I guess I could’ve combined this news with the post I just made… but it kinda felt like it deserved it’s own post.

About 12 hours ago I was asked if I could go on a business trip to Japan.  6 hours ago I booked a flight.  Barring any problems, I’ll be taking off within the next 15 hours.

!!!

I’ll be landing on Thursday (Japan time) and working Friday & Saturday.  However I extended my trip to the next Thursday so I’ll have Sunday through Wendesday to have some vacation time (assuming my Japanese coworkers don’t pull me into the office ^^;;;).  I believe it’s still tsuyu (rainy season == hot & humid orz) but… it’s Japan!

So far I just have a short list of things to do:

1. Akiba
2. Odaiba Gundam
3. Experience some tanabata shenanigans
4. Eva maid cafe?

Busy at work lately, so once again I’m behind on blogs… but anyone else gonna be in or around Tokyo during that time (7/5 through 7/8)?  Feel free to contact me by e-mail (my gmail account is madaminu) if you’d like to meet up.

Packing my new camera and hoping it’ll survive the trip.  I have lens cases (lowepro stuff) for my lenses but nothing for the body nor a dedicated camera bag.  Was just gonna cushion it with some clothing and put everything in my carry-on.  Didn’t seem like it should be a problem?  ^^;

Anyhow, we’ll see if I can manage some posts from my hotel but otherwise, see y’all next week!

以上！

I’m pretty sure there are other niconico sign up tutorials out there but I figure it can’t hurt adding another to the mix.  Come one, come all, discover the otaku joys of nico nico douga!

Click for the artist's blog post

You can see a video of the drawing of the awesome pic above here (timed awesomely with the niconico rainbow medley I posted about earlier).  So let’s get on with the tutorial so that you can follow that link!

Disclaimer: if you do go through with this, I have one simple request: Please don’t be an comment douche.  Well, I guess that falls on the deaf ears of those who are signing up to attempt to troll and for the rest of you I’m preaching to the choir.  Ah well.

First things first, head to the registration page.  We’re gonna click on the button to the right.

The button on the left is for a premium account… but I assume you don’t want to pay for anything :P  You’ll be at the sign up form now:

Looking at the above annotated screenshot I think it should be pretty self-explanatory.  Your nickname must be between 2 and 16 characters.  For the security question it must be between 4 and 64 characters, and the answer must be between 1 and 16 characters.  English characters should be fine for password, security question and your screenname (e-mail too, of course).

Now to verify your input:

As you’re probably used to, type the garbled up word in the picture in the text box like I have in the screenshot.  Then click on the submit button.  Almost there!

Basically this screen says… check your e-mail!

Click on the link to activate your account.

Yay you’ve done it!  The number is your user ID if you’re curious.  Click on the link and you’ll be at this page…

The above page is just some sort of welcome screen… it might have some useful tidbits on it but to be honest I pretty much ignored it ^^;;  The blue button on the right means, “yes I want to graduate out of beginner mode,” while the button on the right means, “no, I’m still a n00b!”.  I think I went for the blue button, and again to be honest, I don’t know what beginner mode even does ^^;;;  Regardless it doesn’t really matter at this point if you just want to watch videos.

If you’ve tried to visit before you may be familiar with the page you’re left off at:

Click on the screenshot above to better see where I’ve annotated the search, ranking and other features.  Well, most important are probably the search and ranking.  The search works in a standard fashion – just remember you can toggle between searching keywords and tags by clicking the corresponding button.  Let’s have a quick look at the ranking page… well actually before we get that let me remind you that you can feed this through your favorite translator and probably get a pretty good idea of what’s going on.  If you’d rather not trouble though, read on ^^

Again, you’ll probably want to click to the full size screenshot to actually read the annotations.  But anyhow, just click on the movie thumbnails or titles to view the corresponding movie.  Or click on a category to change your listing, or switch up the ranking criteria as you see fit.  Or if you’re fed up check out sankaku’s niconico ranking page. ^^;  Which is nice and all as long as what you’re looking for is in the list somewhere ^^;  With an actual account you now have true power!!

Personally I like stopping by and checking the daily rankings by views for music, anime, games, people singing, and the all categories.  When I was beginning though, switching the time period to “total” and seeing the all time most viewed videos in each category gives you a nice overview of what niconico is about.  Anyhow, gonna leave it at that for now.  Will follow up with, at the very least, what is and how to use your “my list” and how to leave comments… let me know if you have any other questions you’d like answered about the site! (I’m no expert but will try my best ^^;)

Oh, one last thing before I go!  When you’re logged out, you’ll probably want to know how to log back in, huh? ^^;  If you’re on the main page it’s actually not to hard to spot since it’s in english and the button is yellow:

If you followed a video link without being logged in it’ll look a little different:

Funny thing is that you can use either login form on the above screen.

Alrighty, that’s it!  Niconico away!

以上！

Took some other pics while I was doin’ my miku review, figured I’d pass them along.

I view all my pics on my computer… biggest monitor goes up to 1920×1200 so it was nice to finally get a camera that can produce pics that I can size down, fit the screen, and stay sharp!

For these pics I’ve uploaded a 1920×1200 version that you can click through for.  On the off chance you actually use the pics for wallpaper, sorry, but hopefully the dust doesn’t bother ya ^^;;;

Speaking of such, anyone have any good methods for removing really really really fine dust?

I think poor suzu was the worst off ^^;;

miku miku shite yan yo~♪

hope to get back to finishing the kemeko manga soon…

random thought: on episode 19 of macross frontier at the moment… really have a craving for a ranka or sheryl figure now orz  klanklan wouldn’t hurt either :P

and has the summer anime season started already?  i’m so bad at keeping up orz

Anyhow, that’s all for today!

以上！

Continuing to review older releases until some new orders arrive ^^;  Looks like tama-nee is released but I had combined her with the delayed moka so she probably won’t ship until July orz.  Anyhow, thought miku was fitting since lately I’ve been watching so many vocaloid videos on niconico ^^;

I believe miku was originally released in September, 2008 – quickly followed up with multiple rereleases.  Good Smile Company’s 1/8 release is pretty solid, though at the moment I wish I had a 1/7 ^^;  (seems like Max Factory is working on that?)

I think it’s awesome that the all time most viewed video on niconico is みくみくにしてあげる♪ (youtube) – miku miku ni shite ageru – I’ll mikumiku it for you.  6.4 million views, 1.9 million comments, and 139k people added to a “my list” (niconico’s playlist system).

It wasn’t really until I started watching all the stuff on niconico that I really started to get into the vocaloids.  All the fan art, videos, mmd (mikumiku dance) and fan renditions of songs is really amazing.  I’ll try to put together my own niconico guide for the less language inclined folk sometime soon ^^;

Been having a bit of a problem with my lens… it’s so powerful all the dust is captured in excruciating detail ^^;;

…and that’s after I spend five minutes dusting orz.

I’d stick with some less magnified views but I’m having too much fun, so dust be damned :P

Plus it lets you see how well the details were done on miku ^^

I find myself using the live view so I can zoom in digitally 10x and manually focus.  Pretty good insurance that my shot is focused, then I just have to worry about getting a narrow enough aperture to keep the rest of the pic in focus ^^;

Hmm just realized I forgot pantsu shots.  You can check in with foo-bar-baz for that.

You can see my background wasn’t high enough for the angle above ^^;  Was nice and blurred out though so thought I’d leave it.  Then decided to see how it’d look without the bg.

Ok I guess, not sure about the black shelf making that horizontal line ^^;

I dunno but I really like her 01 tatoo ^^

And I like the above shot for no good reason ^^;

Lights were causing some weird reflections -_-

Should’ve fixed the white balance below, looks more like world is mine ^^;

Green fingernails match her I guess but not sure I like the color ^^;

Turns out this is the figure I gave away for the contest I held last December.

nanu ended up winning by guessing how many volumes of manga I would have when the contest ended.  Hopefully I’ll have some extra cash to hold another contest this year.  Always fun to give things away ^^

One nice thing about having a sharp lens and higher resolution pictures is that I can finally make 1920×1200 wallpapers that look as sharp as the resized smaller pics!  I’ll have to update my figure wallpaper page with some new stuff.

Unfortunately miku’s out of stock at hlj and hobby search.  Perhaps other stores or some place local may still have her?

I’d be more diligent linking other reviews but since she’s older I’ll just stick with foo-bar-baz and James‘ reviews.  James has links to 5 other reviews if you need ‘em ^^

以上！

Just another niconico public service announcement to spread some otaku love.  I would’ve put a translation in the title but I have a small paragraph worth of explanation about it ^^;  Before that, I should mention I’ll be talking about the latest niconico music medley, 七色のニコニコ動画を元の曲で再現してみたver.D!

If you have a niconico account, can understand japanese, and somehow haven’t seen it yet, I recommend watching it on niconico for the usual comment insanity.  I dunno but I totally love the niconico comment system.  Really changes the experience… rather than inane youtube stuff it’s more of a stream of the otaku conscious… perhaps tapping into the same appeal of videos of people’s reactions to other videos, you get the same sort of thing in comment form at niconico.  Definitely contributes to a community feeling when  you’re watching.  Very amusing, but you have to be able to read fast ^^;

I don’t know the whole history (only joined niconico this year) but as far as I can tell, there’s this guy shimo who has been making niconico music medley videos.  He takes tons of iconic otaku songs and blends short clips into  awesome high energy, 10+ minute long dance remixes.  The original video release is usually just a windows media visualization but fans quickly eat it up and create their own versions (like the version above where someone painstakingly spliced official vids and source audio for each of the songs).

His last two videos have been insanely popular – the previous at 2.7 million views and the current one already having breached 300k in a week.  If the synthetic nature of the original versions turns you off, how about a giant chorus version?

The above vids are fan versions of ニコニコ動画流星群 -> nikoniko douga ryuuseigun -> nico nico video meteor swarm. (mmm meteor shower?)

Back to the vids I posted a the beginning of this post, the original is titled 七色のニコニコ動画 -> nanairo no nikoniko douga -> lit. the seven prismatic colors of nico nico video.  “seven prismatic colors” is pretty clunky, so perhaps a better way to translate it would be “The niconico rainbow”?  Anyhow, I think you get the picture ^^;

Ah yes, and best hurry if you plan on watching 七色のニコニコ動画を元の曲で再現してみたver.D at niconico.  I think because the creator used so many official vids and stuff it is in danger of being deleted.  For the first few days, half the comments were like, “10:32 still up!”, “8:15!”, “2:45 still alive!” or, “This is an amazing hand-drawn movie!”, “I had no idea MMD had gotten this good!”.  Also touching to see so many otaku leaving the, “pleeeease don’t delete this!” comments ^^  At any rate, it’s been up for about a week, but who knows how much longer.

Since the previous ryuuseigun version has been out longer, I believe there are more spin offs like this vocaloid version ^^

Or an impressive auto-playing musical mario level:

These medlies are great ways to see how familiar you are with the great songs of otakudom, enjoy!

以上！

If my records are right it looks like I’m actually caught up for reviews of recent releases!  Time to take a look at some older releases… Limit Gunz!

Also my first review with the new camera… haven’t quite settled into a standard work flow and such… gonna be a while before that falls in place ^^;  Didn’t get all the shots I wanted and at the very least, looks like I need a new tripod.  The cheapo one I had was great to start but there’s no way it can support things in a vertical orientation (though I suppose with the added resolution I could just crop down pics ^^;)

Limit Gunz was released back in January by Art Storm, sculpting by the fine folks at Cerberus Project.  I actually didn’t get her until March since I got her from Kid Nemo (the last figure I ordered from them, in fact).

I suppose you’ve probably already read all about her if you were interested at the time.  Perhaps I’ll keep the chatter down to a minimum ^^;

As I feared, it was rather difficult to get off a full body shot with the 100mm lens ^^;  Required moving my setup around a bit which resulted in some non uniform background results like above.

Think I had a bit too much fun with the aperture settings.

Here’s a quick intro to aperture if you’re wondering what all the f numbers are.  When changing the aperture, you’re adjusting the amount of light that is allowed to pass through the lens.  More light == wide/fast == lower f numbers (i.e. f/2.8).  Less light == narrow/slow == higher f numbers (i.e. f/16).

Wide apertures causes a shallow depth of field – i.e. the distances at which the object is in focus is a small range.  Narrow apertures yield a longer depth of field – i.e. you get a large range in which the object will be in focus.

Now for some pics to make sense of all that mumbo jumbo.

f/2.8

Notice just the very tips of the barrels are in focus.

f/5

At f/5 a little more of the barrels and gun comes into focus.

f/10

f/16

At f/10 and f/16 even more of the gun comes into focus and, more noticeably, limit gunz herself.

f/32

Maxing out this lens at f/32 she still isn’t quite in focus but still sharper than f/16.  Of course, if I was focusing on her I would’ve changed focus to her face rather than keeping it on the barrel.

You may be wondering why you wouldn’t just max out the aperture all the time to get your entire subject in focus.  Well, you would if that’s your goal (sometimes you want other things to fall out of focus), *and* if you have enough light.  The problem with smaller apertures (larger f numbers) is that it requires more light to get the same brightness.  For example my f/2.8 shot required an exposure time of 0.5s.  At f/32 I needed 30s!  As such, unless you have a tripod for all your shots, you need to make some compromises.  No way you’re going to keep your camera perfectly still hand held for 30 seconds ^^;

f/2.8

That’s not to say shutter speed is the only parameter you have at your disposal.  There’s a complicated dance of variables you can tweak to achieve exactly what you want.  Distance of light sources to your subject, and ISO levels can also be tweaked to get you an ideal aperture & shutter speed.

f/9

In the f/2.8 shot you can see I don’t even have her whole shoe in focus.  It’s been quite a change having to deal with such a large aperture range.  My old camera went from f/2.8 to f/8 so my options were much more limited.

Oh yes, another reason why you’re not always using every extreme aperture you can get your hand on is the image quality.  Lenses often behave differently at the extremes so you may be giving up some sharpess or something at certain apertures.  When reading lens reviews you’ll often read about how the lens performs “wide open”.  This refers to the lens at max aperture (aperture opened as wide as possible == lowest f number).  A lens may experience some vignetting at the edges at wide aperatures or need to be stopped down to achieve higher sharpness, etc.

Well, enough with apertures for now ^^;  The 1:1 magnification of this lens is amazing.  You can really see (for better or worse ^^;) every last detail of your subject.

That reminds me… I had the hardest time figuring out what was meant by 1:1 magnification  ^^;;  Lifesize… how so?  and at what distance?  Not sure how obvious it is to others, but here’s what I eventually found out:

For the 100mm macro lens, you achieve 1:1 magnification at the minimum focus distance (which is ~1ft/0.3m).  I believe that equates to a working distance of ~6 inches/0.15m.  Now what that means is your subject will be projected life size onto your camera’s sensor.  Since the sensor is 22.2mm x 14.8mm on the 40D, I will fill my viewfinder with an object of that size at that distance.

A forumla I found was M = FX / D.

M = magnification
F = focal length (mm)
X = crop factor
D = distance to subject (mm)

It seemed to be accurate – 1 = 100 * 1.6 / 160 – i.e. 1:1 magnification is achieved for a 100mm lens on a 1.6 crop factor sensor at 160mm.  (well, actually they mention in the thread that it’s off for some macro lenses but for 100mm it seemed to work out about right).

So to calculate how far back I need to be for a full body shot… assume subject is 6 inches / 150mm, so I need a magniciation factor of ~ 1/10 to fit the figure in the 14.8mm of the camera sensor.  Solve the equation and D = ~1.5m.  Similarly I’ll need to be ~3m away for a full body shot of a 12 inch/.3m figure?  I’ll have to test that later.

You can see above I got the shoe on the right in focus but the left one wasn’t.  Forgot I was on f/2.8 -_-

Ok well perhaps I should talk about the figure at least a little ^^;

If you love big guns… well, I think it’s obvious what you need to do :P  Neat concept and pretty well executed.

The huge stand of the gun was a pretty snug fit so I assume it’s providing more than enough support to prevent leaning.

Gathering all the big guns ^^

The much more petite exelica wields a similarly huge weapon.

I think ‘cuz of the reviews I’d read I thought I’d already done my own review ^^;  Check ‘em out~

• Exelica Meteor
• ELTWorld
• Kyouran Kyodai

以上！

If you were wondering what I meant when I twittered, 「買っちゃった」 this is it ^^

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on my previous post. Please don’t be offended if I didn’t follow your advice ^^;;

Hope I’m handling everything correctly and putting things on right… was too excited to spend an hour reading the insanely long manual ^^;;

Well, I did at least read the bits on attaching a lens.  At any rate, very overwhelming.

So you can see I went with the 40D, and went right ahead with the 100mm f/2.8 macro lens.

For a general zoom I deviated from my original plan.  Looked closer at reviews of the 17-85, compared more images… decided I might as well save some money and get the 18-55 kit lens.  In the end the image quality was actually pretty similar between the two.

Figured I’ll start with the biggest bang for the buck for my zoom and then pursue higher grade glass later.

With the hood on the 100mm macro turns the camera into a beast!  Can’t imagine what’s it’s like wielding longer telephoto lenses ^^;

And now I have a strange urge to go to a park and take pictures of flowers ^^;;

Fumbling around with the settings as best I could I took some test shots… specifically wanted to compare my sakura results.

Here’s a similar pic from the review:

For the review pics I believe I had my camera set to ‘vivid’ which influenced the colors as you can see.  Lighting’s also different… I’ll have to do a true comparison under the exact same conditions.

The greatest thing I’ve already come to appreciate is the depth of field of the 100mm macro lens.

It’s insanely easy to get things to fall out of focus… none of these shots went wider than f/4.  And with my old camera limited to f/8 it feels weird being able to stop down much further.

Not the best shot but I love how I can get in so close without having my camera <1cm away from the subject ^^;;  Can you guess whose leg that is?  Err well, you probably have the answer below already on your screen, huh ^^;

Above was shot at f/13 in an attempt to keep her hair in focus.

Back at f/5.6.

Went through my collection using the built in flash to see how things would turn out hand held.

Lighting’s not the best, but great to have the background melt away.

Need to pick someone to review next ^^;

Sumo soap.

It was a random gift ^^;;

So much to learn/try out/discover!  Hope to get some review pics out in the near future.  Woo hoo!!  This camera is soooo sexay ^__^

以上！

p.s. Thanks again for the well wishes for the 1 year milestone.  And actually I’ve just passed 100k for real!  ^^

click for danbooru

A big thank you to everyone!  WAWAWA忘れ物 is now… well, I guess technically WAWAWA忘れ物 was born late January so it’s only 5 months old :P *ahem* Let’s overlook the name change… one year of blogging, yay! As you’ve no doubt figured out, I’m just gonna talk a bit about some stats, milestones, site trivia and the like. If that’s not your cup of tea, just let me say thanks again for stopping by and see ya next time m(_ _)m

My first post here at wordpress was June 17, 2008, though I actually had a brief stint at blogspot. That only lasted 4 posts though (of which 1 was a no content “hello world” and another, the moving announcement ^^;;). So while it was earlier (June 5), it felt more official to use the start date here (plus gave me some extra time to write up a post :P).

During those brief blogger days, sonic_ver2 was the first person to comment, and the first blog in my blogroll. Happy to see he’s still reading and I’ve been following his blog ever since too. Here at wordpress it was optic, another comrade I’ve been following ever since.

My first figure review was of Shall Rhousemann.  Here’s a sample pic from that post:

Really want to go back and take some new photos someday ^^;

My figure review post count is now up to 53 or roughly 1 a week. (some review posts covered more than 1 figure so number of figures reviewed is probably 55 or slightly more…)

This is the 174th post and over 3,400 comments have been posted. Since I reply to pretty much every comment that means somewhere over 1700 comments are from readers.

Average views per day have been steadily increasing month by month. Started out at 69 in June, grew to 88 in September, had exploded to 193 in December and I still can’t believe it but I’m currently looking at somewhere between 600 and 800 for this month. Graph below.

Monthly Average Hits per Day

And of course with average views per day increasing, that corresponds to total views per month also increasing – started off at about 2,500 per month and peaked last month at over 18,000.

Hits per Month

Actual visitors is a more humbling number and unfortunately I didn’t add another counter to track that until earlier this year. According to statcounter my unique visitors were at around 5,000 in Feb and were approaching 13,000 in May (with corresponding page views of ~8k and 18k).

Participating in various link exchange programs has undoubtedly contributed to a lot of traffic… Danny Choo / otaku.fm and Sankaku Complex both feature a system in which your blog will be randomly featured in a rotating list on the site.  Animenano is another aggregator community I joined.  Shadonia has been gracious enough to take some of my reviews and translate them to french for some exposure to fellow figure collectors overseas.  And finally tsukiboard, while less about traffic sharing and blog promotion (well, actually, now they have an aggregator too ^^;), has been a great site for managing my collection and getting to know more about others’.

click for danbooru

Getting back to some stats, as far as my top referrers go otaku.fm unsurprisingly sits at #1, being the first community I joined.  Combine that with hits from various dc news items and hijacked articles puts dc in general even higher. Animenano follows with over 750 referrals but somehow foo-bar-baz (having picked this humble site to add to his blogroll recently), has already accumulated over half that amount. From the not-getting-50-gazillion-hits-a-day community, Figured’s FigureLog still leads for referrals! She recently had a baby and has shifted to a more personal blog. Following her it’s Daybreak’s Bell, Exelica Meteor, and AnimaticFigmation. Detailed list below:

All Time Top Referrers

For posts… kaguya is the runaway popularity queen. Over three thousand views for her figure review, though I’m pretty sure most people weren’t looking for that :P Have no regrets all ye “kaguya nanbu hentai” searchers. I’m here to support you. In second place is my list of figures (and links to their reviews), followed by Kanu (daiki kougyou) and the Lineage II Dark Elf (wish I had better pics of both orz). More below:

All Time Top Pages and Posts

Top searches show the true nature of the internet:

All Time Top Searches

If you’ve been reading for a while you probably know I don’t shy away from visual novels nor eroge. And my sankaku complex feed should alert you to my attitude towards ero stuff. Have no shame my friends :P Speaking of underboob… there’s this post on sankaku complex you’ll probably want to check out, and particularly this:

Pic from sankaku complex. Link to post is above.

I actually first saw this pic on dc but it’s been captivating. Who the heck is this?!

Alright, hopefully I haven’t scared off those of purer intentions ^^;; Last set of stat pr0n included in the wordpress report is clicks. Mostly dominated by my room pics, (largely due to danny linking my site when I participated in the room contest ^^;). A mio pic also got its way up pretty quick, and of course kaguya pics are high too.

Unfortunately you can’t click the links in that pic to see what the heck those urls are pointing too.  You’ll have to take my word for it  ^^;  As far as blogs go, looks like people most often head over to How a Girl Figures, Flying Pussyfoot and Exelica Meteor.

My biggest day was actually very recent – June 10, 2009 saw 1256 page views.  Largely thanks to foo-bar-baz and danny choo I believe.

And finally, all told, I’m still a bit shy of 100,000 page views, clocking in at ~97,000.  If you’ve been wondering, yes the little blurb in the left column labeled 情報 is the wordpress hit counter.  情報 just means info/news and “＃＃＃＃＃メロンパンを食べました。” means “#### melonpan have been eaten.”  Well, actually given that conjugation I suppose it’s more like, “I have eaten #### melonpan.” ^^;

click for danbooru

Oh, and before I wrap up. Many thanks to James, super rats and foo-bar-baz for their wonderful sites. I’ve always looked up to you guys for your photos and it’s been my inspiration for improving my own.  Not to say there aren’t many other reviewers with beautiful pics, but those were the first I stumbled upon ^^;

Starting out most of my stuff looked like this:

Hand held with the built in flash (not that my camera accepts an external :P), I tried to make up for it with interesting angles, group shots, or whatever else I could think of.

Slowly over the course of the year I added a tripod, backgrounds, lamps, homemade diffuser, and finally some umbrella lamps:

Still not perfect by any means, but comparing to my first shots I can’t believe the results ^^;;  It’s all with the same camera, so it definitely is true what they say about proper lighting. (pic from my sakura review… I think my favorite set of pics to date)

We’ll see just how much some better glass will help out… perhaps in the near future ^__^

Sorry for the insanely long post but I guess I’m a sucker for anything nostalgic… and stats ^^;  And hopefully this didn’t come off as too self indulgent or arrogant or whatever. I try to know my place in the blogosphere food chain :P (what was it, like 1,000,000 page views for sankaku in the first four months?)

Thanks again for reading!  Never expected to achieve more than just a fraction of the traffic I’m getting today.  It’s been a pleasure getting back to my otaku roots and sharing the experience with everyone.

これからも宜しくお願いします。
kore kara mo yoroshiku onegai shimasu

Here’s to another year!  kanpai!

/乾杯

以上！

Not that there wasn’t anything I wanted, but rather I had been shielding my wallet from damage ^^;  Was going rather nicely for the last month or so but leave it to Alter to bust it open again…

official (i assume) pic found at hobby search - link below for more

Back at Hobby Search I found myself adding figures to my cart ^^;  Ah nanoha.  No way I could pass her up.  Series is named after her!  With all the bits flying around her, I really have no idea where to put both her and fate orz.  *ahem*  Sorry blowfish, I’ll try to keep the nanoha bits to a minimum :P

Two others made the cut – first we have Freeing’s Kanu.  Really love the pose and had been wanting a kanu from koihime musou.  Giga Pulse had released her earlier… but with her oppai exposed and a very subdued pose I passed.  The link goes to their more recent clear version, but there was a normal colored version too.

pic also from hobby search - click link above for more

I was able to see the prototype at wonhobby and had been impressed then, despite the lack of painting.  Now seeing the fully colored prototype I think this is going to be a winner (assuming she doesn’t lean ^^;).

Last to end up in my cart was Alter’s miyafuji.

pic found at hobby search, link above for more

I’m not exactly a pantsu witches fanatic but despite all my complaining, I love sets… and the prospect of an Alter pantsu witches set was tantalizing.

Had to stop myself there or my plans to purchase a dslr would be liquidated ^^;;

The Unfortunate Unchosen

Some others that I had to cut (but am still considering… if budget constraints let up ^^;)…

Click for pic source (hobby search listing)

More queen’s blade ^^  Alleyne (sp?) looks pretty dang good but when trying to trim down my cart, I just couldn’t help but think… I’m not really a devoted Queen’s Blade fan… no need to push this one.  But on the other hand she’s an elf!  Pose could also stand to be a bit more dynamic… but yeah, gonna wait and see.

Max Factory’s realistic Yoko was another…

Click for pic source (hobby search listing)

I totally love the execution but again thinking about it… am I that much of a yoko fan?  I’m going to have Alter’s & Enterbrain’s release in hand… and perhaps I should get Gift’s rendition first…  But yeah, hesitated so gonna sit on this one too.

Completing the haruhi gekisou set was also tempting… and having just finished watching Candy Boy, kanade and yukino were also calling to me.

Pics from hobby search listings. Click links above for more

And finally there was Alter’s Saber Lily and Silfa.

Click for hobby search source

With GSC’s version already on order I couldn’t bring myself to get the Alter one.  Looks like her outfit may have some finer details (and that scabbard looks beautiful)… but I am not (yet) a Saber fanatic.  Plus the GSC pose and base grab my attention more.  Can definitely see how people may prefer this one, just saying I couldn’t justify a 2nd saber lily purchase ^^;

Click for hobby search source

Though ToHeart2 holds a tight nostalgic grip on me, silfa wasn’t really a favorite of mine.  The figure looks fantastic but just reminds me how disappointed I am that Alter hasn’t released tama-nee ^^;

That actually only scratches the surface of my 96 figure wishlist (’course that has everything, including the kitchen sink) but the above are probably the ones most on my mind at the moment.

Have preorder announcements incurred much damage to you lately?  Anything you’re looking forward to?  I’m still trying to figure out if I’ll nab the actSta subaru when she goes up for order…  and bikini-Fate is probably just around the corner, which is another must buy ^^;

以上！

The problem with following so many series is that auto-buy mode becomes increasingly damaging….

I had ordered Saki a couple weeks back, and having finally started the hatsukoi anime I had to get the rest of that series.  Totally recommend hatsukoi limited for fans of romantic comedy.  What it reminds me most is kimi kiss.  No fantastic elements or anything, just a nice complicated web of relationships.  I guess those are kinda hit or miss, depending on if you like the characters… but for what’s it’s worth, they were a hit with me ^^;

Yui’s seiyuu (豊崎 愛生 – toyosaki aki) does the voice for Koyoi, which niconico has taken advantage of for moelicious results.

【ニコニコ動画】平沢唯に「お兄ちゃん」と呼ばせてみた【けいおん！】

Koyoi, for those unfamiliar with the series, is a hilarious buracon (brother complex).

There’s a mix of middle school students and high school students… misaki falls into the high school category.

…and an uber girl next door ^^

As a romantic comedy with so many characters, they’ve got pretty much all the bases covered as far as character archetypes go.

tsundere included ^^  So yeah, check it out.

And if those 8 volumes weren’t enough…

I actually already have all of azumanga but… according to sankaku there’s ton of new art so I couldn’t resist.

I’m glad I guessed correctly that I hadn’t already bought ToLoveる volume 14… yami on the cover ^^

Was surprised to see the ToHeart2 manga in stock… kinokuniya was pretty bad at keeping it stocked as I always had to order the latest volume.  It was thanks to this manga that I got into visual novels ^^;

And last but not least kimi kiss vol 5!  I wish more manga adaptations of visual novels would take this form – each volume is a complete story arc for the given character.  Rather than try to smush everything into 1 plot you get a much better adaptation imo.

click for gelbooru

As mentioned above, kimi kiss is also a romantic comedy without any fantastic elements… you’ve got your choice for the medium in which to enjoy… started as a visual novel but manga and anime are both out if you prefer.

Figure gets have been slow of late, though I still have my fair share of reviews to catch up on.  Just need to pick who’s next ^^;

以上！