I was at my cousin's place when I found a hollow red plastic tube lying on the floor. I asked my uncle if I could have it, and he said yes.

The next day, I went to the dollar store and bought a flashlight and a small styrofoam ball. The goal: to combine these components with the red plastic tube to create a large-size LEGO lightsaber. I ended up with just a LEGOesque lightsaber, because I left the flashlight as the hilt, instead of fashioning a replica of the LEGO hilt. I'm also too lazy and cheap to put that much effort into it. For $2, I'm happy with what I got.

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Random impulse. There's a few things that I'd need to work on for next time. But meh.

After upgrading from my generic brand photo paper to Epson photo paper for my custom DVD cover printouts, I had some of the old paper leftover. The old paper was thicker and stiffer than the new paper, so I decided to try creating some custom card boxes using Photoshop and an online tuckbox template generator.

I started off by creating boxes for the BANG! card game, because I'm not a big fan of the boxes they came in. (I've found a lot of card games come in a kind of box where the deck is split in half and stored side by side without any boundary between them, and I find that annoying.)

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In the past little bit, I outfitted my computer with a new hard drive, a new DVD burner, and a new Epson R300 photo printer. With all these new toys, I've been hopping back and forth between projects like a caffeinated grasshopper of thought.

Over the last few days I assembled a custom DVD cover for Wonderfalls, since there's very little out there for that show. I don't have the printer paper I want to use for it yet, so I haven't printed it out. In the meantime, here's a computer-generated preview of the cover.

Brandon and I are planning to build some homemade DDR pads in the near future. So, instead of working on WFR2, I spent some time this evening getting some practice by putting together a tiny DDR pad out of some spare cardboard, foam and foil. Then I realized, hey, I've got a camera. Let's use it.

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Well, after a long, hard, gruelling battle with Kinko's, I've finally gotten some of my new DVD covers printed off. The quality of these printouts isn't quite as good as the old Angel covers from Kinko's full serve, but at this point I'm happy to settle for printed covers at all.

I reprinted the Angel covers for several reasons. For one, I now have a season five cover. I also wanted to fix some things on some of the fronts that bugged me. Lastly, I changed the image in the background of all the backs. The whole mono-color thing I had going with the old backs looks fine on a screen, but when you're dealing with a straight printout without any backlighting, it's not quite as effective. So I mixed in a little bit of color with the new background images.

Next came the Buffy custom covers. I didn't want to spend as much time on these covers as I did on the Angel covers, so these are a little more thrown-together. Like with the Angel covers, I kept the overall color schemes of the original packages, and I replaced the synopsis information on the backs with quotes. The spines once again form an image when lined up, although it's a little less continuous since the cases I used for Buffy are thinner and less square.

Sometime down the road, I'll probably be reprinting some of these with more fixes. It's kind of pricy, but it's a hobby I enjoy. Well, here you go.

(Warning: The Angel DVD pictures contain minor spoilers for all seasons of Angel, and the Buffy DVD pictures contain minor spoilers for all seasons of Buffy. These spoilers are in the form of pictures of characters in that season, episode titles, and some pictures of the villains.)

• Redone Angel DVD cases (Front)
• Redone Angel DVD cases (Back)
• Redone Angel DVD cases (Side)
• Buffy DVD cases (Front)
• Buffy DVD cases (Back)
• Buffy DVD cases (Side)

Once again, instead of working on WFR, I decided to work on WFR-related program activities. Specifically, I made myself three posters of the logo symbols for the first three WFR games out of colored poster board. I've put them up on my wall, to replace the smattering of miscellaneous anime posters I had there before, and hopefully to remind me that I need to work on them. Here's a picture.

As far as DVD goes, the Angel DVDs are fairly high quality. The visuals and audio are well done, the interface and options are good, and the features are interesting. The only thing that bugged me about them was the packaging. I have two complaints with the Angel DVD packaging.

First of all, the outside is lackluster. How do I mean? Let's consider the front picture. The front covers are mediocre at best, but what really bugs me is that the front always depicts just Angel and Cordelia. I feel that Angel is very much an ensemble show, and that the other actors/characters should have their go at the front. (In contrast, over the course of Buffy's seven season sets, the only character to be unjustly denied a cover position is Giles.)

The back of the packaging often has a picture of the entire cast, which helps make up for the absence on the front. The annoying thing about the back of the packaging is the blurb that every DVD has telling you what the movie's about. The problem is that Angel (and Joss Whedon shows in general) benefits greatly from the effect of surprise. So it bugs me when I read the blurb on the back of season 3's packaging, and it spoils half the freaking season.

The spines on the package aren't very interesting, either. Just a logo with a reprint of Angel's picture from the cover (except for season 4, presumably because Angel's picture on the cover sucks). Oh, and the logos all say "SEASON X ON DVD". That ON DVD is annoying.

The second complaint I have concerns is how the discs are stored. Like many other lower-end season sets, the Angel DVDs are laid out in a fold-up paper/plastic tray thing that, when unfolded, is probably over four feet long. That's just plain unwieldy and annoying.

There are parts of the packaging I do like. The disc surfaces are very attractive, and the images on the folding tray are interesting and very high quality. But it's the outside that gets put on display, and I didn't like it.

So, assuming you remembered the title of this entry, I decided to get myself some sextuple DVD cases and make my own custom DVD covers. Well, actually, at first I decided to search the internet to see if anyone else had done this already. Finding no one, I set out to make them on my own.

The DVD cases I chose to use are the Alpha 6-pak cases, which I ordered from US Plastic Corp. They're thicker than the original packages, but also plastic instead of cardboard. I designed the covers using Paint Shop. The pictures I used came from Last Beautiful Girl (wonderful gallery of high-resolution promotional photos), Dusk Til Dawn (general Buffy/Angel gallery for some missing pieces), and Google (for generic pictures, like the patterns behind the Angel logos).

My covers address the complaints I listed above. The fronts contain pictures of all the characters that appear in the opening credits of the season premiere. At the top of the front covers, I've listed the names of all the actors who appear in the opening credits at any point during the season.

The back covers use a quote from the season instead of a blurb, and the quote spoils nothing. However, I'm still mischevous, and I did find way to sneak spoilers into the design. However, I've incorporated them into the design in a covert manner, which hopefully won't actually spoil anything. The rest of the back that was originally taken up by a cast photo has been replaced with an episode list, because even though I'm probably at the point where I could pick out which disc has which episode, it's still slow to do from memory.

In traditional custom cover form, the spines line up to form a picture. I love doing that.

I did take some cues from the original packaging. The color schemes that define each case are based on the color schemes of the original cases, and I kept the ghostly Vamp Angel visage that adorns the top of the front cover. Aside from that, it's pretty much new.

I had the covers printed off at Kinko's, and I'm very happy with how they turned out (and a little disappointed at some of the cutting jobs I botched). They're big 300 dpi images that took forever to spool, but I love this show so much that it was all worth it.

So here they are, the photos of the finished cases. I would put up the original source images, but while researching the custom DVD cover community (yes, there is one) I found that Fox has a tendency to frown on these things when it concerns their products. Also, since I don't know what color season 5's packaging will be yet, I haven't designed that cover. You'll notice it's missing from the combined spine image. So, here's some photos, taken on the floor outside my room and down the hall a bit.

• Angel custom DVD cases: Fronts
• Angel custom DVD cases: Backs
• Angel custom DVD cases: Spines

I don't think I'll make any more custom DVD covers for a while, after I do season 5. I didn't mind doing this work for Angel, because I had complaints with the original packaging and I really like the show. So far, I don't have anything else that fits that description. But at least now I know how to go about things, so maybe I'll have some more in the future.