I apologize for the posting delays, and for the shitty photo quality. For some reason the charger of my camera vanished. Somewhere. I can’t find it. Hence limited to ridiculously shitty cellphone camera.

I’ll unpack the Louise and do a proper review after I find it.

On an unrelated note, I came across this gem in the manga section(!) of a bookstore a few days ago.

I’m scared.

(And yes. Because I was just asked about that. That’s the book to the movie. The book. To Dragonball Evolution. In the manga corner. My brain is bleeding.)

I’ll also do some comparisons between the joints and bodies of the figmas vs. the MMS-body of the Shinkis.

Well, here we go. Captions below the pics. Click the pictures for larger versions. :3

Here we have my Nagato Yukis, plus the figures you saw the other day. Looks like Konata fell over.

I’ll start with my new figma Nagato. The first thing I noticed with her is that she’s much easier to balance than Miku. I didn’t use any tricks to make her keep her balance here, just used some patience.

Izumi kick! Interesting side-effect of Konata’s hair is that it functions as impromptu-stand on pictures like this.

Same, but done with a ‘little’ more patience than the previous pictures.

Nendoroid Yuki is ‘top-heavy’, so she constantly keeps rolling off of her chair, sadly. Will probably put her back on her stand pretty soon.

From the left to the right, we have: Konami Nagato Yuki, Max Factory Figma Nagato Yuki, Max Factory Nagato Yuki, Nedoroid Nagato Yuki and Freeing Nagato Yuki Bunnygirl ver.

Wee!

Nice gimmick on Strarf’s armored legs: The feet are ball-jointed, which makes balancing her without stand easier than it seems at first.

I’m surprised how easy it is to balance Starf. You pretty much just pose her and she just stands that way. Even when tip-toeing with one foot.

Shown in these two pictures is what gives Shinki bodies the freedom of movement of their legs. The thighs can pop forward, which allows the legs to be raised a lot higher.

High-kick! I know I promised pictures of Shinki kissing their feet in this post, but this is as close as it gets.

Incidentally, the above picture is the only one where I had to cheat and make Strarf use the box behind her as support.

Izumi-kick! Konata really looks like she enjoys that. Masochist.

As you may know, the shoes of the Nagato figma are attached like this.

This gives her feet quite some wiggle-room, which is what made balancing her on one foot so simple.

While Shinki-feet are attached the same way…

…twisting them looks very odd. Plus the ‘joint’ offers very little resistance when the foot is not in the proper position. That and…

…the fact that her feet are shaped naturally (as in, the bottoms are rounded), are the reasons why you pretty much can’t balance Strarf on one foot. At least, without using some support.

Pretty much my favourite part of the MMS body is…

…the torso joint, which the figmas lack completely.

Even though it looks like that joint doesn’t have too much flexibility, it makes posing and balancing the figure a ton easier.

One situation where the MSS-body loses to the figmas is doing the splits.

Vocaloid kick!

Posing Miku like this without stand is neigh-impossible. Her skirt is much stiffer than Yuki’s, so her thighs keep moving back together. Makes her topple almost instantly without the stand. And the huge hair is a nightmare. The joints are a nice touch, though. The Konata figma really could use some hair joints.

While we’re on the topic of Konata. Her front hair sits very loose. It probably popped off 1-3 times for each of the pictures containing her. Problem, if I’d glue it down, I could no longer change her face. Any ideas?

Konata and Yuki sure aren’t using the same scale. They’re almost the same size. Notice how Konata has Lucky-Star-ey ‘chubby’ hands.

That’s it for now. My Flickr gallery has a few pictures that I didn’t use on this post. If anyone wants more pictures of the figures at other angles or whatever, please say so, I’ll try to fill requests. :3

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.

f

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.

Danny Choo posted a huge amount of photos from the Hobby Complex 6 on his page here. Careful, this is very likely NSFW.

Some of those figures really impressed me.

These three are the ones that caught my attention.

Do want.

Especially the Kan-U. I’d kill to get this one. D:

How about you? Was there a figure that you really like? If yes, which one?