Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I've been putting a dent in some shows that I've had on my "I should watch this sometime" list, slowly but surely... The first season of Stranger Things was pretty good. The 80's nostalgia factor works for me. The mix of youth adventure and supernatural works for me. The cosmology felt a little so-so, but overall interesting enough to watch and I'll follow up on it, I'm sure. There were a few details that strained my suspension of disbelief, but overall pretty cool. I do find it a little hard to devote the time to hour-long shows, though, it seems. Curious. I also went through the first season of The Dragon Prince . That was easier in a time sense, at least. The whole "from the makers of Avatar" sort of told me early on I would want to check it out. The art style turned me off a little, though. I dislike the CGI/cell-shaded look to the point it's a mark against several series, though I can like something in spite of it (like SW: Rebels).

Progress which mostly consists of gathering pieces so far, honestly. I still have costume ideas floating around that are incomplete. If I could settle on something and just go with it, that would be so much easier and more direct than my current/usual process, where I get an idea, gather some parts for it, decide to change/evolve the idea, which requires something else... and so on. It's a learning process. Or many of them. I went to tint some lenses on a mask and found a video online about doing it with dye. That seems way easier in this situation than applying some film or something, and I'd used Rit dye before on my Mandalorian belt. It did not work, after hours of trying. Then I gave one more attempt with iDye, which was specifically called out in the video, and after fifteen minutes - perfect. Go figure. It also doesn't help that car costs have been accumulating recently. $250 to fix a broken door handle. Around $700 for new tires and alignment. Now looking at $100

A friend passed along a link from Facebook for a heavily-discounted Lego Millenium Falcon , asking if it was one I already had, implying I may be interested. And at a glance, it is kind of appealing, even if I don't really need another model to put around somewhere. The pictures catch the eye, of course, and you see the Ultimate Collector Series Falcon, which is huge and sells for $800 give or take. Then you see it marked down to $49.95. Wow! I'm a pessimist, though, and that immediately starts triggering red flags for me under the "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true" warning. So I start looking a little closer and some things jump out. The box image doesn't have the Lego logo. in fact, the place where a logo would be is blacked out. The description actually doesn't say Lego anywhere. Hmm. This brought to mind the Chinese Lego bootleg/knockoffs known as Lepin, and a quick search turned up Falcon models from them for around

There are some things I actually want to watch on Netflix, so I'm not sure why I find myself scrolling through options looking for other things that catch my eye. Odd. This weekend, I settled on Ingress as an interesting-enough animated series to try. It's... odd. There are some interesting ideas that never quite come together well. I actually quite liked the main characters and watching their adventure, but the foundations of central concepts and the setting are so awkwardly forced. There's this supernatural XM (exotic matter) that's been around in the world basically forever, which tends to gather at sites people considered sacred. There are "sensitives" with psychic abilities that can tap into this on some level. Only fairly recently has technology been able to perceive and try to harness all this. Okay, that's fairly standard for an urban fantasy-style setup. Then, they go and gamify it all. There's two factions and they can claim these sites