Tentacle Armada » Random Thoughts

Random Thoughts IX

Tier — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 02:57:07 +0000

I am old and the mind wanders when it gets old. Thus, this is the post in which I write about various random things.

The Amiami Hostage Situation
I have a bad tendency to procrastinate, which got me in a great deal of trouble when I was in school. It continues to do me no favors because I often waffle for a while before ordering figures, and sometimes preorders close before I make a decision. So it was with several recently-released figures, which I waffled on, and when I decided to get them, they were sold out at Hobby Search. I ordered them from Amiami instead, and I was happy to see that three figures that I ordered were released this month. However, they mysteriously combined my order for Kotobukiya’s Blanc Neige with my order for Alphamax’s Senhime, which I didn’t ask them to do. Last week, Amazon JP listed Senhime as an October release, so I e-mailed Amiami asking them to combine my orders for the three in-stock figures and ship them together. They did so, and they also added Senhime to that order, which means my three in-stock figures are being held hostage from shipping by this figure that I don’t even really want anymore. I’m hoping they read my next request to ship the in-stock items with a bit more attention to what I am actually asking, and I think I’m going to stick to Hobby Search for figure orders. They charge a little more but at least getting orders recombined isn’t a hassle.

Breaking the Miku moratorium

I am tired of seeing Miku. This doesn’t explain why I’ve preordered Miku Append. And it also doesn’t explain why I’m thinking of ordering this figure. I had no intention of even considering Good Smile Company’s Love Is War version of the little green-haired computer program but I’ve reconsidered. The figure looks nice; Miku’s standard design is straightforward generic moe but this version features a more mature look, which I appreciate. And the less-elaborate version is pretty cheap. Now what I’m really thinking about is the base that comes with that one Real Art Project figure. I’ve been thinking of constructing something similar, but I was not sure if any of the figures I’ve ordered would be a good match for it. And now here we have Miku, arms flailing around. Bent over and ass out, mouth wide open, screaming. I think a plan presents itself. I hope that megaphone is removable.

Jeebus bless the Chinese
No, not for the recently-unveiled Martin Luther King, Jr. statue, which reminds me of some of those Soviet-era statues of Lenin and Stalin, if you ask me. What’s great about the Chinese is all the cheap stuff they sell, particularly camera stuff. Camera accessories can be quite expensive but there are all sorts of cheap things on eBay – sync cords, shutter releases, flashes, modifiers, adapters, and so on. I recently picked up some stuff from some Chinese sellers, including these microfiber cleaning cloths.

The “Super Cloth” is a great product, but I admit to having some doubts that it can clean “dead electricity” off the front elements of my lenses. I also like the suggested product usage; the first picture shows eyeglasses, which is certainly appropriate, since I do use this cloth to wipe my glasses. They also show a notebook computer and camera, and I can believe one could use the Super Cloth to clean off their screens. Then the last picture is of a BMW. Somehow I find it very difficult to believe anybody’s going to be wiping down an automobile with this product.

Football season is almost here
I’m barely out of basketball mode. I’m not ready at all for my fantasy draft – I pick eighth out of twelve teams and I have no clue who I should take. I’m also certain my school is going to get blown away by a I-AA team this weekend; after all, they kicked our ass two years ago, and none of the seniors on the team have ever beaten Duke. In football. God, we’re pathetic. It’s so depressing to know your team is doomed before the season even begins.

TMI
I was hoping Yamato would restock vmf50 Type D body parts so I could buy an extra torso to pierce Simone’s nipples and give her a nipple chain, but sadly, they have not done so.

NEW CAMERA!
Yes, I bought a new camera. What did I get? A 5D Mark II? An M9? Nope, I bought this:

Uhh … this is a camera?

Yep, this is a camera! It’s a Polaroid SX-70. Back when I was a kid, some of my relatives from Hawaii visited my family and brought along a Polaroid camera. I thought it was one of the coolest things ever (I was a really dumb kid; I thought Nintendo’s Power Pad was pretty cool, too). Since everybody shoots digital these days, Polaroid cameras aren’t too expensive on eBay. Unfortunately, film is extremely expensive since Polaroid doesn’t make it anymore. I bought a few packs of film from The Impossible Project and I have mixed feelings about it. If you don’t know their story, some Polaroid employees purchased Polaroid’s factory and machinery and re-engineered the film. It takes a great deal of ambition and conviction to attempt something like this, being that a famous international corporation like Polaroid couldn’t pull it off (and went bankrupt twice in recent times). On the other hand, the film quality isn’t very good and at about $25 for eight shots, it’s really, really expensive.

So I’m not sure how much I’m going to use this camera, since I have to carefully ration my film. What I’m thinking now is I might just look for a cheap 35mm film camera and see if it’s any fun to use. Yeah, I know it’s a dumb idea. Hey, I’ve shot off a lot of digital photographs over the last few years, so I think it’s okay if I pursue dumb ideas.

From the Five-Years-Late-Department

I picked up Oblivion a few weeks back, which explains why I have no figure review prepared. I bought it when it was released on the Xbox 360 but couldn’t play it because it made me terribly ill. I’m not sure what it is with Bethesda’s games, but all their games from Battlespire to Oblivion have given me motion sickness. However, I was happy to learn that Oblivion isn’t too debilitating if I play it in first-person mode. So I’m playing through it now and it’s a lot of fun. Here’s what my character looks like:

I’m not really digging the advancement system much. Whenever a level system requires you to minimize your major skill usage to prevent uncontrolled leveling, you know your system is not thought out very well. I ran around the countryside doing side quests before I began the main quest at level 21, and then got slaughtered by a horde of angry demons. I suppose it’s just as well. Back to doing figure pictures, then.

Doujinshi Stuff Part 3: Fate Testarossa Edition (NSFW)

Tier — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 03:57:57 +0000

It’s been a long time since I last mentioned the doujinshi I’ve purchased. Too long; it’s been three months since Comiket 79. I meant to show pictures of all the stuff I’ve gotten but looking through my collection, I was surprised to see how many Fate books I’ve got. Accordingly, this post will mainly be about her, and a little bit about her white devil magician girl compatriot.

Incidentally, a lot of the doujinshi I show here features stuff like monster rape, gang rape, and tentacle rape. If those sorts of things offend you or repel you, I strongly, strongly urge you to continue reading so that I might have a chance to change your mind. Tentacle rape is surely the most beautifullest thing in this world and I hope I can bring people to appreciate its elegance and delightfulness. All righty, with that out of the way, let’s proceed.

This book is by Blade, whose circle is called Galaxist. He may be known to the general hobby community through his art on the Cham Cham Queen’s Gate book, though that’s one of the more obscure books in the series. I think this book is titled “Ikazuchi Kago,” if the romaji translator is not deceiving me, and it very well might be. It’s pretty short but it’s a good book, with Fate being molested by some odd monsters that vaguely resemble an illithid from Dungeons & Dragons.

This book is by Studio PAL, whose work I admire. Their previous Nanoha titles have carried classy names like “Rape 2,” “Rape 3,” and “Rape Grade Up,” but this book is called Fate no Nyotaigokuhikunren, which an auto-translator suggests means something like “Fate’s Secret Woman’s Body Training.” It’s a pretty short book, being only 16 pages long, but it’s all in color and the artwork is very nice. Also looking very nice is their upcoming Fate dakimakura cover.

This book is called NF-03 and is by Yoru no Benkyoukai, the circle of artist Fumihiro. Presumably it’s a continuation of the story presented in their previous title, which was called NF-02. In both books, Nanoha tentacle-rapes Fate, ostensibly to power up her abilities.

This book is called NF-04 and as you might imagine, it’s about Nanoha tentacle-raping Fate.

This book is by the artist Akira Mikazuki of the circle Tri-Moon. It’s an oversized book with a mix of stuff inside; there’s a short comic and then some artwork of several Nanoha characters. The comic is a bit peculiar in that it seems Nanoha turns into a boy. Genderswapping in anime seems to often go the other way but nonetheless, here we have Nanoha as a man. It doesn’t take Fate long at all to take advantage of this unexpected occurrence. Much of the artwork in the remaining pages is available at the artist’s website.

This book is by the artist Mio of the circle Fastest Lap and is titled something like “Ooki kunattemo feito ga suki desuka?” I think. The auto-translator suggests that this means something like, “Do you like Fate even if she is bigger?” Fate appears to get a considerable bust size upgrade in this book and then has some happy sex with some guy. I’m not sure who the guy is supposed to be.

From the same circle, this book is titled “Shitsuke,” which apparently means “Training.” This book seems to be less consensual though Fate looks like she’s still having a good time. That also looks like her mom that’s fingering her there. I guess that’d be incest? Incest is all the rage in anime these days so I suppose this is pretty much normal.

This book is titled 567 and comes from the circle Cyclone. I’ve got a number of their books and I’ve also reviewed their Nanoha dakimakura cover. This is an older title that I picked up a while back but it’s still among my favorite books. It’s an oversized book and it’s all in color. Basically Fate gets abused by some of the Numbers and then some faceless dudes. Who literally have no faces. The reverse side has some nice artwork of her in a Numbers suit. She looks really good in that suit, they should make a new series of her in that suit with Nanoha trying to redeem her. Kinda like Star Wars.

This is Cyclone’s F850-x2, a followup to their F850 book that I mentioned in my last doujinshi post. Nanoha gets boinked by some faceless dudes. They must have an army of faceless dudes somewhere, the way they keep showing up in these sorts of books.

This is Cyclone’s F850 X2.01, which was released at Comiket 79. It’s a short black-and-white book with simple staple binding, but it’s still fantastic. It’s about Fate getting raped by – you guessed it – some faceless guys. And then making this funny face at the end. Really great book. Really wish there was a color version of the cover available.

And this is Cyclone’s 767B, which also came out at C79. Unlike the other books, this one features Nanoha as she appeared in StrikerS, and it also includes Subaru and Teana – not as Nanoha’s comrades but as the people raping her. As you might imagine, it’s a great book. It does feature a lot of futanari action and personally, I’m not a big fan of that. However, I really like it here. Speaking of Cyclone, they are apparently not content just to do pillowcase illustrations, they are moving on to underwear. No joke. White Canvas has them up for sale if you want to gird your loins with Nanoha and Fate.

This book is titled “Kin’iro Shoujo,” which translates to something like “Golden Girl.” It’s by the circle Hanzai Tengoku and contains two stories, one with Fate and Nanoha and one with Seikon no Qwaser’s Katja and Hana. The Fate story is a straightforward story with the Nanoha girls having sex with some random guys and the Qwaser story has Hana growing a penis with which she services her mistress.

I’ve got a ton more books, including more Fate books, but that will do for now. I’ll show a couple more things here that I got a while back:

This is a promotional pamphlet for preordering the game Zanjibaru. I didn’t get one since I bought my copy of the game a year after it was released, so I picked this one up off of Yahoo Japan Auctions. It’s got some nice concept art of the main characters.

I don’t think I ever showed off my 3D mousepad in a post here. This is Mikoto Shiratori from the h-game and ero anime Inyouchuu. Most 3D mousepads raise the busts of the depicted characters but this one takes a different approach, elevating Mikoto’s thighs to serve as a wrist rest. It’s pretty neat.

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Year Two Retrospective

Tier — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:34:39 +0000

This site has been on the internet for two years now. Imagine that. Just before I started up Tentacle Armada, I was in the throes of World of Warcraft addiction. I abruptly quit the game when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out and decided to kick off a figure review site. I can scarcely recall what things were like back then; it feels like I’ve been running this site for as long as I can remember. Blog years ought to be measured in dog years, where a year of blogging feels like seven years of life.

I don’t spend much time talking about the site itself but as today is an auspicious day, I will make an exception. Let’s take a look at how Tentacle Armada has evolved over the past year.

I think that the most obvious shift is that the pictures have gotten a lot better. When I quit Warcraft and gave serious thought to starting up this site, I had neither a camera nor a clue. I haven’t had instruction in any form of art since leaving the sixth grade – something I regret quite a bit – so I didn’t know where to start. The camera came quickly – the spoils of one of my first paychecks – but experience and knowledge were hard to come by. Looking back at my old reviews makes me wince; sometimes I think I ought to take a blowtorch to the site archives to hide them. More realistically, I intend to reverse the order of the figure gallery page so that the older and incompetent stuff will be hidden at the bottom, where nobody scrolls to.

However, I’m happier with my photographs now, not because I think they’re any good but because I can see progression in my learning. In the middle of 2010 I moved away from solid black and white backdrops to more elaborate sets. They don’t always work – actually, I think they often fail – but they make for more interesting pictures and I usually learn something from the experience. I’ll admit that there are many times when I have no ideas and I want to stay in a safe zone, but ultimately I think that the backdrops I’ve made are more creatively fulfilling.

Just for kicks, here’s a visual example of how my pictures have changed over the last couple of years:

November 2008

February 2009

July 2009

February 2011

Along the way I picked up a new camera, which is important, because everybody knows that it’s the gear that makes the picture and not the person holding it. Otherwise, nobody would ever ask, “What camera should I buy?” or say, “My pictures would be better if only I had a more expensive camera.”

Not to disregard equipment completely, however; I think one of the biggest changes in my pictures is that I’m using camera flashes for almost all of my lighting now. They offer far more creative flexibility than light bulbs – and of course, they also give me another excuse to buy yet more gear. Not that I need much of an excuse to buy stuff but I’m always up for ad hoc rationalization.

I have some site stats to share. Some people don’t care much for stats but me, I love stats. Absolutely love them. I’ve played fantasy football for the last ten or eleven years because I love stats. In World of Warcraft, I was a chronic min-maxer who tried to optimize my character’s stats to the fullest extent that I could – which was rather hard in a three-player guild. And while I didn’t start up this site to try to get traffic, I very much enjoy examining traffic stats, though that is also due to a certain voyeuristic propensity on my part. Here are the visits and pageviews stats for the entirety of this site’s existence:

This is the visits graph. Visits have climbed slowly and steadily throughout the life of this site.

And here’s the pageviews graph, with overall site stats.

Here are the same stats for only the second year:

Visits.

And pageviews with year two stats. I think things are going well. Traffic more than tripled from year one, so I’m pretty happy about that.

I also use StatCounter, as it offers better realtime traffic tracking than Google does. Notably, it tells me what files people are downloading, which is useful information since I can learn what pictures people click on. Generally I’ve found people tend to click on close-up photos featuring breasts and buttocks.

Where are people coming from? Google also has the answer to that.

Last year, I complained that I hadn’t gotten any visits from North Korea, Cuba, and Turkmenistan, and that people needed to launch revolutions to throw their leaders out of power already. Interestingly, I’ve gotten a couple of visits from Havana since then. Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten anything from North Korea or Turkmenistan, but perhaps the current wave of populistic furor will spread to those countries and install democracies so their citizens can visit my site and look at my pictures.

And just for kicks, here are the wildly inaccurate statistics from my host provider’s server log.

And post stats. I had no clue what sort of review format I wanted to use when I began this site, and so the older reviews are far less verbose than they are now. Taking pictures also took much less time when I didn’t need to construct sets or work out new techniques. Now, reviews typically take somewhere between five to fifteen hours to complete, with a few – like Momohime’s – taking more like twenty hours. My post count has dropped a lot from the first year but I’ve managed to keep a consistent schedule of posting every four to six days, on average.

I often hear people say that if you want to get traffic, you should put up porn. I’ve wondered about that because I know this site is filtered from several workplaces and is blocked by Google’s SafeSearch algorithm. Sometimes I’ve thought that this site would get more traffic if I kept it clean.

Then I look at the list of the ten most popular reviews on this site for just the last year:

1. Aaliyah (NSFW)
2. Diskvision Eve (NSFW)
3. Nora Stuart (NSFW)
4. Marie Mamiya (NSFW)
5. Tony Taka’s Collet (NSFW)
6. Tamaki Kousaka (Kaitendoh) (NSFW)
7. Rika Shiraki (NSFW)
8. Happoubi Jin’s Rider (NSFW)
9. Happoubi Jin’s Hustler (NSFW)
10. Kanu Unchou (Project Dynamite) (NSFW)

The most-accessed tag page on this site for the last year? Giga Pulse. The second most popular? Hentai. So … yeah, porn brings traffic, that definitely can’t be denied. I really have to marvel at the appeal of that Nora Stuart figure; I’d guess 95% of the entire figure collecting community hasn’t even heard of this figure but it remains one of the most popular pages on this site. Its popularity is even more amazing given that it’s one of the earliest and worst reviews I’ve written.

While I love statistics, I don’t care very much for what these statistics actually represent. Early on in the life of this site, I did all of the usual things that people do to let the world know their site exists – I banzai-commented on other people’s blogs, began posting on anime forums, and posted short excerpts elsewhere that ended, “For the rest of this post, go visit my blog!” I quickly decided it wasn’t worth the effort and now, I don’t do much myself to generate traffic. I don’t cross-post reviews on figure.fm. I don’t use Facebook, Flickr, Digg, or similar sites. I don’t integrate this site with my Twitter account. I don’t bribe visitors with giveaways. I don’t do blogroll link exchanges. I don’t give space to any other site’s feed. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, and I reserve the right to do any of those things in the future, but right now, they’re not for me. One of the core philosophies governing Tentacle Armada is that I want this site’s success to be determined solely by the strength of its content. If people come here, I want them to come here because they’re interested in what I write or the photos that I take. I recently did an interview with Tomopop and never mentioned it here because I don’t want to call attention to myself; I’d rather keep a low profile and let people find this site on their own. That’s easy for me to say now, of course, but even if I were getting no traffic – and as this site got virtually no hits for the first quarter-year of its existence, I know what that feels like – I wouldn’t change my approach at all. This site is about me as a figure reviewer, not as a marketer, and I’m very happy that this site is doing well on my own terms.

There were also a few things I thought about changing but haven’t done so yet. I considered putting advertisements up since it’d be nice to make some money off of something I put a lot of time into, but I don’t think I will; I doubt I’d make much money from them and I don’t want to clutter the site with flashing ads and annoying graphics. I’ve thought about watermarking my images but I just don’t like adding labels to my pictures. It’s strange that I feel that way since it sometimes annoys me when people steal my pictures, which is another problem that has arisen since this site has become better-known. The stress caused by the business and administrative side of running a site – even a site that makes no money – can be very burdensome, and there have been a couple of times that I wanted to take a long vacation from reviewing.

As I mentioned, I’ve thought about toning down the content of this site. There’s a part of me that would like this site to enter the mainstream of figure collecting. Fanservice-y figures are one thing but full-blown hentai is another, and I’ll admit that I did hesitate for just a couple of seconds when I was thinking of ways to photograph the bondage dolls and the tentacle stand. On the other hand, I think I excluded myself from the mainstream the moment I selected this site’s name, and at any rate, I don’t think it’d be right to ballgag my personality. It might lose me some readers but I’m going to stick with what I’ve been doing. And the tentacle stand will definitely be making future appearances here.

Even accounting for all of these issues, running this site is a helluva lot of fun. I like to think that this site is one of the better figure review sites on the web and I’m glad that it’s given me the opportunity to meet a lot of people who share my interests. I’m also happy that I’ve helped a lot of people get into figure and pillowcase collecting. What do I plan to do with this site in its third year? More of the same, basically. I think that my review style is pretty much set, the focus will stay on anime figures, and I hope that the pictures continue to improve. “Keep it simple, keep it happy” is the other guiding principle of this site; it’s the way I like to run things and it’s the way things are going to be.

WTF Shopping Mall Japan?

Tier — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:29:54 +0000

So I get an invoice from Shopping Mall Japan and I see that it’s for a promotional pamphlet for a video game that I purchased for 400 yen off of Yahoo Japan Auctions. Then I see the total is $84.35. For a 400 yen item. SMJ uses a conservative exchange rate of 79 yen to a dollar, so 400 yen equals $5.06, and the other fees add up to about $14. And yet I’m getting charged $84.35. What the hell?

(Edit: Never mind, the total listed on my user page displays the correct total. I’m still waiting for an explanation from SMJ as to why the two values are so disparate [or why they are different at all]. I think I’m going to be checking my invoice totals by hand from now on rather than automatically going to Paypal to pay my bills.)

Doujinshi Stuff Part 2 (NSFW)

Tier — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 03:30:11 +0000

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.

This is the most recent book from Veronicanoha and is titled, “I Can’t Possibly Be This Cute” (heh). Basically it features Rance knocking up his female self. How existential can you get?

The only non-explicit book that I bought, this is a Strike Witches book by Kabocha Oukoku, the circle of Akaga Hirotaka. I bought it mainly because the artist created Irma for the Queen’s Blade series, but the art is very nice. It’s also a pretty short book at just eleven pages long. Now tell me, where is my Irma figure?

This book comes from the circle Hotel California and is called Strike Out. It’s basically about Dead Master raping Black Rock Shooter with tentacles. As you might imagine, it’s a great, great book.

This doujinshi is more of an artbook than a comic book. It’s by Gin no Hoshitei, the circle of Tamiya Akito, whose work I’ve effusively praised here before. It’s got pictures of Dizzy, Sophitia and Cassandra from Soul Calibur, Riesz from Secret of Mana, Tifa Lockhart, Fate Testarossa, some Sailor Moon girl, and a few more characters suffering traumatically large insertions, stomach inflation, maggot birthing, and all-the-way-through tentacle skewering. There’s a short comic at the end with the Mahou Shoujo Ai girls. It’s kinda hardcore (the Dizzy pic is one of the tamest ones in it) and fans of Zanjibaru and Inyouchuu would like this book a lot, I think.

Surely the book with the classiest title here, this doujinshi is titled “Rape Grade Up” and is by Studio PAL. It’s mostly black and white with a few color illustrations at the beginning, and it’s got some additional art of the Nanoha girls in compromising positions towards the end. No adult Vivio, though, sadly.

667 is an older book by Cyclone, who’ve produced a number of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha doujinshi. This one is all in color, which is very nice. Nanoha looks great in a Numbers suit; so does Fate, she shows up in the book as a brainwashed member of Jail’s harem, too.

This is Cyclone’s 667 Kai. I think it’s an omnibus reprinting of some of Cyclone’s earlier books, including 667 and I think 567 and 767A as well. It’s in black and white, so I’d recommend getting the individual books; 667 at least is in color, though I don’t think 767A originally was. I’m not sure whether 567 was or not. Cyclone’s titles are kinda confusing.

The other book is Cyclone’s Situation Note LM8. It’s basically about Nanoha getting molested by some kids. Vivio shows up in it but doesn’t do any of the molesting herself, which is a big missed opportunity.

Cyclone’s newest book is F850, and it deviates from their recent work by featuring Fate Testarossa during her younger days, rather than including the StrikerS cast. It’s in black and white and shows Fate being boinked by some faceless dudes, which is sorta par for the course with a lot of Cyclone’s books, if the Numbers aren’t involved.

This is Cyclone’s NNR; I’m not sure if it’s a copybook or not, since I’ve never bought one before, but it might be as it’s entirely black and white and is stapled together, while their other books have more professional binding and color covers. The neat thing about it is this little plastic thingy it comes with. I guess it might be a shitajiki; I don’t collect those so I’m not sure how large they are, but it’s a bit thicker than an index card, it’s made of hard but flexible plastic, and it’s a bit smaller than an 8.5 by 11″ sheet of paper. It’s got two illustrations, one with Nanoha being accosted by some Numbers and her former compatriots, and a picture of Nanoha having her clothes transformed into a Numbers bodysuit. Spiffy.

Cyclone has also done a couple of books based on Beat Blades Haruka; this one is titled T-01. Haruka gets raped by a group of faceless thugs, and it’s a bit disconcerting how she remains mostly clothed while the dudes are all nude; shouldn’t it be the other way around? Also, we learn a useful tip: when taking a girl out on a date, the cool new thing to do is to fill her backside up with chicken eggs. She’ll love it, I swear.

And here’s the sequel, which was released just a couple of months ago. It’s more Haruka and more faceless thugs, though she seems to be having a better time. Also, Narika shows up for a few pages and has a good time with some of the bad guy ninjas.

This book is by the circle Otogiya and is simply titled Kannagi. Appropriately, it features Itsuki Kannagi, who is tied up and raped by some faceless dude. You know, these faceless dudes really get a bum rap in doujinshi these days. Why are they so demonized in these books? Won’t anybody stand up for the faceless dudes?

The back cover shows Itsuki in her new job as a pitchwoman for useful products.

This is Fermata from Tri-Moon, the circle of Akira Mikazuki (usually written with an exclamation point, for some reason). It’s a large book, measuring about an inch wider and taller than most doujinshi, and it’s entirely in color. There’s a short comic featuring a woman who looks like Fate Testarossa, I think, and a number of gorgeous images of the Nanoha girls. I deeply admire Mikazuki’s art, and this is a beautiful book.

This book is Magical Seed Soushuuhen World from the circle Plum, another circle that’s done quite a few Nanoha books. It’s an omnibus book, weighing in at a hefty 177 pages. The artwork is very nice, but the thing I like the most about this book is the humor, which shines through even my total illiteracy in Japanese.

The book also provides an alternate telling of the events of episode 23.

Two books that were released at C78, the left is Tomose Shunsaku’s Level 16 and the right is Taihi Mixer and Type G’s Muv de Luv 2. I’ve seen both books floating around on the interwebs already.

And two more Muv-Luv books: the left one is Taihi Mixer’s Ore te Kimi Alter 2 while the right one is Project Prominence. Ore te Kimi Alter 2 is an older book, and the back of the book credits Azusa Makishima and Sou Miyata. I think Makishima is the illustrator of the Muv-Luv Alternative manga and Miyata has illustrated several Muv-Luv spinoffs, including Total Eclipse and Muv-Luv Alternative Chronicles, so I guess this is about as official as an unofficial doujinshi gets.

Project Prominence is very much an official product, having been released by Age-soft back in December 2008. It’s mostly mecha art and text; I can’t read the text, but I can definitely appreciate the mecha art. Age also released a couple more books, including Lunatic Dawn, which I can’t find for a reasonable price anywhere.

I actually bought a bunch more books, but this’ll do for now. I’ll save the rest for a third part, and hopefully I’ll remember to photograph Rei and Asuka, too. Speaking of photography, excuse the crappy scanning here, I’m a lot better with a camera than I am with a scanner.

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Doujinshi and Doll Stuff, Part 1 (NSFW)

Tier — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:39:20 +0000

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

Recent Non-Figure Acquisitions

Tier — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 03:33:02 +0000

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.

Random Thoughts VIII – Why is it so hard to buy h-manga?

Tier — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:57:26 +0000

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:

One Year Ago, One Year Later

Tier — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:12:29 +0000

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?

Rei and Aegis Photo Re-shoots

Tier — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:01:18 +0000

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.