Late Christmas, or something.

Posted by Halconnen on January 3, 2009

Well. This is about four days late. O_o. Where the hell did all my time go?

Anyway, I initially intended to write a post about what I did from the 24th to the 31st. Sadly, I still didn’t get all of the pictures that were taken sent to me, and I really wanted to use some of those.

Instead, I’ll write about something else. Namely, about what the mailman brought me today. :3

This actually took me quite some time to get to work. First, I tried to just upload the images to wordpress, who crapped out on the thumbnail generation with an exception error. Ironically, I checked via ftp, and the thumbnails were created properly, yet probably not properly written into the DB backend, so they didn’t show up in the gallery. Which was a clusterfuck. Can’t have people open two dozen 800KB images every time they open the blogpage. So I tried another gallery plugin. Out of memory error. Gah.

I then resigned, batch resized the pictures myself via Irfanview (nifty tool, that), then uploaded them to flickr and grabbed a flickr plugin for WordPress instead. Let’s see if this works well. If it does, it’ll save me tons of traffic in the future as well. Nifty.

Anyway, this afternoon I recieved this:

Hurray, packages! From HLJ, too! This made me noticed that ‘large’ Flickr sizes are about 40 pixels too wide for my layout, while medium is kinda tiny. Hmm.

Anyway, let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Smaller Package first.

Now what (or who?) could that be?

Looks like a Miku!

Closer look at the package.

Without the box.

Accessories. They included two leeks! Awesome. Er. Ignore the cables. They’re not part of the set. Didn’t even notice up to now that they slipped into the image.

“Is that a FACE on the floor?”

See those two little hair tentacles close to her neck? They prevent her from tilting back her head to look upwards. Erk. Also, see how one of the hair-joints is flipped.

Unintentional but obligatory pantsu shot. That’s one of my desks she’s standing on.

I’m sadly short on time, so let’s take a look at the second box for now.

Zomg. Is that a toll notification thing on top? Ew.

Hmm, box in a box?

Mystery lifted! Interesting way of packaging all that.

Tower flip!

Yep, my second HLJ order. Wonder why it ended up arriving at the same time as Miku. Here we have figma Nagato Yuki, figma Izumi Konata, Busou Shinki Strarf bis (yay, Starf reissue), and the Fort Bragg Ex Kit.

The two Shinki boxes side by side. The Strarf box sure is big.

Side of the Fort Bragg box. Table of contents.

Contents of the Strarf box. Can you say parts overload?

Still asleep. Wakey wakey!

There we go.

*poke* – “Uwah!”

“Eep.”

Also, lol at random desk stuff.

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Contents of the Fort Bragg box.

I have no idea what you’re talking about, so here’s a Bunny with a Shinki on it’s head.

My first impressions on the figures:

Shinki’s are a lot easier to pose than figmas, and have a huge range of articulation. They can pretty much kiss their own feet. (Pics of that later, maybe.) I was permanently afraid of breaking the Miku when doing anything, while the Strarf just moves. As you can see, the Strarf also stands pretty well without help of her stand. I had trouble keeping the Miku from falling over, so I used her base in the above pictures.

Also, the sleeves of the Miku make changing the hands a serious pain, and as already said, hair tentacles prevent Miku from looking up. The Miku figma is very nice to look at, but not perfect.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I finally want to get some content onto the page.

More in-depth review of Strarf (in battle gear!) and Miku later. Along with pictures of Konata, Nagato, Strarf in Bragg gear and maybe some pictures of the figures I already own.