Back from 4th of July

Hey everyone, I haven't updated since Friday I believe when I had left to go to Bush Gardens for their Illuminights and there fireworks for the much proclaimed 4th of July. If you are over near Williamsburg at any time and like parks and rides, go on over to Bush Garden's where everything is based on Europe and the Illuminights is lasting through August 22 and there are fireworks every night and concerts every weekend! It was a great show, my opinion as I haven't seen a firework show like that in a long time. The special shows that they have are small and short but are neat and fun to walk around and watch. Germany has the largest Coo-coo clock coming to life, Italy has acrobatics in the Gardens, France/New France(Canada) has a parade and Ireland has some little show that I didn't catch but I have all summer to catch it again haha.

It was a very realizing weekend for me some pros and cons. The heat is getting higher and now I am lost on who is going to the convention later this month. My girl friend is interested and we are going to team up and do Ash and Misty from Pokemon at Nekocon in November. That should be fun and the weekend pass right now is at $40 and I still haven't gotten my Otakon badge yet which is $75 :( I don't have anyone really to go with and I might just go alone this year which is fine. I need a camera and so I have been looking at cameras and reviews. If anyone has a good choice or experience with a camera under $200 please let me know in the comments section :)

I finally have a Flickr account(www.flickr.com/photos/samshio/) for all the photos that I will be taking, I will bring up the album in the blog so you can click and go check them out! Currently I have some photos that I have taken some old that are near my house and from various spots, check them out!

Lastly, I emailed the curator (Joe Peacock) of the 'Art of Akira' exhibit in Pitsburg, the one that I am excited about and may never get a chance to see, about his work and what drove him to put the exhibit together. I thanked him for bring his private collection out for the masses to see and asked where it was headed and if so anywhere near me :P He got back to me today by email and thanked me for my email and said that the exhibit is headed to Indianapolis for GenCon for August 3rd, then to Atlanta for DragonCon over labor day weekend. He said as of now there are no plans for a D.C. or Baltimore appearance, but will be touring the exhibit for 2-3 years so it is possible for it to come closer for those places. I was wondering if he had ever got my email and now I feel better that he did. He recently headed to Pixar because he had an invite so he visited and talked to artists at Pixar which usually make the most popular animated films in America.

Other news that has happened is;

Two Mad Max films are in the works, and I doubt that Mel Gibson will star in them. They will be called 'Mad Max:Fury Road, and Mad Max: Furiosa. The second I am guessing is a sequel and they will be shot back to back.

Some photos from the Transformers 3 set are out,

Some leaked photos of 'The Three Musketeers' outfits are out,

Some mobile news is that the Samsung Galaxy S smart phone that is coming out to rival HTC smart phones like the Evo 4G and Incredible and Apple's iPhone 4 will be hitting a bunch of carriers in the US. Apple is only on AT&T and Evo 4G is Sprint and the Droids are on Verizon, but this phone will be hitting all of those carriers and plus more so if you like the phone, I am sure you don't have to give up your carrier because it probably is on it! That is a first for these smart phones top be on that many carriers and be compatible with their features.

If you have heard me talk about the "Zune Phone", which was code Project Pink for a while and then indeed up being the Kin1 and Kin 2 social networking phones. Once they were released they were doomed. I thought that they were priced really high for what they did and you had to get the $30 data package with Verizon for it. Microsoft finally killed a few weeks ago and was in the market for a total of 47 days. Not long at all, barley 2 months. You can now go to Amazon online and buy it with a carrier service from Verizon at the large price of 1 cent. Thats right, 1 cent. Microsoft wants to get ride of them and are now not so hot in the mobile market as its Windows 7 mobile needs to build up speed to compete with Android and the Apple OS system for smart phones.

Anime Expo came to a close on Sunday. Anime Expo is the biggest Anime con in America and is located in Los Angeles. ComicCon is the largest Comic convention in America, and have sold out there tickets the past 2 years in advance before the doors even opened. Last year, the crowd it drew in was around 125,000 people that came. That is 100,000 more people them Otakon if you thought that was big. Comic Con is in San Diego on July 22nd-25th. That is a very big convention, and a lot of big names show up at the convention every year.

I had my girl friend ask me the question yesterday what was E3. E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which is basically the biggest video gaming convention. No general public can go in and is all press. It is a trade show basically and Microsoft (XBOX), Sony (Playstation) and Nintendo go there and have a press conference every year and preview their biggest title that they will release that year. Its a big deal and usually covered on the internet and on G4 TV.

Something to work for you know :)

I'm heading out, I'll keep you posted seya!

Samshio ©