This site is fifteen years old today! It’s still kicking, and though the updates are still infrequent, my figure purchases continue unabated, as the photo above attests – most of the figures contained in the boxes haven’t appeared on this website yet.
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And we celebrate the conclusion of year 14 of Tentacle Armada, though the pace of updates is still particularly slow, which I’m not proud of. I’m certainly not quitting collecting figures; I think I’m buying more figures than ever before, actually. Unfortunately, I’m also playing more gacha games than ever before; they’re an incredible time sink – though, thankfully, not a very large money sink for me, as I don’t spend a lot of money on them, at least relative to some of my other hobbies.
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Well, the site is a year older today. The pace of updates is still not as frequent as I would like, and I’m actually sitting on a couple of photo sets right now that just need writeups. That said, I’ve done fifteen figure and statue reviews in the last year since the previous site anniversary, which I think isn’t too bad, though it’s a woefully low number compared to the amount of figures I actually bought in that time period.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve done a preorder post – or any post at all, really, but it’s been particularly long since the last preorder post, so let’s take a look at the figures I’ve either already preordered or am thinking hard about picking up. But first, I like to use these preorder posts just to talk about general life updates. My life is going pretty well for the most part – certainly the last sixteen months or so have reinforced how good I have it that I work in a relatively safe and secure job that affords me the opportunity to buy pervy girly figures and wristwatches. But that said, there is no reason to settle; having been vaccinated, I’ve returned to working in the office on a new project whose environs I don’t enjoy, and I’ve spent the last month contemplating looking for new opportunities. These thoughts have weighed me down some, hence the paucity of updates, but I’ve got some time this weekend and a backlog of photographs to edit. Unfortunately, none of them are hentai figures, which some have asked about. On the plus side, I’ve received in the last couple of months all of the remaining figures I ordered that had been trapped in Japan due to the limited shipping options available for much of the last year. I certainly have no shortage of figures to review, particularly R-18 figures.
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Tentacle Armada turns twelve years old today! Obviously there’s been the expected spate of non-posting which has unfortunately become the norm here, but aside from that, the past twelve months have obviously been more notable for a global pandemic unprecedented in the lives of everyone in the United States except perhaps some centenarians who lived through the 1918 flu outbreak. As I’ve mentioned before, the last year actually has been pretty good for me; I’m doing very well in my work, nobody that I know has been infected by COVID, and I’ve mostly weaned myself off of World of Warcraft, which I’ve had a love-hate relationship with for over a decade. The extra time has given me opportunities to indulge my most recent hobby, which is collecting and shopping for wristwatches. As far as games go, lately I’ve been playing Epic Seven and also some Azur Lane, though not nearly as much as I used to. It comes to mind that I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a shipgirl figure from either Azur Lane or Kantai Collection here, which is a little strange given how dominant both franchises have been in the figure world for the last few years.
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We turn eleven years old today! Suffice to say, there’s been less to celebrate this last year due to a protracted spell of non-posting on my part, for which I feel kind of bad, but not particularly so; ten or eleven years is a really long time for one person to maintain a hobby-oriented website and taking a break to recalibrate isn’t an entirely bad thing.
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It’s the end of the first month of a new year and it’s also preorder outlook time. First, though, a bit of administrative commentary: I usually do a post enumerating my five favorite figures of the previous year. I think I’m going to roll that into my site birthday post next month since I do not actually know yet what my five favorite figures of last year might be. As sad as it might sound, I haven’t actually opened most of the shipping boxes containing the figures that I purchased and thus haven’t actually looked at many of the figures I bought, and I feel I ought to actually consider them in person before I decide if they are amongst my favorites of the year.
I had intended to cut down spending on figures this year, but rising prices and the rampant proliferation of porno figures and 1/4 scale bunnygirls is severely testing the mettle of this resolution. Accordingly, it seems like many of the figures on this list are either lewd or are sporting leotards and cottontails.
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Tentacle Armada turns 10 years old today! When I published this site’s very humble first post, I did not imagine that I would keep this site going for another decade. Yet here it is; not as frequently updated as I would like but with 345 figure reviews in the archives, on top of a number of dakimakura cover and doll reviews, I don’t feel that this site has ever lacked for content.
Here are the site stats for the ten years of this site’s existence. Pageviews are off by maybe a hundred thousand due to a several-month period where views were being counted twice. It’s funny; I remember obsessing over site stats for the first few years but I don’t pay a lot of attention to them now. For one, there’s not much point in doing so; also, a lot of internet activity is tied up in social media, from which I generally abstain from participation, and thus never promote this site to new visitors. I do have a Twitter account that I infrequently post to, but I stopped using my Facebook profile a dozen years ago and – perhaps strangely for someone who runs a photography-based blog – I have never had an Instagram account.
This site hasn’t changed much over the years. Sometimes I think about giving it a revamp, perhaps switching over to a more slick and contemporary WordPress theme rather than the rather dated main-box-and-sidebar blog layout that I’ve been using for this last decade, but I’m not motivated enough to do that much work, and I actually like how this site has maintained a consistent look even as self-published blogs have become less of a thing over the years.
There are some other things that date this site, both obvious and less so. A very obvious one is the ex-president doll that I have used, who has kind of become a site mascot, particularly with the more lecherous figures I review. It would certainly be more appropriate for me to incorporate a doll of the current president in my photos, but somehow, I don’t think he’d be very popular here.
A less obvious thing is a post I never actually created. One of the prevailing ideas when I started this site is that you needed an expensive camera to get good pictures. I therefore resolved to do a series of photo shoots using a very inexpensive compact camera, knowing that I could get good results with my standard lighting setup. As usual, I waffled and procrastinated on actually doing the required work, and much to my surprise, the entire compact camera industry collapsed a few years ago, extirpated by smartphones. That was certainly something I did not see coming.
I’ve seen a lot of figure sites come and go over the years. I did take down the blogroll section because almost all the figure review blogs I liked to visit are now defunct (Wieselhead is the only one that is still maintained). That’s unfortunate, I suppose, but for myself, I still enjoy running a figure review website and I have no plans to cease updates. Therefore, here’s to another ten years of figure reviewing and pillowcase photographing (still one of the more popular aspects of this site, peculiarly enough).
Chronic illness and laziness have delayed this post for weeks longer than I had planned, but better late than never; here is the traditional list of my five favorite figures of the previous year. It was a great year for figures, I think, aside from rising costs and the continuing trend of manufacturers selling their products outside of the normal web stores, thus driving up the price of their figures even more. Such is the price we pay to be collectors. At least the figures have usually been worth it.
I should note that I’m only including PVC figures in this list; usually this list includes everything I’ve bought, but given that I’m a big proponent of larger figures, it’s not really fair to compare a two-foot tall, $700 statue to a typical 1/7 scale, $120 PVC figure. If I were to include statues, Aspen and the gigantic 1/3 scale Kitana that I got a few months ago would be on this list, probably at the top. A 1/3 scale statue really needs to be seen to be believed.
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November has been a spectacularly unproductive month for me, for a variety of reasons, most of which stem from the fact that I am unrepentantly lazy. Regardless, it’s been a couple of months since the last preorder post so here is a list of figures that I am thinking of ordering. Unlike most of these lists, where I don’t actually order most of the figures I write about, I’m actually thinking of ordering almost everything on this list; the only one that might not be purchased is Asmodeus.
Reviews will resume very shortly, as I have a stack of figures that have arrived recently. First up will probably the one half-naked Gantz girl and I’ve also got a figure of a half-naked loli (and another girl who could pass for a loli) waiting next.
Also, I have quite a few 1/4 scale figures from FREEing – mostly bunnygirls from To Love-Ru and Muv-Luv, but also their Elizabeth Mably and Angela Balzac figures – and a few Western statues that I had planned to review but now am not sure if I will. I have the feeling that people are not that interested in them and I’m curious to know whether anyone would be saddened if did not review them. Throughout the lifetime of this site I’ve taken the stance that I plan to review every figure that I buy, but being that they seem not that popular, I wonder if that uncompromising principle may be outmoded.
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