I’d meant to follow up my Doujinshi and Doll Stuff post earlier, but I wanted to wait till I received the doujinshi that I recently ordered. Now that it’s all here, I can show off some of the stuff that I’ve bought. No doll stuff is included here, though; I had intended to photograph Rei and Asuka (the original Medicom Real Action Heroes dolls) doing lewd things with each other but I forgot about it. I’ll give a quick review: decent likenesses, kinda sucky for playing around with.

A lot of this stuff is from Comiket 78. Comiket is a huge convention and hentai books comprise only a fraction of what’s exhibited there, but I still like to think of it as the greatest celebration of cartoon porn in the galaxy. This is my small homage to this wonderful thing.

I usually like to space out my preorder posts every few months, but I spent several hours last night shooting pictures, all of which I am going to throw out. That means I have no figure review ready and you know what that means: that’s right, it’s filler time! On the positive side, there have been a number of nice new figures that have been announced in the last couple of months. As usual, pictures are taken from Hobby Search, my favorite place to buy figures.

October

Ibuki Ikaruga from Asu no Yoichi!
This figure is really cute and the combination of skimpy swimsuit and giant bow tie is very appealing, but the price tag really dampens my enthusiasm for Ibuki. I’m not certain why there’s such a disparity in pricing in Alphamax’s product line, but it’s tough to justify the cost when I’m unfamiliar with the company’s quality and reputation. Still, though, I really like how this figure looks. Maybe she’ll be a possibility if I find some skrills under the couch cushions or something.

Black Rock Shooter (Animation Version)
In an ideal world, I’d hock my existing Black Rock Shooter figure on eBay, make back near what I paid for it, buy this one and come out ahead in the bargain. Or alternatively, Good Smile Company would have done this figure in a different scale, or given it something to distinguish it stylistically from their other BRS figures. Unfortunately they did not, and even more unfortunately they’ve decided to reissue their first BRS figure, removing the option of selling the original figure for an inflated price. I don’t really like buying multiple figures of the same character unless I’m very fond of that character or unless there’s something to set them apart – different scale, different sculptor, different theme, something different. I’m not sure that this figure is sufficiently distinct from the one I’ve got for me to want it, but it’s a nice-looking figure, I can’t deny that.

Buddy from Kimi ga Yobu, Megiddo no Oka de
Out of all the scythe girls that have been announced recently, I like how Buddy looks the most. It’s great how Alter plucks characters from random h-games for PVC adaptation, since some of my favorite anime-style character designs come from eroge. Now, how about a figure of Subaru from Beat Blades Haruka? Okay, I’ve come to terms that that’s never going to happen. How about figures of the two girls from Majutai 2? Even the small-boobed girl would be fine. Okay, that’s never going to happen, either.

Klan Klang from Macross Frontier
Klan Klang is looking great and I have this figure preordered. I like mecha girls and mecha girls don’t come much more badass than this. It’s funny how Amiami lists her as being 1/72 scale; hopefully she doesn’t look too far out of scale with my 1/48 Yamato VF-1s.

Kagari from Ninja Girls
I have no clue who this is, but this figure caught my eye nonetheless and I put in a preorder without thinking too hard about it. Here’s a funny thing I noticed about the manga: the image at RightStuf uses the original cover art without significant modification. However, there’s a version of the cover that censors Kagari’s backside by giving her a more conservative pair of shorts, and if you go to the publisher’s website, you get the cover for volume 3 rather than either of those images. I went to the local comic store to pick up the first volume but they didn’t have it, so I’m not certain what the US cover actually looks like. I did pick up volume 2 and flipping through it really quickly, there isn’t quite as much fanservice as I was hoping for. It still looks like a fun read, however.

November

Nodoka Haramura from Saki
I thought about ordering this figure, but I don’t think I like her stiff pose. I can think of one thing I do very much like about this figure, and I’m crass enough to admit that it’s a very persuasive argument in favor of this figure’s merits, but ultimately, I think I’m going to pass. Those wings look real bad, too; perhaps the promo pictures aren’t as flattering as they could be, we shall see.

Asuka Langley Soryu
There was an opportunity to make a really great adaptation of Asuka here, but Yamato and REFLECT blew it by giving Asuka no backside at all. I mean, look at this, she’s flirtatiously thrusting her butt out except she has no butt to thrust. This is perhaps the biggest disappointment on this list, but regardless I’ve preordered this figure because I’m a shallow moron. I’ll just have to keep her turned towards the front.

Fate Testarossa from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
I have to admire Alter’s ambition and willingness to manufacture figures that many manufacturers couldn’t even prototype, but I think their second version of Fate looks a little off. It’s the size of her head; her head looks wider than her shoulders and hips and longer than her thighs. Maybe it’s just me, I dunno. I’m not really one for lolis, though I admit that I do very much like Alter’s first Fate figure.

Xecty from Shining Wind
After waffling for a while between Max Factory’s and Kotobukiya’s version, I decided to roll with this one. I much prefer 1/6 scale to 1/7 but Kotobukiya’s looks too similar to their Elwing figure. And besides, this one looks very nice in its own right, with Xecty sporting an enigmatic expression that should be a lot of fun to photograph. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Xecty when she was announced but now I’m quite looking forward to her.

Dead Master from Black Rock Shooter
I think I am the only figure collector in the universe who is not in the least excited by this figure.

January

Fate Testarossa from Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha
Alter’s version of Fate is kinetic, dynamic, and alive; you can almost hear her screaming strangely-named battle moves in mangled English with magic circles and pyrotechnics detonating all around her. Cospa’s version is, hmm, way more chill in comparison. Staid, even. Not that staid is bad – boring would be bad but Cospa’s figure is interesting enough, with her shy smile and confident pose. Oh, and those killer abs; you could bounce a silver dollar off of those. It’s a good-looking, laid-back figure.

But that price! Man, that price is crazy. I went back through my e-mail archive and found my invoice for Alter’s first Fate figure from early 2007. She cost $64.98, and that’s from a store that is one of the more expensive mail order retailers on the web. Furthermore, I padded out the order with a bunch of Zone of the Enders DVDs to get free shipping. Considering the way the exchange rate has cratered in the last few years, both of these recently-announced Fate figures are around twice as expensive as Alter’s original, and that figure is barely more than three years old. Insane, I tell you.

I think I’m skipping both of these Fate figures, though I reserve the right to change my mind. That said, I’m keeping an eye on a couple of Fate figures, both of which exist only in kit form for now.

This figure is from Cobra Kai and is not in a chump’s 1/8 scale, not a nice 1/6 scale, but a godly 1/4 scale. 1/4 scale! That sword’s gotta be nearly two feet long. Moeyo‘s got more pictures. Both Yamato and Daiki Kougyou have adapted Cobra Kai’s work into PVC form, but a post on the sculpting circle’s message board indicates that they haven’t gotten much interest, which is a real tragedy.

This version of fate is from BUBBA, a well-known sculptor in the figure hobby. I really hope one of the big manufacturers picks this one up, because I prefer it over Alter’s and Cospa’s and would preorder it in a heartbeat. Yamato perhaps? Or maybe Max Factory? I can only hope.

Up to the tizzop

People are surprised when I tell them that I collect dolls, and what is perhaps even more surprising is that I’ve been collecting dolls for far longer than I’ve been buying anime figures. I don’t play around with them much – most are stuck in a drawer or in a couple of cardboard boxes now – but I do enjoy buying them and dressing them up. More recently, I’ve begun collecting doujinshi, and with most of my June preorders yet to ship I thought that I’d take some time to share these things.

Perhaps my favorite doujinshi is Grindcore. This book was published by Gin no Hoshitei, the circle of Akito Tamiya. He also did the artwork for the h-visual novel Zanjibaru, which I liked a lot. Zanjibaru incorporates some strange fetishes, such as belly expansion, massive insertions, and larva birthing, but this book is fairly straightforward tentacle sex. What makes it hot is that it seems that Nanoha is the one plugging up Fate with tentacles.

This doujinshi is mostly black and white, with several colored pages in the middle.

Gin no Hoshitei has also done a sequel, or at least a book that is identical in theme, called In Search of Sanity. It’s more of the same and it looks great.

Have you ever seen anyone take as much joy in their work as Nanoha does here?

Moving on to another Fate Testarossa doujinshi, this one is from the circle Type-G. This one’s a pretty fun book, and there’s an English translation floating around out on the internet so I can understand what’s happening.

And here’s the followup book, which has Fate getting banged by some faceless guys.

This one is by Studio PAL. I randomly came across one of their works – a Dragon Quest doujinshi – on the English version of DLsite. I went ahead and bought it and was slightly disappointed to find that it was in PDF format, which is a bit unwieldy to view compared to a directory of JPEGs. However, I really liked the artwork, so I was happy to learn that they’ve put out a number of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha books. This one is called Mahou Shoujo Dai Pinch, I think, and has Fate being accosted by some evil dude. Anyone know who this metro-looking purple-haired wanker is?

Unfortunately the Fate part is pretty short, and the rest of it shows a brief sexual encounter between Teana and Subaru. At least, I think that’s who they are; it’s not in color and being generally unfamiliar with the Nanoha characters, I rely on hair color to help identify them.

There sure are a lot of Nanoha doujinshi out there. This one’s from Cyclone, and despite what it says on the cover, is entirely black and white on the inside. It’s basically just an omnibus reprinting of several of Cyclone’s doujinshi: 840, 850, 860, and 865. Very nicely drawn, though being Japanese-illiterate it’s difficult for me to tell what’s going on. It seems that Fate gets mind-controlled in one of these books, because she beats up and rapes Nanoha. I think, anyway. It’s a couple hundred pages long, which gives it good value for the money.

Taking a quick break from the porno stuff, this book is titled Daughters of Mogthrasir. At least, I think that’s what it says. What’s a Mogthrasir? Wikipedia has the answer. Back when I was a kid, I wished that I had a machine that could answer any question I wanted to ask, and now, we have Wikipedia! Is technology not wonderful? Unusually (for me), this book doesn’t involve any sort of sexual activity. I pretty much bought it because I liked the cover. And Muv-Luv. For someone who knows almost nothing about Muv-Luv, I sure do buy a lot of Muv-Luv stuff.

Uhh, no idea what that says on the cover. I plugged it into an auto-translator and it comes back with “Sandome no Make Sen Torawa Reno Hime.” No idea what that means, either. Anyway, this book is about my favorite Sengoku Rance girl, Senhime, and is by the circle Veronicanoha. She doesn’t seem to have many doujinshi out there, so I’m glad that this book has some very nice artwork. I wish that I could read Japanese, since it seems that she’s either recounting a fantasy of hers to Rance or she’s describing something that actually happened. I’d like to know which it is. Maybe I ought to try learning Japanese one of these days. I studied engineering in school, and half of it was in bloody Greek letters, so it can’t be that hard for me to learn a foreign language, can it?

Punching this book’s title into the same translator gives its name as “Deriketo Bangaihen Kaki Kudashi.” It translates that as “Delicate Bangaihen Oyster Evacuation,” which I am thinking is not an accurate interpretation. Also, this book is for adlut comics! I guess I shouldn’t make fun of that typo, their English is certainly far better than my Japanese. Anyway, this book involves a couple of cheerful girls who share a guy. It’s full of happy sex which is a bit of a difference from most of the books that I bought.

All right, that’s enough pictures of porno comics for now, let’s move on to the doll stuff.

I got this doll a few months back after seeing some pictures of it on Akibahobby. Right after seeing those, I googled the name and got HLJ as the first hit. Happily, HLJ stocks some of Yamato’s limited edition items and they had this doll in stock. I went ahead and ordered it, which I suppose was their last one, since it’s showed up as discontinued ever since. The doll is named Risa, and Yamato has a few other dolls in the series named Miu (who looks pretty cool) and Miki (who looks utterly terrifying). I wanted a name that sounded a bit more like a porn actress’ name, so after some consultation with friends I renamed this doll Simone.

This doll is part of Yamato’s vmf50 series line, and they sell a bunch of clothes on their website. Most of the options look like hooker suits, so it’s pretty obvious what sort of demographic Yamato is targeting. For example, there’s this swimsuit which is basically see-through. Then there’s this outfit and this one and that one. Straight up ho-wear. Well, maybe not that last one. Or maybe it is, I dunno. I like them all, though.

I don’t have a lot of clothes for this doll; I got the transparent swimsuit (a real pain to put on her), the gym outfit she’s wearing now, and some underwear. Most of the clothing options are relatively expensive and sell out quickly, so I’m not all that inclined to buy more stuff.

I also got these hooker boots for the doll. The vmf50 body is somewhat anatomically correct (no anus though) and I did get a request to display it, so here it is:

As the product name suggests, this doll is about fifty centimeters tall, putting it somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 scale. It’s too big to easily display right now so I usually just keep her in her box, like a vampire.

The first dolls I bought were Blue Boy Toys’ Cy Girls. These were licensed versions of Takara’s Cool Girls dolls and are in 1/6 scale, like most action dolls. They came with a bevy of guns, holsters, and accessories and generally were sold for around thirty bucks back in the day. The two here are Electra (brunette) and Bloody Rose (orangehead). They were part of the third group of Cy Girls and I got them back in 2003, if I remember right. If anyone thinks the Cy Girls name sounds familiar, it’s probably because there was a forgettable PlayStation 2 action game based on these dolls.

Bloody Rose is wearing her original clothing but Electra is wearing a suit from Triad Toys. I’ve got a bunch more Cy Girls but I ran out of time while shooting these photos so they’ll have to wait till a follow-up post.

My newest doll is Deunan Knute, the heroine of Appleseed. This doll was manufactured by Hot Toys. I had wanted it for a very long time but could never quite afford it, but I had an opportunity to acquire it not so long ago and jumped at it. She comes with a ton of accessories – rifle, handgun, sword, watch, holster, sighting system – and a bunch of hands. The hands are the weakest part, I think – they mount using some very narrow pegs, which seem quite fragile. In fact, I snapped one while taking these photos. Fortunately I keep super glue around for such contingencies, but now I can’t pose her right hand. Regardless of her delicacy, this is a great, great doll. Maybe I ought to give Deunan her own review because she looks fantastic.

I’ve got a couple of male dolls, most notably the president of the United States. This doll was manufactured by a company called DID. The president came with some extra hands, an American flag, a blue necktie, a watch, and a work stool (no idea why). He also comes with two different heads – one shouting, one calm-looking – but it’s a real pain to swap them; the plastic of his neck isn’t very elastic, so it’s very difficult to fit it over the thick neck post.

This is how the president makes love. Though Deunan definitely has the upper hand here because none of the president’s extra hands are shaped to hold a gun.

Why is the president pointing there? Well, because I don’t remember where I stashed his hands so I can’t swap it out. And besides, this president is a fan of booty; he’s not afraid to show that he knows what he likes.

I’ve got more doujinshi and more dolls, but since this post is already running long I’ll break it into a two-parter. Stay tuned!

Up to the tizzop

Saya Tokido from Little Busters!
I’ve preordered this figure and I’m very much looking forward to her. I’m not familiar with the source game at all and I find its Wikipedia entry more confusing than enlightening, but I know that I like girls with gats, and an open shirt and an impressive rack are big, big bonuses.

Mizuho Kagami from Onegai Teacher
I’m thinking about ordering Mizuho, although it’s unusual that I haven’t seen any sample pictures on any Japanese websites yet. I have the feeling this one’s a good candidate to get pushed back, which wouldn’t make me unhappy, since while I like 1/4 scale figures, I could use more time to come up with the required funds and space.

Compact Hog from Tsukasa Bullet
What a great name for a figure. It’s technically the name of her gun, but it’s such a good name that I’ll use it for the girl, too. I’ve preordered this figure and I’m very much looking forward to it, although a second look at the promo pictures suggests that her neck is pretty long. Daiki Kougyou’s 1/4 scale Saber suffers from the same problem – one of two major problems with it, in my view – but hopefully it won’t be as obvious an issue with the production figure.

Mothra Larva from Godzilla
I’m not a big Godzilla fan – the only one I’ve seen was the unbelievably bad American movie by the hacks who made Independence Day – but the descriptions of this figure are very entertaining: “Please enjoy the cute Mothra larva as it wiggles innocently towards its target” Hobby Search suggests while Amiami gushes, “A great rendition of the larva that actually manage to be cute – in amazing 30cm form!”

Anyway, I’ve got the larva preordered. You don’t want to ask. You don’t want to know.

July

Momohime from Muramasa
I’ve preordered this, like everyone else. I’ve been hoping that Muramasa would come out for the PS3 or 360, but I suppose there’s little chance of that. At least I’ll get to ogle Momohime on my shelf even if I can’t ever experience the Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife level.

Vivio from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS
I’ve also preordered Vivio, as I cannot resist a cute girl in a tight bodysuit. A Ginga figure would be nice too.

Seena Kanon from Shining Wind
Ehh … you know, I ought to be really excited about Max Factory’s Shining Wind girls, since I like swimsuit girls and Tony Taka’s art, but for some reason, I don’t find any of them all that compelling. I like Seena better with long hair, and she looks kinda like a little boy here, so I think I’m going to pass.

Revy from Black Lagoon
See, this is how you get me excited about a swimsuit figure; give her a big gun, a sheathe knife, and a spliff. Okay, I’m hoping you can pull the cigarette out of her mouth, since I despise cigarettes, but the rest of the figure looks very nice. I’ve preordered Revy and this will be my first New Line figure, so I’m hoping it turns out aight.

Ikaros from Sora no Otoshimono
Is it just me or does it seem like this figure dropped off of everybody’s radar when it went up for preorder? The promo photos don’t look quite as good as some of the convention photos and that gives me pause, but I like the character design a lot. I haven’t preordered this figure yet but I think I might do so yet.

Lady Robin from Kinnikuman Lady
Now here’s an unusual-looking figure. I’m not sure if I like it as much as I would if she had normal proportions, but I’ll give props to MegaHouse for trying something different. She looks pretty cool, so I’m thinking about preordering her, despite the odd elongated design.

August

Leina from Queen’s Blade
I’ve got Reina preordered even though she’s not really one of my favorite Queen’s Blade characters. I can’t resist a sword-packing thong-wearing fighter girl, though, and maybe good sales will encourage someone to make an Irma figure (ahahaha, who am I kidding, that ain’t ever happening).

Rin Kagamine from Vocaloid
You know, I really didn’t like this figure when it was first announced, but over time, it’s been growing on me, and I’m thinking about putting in a preorder. I really didn’t like her hair or the shape of her head at first, but now I think she looks pretty cool. I also really like the design of her face; she looks older here than in most of the Vocaloid art. I don’t really care for her big frilly skirt or the strange sharpened stakes behind her, though. I’ll have to think about Rin a bit more.

Xecty from Shining Wind
I’m not entirely certain how I feel about Xecty. On one hand, she looks very nice, she’s very large, and I like Elwing a lot, and Xecty is the mirror image of Elwing. Wait, no she’s not – Kotobukiya posed her curved in the same direction as Elwing. I wish that they’d flipped her, but them’s the breaks. She looks nice, but I’m thinking that my money might be better served being spent on a more interesting figure, like Rin.

September

Rider from Happoubi Jin’s Sweet Body
Preordered and I don’t think I really need to explain why.

Kurisu Makase from Steins;gate
I’ve preordered this figure, although I have some reservations about her sculpt; her legs look peculiarly long. I love the stockings and hot pants combo, however. And besides, her product page on Hobby Search quotes, “I feel like opening your head and stabbing an electrode in your hippocampus.” Have you ever heard a better pickup line than that?

Kureha Touka from Shining Wind
I like Kureha best out of all of the Shining Wind girls, so I’ve preordered her, despite not being particularly thrilled by this figure. I suppose one can’t have too many of Max Factory’s Kurehas.

Sasami Sasasegawa from Little Busters!
This figure sure does give off a very different vibe than Saya Tokido does. Anyway, I’ve preordered Sasami, since I can’t turn down a figure that gives off such a nice view of the goods. Not that you’d know that from the promo pictures, though; it continually amazes me how clever figure manufacturers are when it comes to avoiding pantyshots in their official photos. I suppose in this case they were simply judicious with the crop tool rather than artful with the camera, though.

Asuka Langley Shikinami from Neon Genesis Evangelion
Two Asuka figures were announced in a very short span of time, and I like big figures rather than small, so if I get one of them, it’s likely going to be Kotobukiya’s version. Still, I find it difficult to get over just how ugly that test plugsuit is. Asuka seems to know it, too, since she looks very uncomfortable here, which I think is incredibly hot.

Ryomou Shimei from Ikki Tousen
Interestingly, it seems that Daiki Kougyou is drifting away a bit from Toshirou’s original sculpt in favor of a more conventional facial design. Perhaps they’ve taken to heart some of the criticism leveled at their earlier Saber figure (though my beef is with the lengthened neck and the lack of castoff option). I really like how she looks in some of the recent Akibahobby photos, but Ryomou isn’t really one of my favorite Ikki Tousen characters and I don’t know if I can justify spending the skrills on this figure.

October

Clalaclan from Shining Wind
I’m not planning on getting this figure, but does it look to anybody else like her navel is too low? I went and checked some of my por – I mean, reference videos and it looks to me like her navel ought to be higher up on her stomach. Maybe it’s just me, I dunno. Great swimsuit bottom, though.

Hitagi Senjyougahara from Bakemonogatari
Ehh … I like this figure but I’m not too familiar with the source TV show. In fact, the only thing I really know about Bakemonogatari is that I sort of share a name with one of the characters in the show, which is unusual since it’s a relatively uncommon name. I’ll put this one down as a maybe; I don’t really have a lot of feeling for the character design, and it seems odd to me to buy a figure purely because of some tumbling school supplies.

Asuka Langley Shikinami from Neon Genesis Evangelion
When I think of Asuka, I think of a tactless, cocky loudmouth. This version of Asuka appears gentle and shy, and I can’t quite reconcile these two images of Asuka in my mind. On the other hand, Asuka looks great and I know this figure is going to turn out very well, so it’s hard to pass up. I wish that Alter had put her in her normal plugsuit or given her blonde hair or something to make her stand out more, but as it is, I’ll have to think about it some more.

Tsumugi Kotobuki from K-On!
Okay, I have no intention of ordering this figure, and I wouldn’t do so even if I cared for K-On! due to the ridiculous eyebrows, but what I’m wondering is, where are these girls getting the money for their instruments? Mio uses a bass that costs four figures, and Tsumugi appears to be using a Korg Triton Extreme. This keyboard’s out of production and it’s been a long time since Musician’s Friend has sent me any catalogs, but I recall that this synth ran around two grand. So is it ever explained how these kids are buying their gear? Do they have after-school jobs? What sort of after-school jobs? Curious minds want to know (without actually having to watch the TV show).

Heat Blade from Tsukasa Bullet
I’m lazy so I haven’t gotten out my credit card to preorder Heat Blade (you’d think I’d have it memorized by now), but I’ll order this figure pretty soon. I think she looks great and I’ve been looking forward to seeing the painted sample for a while now.

December

Mai Shiranui from The King of Fighters
This is an amazing figure, and the only reasons I haven’t put in a preorder yet are the price and my lack of familiarity with Alphamax’s work. VF’s recent review of Spica allays the latter concern, so now I need to decide whether I feel comfortable putting in an order with Hobby Search or Amiami that I can’t cancel. Then again, I’m not sure that it’s all that likely I’ll want to cancel this figure anyway.

Up to the tizzop

Most of my discretionary spending budget is allocated to figure purchases but every now and then I buy other stuff. Here’s a few things that I’ve picked up in the past month or two.

I bought some DVDs from RightStuf; I’m not quite sure when I’ll get around to watching them, though, as I’m trying to keep up with a few ongoing series (notably Seikon no Qwaser, the greatest anime of all time).

I got this dakimakura depicting Natsuru Senou, the genderbending protagonist of Kampfer. This makes dakimakura #6, but I’m not done yet, as I recently won one off of Yahoo Japan. I’ll probably review Natsuru sometime this week.

I got this Total Eclipse artbook at the same time as I got the Mahou Shoujo Ai book. I will freely admit that I bought it in the hope of seeing pictures of cute girls in tight piloting suits, but the book is mostly mecha art (and text, natch). I guess I don’t mind that too much – the art, that is – since I like mecha. I wish I could read all the words in the book, though, since there’s a lot of them.

H-manga! The Nanoha doujinshi is by Cyclone, who have put out quite a few good Nanoha books, and the other two books are from Kill Time Communication. The Lightning Warrior Raidy book seems to be an anthology of stories from different artists and series, as Raidy’s sequence only takes up maybe fifteen pages, but the other book is all about Beat Blades Haruka. It’s a great book with great artwork (although I could’ve done without futanari Narika, I guess) and I’m hoping that KTC chucks out a sequel, since it ends at about the point where Haruka encounters Subaru in the modern age.

I saw a review of Yamato’s VMF50 Risa doll on Akibahobby a few weeks ago and I liked how it looked so I picked it up. Why did I like it? For one, it wasn’t too expensive for such a large doll and for two, I’m insane. And for three, she’s pretty realistic. You know what I mean. I ordered some gym clothes and underpants for her but they aren’t here yet. A friend of mine suggested that “Simone” sounds a bit like a name for a porn actress, so that’s what I named her.

This is perhaps the strangest impulse purchase I’ve ever made.

I bought a new camera cuz, you know, more expensive camera means better pictures. Everybody knows that, it’s a scientifically proven fact.

I also recently picked up Resonance of Fate and Sakura Taisen, but I figure everybody knows what those look like so I don’t need to put pictures of them up here. Actually, I completely forgot to take pictures of them and while I’m trying to actually complete Resonance of Fate (it’s a great game but I don’t have a good track record of beating games), my list of RPGs that I’ve bought in the last six months or so and not even played for more than five minutes is impressive: Mass Effect 2, Valkyria Chronicles, Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2, Dragon Age (technically, I played far enough to name my dog), Fallout 3, and Ar Tonelico II are in that list and I’m sure there are more that I’ve forgotten about.

So I wanted to buy this porno manga. The first place I checked was Amazon JP but unfortunately they’ve labeled this item as adult and thus will not ship it overseas. Undaunted, I next hit up J-List, knowing that they have a selection of h-manga. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them. I looked up Sasuga Books but they didn’t have it either. Then I found out about Rakuten, saw that they had it, and was delighted to find out that they ship internationally. Delight turned to dismay as I found out that this isn’t one of the items that they’ll ship internationally, but they did provide a link to Tenso along with a recommendation to use them for items that can’t be shipped outside of Japan.

I went to the Tenso website and signed up and then looked up their policies (sort of the reverse way of doing things, but that’s how I roll) and found that one of their prohibited item categories is anything deemed “obscene.” So what do they define as obscene? Do they have a set list of guidelines, or do they just know it when they see it? I didn’t bother asking, since I’m pretty sure that this book has tentacle rape, gang rape, bondage rape, and probably bestial rape (knowing Subaru’s penchant for pigs), and I suppose most people would define any of those as obscene. Can’t quite figure out why anyone would think that, myself. Finally I wound up just asking a proxy service to buy the book for me, but I’m really disappointed at how difficult it is to buy such things. All I want to do is buy some porn; is that really so unreasonable?

I did notice some nifty things on Amazon JP while looking through their selection of ero stuff and having never bought from them, decided to give it a shot. The first thing I will say about them is that their shipping fees are freaking expensive. They’re also a bit inconsistent with what they label adult, as several of the books I bought are clearly ero in nature. Maybe it’s because those books seem to actually be novels; being Japanese-illiterate, this is somewhat problematic, but it just gives me some additional motivation to learn Japanese someday. I’m not sure what these books are about, exactly, but I figure that officially-produced tentacle rape fiction has to be pretty cool, right?

The main thing I wanted from Amazon JP was the Moe Moe Shin Weapon Collection, mainly because I like the cover illustration. This book purports to be a reference for historic, famous weapons but it curiously eschews realism in favor of depicting the associated warriors as cute, often half-naked girls. Wish it had more pictures, but I guess it’s supposed to be an encyclopedia so it’s pretty dense with text. The book breaks up the selection by region, and here’s an image of a couple of warriors whom I think are supposed to be German:

The chapter intro says this comes from a German folk tale, although I’m not sure which one that could be. I guess German girl fighters wear fur-lined cloaks. And run around half naked. On a glacier. Are there glaciers in Germany? I’ve never been to Germany (or Europe, actually) but I don’t think there are glaciers in Germany.

The book says that this battler comes from Norse mythology, although I’m not sure exactly which exotic part of the world she comes from.

I really need to get a new scanner so I can scan these. Pro tip: you know how scanners have a switch to lock the scanning unit when packing it up? It’s actually a good idea to use that switch while moving.

The end of the month is usually when a bunch of figures ship, but curiously the end of February was pretty quiet as far as figure releases go. Since I’ve got no figure reviews ready and I’m too lazy to properly photograph Miku or gangsta lean Saber yet, here’s some throwaway pictures that I took when I was trying out some new things:

Over the past few years, I’d given thought to starting up a figure blog, but when I actually kicked it off, I figured that the most likely result would be that I’d have gotten bored after a couple of months and called off the entire enterprise. A year later, I’ve somehow kept up with it and nobody is more surprised that this thing is still going than me.

The two blogs that provided the motivation to create this site were HappySoda and RIUVA (though I have no idea what that site is about now; it’s definitely not about figures anymore). When I decided to give this a shot, I thought that maybe I could establish a niche by covering figures that most people wouldn’t buy – porno figures, in other words. It hasn’t gone entirely that way since my tastes don’t completely diverge from the mainstream so I’ve tried to distinguish my writing by not taking myself or this hobby seriously whatsoever.

The fact that I’m very lazy and not particularly disciplined or self-motivated is one reason for me to be amazed that I’ve kept at this, but I’ve also been surprised at how interesting photography has become to me. I cringe at some of my earliest pictures and I’m still planning on reshooting a lot of the figures whose photos show off my cluelessness in bald, stark garishness. Here’s one of the earliest photos I took for this site:

Yipes. I started practicing figure photography in late 2008, a few months before I took this shot, and those pictures are even worse. I’ll see about uploading one of those for the general amusement of the world.

I think that I’ve gotten better at taking pictures although I definitely wouldn’t describe myself as being good (I figure that a good photographer has some idea of what he or she is going to get before taking the shot; me, I shoot a test shot, transfer it to my computer, run my standard post-processing routine on it, hope that the photo comes out reasonably close to what I was looking for, and then I do the shoot). The creative aspect of this hobby is probably my favorite part, so much so that figure photography has superseded my interest in most of my other hobbies.

Whenever one celebrates a blog anniversary, it is customary to provide traffic statistics. Everyone wants to see everyone else’s stats; it’s sort of like high school, where everyone wanted to know who was going out with each other and went to great lengths to uncover that information, listening with clandestine rapture and passing it around with breathless incredulity and raised-octave ohmigods. That is, if you ran in those social circles; I did not, I wasn’t the most popular guy in school nor did I particularly care very much about the lives of my classmates. I have the feeling most people in this hobby come from a similar background and … ehh, well, anyway, here’s visitor stats:

As you can see, the blog basically got no traffic for the first three months of its existence. I’m pretty sure what traffic I did get was me, since I didn’t start filtering out my own IP addresses until a couple months after I began logging statistics. Also, those two spikes really cramp the graph. Here’s the graph for pageviews:

It’s a bit more interesting. Pageviews is an important stat for me to track since the core of this site is the figure reviews; most people who visit this blog don’t actually ever load the front page.

Incidentally, I hit the 300k mark only yesterday, and for a while I was thinking that I’d have to compromise my integrity and turn off the self-filters and click on every link on this site myself to push it over. Happily that wasn’t necessary.

Here’s where people are coming from:

I’ve gotten no visits from loser countries like North Korea, Cuba, and Turkmenistan. People over there need to hurry up and overthrow their dictators and visit my site.

I use Google Analytics as my main traffic logging tool; I figure that the people at Google know a thing or two about web applications and I’ve also noticed that their analysis seems to be more conservative than similar sites, and I’d rather underestimate than overestimate my actual traffic. For example, I also use Statcounter and there’s a bit of a discrepancy here:

Traffic was sort of discouraging at the start, although I’ve always had the attitude that I really write this blog for myself and accordingly I try not to let traffic patterns affect this site too much. I decided at the start that I didn’t want a Sankaku Complex or Danny Choo feed on this site; I don’t like cluttering up the sidebar here and you see those things on every other figure site on this planet, and I wanted to be different in that respect. I also stopped trying to actively generate traffic a while back; I used to post on figure.fm, for instance, but it seems to be mainly a Dollfie joint these days and that’s not really my thing, so I don’t put much stuff up there anymore.

Anyway, it’s been a good year and a fun year and I’m hoping that the next year is just as fun and that I get better at photography and that figure manufacturers finally make me a freaking figure of Irma and Itsuki Kannagi already. One can hope, no?

I recently spent some time practicing my Photoshop photography skills, and I shot some new pictures of Aegis and Rei. My Aegis photos were one of the earliest photo shoots in which I played around with shadows and a black background. I liked those photos a lot at the time and in retrospect, I can’t quite remember why:

I really am not digging the folds and creases in the background. It makes me want to re-shoot pictures of every figure I reviewed using a cloth backdrop.

I like my new pictures, but I wonder if I’ll look back at these photos a year or two from now and think, “What in the world was I doing? C’mon man.”

Here’s one more image that isn’t quite as dark as the first:

Rei was one of the earliest figures I photographed, and I was still using a ragged blue curtain then as the background. I also used three lamps, one shining from each side and a third illuminating from above. It made for a lifeless photograph, as if Rei were nothing more than a chunk of molded, painted plastic:

How boring is that? Really bloody boring. Rei’s an albino clone girl who slides herself into a tight bodysuit to fight off huge monsters bent on genocide in an apartment-sized robot; she shouldn’t be boring. I think my new pictures are more interesting than my old ones, even though I don’t really have any clue what I’m doing. They’re probably not quite as useful from a review perspective, but I’m comfortable with making that sacrifice in the name of prettier pictures.

Or more precisely, new computer parts. My current computer (5.5 years old at this time) is just about dead; it takes around eight hours to reboot and the video card croaked. Being that nobody makes AGP video cards anymore – and that I was very lucky a friend still had an old machine that I could scavenge working parts from – I felt that it was time to get a new machine. My new computer is going to have a 2.66 GHz Intel i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 300 GB and 1 TB hard disks. I had hoped to include a Radeon 5850 card but they were sold out planetwide when I bought the parts, and as I mainly play console games, I don’t feel too badly about having to settle for a lesser video card.

In keeping with my indomitable spirit of laziness, I’m probably not going to get around to building it until the weekend. No doubt I’ll need the additional time to fix the inevitable problems that are going to occur; something always goes wrong when I build computers.

I got asked to provide a size comparison picture of Kenshin and Meiya, so I also thought this was a good opportunity to provide the goods.

Of the eight figures that I had preordered this month, six have been delayed till next month or beyond. I’m not sure why figure manufacturers don’t tack on extra month on all their pending figure releases just to sync their schedules back up with reality. Even this pornographic figure that I preordered got kicked back a month. You know things are messed up when a small-scale manufacturer like Giga Pulse can’t meet their projected ship date. I bet transvestite Yoko doesn’t make it out this month, too. (And as I type this, I am proved correct! I wish I could say that this prognostication was built upon careful deduction, but anybody could see this coming.)

Serendipitous it is indeed, then, that HLJ is holding a holiday sale with shipping costs waived if you buy a sale item. With funds freed up for this month, this sale is a pretty good opportunity to pick up anything that I had passed on. Or at least, it would be, if there were anything that I wanted to buy. I went through HLJ’s inventory for Alter, Max Factory, GSC, Yamato, and all the other major figure manufacturers and I’m having a real tough time finding something that I want that I don’t already have. I guess Akiha might be a possibility (where’s the Itsuki figure, GSC?). Given the expense of EMS shipping, I feel like I should take advantage of this sale. I was really hoping that they’d have GSC’s 1/4 scale Nanoha or the Aegis Figma still in stock, but unfortunately they do not. I guess I will have to take a second, less discriminating look through HLJ’s inventory. I should probably also take this as a sign that perhaps I shouldn’t throw money at every figure that I want as soon as it comes out.