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Crowns of The Collection

Thursday, August 27th, 2015

I was sent these two postcards recently:

OMG, those are gamebook covers?! Let’s see what’s on the back:

HOLY MOSES! Those are nothing less than the actual signatures of the creators of FF gamebooks, Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson! These are holy grails to a gamebook collector such as myself 🙂

So where did they come from? Well some months ago on twitter the company Tin Man Games (who makes app versions of gamebooks) started posting pictures of their collection. I jokingly suggested it needed organization, and this led to a conversation between me and them which led to them learning about my collection, being amazed by my collection, and saying they wanted to ‘send me something small for my collection’. Little did I know the magnitude of this ‘small’ thing they wanted to send me!

Here the autographs are with the books from pictures on the cards:

I think I have a fourth imprint of House Of Hell as well. But I didn’t want to show off 😉

Posted in Celebrity, Gamebooks, Otaku | Comments Closed

Valrave The Liberator

Sunday, July 19th, 2015

I wanted to make another robot kit, but rather than a weeks-long HG Gundam or Zoid (both of which are on ‘my stack’) I instead opted for an ‘easy’ 1/144 kit.

My thoughts first turned to the impressive Strike Freedom Gundam 1/144 RG kit, but Florence is going to make that one and I didn’t want to ‘copy’! Then an enjoyable search online led to me buying this guy for about $20:

It’s ‘Valrave’ from the anime Valrave The Liberator. I neither know or care to know anything about the anime but loved the design of the mecha 🙂

Here’s what I found inside:

I hadn’t bought a 1/144 kit in a long while and was surprised at the detail of this one. 7 different plastic colours along with metallic stickers is more than I expected from a budget kit.

Assembly was easy enough, with the whole shebang taking maybe 4 hours in a few sessions. The most complex part was easily the abundance of stickers:

Here’s a before-and-after of the right leg:

If you look along the bottom edges, half-way up the leg, and along the rims of the two curved hip pieces you can see where I (carefully!) have applied stickers. I needed tweezers and patience to get these perfect, and thankfully they were normal adhesive stickers and not the challenging water-applied decals.

Here’s all the body parts pre-assembly:

And here he is put together:

So much detail for such an inexpensive kit! He’s very poseable, extremely well balanced and looks great.

Next were the weapons and stand. I’d never had a kit with a stand before so even though he stands easily I put him up on the stand as if he were hovering:

There are many weapon options. I went understand, with just the one sword and shield. Here’s a shot from behind:

And here he is in his new home, sharing a shelf with a giant stuffed Peep:

Obviously I’m very pleased with everything about this $20 model. Good thing I bought another in the lie at the same time 😉

Posted in Models, Otaku | Comments Closed

Probably Of Interest Only To The Bear

Saturday, July 18th, 2015

I haven’t made a World of Warcraft post in ages since I stopped played about 2 years ago (Sep 10, 2013 to be precise). Blizzard have been relentless in trying to get me to return, offering me free game time several times over the years. Mostly I ignore the offers, but yesterday I redeemed a free week and logged on to see what has changed.

Here’s what I saw upon login:

Of course there has been a new expansion added as well. I found it interesting they don’t mention that.

A couple of UI buttons were highlit with big glowing help arrows. One was the ‘collections’ button, that contains the pet, mount, toy and heirloom collections. Here’s a shot of the toy collection:

And here are the heirlooms:

There are so many mounts in the game now (>400 I think!) it’s just a bit crazy. The new ones added in the expansion are mostly boring reskinned wolves and pigs, but this guy caught my eye:

Look at the cost! Many of the new mounts seem excessively pricey. I guess Bliz wants to reduce player wealth.

Speaking of wealth, the other UI button they were directing me to was the in-game shop, where you can buy mounts and pets…

Or other things like game-time tokens ($20 each) that can be sold on the AH (~24k gold apiece) or even a $60 – sixty dollars! – level boost:

I wonder if they only priced it that high to make the additional cost of the expansion (which includes one boost) seem like a deal?

Anyway I had to see the new character models, which were billed as a big draw. For comparison, here’s a shot of Momomo (my main character) from back the days of the old models:

And here she was, all ready for some styling, immediately upon logging in today:

It’s not a massive difference is it? The short hair and weird face were not to my liking though, so I tried a few looks…

Before settling on this:

The fancy new character models are underwhelming. For starters the characters still look quite dated due to the limitations of the armor. And secondly the vast majority of characters have their faces covered by big bulky helmets (or shoulders) so you never see the new faces anyway. Not a selling point in my opinion.

Since I don’t have the expansion – and don’t intend to buy it now – playing the game stuck at level 90 is a bit like getting a free ticket to the movies but having to leave after the trailers. There wasn’t really anything to do that wasn’t available back when I quit, so I got bored very quickly.

I did have one quest I was always meaning to solve, so I went and beat up this dude:

They have added some sort of buff when it comes to fighting lower-level monsters (including raid bosses), which made Black Temple a faceroll. Which is good, since I’ve forgotten how to play and the class has changed so much I couldn’t really be bothered to relearn 🙂

Oh, and the game is dead. There wasn’t many people on at all (including in the capitals) and the guild seems to only have a dozen or so people that play:

So my free week didn’t keep my interest more than 24 hours. I parked Momo on her pretty sparkling horse (obtained from playing Hearthstone of all things) and said goodbye once again:

I’m sure one day I’ll buy the new expansion(s?) and return again. Just not today!

Posted in Games, Otaku, Time | 2 Comments »

Blast From The Past

Tuesday, June 30th, 2015

A few weeks ago, I visited Notre Dame in Paris. It was a spectacular place, and I remember it fondly.

On that trip I purchased the following papercraft kit of this very same cathedral:

This was originally intended as a gift for my brother, but as these things tend to happen, I decided it would be mine! Here’s the contents once opened:

The fact all the pieces are pre-cut and pre-scored is a big plus, since craft kits of this type that require you to cut the pieces out of a book are massive pains in the butt (which I know from personal experience). Even so, the kit was a bit tricky to put together, mostly because of the complexity of the curved surfaces (especially the steeple). Here it is completed:

Impressive isn’t it! It’s about 20 cm long and stands about 15 cm high, and is quite sturdy and a decent recreation of the original building. For a model made of paper, I was quite impressed.

But I thought I could improve on the kit with a little modification of my own…

…such as by making a few additions:

That’s five fireworks, 4 small guys and one ‘Mini Californian Rocket Fountain’ (from which I had snapped the stick to raise it from the ground). I put my considerable pyromantic skills to work and filled the empty space inside the Notre Dame model with these five bundles of fun:

If all went well, this would faithfully reproduce the great fire (that never actually happened) that caused irreparable damage to Notre Dame in 17XX (that never actually happened). A quick trip outside, and here’s the completed modified kit sitting peacefully on our ‘fireworks launching log’ waiting for the flame…

Three fuses. Five fireworks. Could I light them all and get to safety in time? What would actually happen? Would it fizzle out? Burn? Be spectacular? There was only one way to find out:

OMG! Just… omg! Here’s the aftermath:

My Notre Dame papercraft model: it lived fast, died young, and went out in a blaze of glory. What more could it have wanted?

Posted in Art, Crafts, Home, Miscellaneous, Models, Otaku, Trip | 1 Comment »

Another Robot Dinosaur

Sunday, June 28th, 2015

It was time once again to reach to my giant pile of unmade plastic model kits and remove another for assembly. The lucky kit this time was:

Another ZOID! I’d bought this kit about a year ago after falling in love with the design, but I was a bit daunted due to it’s size (easily the biggest model kit box I’d ever seen). But I’m no amateur! Here’s what I found inside:

That so many pieces right there, somewhere over 700 divided amongst an astonishing 47 different runners in at least 9 different colours! This would be a fun build…

There’s an in-progress shot. I used the same old tools I always have, only this time kept a bottle of glue handy just in case. In theory I wouldn’t need it since this was a snap-together kit. The ipad you can see played mostly Amiga or ZX Spectrum longplays off Youtube while I assembled, which was done in approximately 2-3 hour sections over a period of about 6 weeks. As with most kits of this type assembly is done in sections: head, breast, torso, legs and lastly weapons.

Here’s the completed head:

Menacing isn’t it! The mouth opens and closes, the spines on the crest and lower gun are posable and the entire upper half of the head opens to reveal the cockpit (the driver looks out through the green glass eyes). Very quickly I learned that this was no beginners kit and I needed to take things slowly, and a few steps during the head construction were technically difficult. The whole thing took maybe 90 minutes and contained an amazing 71 individual pieces!

The breast and torso were next, and a real pain at times. The kit is designed to a very high level of precision, and there is little ‘wiggle room’ for the sections when they all come together. Joints are quite tight, and some even lock together when you put the pieces in. This means you need to pay very close attention during assembly since it can be challenging to take pieces apart if you make a mistake.

I managed to avoid any major problems during assembly, but if you look closely at the completed breast section above, you’ll see two flexible pipes protruding out the back. These would eventually connect to the torso section once they are combined, but (since the instructions are all worded in Japanese) I did not notice they had to be trimmed from their original length to precisely 87 mm and had to do a bit of disassembly to fix this after the fact 🙂

The front and rear legs are both made in pairs (left and right being reflections of each other) and were the most fun parts of the kit to assemble. Each are highly articulated and at the same time look very stocky. Each of the two legs shown in the above picture have 45 pieces in them.

This particular ZOID is (apparently) a heavy weapons platform (almost literally) and the weapons are the last part of the assembly. From the left you see some sort of beam weapon (let’s call it a ‘linear wave motion cannon’), some sort of mass driver projectile weapon and a conventional chain gun. The mount on the lower right connects the weapons platform electronically to the cockpit. Often in kits like this the weapons are a bit of an afterthought, each consisting of a few pieces and mostly secondary to (and in some cases not even attached to) the main figure.

Not so here! Weapon assembly is a full quarter of the instructions, and they are just as complex and have just as many parts as the main kit sections. The wave motion cannon for instance (big grey thing, lower left) is articulated in three places, and contains an amazing 37 pieces.

Here is ‘Dark Horn Harry Special’ once he is all finished and assembled:

Another shot showing scale:

All told I’d say it took me about 10-12 hours to assemble, and was one of the most finicky and difficult kits of its type I have ever made. 99.9% of the joints were snapped-together; I only ever used one single tiny drop of glue. Perhaps due to the challenge – and certainly the design – I immensely enjoyed making this kit, and think he looks great on my bookshelf where he will now live.

Next though I think I’ll move onto something a bit easier. Didn’t I have a HG Gundam somewhere in that big pile of unmade models…

Posted in Art, Miscellaneous, Models, Otaku, Toys | Comments Closed

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