarrhea. I noticed the dark putrid patches everywhere now and try to soak them up with towels but the wet spots can't be dried and they begin to fill my entire apartment with diarrhea stench. I immediately complain to the landlord above and the landlord-husband comes down and merely says that he'll have his wife clean the mess. One day passes, two days pass, three days pass, a week passes, the diarrhea spots begin to grow all sorts of mold. Awesome-strike number 3.
At this point I can't take it anymore and call the Seattle housing authority to file a complaint that my living situation is unlivable. I provide my address so they can send an inspector and then a revelation is discovered which explains everything. They can't find any permit records for the unit I'm living in which basically means I had been living in an illegal rental unit all this time. At this point I'm feeling optimistic that I'll be able to break the lease and go somewhere else. The inspector comes and finds all sorts of problems with the unit: no separate heating system (the entire time my unit was at the mercy of whatever settings the landlords above me had), shoddy electrical wiring, holes in the ceiling, gaps in the doors and walls, no permits, etc. etc. Then the kicker came, the inspector would have to provide the report to the landlord and provide sufficient time for the landlords to make sufficient repairs to fulfill the requirements to apply for a rental permit, etc. If the landlords couldn't make repairs and apply for the permit by a certain date the lease could be broken. However, the landlords applied for and were granted extensions which prevented me from leaving but at that point I had dealt with enough from the slumlords, found a nice new place elsewhere, and was forced to double pay rent for the final month. As the lease was about to expire the slumlords had the nerve to tell me that rent would be going up if I chose to extend my lease--what a joke.
The moral of the story is; don't do what I did. Never buy or rent anything without seeing and inspecting it in detail and keep records of everything. The whole experience provided for a ridiculous story but I'd rather not have had the experience. That's it for this storytime. There may be more in the future.
No real update to add right now as I'm currently on vacation in Arizona right now until the end of the year. I haven't been doing very much which has allowed my mind to wander when thinking about various things including future plans and what the next year will bring.
I'll be traveling to Los Angeles again in the first week of January for ALA to do the usual cosplay filming. Going back to the idea of having a lot of free time to think--prominent cosplay YouTube videographer, AcksonL, has been having a lot of issues with the sound in his videos being muted due to copyright infringement. This is kind of a big deal in that a lot of work goes into producing these videos which are oftentimes created and designed with a very specific song in mind. When the audio at some point later gets muted, that becomes a pretty big motivation killer.
Next year I want to branch out and produce some video shorts, still currently thinking about what niche I plan to fill though and how that will impact shooting cosplay.
The legs are proving to be a ton of work and it almost feels like nothing is really becoming of all the effort that I've spent on them. The two legs are currently in different states of finish and in the latest picture it's really apparent how dissimilar they are which is pretty annoying. I don't think I'll be able to get the leg on the right perfect without having to completely remake it--and there's no time for that with so many other pieces left to make. I picked up a little trial size of Apoxie Sculpt, and used it to build up some raised edges on the model. I must say that Apoxie is a pretty amazing material to work with and the kneading process you have to do at the beginning is quite therapeutic and feels great. The cure time is a bit long (24hrs) but that's the price that must be paid I suppose.
I also started work on the shoes or boots by splitting the pepakura model and integrating the pieces with an old pair of dress shoes I had lying around. The fitment was surprisingly good. The only issue or concern is that the bit at the rear sticks out a good inch or so at the top and might make it look like im wearing clown shoes--but it might just be a matter of perspective at this point. I need to decide how to fill the gap in the center of the two pieces by deciding whether to use something flexible or jointed to allow the toes to bend or just rigidizing the piece to a uniform / fixed model with fiberglass. I'm pretty excited to see how these will turn out.
Sanding and bondo work continued... One of the legs (on the left in the pic) seems to be coming along nicely while the other (the imperfect / warped) one is a major hassle. Because the pepakura model consists of low-polygon count design and the unit in the game isn't perfectly smooth (aside from the portrait) it's hard to determine how smooth to make the legs--that is whether to keep the appearance of sharper edges or to round everything off smoothly. I think I'm going to try and keep the front somewhat sharp and try and smooth out the back. It's taking a lot of body filler though, already went through a small tub of it. Might have to pick up a large gallon size portion for future pieces too.
Still a bit of work left to do on the legs but making slow forward progress I think.
Spend a good part of the afternoon sanding down the legs, got most of one leg shaved and a small portion of the other. While sanding the second leg I noticed more and more the quality discrepancy between the two, the second leg is 10000x inferior it's almost as if the model is warped. It's a little disappointing but I'm going to try and make the best of it--hoping more bondo and more sanding will help alleviate the problem slightly.
Sanding down the bondo is a pretty time consuming and nasty process, a respirator and other personal protective equipment is definitely mandatory. After working on the first leg I was covered in dust and swept up 1-2 cupfuls of fine powder. The first leg isn't perfect and there's a lot of divots and imperfections in the surface. I think I'll need to pickup some Apoxie sculpt which is like an epoxy clay to fill in areas, reinforce the leg openings, and build up the edges of sharp surfaces.
Hopefully I'll get to spend some more time working on the second leg tomorrow. Bondo sands somewhat easily but requires a lot of patience when cutting through thick areas. I found that rough bondo surfaces destroyed my 80 grit sandpaper pretty fast. Bondo placement should be deliberate and precise to avoid / reduce headaches later.
Worked on the legs a little bit, tiny progress--sanded the insides of the legs to remove the fiberglass jaggies and scuffed the outer suface of the legs to prep for bondo. I picked up the 3M "bondo" variant which is technically called "body filler" as bondo is the name of the company from which the material name is attributed. I was reminded just how foul the stuff smells due to raw styrene monomer present in the material--it's just horrid. Thankfully much of the smell dissipates after the material is cured. One thing I don't really like about the 3M body filler is that the hardener isn't a profoundly different color from the "resin." One is gray and the other is white so when mixing the two it's pretty much impossible to tell if the material is thoroughly mixed like you can with standard bondo. The 3M variety does cure to a nice light-gray solid though.
I coated the legs entirely with body filler and tried to contour the surfaces as best as I could in an attempt to minimize sanding time. It was probably a futile attempt. I also discovered / encountered a bit of a problem with the legs--after laying up the body filler I tried to "put on" the legs... but they don't fit!! My foot can't squeeze through the opening now that the model is entirely rigid. I'll have to improvise a solution eventually. Cutting a slat in the back of the legs that goes through the entirety of the model or at least partially is one idea that came to mind--the slat can be re-affixed with some kind of latching mechanism and shouldn't detract from the look too much. Tons and tons of painful sanding is foreseeable in the immediate future.
Was delighted to find this on my desk today when coming into work. There's some good people that I work with, it brings a tear to the eye :'D.
I guess I'm a little bit of a root beer connoisseur (or try to be) and like to pick up / try all sorts of varieties so I suppose one of my coworker friends decided to help me on my "quest." One my current favorites right now is Natural Brew, it has a nice complex taste that's quite different from your run-of-the-mill "chemicals and soda water" root beer. I'm looking forward to trying this one!
Edit: it's pretty good, very similar to Natural Brew, has a good complexity, slightly more apparent carbonation, it would be a hard pick to decide from the two.
Last week I ordered some Epoxamite from Smooth-On to use in stiffening up the papercraft model of the Spectre legs I constructed. There were 3 different hardeners to choose from when buying the epoxy resin (101, 102, and 103). I ordered 102 which is a medium cure-time epoxy and found that the cure time is quite long. Next time I'd get the 101 to speed things up. Basically have to leave the material to cure overnight and then some with the 102.
Coated / laminated the outside of the pep model with a thin layer of Epoxamite and waited a day for it to cure. The rigidity of the model after the coating left a lot to be desired (card stock at large scales is pretty weaksauce flimsy) and the model was still flexible. So I separated the shin bit of the model from the boot bit and cut up some tight-weave (what I had on hand) fiberglass cloth and coated the insides w/ fiberglass. A day later and the rigidity is now at an acceptable level. Next steps will be to trim excess fiberglass and smoothen the inside of the model as the fiberglass is pretty sharp and rough / jagged.
The boot looks pretty hideous by itself. I'll need to make an incision and splice a few inches of length to the final segment so I can meld it to a pair of dress shoes I have laying around. I'm not yet sure how I'm planning to work with the shoes because if there's no flexibility in the model during walking in the toe area, the model will fracture / separate from itself or walking will look incredibly awkward.
Spent a good part of this evening working on completing the other (left) leg armor pepakura piece for the Spectre cosplay. The new piece looks like its of a little better quality than the one I did previously as a result of becoming more skilled at building pepakura models. Hopefully this won't make any difference after "finishing" the pieces.
Since I constructed these pieces from card-stock paper it's a bit flimsy--so in order to add rigidity to the models the next step will be to do a fiberglass layup. A lot of people seem to be able to get away with skipping fiberglass and just coating the model with fiberglass resin (essentially epoxy) to add a clear rigid coating to the material. The downside to using resin alone is the end product may be a bit brittle and not quite as rigid as it would be after doing a proper fiberglass layup. Downsides to the layup are time and mess due to the hassles involved with having to sand fiberglass. I have a bit of fiberglass cloth laying around so that's the tentative plan. Hopefully will be doing that step shortly.
