Figures of the Actional Variety

Action figures are pretty neat. I know they're just poseable lumps of plastic, but there's something inherently awesome about having little figures of your favorite characters on your shelf. You can take them down and mess with them, customize them with paint and glue, or just leave them as a beautiful display. Call them dolls, whatever you want, but you have to admit that some of them get to look pretty sweet.

Cool Series
- Bionicle, a line from Lego, is a series of huge buildable figures. Not only do the finished sets look incredible, you can also tear the apart to build pretty much anything you like. Recently, they've just restarted the line to feature post-apocalyptic themed characters, and some amazing vehicles (think desert bikes) are to be released in August.
- The Star Wars line from Hasbro is generally hit and miss, but it contains some truly awesome figures, like their latest Darth Vader or the numerous Stormtrooper variants.
- Transformers is an interesting concept, and Hasbro's latest Animated line is generally composed of nice toys with plenty of poseability and good aesthetic in both modes. Of course, other lines, especially those intended at adult or older fans, are worth a look. You never know when you may stumble across a gem.
- Apparently, the Japanese really know their stuff, because they make friggin' sweet figures. Most are presented as model kits, since the figures require assembly, and as such they have a ridiculous amount of poseability and quality. Especially of note are the Gundam kits and the odd rare anime/game figure. Rock on, Nippon.

Thus ends the rant.

Advanced Mathematics

I got this joke from the good RyokoTK:

2.71828183, 3.14159265, 299792458 m/s

A truly e-pi-c joke indeed.

Orange

You may notice that orange is appearing more often nowadays. Maybe it's just me or this particular region, but it can't just be coincidence that EC House recently revamped its appearance to orange, Velocity Sports Mall opened with a certain color theme for its logo and signs, Comics Connection just opened a new outlet which is orange, Action City... yeah. Even supermarket Giant is now using an orange theme. (remind me to go there more often)
Why orange? If you take a moment to analyze the color, you find that it's a relatively newly used color (most older brands use easy-to-print colors such as red, blue, white, etc). I suspect this is because orange materials were difficult to find previously, but now that plastic and color printers have surfaced, orange has become more widespread.
Also, orange is a relatively bright color and hits the viewer with an energetic punchy feeling. Orange is probably also used to symbolize youth and action, and thus to appeal to young adults and teenagers. If we take EC House's example, its new color scheme is orange, white and black, a highly contrasting yet elegant combination and really conveys professionalism.
This is why orange is so prolific recently. Not a bad thing either, as it just happens to be my favorite color. Neat, huh?

Alpha

I'm back.

I'll be throwing this blog around, I don't know. I don't always have the time to go online nowadays. but I'll probably be posting here every so often.