Talk about mind trip. Satoshi Kon just loves messing with your mind. His latest anime movie, Paprika has had a few showings in the U.S., hopefully in a film festival near you soon. If you’re familiar with his other works like Perfect Blue, Paranoia Agent, you probably already expect the mind melting that you will be in for. And the central subject of this film is dreams, so there’s no holds barred. It is quite a trip. And yes, that’s Megumi Hayashibara voicing the lead female. Gets to do both a serious and low emotion voice & the more familiar in one role. I’m not including any images, just do a search on Paprika and you’ll get tons of hits with images & trailers.
Author Archive for taro
Page 87 of 88
This past Saturday was chop day. 
Derek came by with his demolition saw. Tools of destruction are always fun. Anyway, to start cut the welds for the door skin with cute little Dremel. Derek’s got some skills, he was able to cut the two welds without that self-destructo cutting wheel exploding. That didn’t happen until after when I attempted a cut into the plastic door handle, whereupon it promptly shattered in two sending a piece flying into another dimension somewhere. The same place all spring clips go. That done it was time to graduate to the more serious tool.
Everyone’s favorite, the demolition saw. People call it sawzall, but that’s actually a tradename, like scotch tape. Continue reading ‘Cut! Cut! Cut!’
Well that didn’t work. Tried to get the door off. Started with this:
Drilled a bunch o holes for the slide hammer dent puller. Have I mentioned for some odd reason I get a sense of satisfaction from this tool. I like using it.Â
Silly me didn’t take a pic of the actual hammer. Anyway, results were marginal and slow.
Not being very concerned with preserving the door, at least not the top part, things got down to yanking on it like a crazed monkey.
Which actually was fairly effective. Maybe body shops should keep a crew of chimps on hand. But if you didn’t give them all cake they’d go ape sh*t and gnaw on your genitals. That tends to make for bad crew morale, although if you watch any of those kustom car building shows, you gotta wonder. Anyway, this is how the door stands now.
In case you’re wondering, my objective here was to remove the door so I could install my old rusty crusty door. So what I was hoping was that by somewhat straightening the door & accessing the linkages, I could unlock & unlatch the door. No such luck. Although I was able to get things straight enough that the linkages moved, the latch itself is too messed up & out of alignment to open. I even resorted to climbing inside & kicking at the door from inside. Kind of eye opening that with damage of only this extent you can’t easily force a car door open. So it looks like it’s time to call in the big guns and bring in the boys with the demolition saws. I think we’re going to have to cut the door apart. I thought of attempting to unbolt the door hinges, but you need to remove the fender to access the bolts. And in order to remove the fender, you need to open the door to access one of those bolts. Besides, chopping the door up should be good for some entertainment value, and I think Dr. D hasn’t busted out the demo saw in a while.
I’m feeling sad right now. Poor little FX got smushed today. After finishing a job call, was waiting to pull out of Y Hata onto Sand Island Access Road. Big o Dodge Ram 2500 sitting to right of me on shoulder behind the cars that park along road fronting the Y Hata wall. Wondering what the heck he’s doing, is he waiting to pull into traffic? He’s not doing anything or signaling, so I finally pull forward to get ready to pull into traffic. Then he decides to back up. I lean on my pathetic little single stock horn as I watch the tailgate looming through the side window, get dark from the shadow cast, then the sickening crunch and the sudden whiteness as the safety glass crumbles into those little jewely cubes.
With 20/20 hindsight, I suppose I could have backed up, but I didn’t know if it was clear behind me and I know I didn’t want to go forward since I was sitting there because I was waiting for a hole in traffic. So all I could manage was to lean on horn and watch like a deer caught in the headlights.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen now. Got initial estimate from body shop. Verdict was its non repairable as they can’t get the part. I’m taking in my original FX door tomorrow, but pulling it off just a while ago, found it’s badly rusted.
Leave it to Gainax to kill off a major character and inject some darkness into what’s been a pretty lightweight series. And leave it to them to have done a recap ep only six in with massive amounts of reused footage, but to appease fanservice make the new stuff an onsen.
Well, no surprise the FX has no A/C. Both the original & new one at one time did. The new one was striped of it & p/s, but in order to get p/s into the new one, I had to mount the compressor even though I have to suffer with no A/C. I found the bracket & pulley I needed on ebay to replace this, and amazingly got a really good price on it. From Toyota parts I was looking at something like $300. I got it for basically the cost of a work weeks worth of plate lunches.
 So here we have the compressor sitting in here acting as a big heavy idler.
Here’s the original bracket & compressor being removed and the new bracket & pulley that is replacing it.
Scale is kinda off, but this should save a good amount of weight & clean things up a bit. Here’s the arrangement now.
Holy cow, I just took a shower, and I feel like I need another shower. Oni, having Okinawa flashbacks yet?
Glad we rode yesterday and not today. Thought yesterday was hot? Sheesh, today’s worse! Chuck would have been kicking my ass even more! Guess I shouldn’t laugh at golf, hasn’t hurt him any!
And you’ll have to excuse my jumping topics all over in one post, this heat & humidity is adling my brains. It also made me want to do absolutely nothing & I ended up sitting in front of the computer all day. Most of it spent editing the sub for Toki wa Kakeru Shoujo for my satisfaction. Oh yeah, I should have realized the character design is Sadamoto of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame.
Looks like we have a winner here, I couldn’t wait for fansub & watched it raw. Having seen the teaser trailers for it, this intrigued me very much. Interesting art & designs, can’t help but be reminded of Ghibli works. The little girl (younger sister of the girl pictured in the right but not in this pic) is a ringer for Mei from Totoro, and there’s funky bizzarre creatures too. From what I know so far, the story involves a world where virtual reality is quite advanced. The kids are kind of playing a hyper real pokemon almost, they’re out looking for virtual animals. But it seems there’s some strange black thing loose in the system regarded as a virus that seems to be responsible for dissappearances of virtual pets. This is a show I’m definitely keeping my eyes on.
OK, a slept the whole day away, I think yesterday’s ride & eating a complete half tub of Haagan Daaz asian girl ice cream put me out. Doesn’t help that I had/have a dang headache that this nasal congestion I’m sure has something to do with. Damn these plants & their reproductive cycles. Anyway, since I’m not doing much of anything today, guess I’ll catch up on some anime mini-reviews.
Lesse, there’s this show, El Cazador de la bruja
Again, it’s all things we’ve seen before. Mysterious cute little girl is actually some subject of mysterious experiment that gives her powers. Tough on exterior hot shot girl bounty hunter ends up taking the girl under her protection, resulting in them becoming the object of everyone’s attention. It’s done well enough to be entertaining for now. Continue reading ‘Anime Quickies’
When will it end? Well, here’s the ECU without the glob of goo.
And everything in engine bay is back together! I’ve also swapped out throttle cable as the hack one was short and the cable stop mounting was also hacked to accomodate. I’m not sure why they did this.
And so, finally the moment of truth arrives:truth.avi
After this I take care of some other issues like figuring where to hook the tach, the speed sensor, check engine light. Man does this feel good!