Catalyst Castle

1. Sooner Dead by Mel Odom
Sooner Dead is novel set in the universe of Gamma World, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi role-playing game. For those unfamiliar with role-playing games, the general idea of a game like Gamma World is to give the players a detailed and interesting setting, and to let them create their own characters and stories in that setting. So I found it interesting to read what an established author had come up with given the same resources as the common gamer.

The novel itself was pretty straightforward, but it had a few surprises. The characters were entertaining, but not too complex. It was fast paced and featured plenty of action. I think one of the things I enjoyed the most were some of the author's descriptions. Just the opening chapter contains a really cool description of the way that lightning illuminates a dark landscape, and really goes a long ways in building tension.


2. Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard, Volume 1
Legends of the Guard is a spinoff of the excellent Mouse Guard series by David Petersen. Legends is a collection of short stories set in the Mouse Guard world and framed as a bunch of tales told around the table in a tavern one night. Each story is written and illustrated by a different writer and artist, making for an interesting variety in themes and presentations. I'm looking forward to getting back to the main Mouse Guard story with the publication of The Black Axe within the next year, but Legends of the Guard made for an entertaining diversion in the meantime.


3. Dr. Horrible and Other Horrible Stories
The awesome musical tragicomedy webseries, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, from creator Joss Whedon, was something of an origin story in itself. It artfully portrayed the rise of Dr. Horrible from a hapless do-badder to evil criminal genius. Interestingly, this graphic novel goes back even further, showing the origin of Horrible's grudge against the world, the beginning of his rivalry with Captain Hammer, the origin of the Freeze Ray, and other details. This graphic novel is really a collection of short stories, but the way they are woven together is delightful and funny. Though not written by Joss Whedon himself, this tale definitely has the Whedon flair and style.


4. Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game, 4th Edition
This core book for the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game is one of the most masterfully written roleplaying game books that I've read. The rules for the game are straight forward and do a great job of invoking the flavor of the setting. The setting, a sort of fantasy version of ancient Japan mixed with elements of other Asian cultures, is very compelling and artfully conveyed. Nearly every other page or so of this 400 page book contained some detail that sparked an idea for a story or character that could exist in this setting. The book is also beautifully illustrated throughout, and stands as one of the most well put-together roleplaying books I've read.


5. Bunny Drop, Volume 1
A cute an endearing manga series by Yumi Unita, Bunny Drop tells the story of Daikichi, a 30-year-old bachelor who, through a strange set of circumstances, ends up raising Rin, his 6-year-old aunt. It's touching to see how these two strangers gradually take to each other, and the sacrifices Daikichi makes to adjust to his new role as parent. The artwork is pretty good throughout. Rin, especially, is adorable. Not that I have any real experience with the subject, but this story struck me as a fairly realistic depiction of the challenges and joys that might come with suddenly being a single parent.


6. Kamikaze Girls (manga adaptation)
Having already read the original novel and having seen the movie adaptation, I wasn't sure what I might get out of this manga adaptation of the story. The artwork was pretty good, but it was rather typical of shojo manga. The way Ichigo was drawn she really looked like a boy, which was kind of odd. The story itself was considerably abridged. It wasn't bad, but for me it didn't really add anything to the novel and movie, which already compliment each other so well. The real charm of this manga volume was Ichigo's Case, a short sequel to Kamikaze Girls that portrays a budding romance of Ichigo's. This story was a nice addition. The book also contains The Pinky-Ring Princess and The Middle-Finger Princess, two parts of a short story written by the artist of the Kamikaze Girls manga. These stories are somewhat entertaining, but have no real connection to Kamikaze Girls. It seemed like they were put in there either to pad out the volume because of the short length of the main story. Or, it could be that Kamikaze Girls was simply being used as a hook to promote the artists own story.


7. Amulet: The Stonekeeper, Book 1
I read the first few pages of this full-color graphic novel on amazon.com and was immediately hooked. The opening pages of this book are just gripping. It seems surprisingly dramatic for a book aimed at younger readers. Overall, this is a sci-fi/fantasy adventure story about a couple of kids who journey into a fantastic world in order to rescue their mother, who has been kidnapped by monsters. The older child, Emily, becomes the keeper of an amulet that grants incredible power to its wearer. The story conveys a sense of wonder and excitement, but there also seems to be something more sinister going on in the background. It's hard to tell if Emily should really trust the power of the amulet. This was a fun and fast read, and I'm really looking forward to picking up book 2.


8. Dengeki Daisy, Volume 1
Dengeki Daisy is not quite like any of the other shojo manga I've read. At its core, it is a pretty simple relationship story with the added complication of a secret identity, but surrounding that is a much darker story involving a conspiracy and some pretty ruthless people who seem desperate to get their hands on something the main character may or may-not have.

Basically, Teru is a high-school girl who's left alone in the world after the death of her older brother. Her brother left her with a cellphone, however and the email address of a mysterious person called "Daisy". Teru and "Daisy" communicate through email and "Daisy" becomes Teru's protector and confidante. Meanwhile, Teru breaks a window at school and ends up working off the debt incurred by the damages doing chores for the Kurosaki, the school's custodian. Kurosaki is a relentless bully who Teru quickly grows to hate. Of course, it should be no surprise to anyone that Kurosaki and "Daisy" are actually the same person.

The real intrigue begins when it begins to become apparent that Teru's brother was a computer software engineer and was involved with some rather shady people before he died. Now those people are after whatever project her brother was working on before he died, and they think Teru must have it. Excitement and action ensues.


So, those are a few samples of the books I read this year. I'm looking forward to reading another 52 books next year. I've already begun making a list of a few I intend to read, but I'm always open to recommendations. Feel free to sound off in the comments. ^_^

Hey, sorry I haven't posted anything on here in forever! This is just a lazy post of some artwork I did recently, but I hope you enjoy it. The image was sketched in pencil and colored digitally.

Because Borders is going out of business, they are emptying both their stores and their warehouses and selling everything at a 40% - 60% discount. I stopped in at the last Borders within a reasonable driving distance of me this evening and bought a bunch of books. Yay! Getting new books is always exciting! I thought I would snap a quick photo of what I got and share it with you guys. Now I get to go take some things off of my Amazon wishlist. ^_^

Read or buy any new books recently? I bought some of these off of recommendations. Is there anything you could recommend for me to read?

I was feeling kind of silly, and I was about to wash my hair anyway, so I did the unthinkable and put hairspray in it (*Shock!* *Horror!*) so that I could attempt a crazy anime hair style. Then, being as vain as I am, I snapped some pictures in the mirror. And now, I'm posting a couple of those pictures to my blog. (Ugh... I'm so vain I should be shot. -_-; ) The photos don't quite do it justice. The hair do was EPIC. ^_^

So, I haven't posted anything here in quite a while and now I post something this silly. Boo... I'll post something far more serious in the next couple of weeks. (I think... Or, I probably won't. ^_^)

Allow me to explain.

I wash windows for a living. One of the accounts I do every month is a hair salon located near Altamonte Springs. I wash the windows on the storefront and I come inside to wash all of their mirrors. The hair stylists and the clientele are all older women, for the most part. Every time I work in there, it seems that someone always has some kind of remark to make about the work I'm doing. These comments fall, almost universally, into one of two categories. Either, (1) you would think that I was there performing brain surgery by the way these women are just in awe of my ability ("No, really ma'am, this isn't as hard as it looks." -me), or (2) you would think they had earned their doctorate in window cleaning by the way they can critique my work and point out the various things I could be doing better ("Yes ma'am, of course Windex and newspapers would do a better job, but I only do this for a living." -me).

On the other hand, one time I overheard a very nice old lady ask her stylist: "Do you think that young man would mind if I pointed out to him that he missed a spot?" Of course, I want my customers to be happy with the quality of my work, so if I miss something I'm happy to have someone point it out to me. I thought it was nice that this woman was considerate about it though. It also occured to me that she may have been aprehensive, because some young guys wouldn't take kindly to being called on the carpet, and may take up a retalitory attitude. That makes me sad.

-Your Friendly Neighborhood Window-Washer

So, I've already posted a review of Mascara, my favorite manga on the web, but I thought I would share a couple of other web comics that I follow from week to week.


No Need for Bushido is set in ancient Japan and weaves an intricate tale of love, war, intrigue, deception, ninja assassins, samurai warriors, blind Taoist priests, pointy hats, and dysfunctional families that historians forgot to put in the history scrolls... Go figure. This is actually a pretty great comic. It has an intricate plot, interesting characters that you actually come to care about, lots of humor, action, drama, and the most hilarious use of onomatopoeia. The art starts out very simple, but has really advanced over the course of the comic. The most recent pages are simply beautiful. There are currently over 400 pages and the comic updates with 1 new page every Monday. (Fair warning: some of this comic is PG-13)

The Adventures of Superhero Girl is a comic I've only started following more recently. It is actually published in a Canadian newspaper, but the artist is republishing the strips online. This comic tells the story of "Superhero Girl" and her mostly ordinary adventures - trying to find a job to support her superhero gig, trying to fit in with normal society, and her search for a fulfilling hobby. The art is pretty consistent throughout, as the artist has written and illustrated other comic strips in the past, and thus has had plenty of time to develop her skills and style. This comic doesn't have any overarching storyline, instead it mainly focuses on some kind of gag on each page. It is always a fun read though.

Frenzy is a card game of real-time strategy. Two players choose from four different factions and then pit their forces against each other in a fast and furious confrontation. The game revolves around drawing cards from your deck and then placing them on one of seven piles which represents the distribution of your forces across the battlefield. You have to watch your opponent's moves and react to them quickly in order to stay ahead.

Each of the four factions in Frenzy is represented by a deck of cards, each of which comes in its own little tuckbox. But as with the Yomi card game, I decided it might be nice to have another box to keep the four decks together in, so I decided to build one. This was a fun little project. Lately I've been really frustrated because I've had a hard time doing anything creative. I sit down to write and I find that I just can't write. I sit down to draw and I find that I just can't draw. But, I can measure and cut! So that's what I've done. Here are some pictures of the process and the final product.

Yomi is a competitive card game for two players that captures the strategy elements of a fighting video game like Street Fighter or Tekken. The game consists of ten decks of cards, each deck representing a different character and requiring varied strategies when playing against different other characters. You can read more about the game here if you're interested.

I just recently purchased the four remaining decks to make my Yomi collection complete. While each deck comes in a nice tuckbox of its own, I decided I would like a nice box to keep all of the decks together in. Feeling a little bit "crafty", I decided to make a box that would be just the right size, and hopefully a little appealing to the eyes as well. I hadn't really done anything craft-wise since I made my Bat Mobile, so I figured I would take some photos of the project and share them here.

Check out this TED talk about a really cool game a public school teacher created to teach students about world politics and global community. This looks like an awesome activity for kids, and I have to admit I wouldn't mind playing it myself.

Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo is one of my favorite manga series. The title can be literally translated as "His and Her Circumstances", but is generally shortened to "Kare Kano" in both it's Japanese and English publications. The series ran 21 volumes in its American publication, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end. There is a slow section in the middle of the series where the story gets sort of derailed as it explores the lives of various side-characters, but these side stories are also enjoyable in themselves, so it isn't a big deal to me. The main plot revolves around two high-school freshmen, a girl named Yukino Miyazawa and a boy named Arima Soichiro, who are both academic over-achievers. Their relationship starts out as a rivalry wherein the two of them compete for the highest grades in their school, but quickly turns into a budding romance.

I'll admit that this isn't a proper review of the manga, and it isn't meant to be. (If it were, I would have to mention that - while the art is beautiful - it is dreadfully dificult to tell certain characters apart at times. -_-;) I'm writing about the series for more personal reasons. To me one of the most powerful scenes in the series comes at the end of volume 9, when "Dark Arima" makes his dramatic and disturbing appearance. This is a personafication of Arima's doubt and self-loathing that gradually lures him into depression and a self-destructive frame of mind. The scene really struck a cord with me when I first read the series as a teen, and in the last few weeks I think I've had a few encounters with my own "Dark Arima". It's comforting (and not too much of a spoiler) to know that Arima eventually overcomes these feelings with the help of loving friends and family and grows up to have a happy life as a husband and a father - even if he does end up getting shot and killed during the series' only action scene. (Again, not really a spoiler - and an intentionally misleading one at that. ^_^)

Saturday, March 26th, we had the spring cleaning of our Kingdom Hall. I didn't get any sleep the night before, so I was super tired by the time the work was wrapping up, but I did manage to keep going most of the day. Here are some photos I snapped throughout the day.

I remember seeing advertisements on TV for the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers when I was a kid. I may have even seen an episode or two, but I certainly didn't watch it on a regular basis. I don't think it was until much later that I found out it was originally a Japanese show called Super Sentai. When they brought it to the USA they cast american kids and refilmed scenes where the characters weren't in costume, and then spliced that new footage with the action sequences from the Japanese show.

Well, I hadn't heard anything about the Power Rangers or Super Sentai for a long time, and I had sort of assumed the show was long gone. Just today, I discovered that it is currently in its 35th season in Japan. I also learned that each season of the show is treated as a separate series, dealing with a totally different set of heroes dealing with a totally different menace. All of this was brought to my attention when I found this video of the opening to the 33rd Super Sentai series.

Now, party of me wants to laugh at the pure campy-ness of that, but part of me feels like a ten-year-old boy sitting in front of the TV on a Saturday morning thinking "This is so awesome!" I did a quick Google image search and found the picture below of the main cast from that series. Why are campy Japanese superheroes so awesome? And why do Japanese kids look so much cooler than American kids?

This is a photo I snapped a while ago. I saw this statue in somebody's yard and it reminded me of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. I adjusted the colors in the photo digitally in an attempt to evoke the kind of spooky mood associated with these aliens.

I took this picture months ago. I thought it was neat how clear the reflection was in just an inch or so of water.

I was suddenly inspired to put together a movie-type poster for my version of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, since all of the characters I chose have been featured in movies. This is the best I could cobble together in about an hour.

The characters are from left to right: Frankenstein's Monster, The Artful Dodger, Sherlock Holmes, Red-Handed Jill, and The Phantom.

What do you think? Any advice on digital image manipulation would be welcome. ^_^

I've spent most of the day cleaning my room. It's amazing the things you rediscover when you open boxes you haven't unpacked in years. Here are a few of the interesting surprises:

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, published beginning in 1999. According to Moore, the concept behind the series was initially a "Justice League of Victorian England" but quickly grew into an opportunity to merge all works of fiction into one world. There was a very loose feature film adaptation of the same name, released in 2003 and starring Sean Connery. I’m not recommending either the comic or the movie, because I’ve never read the comic and the movie was pretty lame. But the idea of assembling a team of heroes from various works of fiction really appeals to me.

The original League presented in the comics consists of Allan Quatermain (King Solomon’s Mines), Captain Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Dr. Jekyll (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), The Invisible Man (The Invisible Man), and Mina Murray (Dracula). The movie added the characters of Dorian Gray (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and Tom Sawyer (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer).

So, I got to thinking about this idea and decided to assemble my own League. Here are my picks and a little information on how they would contribute to the team.


Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)
After the murder of Dr. Watson during the course of one of Holmes’ investigations, the brilliant detective falls into a deep depression and is completely overtaken by his cocaine habit. He becomes even more of a recluse, turning away all cases and calls for aid. Finally, in England’s most desperate hour, agents of Queen Victoria herself come to Holmes for aid in uncovering a conspiracy against the throne - a mystery that seems to have connections to the death of Watson. Eager to bring Watson’s killer to justice, Holmes pulls himself together and accepts membership in the League.

The unquestioned leader of the group, Holmes would use his logic and investigation skills to identify their opponents, deduce their plans and devise effective countermeasures.


The Artful Dodger (Oliver Twist)
The most notorious thief London’s ever know, there isn’t a place or a pocket Jack Dawkins can’t get into and out of without getting caught. That is, until he tries to steal the crown jewels. He is finally arrested while attempting to escape Buckingham Palace with enough loot to buy a small country. Rather than going straight to prison, the Artful Dodger gets an audience with the Queen herself, who is curious to meet the infamous young outlaw. Recognizing his good nature and considerable skills, she offers him a pardon if he’ll lend his services to the League.

The Artful Dodger is the team’s sneak, using his skills for covert missions to infiltrate enemy strongholds or misappropriate enemy resources.


Frankenstein’s Monster (Frankenstein)
Following clues from the letters of Captain Robert Walton, Sherlock Holmes tracks down the monstrous creation of Dr. Victor Frankenstein deep in the Arctic Circle. Weary of the miserable life he has led, the monster has gone there to die. Holmes finds that he sympathizes with the creature in light of his own depressive episode connected to the death of Watson. Through logic and philosophical reasoning, Holmes helps the monster to see the value of his continued existence if he turns his efforts towards accomplishing good. In the process, Holmes manages to reaffirm his own confidence and self-worth after the loss of his friend.

Frankenstein’s monster is the team’s muscle, using his brute strength to go head-to-head in combat with their toughest opponents.


Red-Handed Jill (Peter and Wendy)
On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Wendy Darling yearns to escape pressures of growing up. To her surprise and delight, Peter Pan appears again at her bedroom window and whisks her away to Neverland. While this is exactly the escape she was looking for, she quickly finds herself disenchanted with Peter’s immature bravado. She soon falls in with the pirates, who are have been lacking a firm leader since the death of Captain Hook. Before long, she takes up her pirate name, Red-Handed Jill, and leads the pirates in a war against the Lost Boys. Peter is heartbroken by the betrayal, and Neverland begins to wither under the pirate onslaught. As the pirates and the Lost Boys battle to a stalemate, Jill realizes the destruction she’s brought to Neverland and feels remorse. She offers a truce, and as penance, leaves Neverland with the rest of the pirates, never to return again. Back in England, she offers the services of herself and her crew to Queen Victoria.

Red-Handed Jill has a sharp tongue and a sharp blade. She also has a crew of loyal buccaneers at her command and a rogue fairy as her companion. Her flying galleon, the Jolly Roger, provides transportation for the League.


The Phantom (The Phantom of the Opera)
Searching for more extraordinary people to round out his team, Sherlock Holmes investigates the great fire at the Paris Opera House and rumors of the opera ghost that once haunted the place. Through an interview with a ballerina named Meg Giry, Holmes learns that the phantom was actually a deranged genius named Erik, and that he survived the fire and escaped Paris. Holmes pursues the Phantom all the way to Manhattan where the he now operates an amusement park called Phantasma. Holmes and his team are promptly captured by the Phantom after discovering that he intends to assassinate Queen Victoria. Through careful questioning, Holmes deduces that the Phantom is being manipulated by another villain who is holding the Phantom’s son Gustave hostage. Holmes convinces the Phantom to join the League and they’ll help him rescue the boy.

The Phantom’s cunning is almost a match for Holmes’, but his expertise lies in devising traps and ambushes for their opponents. He is also an inventor, a magician, and a ruthless combatant.


Those are my picks, along with some rough ideas about how each of them would end up joining this elite team of crime fighters. Just for fun, do you have any thoughts on this concept? What fictional characters would you choose for your own League of Extraordinary Folks?