I am wondering about the cost though. It seems that I could roll the dice on not preordering and buy from an online retailer for the same price (and possibly cheaper). I know I would be taking a risk, but Robert’s seems to have comparable prices to ordering from Amiami taking into account the large shipping cost. Maybe shipping from Amiami isn’t that bad though.

At the moment, there’s just one shop on ebay that offers her, so prompted by you, I had a look at AmiAmi. They’re not as expensive as the ebay guy, and I hope their shipping doesn’t turn out to be a huge rip-off. So I registered with them and ordered Imari. Are they reliable? I guess so, because you’re shopping there, too…

I’d imagine it’s probably okay to order from them now.

I sent the initial email using their inquiry form on the site, and got a response back within a day saying to order the items and they’d send a Paypal payment request email. I went through and added 3 preorder items to my cart; in the note when checking out, I put “Would like to pay with Paypal” just in case.

Got an email notifying me I had a new message a few hours later, and at first it was a bit confusing. But I logged into my account, clicked the order number, and saw a comment thread. They basically had everything tallied up with the total cost (including EMS shipping) since obviously it’s going to be a bit more than their uniform 500 per cover for Japanese orders. I confirmed the total, they sent the payment link, I paid, and they confirmed payment.

Overall, I think it’s a pretty cool system and they were really quick in responding. I don’t know how strong their English skills are or how much extra effort they’re going to open their service up to foreigners, but it really is appreciated. I could see two potential negatives with the system.

The first is a minor one currently and I don’t even know if it’s an issue, since I’m not sure how the site reacts if you pay via bank transfer. Currently, it’s showing my order as unbilled (at least according to the translation) despite the happening in the thread. My guess it it’s because I’ve paid with Paypal and they’d have to manually flag my account as paid, but I honestly don’t know. I don’t think it will be an issue as far as shipping is concerned, but I wonder if it will properly credit my EXP/points.

The other thing is more of a personal preference issue, and might not be an issue at all if you ask. The three items I ordered release roughly around the same time, but one comes out about a month before the other two. They’ll all be shipping together. I have no problem with this, and I’m sure if someone requested separate shipping, they could probably be accommodated (if they foot the bill of individual shipping, of course.) Someone else did a mix of stock/preorder covers, and they’re all set to ship at the same time. It still makes sense to me, but I could understand wanting to get an in stock cover now and a preorder cover a few months down the line.

Horizon is a really weird show. I liked it a lot, I’d say it was probably my second favorite show of last season, but if someone asked me what it was about, I couldn’t give an answer. I’d probably just blabber something about high school girls in really tight outfits who battle religious people when not otherwise engaged in school activities. It is definitely a huge mess in terms of storytelling.

Kyuuketsuki! Man what a great show that was. Mikage was really cute and Claude was really cruel but man, the best part of it was Mikage’s voice actress. So many H-anime voice actresses just sorta squeak and squeal through their shows but Mikage’s actress put some effort into it. She really did a great job with giving the impression that Mikage wasn’t having a very good time.