So I entered a contest on Atop the Fourth Wall, and I won! Check it out, here’s a link to the winners video:

http://atopfourthwall.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/pollo-contest-winners.html

Atop the Fourth Wall is a web show about comics — reviewing terrible comics, for the most part. I enjoy it, though I often don’t agree with reviewer Linkara’s thoughts on comics. Still, he’s interesting and generally fun to watch, even if I don’t always agree. He had a contest to redesign his robot prop (it was previously just a static prop) with the idea being it needed a Cylon-style eye, and some design elements from the original incorporated. Anyway, I thought I’d post up my entry here and give my thoughts on it.

First of all… I didn’t really concentrate TOO much on revamping the design. I liked the mupetty simplicity of the original Pollo robot, so I stuck fairly close to the original design. The main thing I concentrated on was giving the existent design more mobility.

So this is more-or-less the last page I finished. When I do these sorts of designs I tend to draw a really rough finished design, then refine it as the details come together in the other design sections.

I wanted to suggest how things could be built, not just how things could look. So I tried to imagine the components and how they could be created structurally as a puppet. I’m not actually a designer, so I imagine this will need a lot of revision to make it work exactly as it should.

I wanted some sort of design elements that would subvert expectations of the current design. This is why I included the idea that the current Pollo’s chest decoration and stub arms would be able to conceal more ‘real’ arms and and the chest gun. The use of the cup idea is because I realised that this wasn’t an expensive production — it should be buildable from cheap, easy to access parts.

Because Atop the Fourth Wall is mostly a one-person operation I wanted the design of the puppet to be as one-person as possible. So I wanted Pollo to be able to be used just by sitting him on a desk, or some other surface, so the puppeteer wouldn’t have to support his weight for a long time. The reason for two handles is because it’s hard to support something’s weight with the same handle you’re using to manipulate it. Here’s hoping these ideas actually work out well for the finished design.

I like the idea of a spring, but obviously springs can be tricky to use. I imagined something like a slinky spring — very flexible and highly mobile. But if that didn’t work I wanted to offer an alternate suggestion of how you could have the same effect of collapsible arm sections. I also like the idea of seperate hand attachments, as seen here. After all, why not?

Plus, hey, I did an ink drawing here!

I don’t know what a “Bloomberg reading” is. I’ve never even heard of “Bloomberg radiation”. Just so’s you know, I think I just made that shit up. This final page was basically a proof-of-concept page, showing how the various design elements for the pupeteering would work in practical terms. I… uh… think I drew this before I knew that Linkara and Iron Liz weren’t together any more. Oh well.

–Andrew S.

So we went to Groovin’ the Moo and once again I was the sidekick to Andrew Hobart’s costumery.

Groovin’ was good as usual this year. So instead of going into too much detail right now I think I’ll just show some pictures and give a little commentary on them!

Okay, so Andrew W. K. was at Groovin’ the Moo. He’s the only act I bothered to take a photo of. Why? Because my camera was confiscated before the show! Turns out you weren’t allowed to take ‘professional’ cameras or recording devices into the place. Not like everyone doesn’t have a freakin’ recording device on their phone nowadays. Oh well.

The result of the confiscation is that all the photos got taken on Hobart’s iPhone. Which meant I couldn’t be bothered trying to take many photos of the stage or anything. I just contented myself with trying to take photos of every single person who wanted a photo with Hobart. See if you dress up in a costume people will ask to get a photo with you!

So here’s my technique. Stand behind the person taking the photo and take a photo of them, and the people getting photographed! Woo. For some reason all the girls wanted to grope Jason Voorhees while their boyfriends (or at least their male companions) took photographs. I’ll let you guys decide what that means.

So I took another photo of the girls — and the girl in black grabbed her friend and said, “Oh my god! He thinks WE’RE the weird ones! He’s taking a photo of us!” I found this amusing. Later in the day a guy observed that I was taking photos of all the people who were getting photos with Hobart. He suggested maybe I wanted to take the photos for ‘the girls’. I’ll let you guys make of the different assumptions what you will.

Sometimes I didn’t quite manage to keep up and photograph the people while they were taking their photo. But I tried to get a picture of the people all the same. This is one of my favourite pictures from the entire day — a photo of two people who moments before were taking a photo of Jason.

This year the over 18s has blue-green wrist bands and the under 18s had orange wrist bands. Why do I mention this in conjunction with the photograph above? No reason.

This is one of the few photos from the day where it was me seeing someone in a costume and asking for their photo. It was Wolverine! Hobart loves Wolverine. I have no idea why Wolverine is posed like that, but dammit it’s Wolverine. Wolverine was also impressed by Hobart’s iPhone — which has a Wolverine case. Wolverine didn’t actually ask for a photo with Jason Voorhees. He asked for a photo WITH THE PHONE. I’m not shittin’ you.

Okay… I… uhhh… have no explanation for this photo.

This is Jess and Alex. They were pretty awesome. They encouraged me and Hobart to line up for the auditions to become a channel V host. We lined up and hung out with them for ages. Then after our auditions (Hobart was very popular with the channel V people, I wasn’t), we completely abandonned Jess and Alex. I feel really guilty about that. But Hobart wanted to take a piss. When Jason Voorhees wants to go take a piss, you go take a piss.

And finally we have a photo of me!

Nah, I’m just kidding. But that is a photo of a girl wearing my hat. She thought it was cool. Which is nice, I guess.

Anyway, Hobart’s bound to put a tonne more photos of the Facebook page if you’re interested! Including photos of him getting searched by security. Oh, I didn’t tell you that story? Yeah, before we got into the festival Hobart was stopped by the drug sniffer dog, and had to take off his shoes and various other pieces of clothing and accessories, and security searched him. It was an… interesting day.

(And no, he didn’t have any drugs.)

–Andrew S.

(Here’s a photo of me:

Hey so last time I said a little something about how awesome Avengers was. But why don’t I talk a little bit more about my viewing experience. I won’t talk about the movie — because I want people to experience the movie for themselves. But let’s talk about how I ended up seeing the film.

There are three cinemas in Townsville. There’s Event Cinemas in the city centre, there’s Reading Cinemas out at Cannon Park, and there’s Warina cinema out at the Warina shopping centre. Warina is pretty much Townsville’s old people cinema. That’s not really fair… it’s… it’s the Cinema for fans of Cinema, not for fans of movies. Teens and young people don’t really go there — and they don’t really play blockbusters as much.

So it’s pretty much been a war between Event (formerly Birch Carol and Coyle) Readings for just about forever. Hobart and I prefer Readings because they have better seating. So imagine our horror when we realised that Reading would be closed for 10 weeks for refurbishments! Gasp! Damn! So it’s over to Event for us to watch Avengers!

I’ve been volunteering at my local comic shop lately, so Hobart picked me up from there to go see Avengers — and he invited the comic shop owner, Ralph, to come see the movie with us. We arrived about 45 minutes early for the movie and found Event packed. I’d never seen it so packed out! It was nuts. Then we realised that whoops — the session we were going to was frickin’ sold out! This was at 4:45 in the afternoon on a Wednesday (okay, let’s be fair, that was a public holiday).

And that was for the 2d showing!

We ended up having to go for a 10:15 pm showing to get a session that a) wasn’t sold out and b) was in 2d. We’d decided to go to the 2d session because, well, modern 3d is pretty balls. (Hugo and Piranha are the only 3d films I’ve seen where I thought it was worthwhile.) Also, Ralph doesn’t like modern 3d.

So we went to the late session and it was frickin’ packed too. The entire cinema was full and well… the movie was great. It was so great in fact that Hobart decided he wanted to see the movie again ASAP. So we went to see it again on Saturday — this time without Ralph. Second time around we went to see the 3d session. It was nearly sold out, and the cinema was frickin’ packed again. I think Readings being closed and Avengers being a big movie was definitely cramming things.

Avengers was amazing. I really recommend it. But if I may make a suggestion? Buy your tickets online.

–Andrew S.

Damn. I thought this thing was updating automatically! Dammit. Oh well. Better late than sorry!

I saw Avengers today. It was a fabulous big action movie.

–Andrew S.

The Warina book exchange has been a really important place for me over the years. It’s not what it used to be, but I still have a real fondness for the Warina book exchange.

For a bit of context we should probably talk about the Warina shopping centre. Warina is the oldest shopping centre in Townsville. Okay I don’t actually know that for sure, since my Townsville history isn’t that good. Let’s be honest, it’s just that Warina FEELS like the oldest shopping centre in Townsville. It’s old-fashioned, the toilets feel like the kind you find in an outdoor park, not a modern shopping centre. It’s… really a strange place to go into. I feel like I’m travelling back in time.

The book exchange is kinda like that too. It’s a remnant — book exchanges aren’t that common any more. But there it is still trundling along.

Warina Book exchange was important to me because I bought so many comics there over the years. Second hand issues of G.I. Joe, Transformers, Rom Spaceknight and even an issue of Battle Beasts that was my only issue of that 4 issue series for over a decade (I now have three issues).

I went into Warina Book Exchange on the weekend to see what it was like. It’s been nearly 7 years since book exchanges have really had any significant amount of comics here in Townsville, and I was disappointed (but not surprised) to find that Warina Book Exchange doesn’t have any sorts of comics at all any more. It’s sad, but it’s the way things are now.

I still have a fondness for Warina Book Exchange, but it’s not really the place I liked any more. It still has a fairly nice little science fiction/horror section, so that’s good. But dammit, I miss finding random comics.

–Andrew S.

Bubbles suck.

–Andrew S.
(No they don’t. Bubbles rock.)

I’ve been a bit caught up this week, so you’ll have to wait until next week for another story about one of the awesome fannish spots in Townsville.

Oh yeah, and just remember, don’t throw your cigarette butts. You start fires.

–Andrew S.

Actually let’s not. You might remember a while back I did a comic strip about Comics Haven.

http://www.townsvilletale.com.au/2010/03/31/20100331_interlude02pg0025/

It’s funny looking back on that now, because I kinda heavily self-censored at the time the real anger and frustration I felt with the store at the time. You can see a little of it in there — they don’t have my order in, and I reference the fact that, well, they were the ONLY comic shop in Townsville. That’s no longer true, so I no longer shop at Comics Haven and I wouldn’t recommend you do either.

Comics Haven started as a second-hand book store called Books and Bounties. The owner, an older lady named Carol, slowly moved from second-hand books into comics, until the point where she got rid of the books completely and became a dedicated comics store. Despite knowing nothing about comics, really, she was a great store owner. She cared about her customers, and ran a pretty tight ship — she was professional and personable.

Comics Haven was a great place to be — probably my favourite place in Townsville, for a very long time. Both myself and basically everybody I knew who collected comics (especially Hobart) really liked Carol and her husband (whose name escapes me right now). But they were, as I say, an older couple. So eventually they decided to retire and to sell the comic shop.

Hobart once talked about buying the shop — in hindsight I’m glad he didn’t. But… well… for a long time it seemed like not trying to get finance to buy it was a big mistake. Because the new owner was… well… she wasn’t Carol.

Kerry, the new owner of Comics Haven was someone we knew from another store she owned — a store in the mall, which eventually moved somewhere else. A dingy little store that was unpleasant to shop in, badly organised and smelled of cigarettes. When we heard that she was taking over Comics Haven… well… Hobart was cautiously optimistic, trying to hope for the best (after all, Carol was staying on for a bit to help train Kerry in how to run the business). I on the other hand predicted doom — I predicted that she would run the store into the ground, and that it would be horrible.

It seems the reality was a little somewhere in between. Comics Haven became a dingy, unpleasant, badly organised shop that stunk of cigarette smoke. Over and over Kerry would forget my order, or fail to put something away for me when she got it in, even though it was on my pull list. Trying to talk to her was an exercise in frustration and frankly both Hobart and I found ourselves trying to look for alternatives — maybe order our comics online?

Fortunately, an alternative came along in the form of a new comic shop called The Comic Shop.com.au — a brilliant little shop. In fact you can visit it online: http://thecomicshop.com.au/

Comics Haven still has its place in Townsville. They do Yu Gi Oh tournaments, sell collectors cards games and role playing games and of course still sell comics. The thing they have that the other comic shop doesn’t have much of is Japanese comics, so they’re a pretty good source for that. Would I buy or order comics through them, though? No, probably not.

The shop Kerry ran before Comics Haven was oriented towards collectors cards, memorabilia and other junk, with comics as a very small sideline. The comics were basically in some grubby boxes you had to climb under a table to get to. In Comics Haven the comics are easier to reach, but it’s still not a comic store with a dedicated comic book focus. (Oh, unless you like Deadpool like she does. If you like Deadpool she can get anything in, for some reason.)

–Andrew S.
(Comics Haven is on Charters Towers road. It’s opposite KFC. You can’t miss it.)

No new story about some local shop today. Things have been a bit out of sorts here, so I haven’t really been out out to take any photos or do any research. So you’ll just have to wait until next week.

We had a huge storm here a couple of nights ago. This meant I was without power for a little while — this has nothing to do with anything, I’m just complaining.

–Andrew S.

So this week we’re beginning a series of articles about some geek outposts here in Townsville. The first we’re going to look at is Fortress Games.

A long while ago — nearly 20 years ago now, maybe — there was a comic book shop in the Townsville mall. That comic shop was my first real experience with comic book fandom. It was a real comic shop with back issues, new comics, and even the idea of preserving comics. Yay! But eventually the comic book boom of the 1990s ended and this comic shop folded and that brings us to Fortress Games.

Fortress Games used to be called Games Exchange, and was a place where you could go and get cash for old computer games, or trade-in your old computer games. I remember walking up there with the intention of selling them a bunch of my brother’s Gameboy games with the intention of getting a bit of cash, when I was younger. I… got some guilt pangs and never did sell those games, because, well, they weren’t mine. Who knew I had morals?

Anyway, when the comic shop in the mall folded their customers and their comics all ended up going to Games Exchange. At least I think it was the comic in the mall that ended up giving its comics to Games Exchange. This is really when I started paying some attention to the shop. They had computer games, roleplay games, tabletop stuff, anime, and comics. It was a pretty complete store — but also not really one I visited an enormous amount.

Nowadays, though? Well, the name change might give it away to you. Fortress Games is pretty much a tabletop gaming store. If you love tabletop gaming then there is literally no other place in Townsville to go. (Okay, Comics Haven sells some Games Workshop stuff, but fuck them.) It’s basically a monopoly. Fortress Games also still sells some anime, but pretty much the reason to go there nowadays is to buy little trees, or little statues, or to organise a tabletop game — because it’s not just a sales site, but also an organising force for tabletop gaming here in Townsville.

I have no interest in tabletop gaming, but some people do. If you do, then when you’re in Townsville you need to go to Fortress Gaming.

–Andrew S.
(Their address is Cnr Ross River Road and Anne Street, in Aitkenvale.)
http://www.yellowpages.com.au/qld/aitkenvale/fortress-games-11938170-listing.html?context=businessNameSearch&referredBy=www.yellowpages.com.au