Morialta Conservation Park

This weekend, I headed out to Morialta Conservation Park, a short half hour ride from the city via the H30 bus. Watch for stop 26 carefully, as the bus stop was hidden behind some trees. Thankfully, there were a pair of hikers who were also visiting the park that rung the bell.

The bus drops you off mere meters away from the entrance to the park, and from there it's a short stroll to the trailhead.

The park boasts walks and hikes for all levels; one of the easy level course meanders along the base of the hills, and ends up by a platform below a waterfall. The medium and hikes take you up rather high.

Being the idiot that I am, I took one of the medium courses "because it's only 2.5hrs for a return trip". Riiiight. Heaven forbid that a real life hike is not like running around the world map in final fantasy, because I totally did not bring out enough water. I realize about a third of the way in, that uhoh, I've finished almost half my water supply.

Rationing was the word of the day, and I took sips and did not swallow. Even better, I got lost someway through - decided to "go off the beaten path" - and found myself at the top of a very very steep hill. About maybe a tenth of the way down the hill, the gradient was increasingly steep, easily 12, maybe 15 degrees. Fine for walking upwards, but very slow moving downwards. I decided to turn around then to look for a proper way back to the trailhead.

Thankfully, there was another path on the way up that I missed, which lead directly to the trailhead. Much rejoicing was had once I discovered the water fountain. Because of the lack of water though, I was severely dehydrated, and spent most of saturday in a headache filled daze. Guess I will be bringing more water next time!

I'm also re-acquainting myself with the light in South Australia - it seemed like towards the later part of the day, like 2pm, the sun was hitting at a very nice oblique angle, and I think my photos got nicer once the harsh noon sun moved off.

I also spent some time recording birdsong and the little stream that filled the waterfall, will post up a sound clip when I get a moment.

Definitely will be back again, it's nice to stretch the legs. The path I took had a rather steep gradient for the first twenty or so minutes, then it petered out to gentle up/down gradients. So, ymmv!

The H30 bus also runs at half hour intervals, so plan for that. I waited for my bus with several arachnids, one of which is displayed below:

Can't wait to check out more places in the coming months!

Rule Britannia for Wind Ensemble

Spent a few minutes a day re-arranging this piece for wind ensemble, and told myself "yeah, i'll probably need 2 hours, maybe 3 to sequence it" RIIIIGHT. Bloody took me most of the evening.

Rule Britannia for Wind Quartet

I think the description of the video says it all :)

Cleland Conservation Park

Another stop to visit during my stay here in Adelaide, is Cleland Wildlife Park. I used to spend an insane amount of time here, the last I was in Adelaide. Going crazy with photography and all.

This time round, I'm just taking it easy and just exploring some parts of the park.

There is no direct bus to Cleland from the city, rather, you'd need to take the 864 from Grenfel street up to the Crafer's Park N Ride. From there, you switch to a bus that takes you up to the wildlife park. On the way up, there are stops for Mount Lofty Summit, as well as the botanical gardens.

The bus that brings you up - at least on the weekends - only appears to run 3 times during the day, so you will need to plan your trip very well! I got the earliest bus which got me to Cleland about half past 10. The return buses are at 1.30pm and 4-ish. Being the oddly excited to visit Cleland yet not wanting to wear out the welcome, left with the 1.30pm bus. Actually, it was because I wanted to get to the Central Markets to get a laksa for lunch, but that's another story.

Entry is 22 for Adults, and the year pass is 55. Given that I'm likely to be up here several more times, I got the annual entry pass. My first stop was with the dingos... which appeared to be a different pack from the last time.

The feeding time appeared to be 2.30pm, which I'd forgotten, and I wasn't going to stay that long, so I headed out for the real reason I was here, to record some birdsong.

Cleland has lots of aviaries scattered around Cleland, and I visited several to record the music with the Zoom H1. I've modified the windmuff so that it stays on better, and it breaks up the wind rather well.

I'm still very new to recording nature sounds, and as far as I can tell the zoom performs great up close to the birds. I've put up one of the clips I'd recorded, in one of the outlying aviaries where people tend not to visit, or, don't stay long at all.

Just listening to the birds live whilst the recorder does its thing is great, I should figure out how to meditate and stuff like that.

Apart from that, I had a quick visit with one of the many partitioned off areas of the park with kangaroos. The roos are generally very approachable, and love to eat the pellets. Definitely something to experience once a life.

In the end, time ran out and I headed out the park. I went through the area where the Rock Wallabies were housed in, and as like 5 years ago, are always too well hidden to be seen.

Will definitely be back, but not for a few months - wanna go visit Waterfall Gully, Morialta, Hallet Cove and loads of other place to capture me some sound waves :)

Post Adelaide | South Australia Avaiation Museum | Semaphore Beach

Quite a hectic day today; visited Port Adelaide for a pancake lunch and a quick revisit. I don't remember much having changed, and for some reason I _really_ wanted to visit the Aviation Museum, so there I went.

It was a very enjoyable experience. Lots of information was posted about these planes - and more, like rockets! After that, I left to visit Semaphore Beach.

It was about an hour's walk from Port Adelaide before I arrived at the beach.

Semaphore Beach has a long stretch of shops and restaurants leading to the jetty, and there are public toilets available at well appointed spots. The jetty is the longest of the 3 beaches I've visited so far, and it is rather wide too! Alot of the people don't appear to be native from Australia though, something tells me some of them are from Burma.

I then took off along to beach to do some recording of the waves again! This time armed with my diy windscreen XD Will update here once I have more!

Yet another DIY windscreen/deadcat/windmuff blog post on the web.

So, last week, I decided that my "Dream Job*" was to be a nature recorder like Chris Watson, and OMG! I have to a) buy a new field recorder b) buy some awesome headphones c) buy a windmuff d) buy some awesome microphones! e) buy lots of stuff!

Sadly, I have inflicted by this thing called "growing up" which appears to be a horrendous terrible affliction, which tells my brain to not randomly purchase stuff. Much.

It's quite obvious I'm not going to be a nature recordist, much less have the time to do much recording so I decided to just work with what I got, my Zoom H1. Legitimately, I have a good excuse for getting a new shiny recorder - the H1 _again_ developed the battery drain issue, which I've seen some forum posts mention something about faulty capacitors. The H1 I have is already exchanged for a good one, which was good, but it seems like the components may have failed yet again.

But... I really don't use the recorder much. A whistle recording here and there is all I've used it for, and buying a new one is really not a good use of resources, but we'll see ;-)

In any case, I've brought the H1 out twice for recording beach waves, and I thought it was really good when the wind is calm (last week), but it performs really badly on a windy day (two weeks ago at Glenelg). A windmuff is the first obvious solution, so I thought it'd be fun to diy a windmuff.

A quick hop down to the Spotlight along Rundle Malle and I picked up a 20cm strip of faux fur that's almost 2 meters wide for 12 bucks. A few needles, and an hour or so making a rough pattern and sewing it together... walah!

 The fur chosen had a backing that was really thin, there were other luxury faux furs at spotlight that looked really awesome, but were rather thick. This specimen felt slightly stretchy and I could almost glimpse the overhead lights shine through them.

In-house tests indicates that they really cut the whoosh down when blowing straight a the mics. The real test would be outside in proper windy conditions.

Oh, another reason to upgrade the H1 is that the tripod thread on the H1 is plastic >.>

Seriously, plastic?!

It doesn't even fit my tripod properly. Blargh. Anyways, if everything goes well, I'll be going to Port Adelaide tomorrow for the afternoon, then Semaphore beach to capture the beach waves at sunset.

*Last week, I decided, my dream job was to be a chiropractor. And just about oh, 5 hours ago, I was at a concert, and decided, my Dream Job was to be a violist. Waaaait a second I gave that up like half a year ago. Ah.

FF8 on PS Vita

Stopped playing the FF series after FF7 on the PC - could never really afford the consoles anyways. Now, several months ago, I happened to read that some old PS games could be played on the vita, and looking it up, holy wow! Lots of the old PS generation final fantasy remakes are available, including 8 and 9 which I've never played.

Got my vita a few weeks back, and the experience is kinda bitter sweet. I got a few games for it, FF1, FF8  and Wipeout 2048. I also have FF9 in my account, but my internet access here in Adelaide is quite poor, and I thought I'd finish these games before trying to put more things on the memory card.

FF1 is great, I never played the NES version, but the PS remake is delightfully polished to perfection. I think I got a few hours under my belt, got the Earth crystal, then couldn't figure out where to go next, and decided to put it aside for awhile.

FF8 otoh is an extremely slow game! It takes ages to load, I find the story really slow, combat takes forever, summoning GF's take forever (I literally could set of 3 GFs in a row, and browse the internet, only to find only 2 of them have their animations complete.)

All that said, it's fine, my main gripe is how cookie-cutter the characters feel. Unlike say, FF6 or 7 where each character feels very different in terms of abilities, I think Squall doesn't really play that much differently from any other character. Fight, Draw, GF, Magic, Item blah blah. I don't feel the individuality of each character.

Sure, each character has custom limit breaks - but I don't think I want to gamble with keeping HP low to get the. The R1 extra attack thing doesn't really help, and it gets annoying when I'm trying to juggle 3 characters, and having to time my R1 presses to the animation.

I just finished Disk 1 today, so hopefully the rest of the storyline will improve.

Wipeout 2048, now that is a marvel. Very polished, and the attention to detail is astounding. I regret having to play it on a small screen like the vita - this game deserves proper glory at 1080p - and higher. The pacing of 2048 is really fast, and with the small screen it's actually difficult to see what's coming up. When in combat races, I find it neigh impossible to see mines or bombs.

I think I've only played the original wipeout before this, so I'm not familiar with the series. Must say the slow-down effects are really well integrated and don't stick out. I am very curious about the loading times though, the game is stored on a vita memory card, and each race takes maybe half a minute, maybe more to load? I would imagine having a memory card would make modern games load near-instantaneously.

Classical Guitar!

Decided to explore the classical guitar this year - supposed to be the viola still but I didn't really get along with it, and I learnt more or less enough of the articulations for my orchestration class. I'm travelling lighter nowadays, and don't have my tripod or music stand with me :-/

The view is not too flattering, and I have to look down at the score. Blargh.

Henley Beach/Nature Recording

Visited Henley Beach yesterday, it's a half-hour-ish ride on the H30 bus from Adelaide's CBD. It's a looong stretch of very nice clean, clear water that was not too busy when I visited. It's relatively quiet compared to Glenelg, which I'm guessing it's because a) public transport there is not so convenient and b) not many shops or things to do. There were only a few establishments just by the jetty, which I so conveniently did not process any photos of. The shot above is made from the jetty anyways.

I decided to wait for the sunset, but instead of hanging around the jetty - which I was rapidly getting bored of - I decided to head down southwards to see what's about (more beach, mainly).

A short walk later, I appeared to hit the sea outlet of the River Torens. Nice! That part of the beach was also very quiet, and I decided to pull out my Zoom H1 and ATR3350 to make some recordings of the surf.

The ATR3350, while quite good for recording my whistles and saxophone, is really not up to the task of recording a far more quieter surf. Even with the Zoom H1's preamps at 100, I had to boost it by crazy amounts in post to hear it. Plus the mic's mono, so there is no imaging.

I actually tried recording waves at Glenelg last weekend with only the Zoom H1. Didn't get much, as it was super windy, and I don't own any dead cats for wind shielding. Yesterday though, the winds were very mild, and I managed to snag a nice amount of surf sounds.

I'm definitely going to go back another day with proper wind protection to get a much longer track :)

Got a hardshell, hmm....

On Sunday, I went down to Glenelg Beach, and I accidentally left my Arcteryx Solano on a park bench >.> 15 minutes or so when I returned, it was missing >.> Can you say, OUCH!

Adelaide is still in the tail end of winter - supposedly - and I am just too spoilt having a softshell that I went looking for another one. Which turned out to be a good thing, as the last two days have been cold and windy with light drizzles yesterday.

But in any case, I was on the prowl for a replacement softshell, and was actually rather tempted to hunt down a replacement Solano as it is a great piece of gear. The Solano has a great fit, ok-ish water repellency and the insides have a *very* thin layer of insulation. It doesn't look too technical, super breathable, and rolls up into a small lump.

Initially, when I was introduced to it, I was hesitant to pick it up due to this thin insulation, but I've found it to work really well in Singapore or Montreal. The Solano in combination with my 5 year old macpac fleece was perfect down to zero C in montreal, and of course is perfect for the winter weather here in Adelaide.

The new shell I picked up is a hardshell, a Mammut Juho. Several things were going for it: It has a Gore-tex waterproof outer layer, the price was good for a gore-tex kit (end of season sale - so it was cheaper than my Solano!), and the styling was not too "omg I go for long hikes in the mountains on weekend". It was also a hardshell, something I've never tried before and the waterproofing _really_ called out to me.

The weather has not been wet enough to put the water proofing to the test, but tests in the kitchen showed that the waterproofing is amazing, with water just shedding off. My previous two softshells (the solano and a mountain hardwear which name I've forgotten) initially had great water repellency, but degraded rapidly. I've tried Grangers on the Solano and it only helped a little. I hope this Gore tex fabric will hold up longer.

Now the thing about the new jacket is... I think it doesn't keep me as warm as the Solano. I'm guessing it might be the Solano having the thin insulation layer, while the Joho is straight up synthetic material on the inside, so when the jacket gets cold it conducts the coolness straight to the fleece, whilst the Solano has the thin insulating layer. I'm also wondering if the windstopper on the solano is more breathable than goretex, so less moisture is trapped - which would keep warmer.

At the moment, it's fine as the "cold" is still above zero, and not a problem. If it's seriously cold I'll probably need a beanie but it's not that cold yet, and this is the tail end of winter here. Things should get warmer soon. It was crazy warm on Saturday, easily hitting 20C++.

I'd write more but it's bedtime. Photos from glenelg and food to post. What's not helping is my internet connection, on a good day, getting 35kb/s is a good thing. I need to look into switching to another isp.

Circle of Life | Adelaide | Burger Theory

I've been in Adelaide for the last two weeks for work, and things have been going quite smoothly. Well, apart from some drama at the airport with my ticket being cancelled, but that was sorted out rather quickly via a skype call to the travel agent's office. Thank you Changi Airport Free Wifi :)

Adelaide is very familiar, and yet very alien. Many shops are still the same, but some old haunts have closed down. Many of my colleagues are still there, and while their faces are familiar, the distance of five years means I need time to get to know them again. I know there are buses to take me to places I want to go, but I no longer remember the stops, or the bus numbers.

Ah life.

The year still weighs heavily, but the work and city here appear to be helping me lift this burden. One of the aspect that is helping - out of work - is the food. In general I find the food here difficult to complain about. Oh sure, I ate at this crappy chinese place last night but on the whole my omnomnomnom experience here at the various food courts and sandwich places (hello FUIC!) has been great.

This fine evening, I visited a lovely burger restaurant called Burger Theory. I had their number two burger, which is some kinda bacon with blue cheese thing, and it is absolutely as good as the burgers from Byrons or Honest Burger back in London. The fries are top notch, and the shake is proper.

It is actually a little too much food, as I am typing this feeling rather stuffed, and I had purposely eaten lesser over lunch, and refused to eat the cheese or cake at today's beer o'clock just to prep my stomach for this. Next time I'll probably pass on the fries.

This weekend, I hope to spend it eating more delicious goodness :) Going to find a Ramen place, and hopefully try out another chinese place that sells Wantan Mee - it is unbelievably hard to find a place selling that!  There is also a steak place I know that is killer good. But that's really pricey so I'm going to hold off till after payday.

I'll also be moving in to my new studio apartment tomorrow; I just got the keys today to a lovely place at the end of Rundle mall. It's mostly furnished (it even has a TV! What do i do with a tv lol.) but I need to get the utensils, crockery, bed covers and pillow. It's student housing, first time staying with students, I wonder what the experience will be like. The manager who gave me my induction appears to have gone through some really weird experiences, and I hope I won't cause her trouble.

Apart from that, I'm keeping my evenings easy, just reading books but once I move into my new place and get settled, I'll be returning to music et al.

Looking forward to the next 9 months; going to definitely spend some weekends out exploring out of Adelaide - places like Victor Harbour, Hahndorf etc. While I've been there before, I think I'll see if I can arrange for an overnight stay for the weekend.

Hercules

So, I had a chance to watch Hercules this week. Honestly, I did not want to watch it due to having read that "all you see in the trailer is shown in the first 5 minutes", but given the other choice was How To Train Your Dragon 2 (which I have already watched, and is awesome), decided to catch it in the end.

I steeled myself, preparing for something like Transformers, but thankfully it was not!

As per the reviews, the stuff shown in the trailer was all done and dusted in the first few minutes, and reveals that those were stories used to impress upon people the legend of Hercules. In this show, Hercules is as mortal as you and I, and the heroics are performed not by just one person, but a small troop of mercenaries. The troop goes on to get tricked into doing dirty work, but Hercules cleans up in the end.

I won't go beyond that, but I found the show exceedingly enjoyable to watch. This is not one of those "OH MY GOD MUST BUY DVD" kind of show, but it's the kind of show you come out of the cinema feeling really pumped up, and never did I have the urge to check the clock. My friend and I were discussing the show a good hour or so after.

This deviation from the Mary Sue kind of Hercules people seem to want to watch seems to be what makes people go all rah-rah. Sure, it breaks the mold, and I love it! He bleeds, he gets tricked, he falls and he rises. He's human, and I can emphasize with him. I also can't believe that's The Rock. It does't look like him, and he's impressively more bulked up than I remember.


Looking forward for Guardians and Turtles. Those two look to be enjoyable shows too!

Steerin' Behaviours

http://unity3d.alvinvfx.com/space/

Still in the downtime between job contracts, so I'm spending it by learning new stuff and pretending to be an author. The later isn't going too well, but I have been making good progress learning more about steering behaviours!

It's great fun figuring out how all the forces react, maybe one day I can get to use it for some kinda stuff at work.

Logitech M310t review

So, this is a review about a mouse! XD

The previous mouse I was using, the Logitech M505 has been a bit unstable of late, the cursor gets very unresponsive, and I've definitely have freshly charged batteries. I still have my old microsoft mouse - which is the best - but sadly it appeared to have died from disuse :(

Went down to the nearest IT shop, and I was frankly quite amazed to see one of the 4 walls covered with mice. A quarter of it appeared to be Microsoft, another quarter Logitech, and the last half heavily contested by various gaming mice, together with the brandless mice.

I must say the gaming mice were really tempting, and the entry level contestants weren't that expensive, but they were all wired. There were some wireless options, so my first instinct was: OMG MUST BUY COOL WIRELESS GAMING MICE.  Sadly, the reality was: CANNOT JUSTIFY WIRELESS GAMING MOUSE PRICES.

The prices were almost double what the M310t was, with the priciest wireless gaming mouse almost 200. Uh, no.

So then, that's out of the question. Next, to check out what I like to call "consumer" grade stuff. Yeah yeah, hit me, I used to be a gaming mouse snob. Anyways...

Lots of the wireless mice from logitech and microsoft were what I think would be in the so-called "travel" or "laptop" kind. Which means it's just a tad shorter at the back, but it's just enough so that the rear of my palm is always hovering in the air. Like when I was using the M505.

The M310t stood out from the pack simply because a) It was a full size wireless mouse b) It only required 1 AA battery, and c) it was affordable (SGD36). Win!

The packaging was also simple enough that I didn't cringe, and it was actually very easy to open. Great design Logitech people!

The mouse itself is great. Even with the battery in, it weighs almost as light as my now-dead Microsoft Mouse (It's the cheapest of the intellimouse series, and personally, I thought it handled the best). Has a little slot in the battery housing to stow away the usb dongle if it's not in use.

Other than that... it operates like any other mouse. It doesn't make tea or coffee, and it sure does not try to impress you with Quad Core CPUs or AMOLED displays. Heck, I doubt it even has a hipster commercial.

It's perfect for use with Houdini or Unity, and I really enjoy using it. Definitely something to consider if you have full sized paws like me XD

Jos Stam's Stable Fluids

Finally, omg, after many years of wanting to implement this algo, I finally did it! The last few days were really good, I learnt lots, as well as figuring out what I don't understand, and where to focus my efforts.

For example, the advection of the density field it was quite eye opening to see how the reverse lookup worked, and then how the sampling is done by bi-linear filtering. On the flip side, the pressure projection I really have no idea what's going on. That, was utterly a black box for me. It has _something_ do do with the gradient of the velocity field, or so it seems, so maybe another look through the code would help.

It's been fun, perhaps I can find a simple sph simulation I could cobble together.

Gray-Scott Reaction Diffusion

Unity Webplayer link here :)

Reaction Diffusion has peaked my interest on and off, and I thought what the hell, since I was on a coding high, might as well take a stab at it. I followed this tutorial, which was marvelously well explained, and got it working very quickly.

Jerry Tessendorf's iWave in Unity

Interactive build for Unity Webplayer here.

It's one of those days when you get struck by inspiration, and I was like "OMG OMG! I must implement this in Unity". So I tried, and with some luck managed to get a version of it done. The source code was attached to "Simulating Ocean Water", which frankly, most of it I am puzzling over.

Adapting the code to C# was quite straightforward, however, there was a function used to generate a 13x13 kernel that utilized a j0() function. I was like.... was that some kind of typesetting error? Some googling indicated it was a bessel function. This does not appear to be part of C#'s math libraries, but it is for C/C++. Odd. Anyways, I found - after much searching - source code for the j() function in C that I adapted for C#.

Don't really know why this kernel was chosen, and I was wondering how different kernels like Gaussian would work. Something to explore another time.

The emission also uses a kernel, but only a 3x3 grid that I put in some pre-calculated values. A better solution really, would be to interpolate between positions. Now that I've figured out stuff like this, it's time to explore other stuff!

Descent: Freespace

It's one of those games where I could not play it because my machine back in the day didn't have the specs for it :(

So finally, after almost 2 decades, I got my grubby paws on it from gog :3 It reminds me totally of the wing commander series, even the same dragging-the-mouse-all-over-the-table just to catch an enemy dogfighter. Miss my saiteks.

Playing on medium, there were only a few missions that were annoying to win (recon mission in enemy fighter was one) and some protection missions, but thanks to the mission hints during the debriefing, it was not too difficult to win after a few tries. Overall, it was fun, almost an arcade experience.

For one, the spaceship you fly is really hardy. Starting out, there are no shields, but crashing at over 100m/s into a capital ship just gets some hull damage. With shields, the ship is able to take some serious damage, unless you just ignore the ships on your tail. I remember on xwing having to equalize or set the shield configuration and management all the time, here I mainly used the equalize, and for rare occasions, the boost front/rear shields.

The wingmen (is there a more gender neutral term? Wingpeople? Wingpersons? Those-who-follow-my-lead?) are really good, they are even able to respond to more intimate commands like Disarm capital ships (destroy enemy weapons), or Disable (shut down engines).

Combat, was really very wing-commander like. If not for kilrathi and unknown aliens I'd say this was wing commander. Missiles don't seem to track very well, I rarely see my missiles do proper damage like the guns, but on the flip side, it is quite possible to dodge enemy missiles with the afterburners together with the countermeasures. Even being hit by a missile doesn't seem to do _that_ much damage.

The storyline, honestly is quite straight laced. Attack this, defend that, escort this, blow that up. I think what's missing from WingCommander are no strong characters. You don't really know who the commander is, you don't know who's flying off your wing. It's not like WC where you get hobbes and maniac flying with you for years (why did you kill of hobbes, origin, why?!). I think having characters that grow together with you gives a feeling of protectiveness over your wingmen. I do send my wingpeople home in Freespace when they are in the red, but I'm just not as attached.

The final mission to destroy the big bad invulnerable capital ship, I somehow wasn't able to play (this is dosbox on osx). I could only hear what's going on, but the view of space was blank, with only the hud displayed. Luckily, thanks to my amazing people-who-fly-with-me-on-missions, they took down the big boss with only an "Engage Enemy" command :P

The game also came with the expansion pack. Played the first mission and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Playing as covert ops, we're supposed to silence our own people for the greater good. Bleh. Cmd-Q, thank you very much.

Overall, I thought this was a very enjoyable game. May have to play it again and lose the secondary objectives on purpose to see what happens :P

Transformers 4: Damned enjoyable.

As with the last few transformers films, I went in with little expectations, just wanting to drool over the guaranteed-to-be-awesome vfx, but this was a surprisingly enjoyable film. This is the first Herr Bay Transformers film that I didn't pull out my phone to check how long before the movie ended.

-> Warning: Spoilers ahead.

I thought the pacing was great, and oh my melted cheese cakes, the annoying lead actor from the previous three films was gone. I really, really disliked that whiney character, and the new human representatives were pretty good.

Things I thought were interesting (or lame):
- Optimus Prime was first encountered as the old skool peterbilt design. I was like weeee so cool! He stays and fights in that form for a fair while too, which was great. I didn't groan when he switched over to the "new" design.
- Triple changer samurai robot is sooo cool! Not a fan of the car logo on his chest though.
- Not sure who the green autobot is, but robot with robotic cape and built-in parachutes is just so damned cool.
- Seems like they've reduced alot of the transformation sequences - many shots were like, jump cuts to finished/near finished.
- That reminds me, too much advertising in this film, I was particularly rolling my eyes on the beats speakers. That said:
- Rainbow Dash was in the movie! Squeee! XD
- Unknown robot mastermind has a really damned cool sniper rifle transformation sequence.
- Galvatron is a truck. Like, supposed to be the human controlled, upgraded better version of prime. Mucho differnt from his g1 space gun form, but it kind of makes sense, to be parallel to prime, and the explanation of galavatron/megetron kind of actually makes sense.
- "New" transformation sequence by galvatron and the upgraded robots remind me of the Vexille Jags. Even my friends not in the film industry thought that was very low budget lol.
- Hong Kong as a location is pretty cool, nice change of scenery.
- I'm not even sure if the dinosaur bots are dinobots. They like, suddenly got released by prime, prime did a dominance fight and they joined up. They did not speak at all! I was on my seat hoping to get one liners like this:
- Humans are overpowered in this show. Optimus barely holds his own against the bad guy bent on retrieving him, but the lead human character, damn, actually defends himself against the bad guy with a little gun sword! I would have expected the sword to just slice off his head or something. And he was doing some _serious_ damage to the bad guy with just the gunsword. Imagine if all 3 human characters were firing on the bad guy, he'd be taken out like _easy_.
- Optimus gets stabbed by his own sword, but is flying - excuse me, flying, minutes later, with seemingly no damage? And best of all, only minutes later, he attains escape velocity and flies off into space. Uh, so what, did he like forget he could fly?! Since when did could prime fly?! Was it after he because that "Knight" thing with the dinobots? Even so, why didn't he like, fly around earlier?! That was so, so lame.

Some of the destruction sequences were just so drool inducing. I want to work on destruction of that scale one day.

Lamenting Calculus

Some new music I wrote, as well as some videos of my experience at the Niagara Falls :)