The Avengers Has Turned the Internet Shawarma Crazy

Image: Shawarma near damascus from gomideast.com

Words cannot describe my love for shawarma, if you aren’t familiar with shawarma it’s chicken or lamb or more recently beef cooked on a huge rotating skewer rolled up in flat bread with some vegetables sauce (Garlic sauce or tahina depending on the meat) and occasionally french fries (Although I think the french fries are not part of the traditional recipe) and it is what I grew up eating. It’s a staple food in the middle east, it costs about 50p (I reackon 75 cents?) and it absolutely delicious.

I’ve had shawarma in London, Glasgow and even Tokyo I think if you told me I could only eat one food for the rest of my life I’d pick shawarma. But enough about that. I’ve noticed the internet has picked up on shawarma because of a passing reference to it in the Avengers.

This can only be a good thing as it will hopefully lead to shawarma being more mainstream, which means that I will have access to it wherever I go!

Image from Do-Nut-No
T-Shirt on Be Obscure
T-Shirt On Redbubble
Another T-Shirt on Redbubble

 

 

Stitch Your Journey Together

I love the cocept of this map available from Not On The High Street, you get a beautifully printed map of either: The UK, Ireland, Europe or the World a bit of thread and a needle, and you have to stitch your journey onto the map. It’s like traveling by dotted line in the comfort of your own living room!

This is a great idea for people going on one of those adventure of a lifetime trip around the world things, or a gap year, or just hopping around Europe on an inter rail pass. I’m surprised there isn’t one of the US given the propensity for people to go on road trips in the US. It shouldn’t be too hard to get one made though.

If I did this I’d probably use different coloured threads for different modes of transport, planes would be green (The irony of this colour choice it not lost one me), car journeys red, boats blue and trains some other colour (grey?).

Alternatively you could buy a different coloured thread for each holiday you go one and slowly turn the map into a tapestry of colour!

I might have to go on a trip around the world just so I can fill one of these in. I like this idea so much more that I like the maps where you scratch off the countries you have visited, mainly because it highlights where you have actually been rather than just the countries you’ve been to.

Testing Embeds

So apparently WordPress has added a new feature that will auto embed tweets and the like in your posts…

Twitter

You Tube

Scribd

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Flickr Set?
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Funny or Die

Why is Steel-Punk Not a Thing?

I saw the piece above entitled Pauldrons and Arm Braces by deviant artist vofffka and wondered to my self why there wasn’t a subculture of people who dressed up like knights? The concept of chivalry and honor are quite big in some geek sub circles, George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones series is hitting it off big time both in the bookstore and on the small screen and it involves wearing armour!

Why is this not a thing? I’m not talking about LARP (Live Action Role Play) style costumes, dressing up in full plate would make day to day tasks completely impractical, I’m talking about incorporating things that look like armor into everyday outfits, a little like this Hoodie by Etsy seller SOFworks which was so successful it got the poor guys shop shut down…

Grey Knight Armored Hoodie

We have Steam punk, that’s a thing that’s been a geek subculture for quite some time, arguably for some people it just involves wearing brown goth clothes and gluing on some gears, but it’s a vibrant subculture.

Likewise there is cyber punk, cyber goth, and hundreds of other subcultures consisting of people who want to for one reason or another dress like they come from another time period be it the past or the future, people even dress up as anthropomorphised animals and believe that that is their true form (Weirder still there are double furries who believe that they are animals dressed up as humans…)

Why don’t we have Steel Punk?

Like I said I’m not talking about people wearing full suits of armor, that’s impractical unless you are LARPing or Cosplaying.

So wondering about with swords is probably out of the question because you will probably get stopped by the police pretty sharpish, but accessorizing normal clothing with pauldrons, bracers, maybe a knitted medieval helm or a knitted chain mail jumper (There is a pattern for this here)?

Or knitted armor:

I have found a few projects scattered about the web The following are undergrad projects:

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Undergraduate Lydia Hanchette created this cuir bouille cincher,
pauldron, and vambrace entirely of hardened leather.

 

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Body armor and pauldron/vambrace rig by second year Adrienne Corral
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As above but worn

They are all leather and maybe steel would be a little but less practical, but I still find it strange that there aren’t more people wondering about with bits of armor accentuating their outfits.

As I said actual metal would be preferable, and it’s not like modern fashion designers haven’t tried this like these costumes by designer Naty Chabanenko which are supposed to be android like but lets face it look like stylized armour:

Or this design from Alexander McQueen’s 2007 collection which has a lot of armor inspired designs but this is really the only one that fits what I’d call steel punk:

Or even these armored jeans by Acne Jeans:

Acne armoured jeans Acne make armoured jeans, world wonders why

Or these plate high heels by Nigel carren? He does armor fashion!

Maybe not this plate bra though…

All I’m saying is it seems really weird to me that despite there being a niche for this subculture and there being people who would fit into that niche the subculture doesn’t exist.

And no wearing articulated claw rings does not count, that’s just lame…

 

Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal! – Origami Edition

I was looking at photos I’d taken on my phone and realized that this photo kind of fits the Firefly “Cure Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal!” meme.

If you are wondering what the hell I’m talking about watch this, it’s relatively spoiler free:

I can’t remember where I get the instructions for these two dinosaurs but I think it was origami resource center’s dinosaur page the stegosaurus is Baby Stegosaurus (FG Gomez) and the raptor looks a lot like Procompsognathus by Stephen O’Hanlon.

Go forth and and fold!

Fucking Prawns!

I was in TSUTAYA in Shibuya last week, and while browsing the Blue Ray/DVD section I saw this little sticker and thought: No it can’t be!

Surely enough there is a little cartoon prawn, presumably by the staff, to draw your attention  to the film. I enjoyed District 9 but for weeks after I kept on saying “I hate those Fucking Prawns” in a really bad South African accent.

This amused me no end and will hopefully amuse you. If it doesn’t amuse you then you are probably a fucking prawn!

You Know How They Say Japanese TV Is Messed Up… (NSFW)

So you know how they say Japanese TV is really strange… I was channel surfing in my hotel room while I was packing to leave Tokyo on Saturday night, and this came on the screen… To be honest I have no idea why I watched this except for complete bewilderment. It seems to me like it was a short film about a girl who was ostracized from her school because she refused to wear the school uniform. The school uniform being a bra panties and high stocking in blue so bright it made your eyes bleed.

My what the fuckomiter was going completely haywire while watching this show, it’s an all girls school with a single male teacher and some mean prefects that seems to wear slightly different clothes. At some point the girl who refuses to conform decides she’s going to sleep in a tent in the class. Which insights more bullying, and eventually the move her out of the class by collapsing the tent while she’s sleeping in it and putting it up somewhere else.

She decides to run away from the school because, you know she’s being bullied to wear clothes that she’s not comfortable wearing, and has a touching farewell with her friend where she hands her her notes, and then runs away, when her friend looks int he notes she finds a drawing of everyone who has been mean to her…

The friend feels bad about this and tells everyone that they’ve been mean to the girl, and for some reason the girl comes back and they decide that she doesn’t need to take off her clothes to be accepted. YAY! Isn’t that a lovely moral, you don’t have to take off your clothes to be popular.

Then because everyone has been so nice to her she decides that she is going to take her clothes off anyway and they all dance in a circle…

I forgot to mention she was wearing the school uniform she objected to so much under the clothes that she had been wearing throughout the entire show… How convenient…

Final Fantasy Ultimate Box Good Idea Bad Execution

Final Fantasy Ultimate Box packs all 13 games for $450 from PSOne to PS3, with some extra commemorative goodness

Square are releasing a 25th anniversary Final Fantasy Box Set! I’m not going to lie when I saw this my first though was wow I really wish I could afford $450 for this, then I actually read the article. In order to play this box set you have to have 4 different game consoles:

  • FFI, FFII and FFIV-FFIX are all PS One games
  • FFIII is a UMD for the PSP (So screw you if you have a PSP Go)
  • FFX, FFXI and FFXII are PS2
  • FFXIII is PS3

Discounting the fact that FFXI is an online game which is probably dead at the moment (I’ve not checked) this is still a bit cheeky. How hard would it have been to port these to the PS3? You know so you could play all these games on one system, I know older PS3 systems can play PSOne and PS2 games, but they upscale the games horribly (I’ve been playing FFIX on my PS3 and it looks terrible).

Also FFXIV isn’t included in the box? It’s hardly ultimate then is it? (You do get a pair of Moogle Earrings for your character if you happen to play FFXIV at least that’s my interpretation of the Japanese)

What about FFX-2 &FF-XIII-2? Oh they aren’t included either?

The Game Boy Final Fantasy games? We don’t talk about them…

Also of note is the fact that the PS One Final fantasy games that are rereleases of the SNES games (IV, V and VI) are suffer from really bad lag due to poor emulation and disc read requirements.

You also get a plaque but seriously 35,000 Yen? Thats a bit steep considering anyone who is actually a fan of the series will have half if not all of these already in the format they are distributed in (I think I’ve got all of them some of them in 2-3 formats).

It looks more like a “We could make a lot of money by burning ISO’s we already have to disc with some snazzy packaging because it happens to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the series” move by Squeenix rather than a move that shows they care about the fans and actually want to pay homage to the series that brought the company back from the brink of death.

Why not release this for the PS3 of the PS Vita? I’m sure the Vita can handle every one of these games apart from maybe FFXIII and even then it can probably handle that.

I’d buy a Vita that had all these games bundled with it on a memory card and I’d pay $150 -$200 more than the price of a Vita for the privilege.

I’d buy this for the PS3 if it came on 4-10 Discs and had all the games upscaled beautifully to run on my PS3 (I’m not asking for them to be re-rendered but that would also be a plus).

I’d buy remakes of Final Fantasy 4 – 9 (I’m sick of roman numerals sue me) with modern graphics, I’d probably pay the same price I would for a modern game for each of them.

What I’m not going to do is buy a bunch of games that I already own mostly in the format that I already own  them in just because they have been released in a prettier box.

Then again I’m, probably not the target audience for this, Japanese Final Fantasy fans rival Apple Fans in their devotion to the franchise, I’m sure they will eat this up. I’m sure square could release a box that was a Final Fantasy 25th anniversary commemorative turd and it would still be snapped up by their fan base. Come to think of it that is what they have done here…

Via Engadget