Kalloway

Ooof, I got incredibly off-course with these and it'll probably take a little while to catch up. ^^;; But here's a start!

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing Endless Waltz: Glory of the Losers 1-5 (Katsuyuki Sumizawa, Tomofumi Ogasawara) - I have had all of Glory sitting around for ages and have tried to read it more than once only to repeatedly have Stuff happen. This time, I will grab my swords if Stuff gets in my way. While normally I'm fine with the Sunrise stance of "only animated is canon", this is a firmed up version of the story featuring a lot of amazing redesigns, extra info, etc. Looking forward to reading the rest.

My Love Story!! - anime, since I'd just watched the live action. Honestly, I liked the live action more. I thought the anime was only 12-13 episodes but it's 24 and it really drags in places. It's nice to have the setting and characters filled out, but it really drags in places. Can probably let it go since I can't imagine wanting to watch it again.

Tsukipro The Animation - S1, like with any idol anime, I'm here to listen to the songs as much as anything. One of the guys looks a bit like RS2's Noel so he's automatically my fave. I have S2 waiting in the queue.

Cyborg 009 vs Devilman - this is a lot of fun and a complete mess. Should you watch this if you don't know either franchise? No. Should you watch this if you do? Probably not. But you'll do it anyway, just like I have multiple times now.

The Omen 1-4 - ah, boycritter brought these over because I'd made a comment about never having seen the first one (or being aware of there being more than one, I guess). The first one was pretty good, 2 had me laughing uproariously at the bad special effects, 3 was decent, and 4 was atrocious. Good fun, but more ridiculous than scary and I also feel like 4 forgot half the plot of 3.

Yoroiden Samurai Troopers/Ronin Warriors - technically the latter since I watched the dub. Absolute fun except for the middle part which I want to edit down with a knife. This is one of those "I have watched good chunks of this in the past but never made it all the way through" shows, and yay, now I have. (Except the OVAs which... I can continue skipping, lol.)

And now, I can't believe I'm watching these before even the halfway point of the viewing period - JFF Theater!

The Lines That Define Me - culture drama about a young man finding healing through sumi-e. Absolutely gorgeous and takes the time to explain sumi-e and demonstrate beautifully without feeling like it's taking away from the plot. Also very tropey, as far as culture dramas seem to go. Definitely recommended if you can watch JFF stuff.

Bonsai Warrior - a documentary about a guy traveling the world teaching and demonstrating bonsai. Interesting watch, worth it also for the information about bonsai practitioners around the world.

Thermae Romae - if you can watch any JFF film this quarter, watch this one. It's fucking hysterical in every way. The gist is that a Roman bathhouse architect is in a slump and ends up magically transported to a modern Japanese bathhouse. This happens again and again, and he experiences all sorts of interesting things (like a bidet, lol) but not really understanding what's happening. At one point, a group of old Japanese men end up in Rome.
(Roman slavery is a fairly prominent concept, however, if you would rather not.)

The weekend was honestly nice.

Sunday was my mother's birthday and we surprised her after breakfast with flowers, cake, cookies, and her actual gift (socks! she asked for socks!) and she seemed really happy. I peeked out the doorwall in the living room and the snowdrops were up and blooming! (No sign of the crocuses yet, but none of us were expecting the snowdrops and those are always first.)

Saturday's nerd show was also good. If I could change one thing, it'd be moving the hours from 11-4 to, like, 9-2 or something. Big afternoon die-off.

It was sunny earlier, I had the energy to get quite a few chores done (or at least worked on) and got the all-fi set up. A few weeks back, I got about fifteen notices that the phone company is discontinuing landline service to this area. So my options were try their device that I assume uses the cellular network (yes I know that's not really what it is anymore, but for description's sake here) or go to the reliable and fast and absolutely miserable to deal with cable company. Their device, the 'all-fi', which sounds like a cult, has a free seven day trial to see if it'll work/have a signal so I finally got it and set it up. Unexpectedly, quite literally unexpectedly, I have a good signal and internet that's probably a hundred times faster than previous (not an exaggeration). I'm going to keep adding devices as I only have two tablets connected right now, but I think this is going to work out okay. (And the dire cable company is still always an option.) The set-up was obnoxious (an app that had to go on a phone, not a tablet) and I haven't entirely ruled out ornamental hermitude, but... so far so good.

Built: one small lotus flower brick kit from the nerd show, black Levinix, white Iglight (getting lots of customization, lol), dorky Zeta Gundam 'marble' shooter.

I'd also registered for CitrusCon but I really didn't do much with it because I was busy with the nerd show and also just... didn't really enjoy trying to communicate on the discord. Textual equivalency of being in a room with a thousand people yelling to each other.

I feel like I'm having more and more days where I would like to wander off and become an ornamental hermit.

That is probably also a post on its own... This is, thus far, a weekend of feeling very old/turning to dust and blowing away, and general enshittification annoyances.

Beyond that, I have finished the Destiny Astray as far as I'm going to for now. Absolute nightmare, would build again in an instant. Though I suppose I'd much prefer to be able to afford the ridiculously difficult-to-get official version of the kit and build that. (I remain tickled that the not-actually-wrong translated name of the bootleg kit translated back as Heresy of Fate. So I suppose I should be calling it that.)

I will have to get some photos posted because while building it absolutely sucked, it looks gorgeous and absolutely passes the two-foot rule.

I am going to make good on my promise to build a bunch of 30MM kits for the next little bit...

There are no fewer than four gunpla/plamo contests with deadlines in March. One of which I am definitely committed to (Redacted III), another I strongly intend to do (30ML), and the others are if I have a brilliant and fast idea that I can knock out quickly and easily.

I have a lot of other projects I need to get (back) to, but at this point I just need to get myself together to get to the nerd show today and do that. One thing at a time...

(Please go vote in my poll if you haven't.)

Right after US Thanksgiving last year, a popular and well-regarded gunpla shop announced it was closing. A bummer, but not a huge surprise. This is not an ideal environment to an import-heavy small business. The plan was for a gradual phase-out but on Friday the owner announced someone will be buying any remaining stock, time for one last sale and the site is closing Monday. While there wasn't much left, I did grab a few things, including an MG 00 Raiser.

That shop is also still running a contest and intends to keep the community discord around for fun, so we'll see how that goes.

The minor cold I mentioned a few days ago has progressed to minor obnoxious coughing, so hopefully I'm towards the tail end and it'll shuffle along in a few days. After how sick I was a year ago, when I had the flu, I'll take this minor annoyance.

Both of my Star Abyss models arrived and their boxes are gigantic. ^^;; I'll need to bust them out at some point later and do runner checks. Finished up the little Trans-Am Clear 00 Diver Ace that I guess I subconsciously built for Valentine's Day. It's really pretty but if I ever do another one or get fussy, I'll change its eye color. Pink eyes when everything else is also pink don't really work. Really pretty kit, incredibly difficult to photograph.

Last... autumn? I had picked up the Daban copy of the unobtainable MG Destiny Astray and promptly did a runner check, planned to build it, and... Anyway, started building it now and yeah, a lot of issues and annoyance but I haven't completely broken anything yet. I expect it to be a bit of a grenade when finished but if it looks good on the shelf, I'll be happy. On the off chance work ever tries to kill me with overtime in the next year or two, I'll buy a real one. (But I'm also still brainstorming/building what I need for the 30MM contest diorama!)

Working slowly on archiving and am going to try to shift to cleaning out what's in the WIP folder instead of mirroring what's on AO3. The latter isn't as important. Though I will keep mirroring KH stuff since there's so much and small-dosing it has been working for me.

Need to do some words (mostly written, need typed) and replies...

M, Boycritter, and I went down to the nearest Hobbytown (about an hour away) for Bandai Builders Day yesterday. This Hobbytown just became the only Bandai Builders certified shop in the state, so I definitely wanted to support them and their events. (Hobbytowns are franchise shops and each individual one is locally owned.)

This event had a free 30 Minute Fantasy kit, unique to this event! We got there a smidge early, did our check-in (and skewed their demographics, ha!), and got our kits. It was a pretty simplified kit, so I think it only took about 15-20 minutes to build. We chatted with other folks who turned up and posed for some photos while working, lol. By the time we were done, other people were arriving and waiting for our seats. Yay for a good turnout! By the time we'd finished shopping, maybe 2/3 of their stock of the event kit was gone.

(I picked up a 30MF accessory set, HG Abyss, HG 0 Gundam ACD, and HG Murasame Kai as well. M got a ton of paint for his tanks - though he did like the event kit and might pick up some 30MF stuff. Boycritter got a RG RX-78-2 Gramps and HG Sazabi.)

From there we went up to the conveyor sushi place and ate ourselves broke. So tasty! I tried to be a little more adventurous and found a few things I really liked. Next time I want to try more. ^_^

Details aren't entirely available yet, but there's some sort of 30 Minute Label competition in March and I'm interested, but that's also not a lot of time to come up with something, get a kit, and build. So I guess we'll see. But then again, I'd really like to enter for the fun of entering. Hmm.

Happy Anniversary, Lemonade Cafe! I certainly did not think, 23 years ago, that I was creating anything enduring. But it is still here, and I am still here. Go figure.

I have, in fact, chosen a notebook to tackle, though it's going to share with writing a bunch of stuff (hopefully) for the small_fandoms Drabblethon. It has some blank pages, so I can also write drabbles in it. (Ha!) So far I've been able to tear out and pitch some pages of things already long written and posted, which feels good. Some of what's left includes notes for projects that are downright ancient. And, like, to be honest I can probably just write whatever to finish some of these up? It's been so long that I feel like any actual expectations have vanished.

I am free.

I bought a runner of Super Corgi Butts (by DSPIAE) and they're hilariously larger than expected.



They're for paint color testing, to see how a color will look on contours, etc. Plastic spoons are the most popular thing to use for this, but I had a chance for discounted butts and uh, yeah. LOL.