Alter Azusa Nakano Figurine & Friends

Posted on June 26, 2010 by AlbinoGrimby

So the post office re-delivered my other decorative anime figurine today.

Alter’s Azusa Nakano is three of five of my crazy attempt to collect all of Hokago Tea Time from K-ON. Thank God there’s only five. The box:

Below is Azusa Nakano in plastic wrap. She comes with a separate hair piece. You can take her head off and replace her bangs with a set of bangs with cat ears. Yui gave her the nickname “Azu-nyan” after realizing she looked better as a neko-girl. Did I mention K-ON is big on the moe-factor?

Azusa’s the new freshman the light music club picks up in their junior year at school. She’s much more serious about her music. Both of her folks play in a Jazz band so music runs in the family. She plays back up to Yui and considers herself a n00b. She’s amazed at Yui’s musical savant abilities and she’s not so hip to all of the moe-moe antics of her seniors and their daily after school tea parties.

She plays another Gibson Les Paul guitar. When the other girls realize they’ll be graduating leaving Azusa with nobody in the club they buy her a pet turtle.

It’s Tea Time!

I mentioned that she’s got some friends too. By friends I mean, other figures I collected while I was in Akiba. Those three are some of the bigger ones I’ve collected. Most of the other ones I have are smaller gashapon. For instance, Misato Katsuragi from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I recently watched Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone and Evangelion 2.22: You Can(not) Advance. I like what they’ve done with Tokyo-3 and the Evangelions through the use of toon-shaded CGI. It makes me want to go back to Blender and try my hand at modeling cityscapes for backdrops.

I’m also a big fan of Maria-sama ga Miteru. I didn’t think I’d like it because it was introduced to me years ago as a slow-paced slice-of-life drama. It took me years to sit down and watch it but I loved it when I did. What can I say, I love the over-the-top melodrama. I didn’t think I’d like most of the characters, but each episode presents a new facet about one of the girls that makes them interesting.

When I was in Akiba I collected some of the Yujin series of figures for Maria-sama. Recently I collected select figures from the MOVIC series. From left to right: Touko Matsudaira, Sachiko Ogasawara, Shimako Todou, Yumi Fukuzawa, Youko Mizuno, and Eriko Torii.

Sei Sato and Shimako are amongst my favorites. I’m still waiting to get Sei from a Yahoo Japan acution. There also aren’t as many figures for Maria-sama since it’s about 4 years too late for me. Back in March, when I was in Japan K-ON! was the big thing.

So there it is. I’m turning Otaku one figure at a time.

Anime Figurine: Yui Hirasawa by Alter

Posted on June 25, 2010 by AlbinoGrimby

Otaku fought over her. (BTW, if you’re at work, don’t even bother going to that website.)

But I got her right here. This is Yui Hirasawa by Alter. I pre-ordered her back in January and it came in the mail today. How’s that for a wait? My “dream” of owning swanky Japanese plastic toys is finally coming to fruition. The unboxing:

More pictures:

I tend to just call it a toy, but it’s really something that adds otaku aesthetic value to a room. Some facts about Yui. She’s a high school student (of course, right?). Complete slacker in trouble of becoming a NEET because her only hobbies are doing nothing until she joins (i.e. is suckered into) the light music club at school by Ritsu. She’s easily bribed by cake and tea.

Yui learns to play the guitar and becomes lead singer of Hokago Tea Time (Afterschool Tea Time). She plays a Gibson Les Paul, which Yui calls “Gitah.” I understand that “Gitah” also costs a fortune. The show covers how she got her hands on a pricey instrument. Mugi’s family owns a local music shop and gave her a deep discount. Mugi’s also HTT’s keyboardist.

Yui is also a musical savant and her surname comes from Susumu Hirasawa. The show itself, K-ON! and it’s second season K-ON!! (you see what they did there?), is a slice-of-life, high school comedy. It’s all moe, all the time and every now and then has some funny moments. I can’t really recommend it though. It’s cutesy anime and if you want to veg out and feed your brain candy, it’s perfect for that.

I also have HTT’s bassist, Mio. There are in total five members: Yui, Mio, Ritsu, Tsumugi, and Azusa. My retarded-crazy plan is to get them all. In fact I’ve got Azusa coming and I’ve pre-ordered Mugi from amiami.jp.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures. I took them with my Sony A200 using the basic lens. Yeah, I know. I’ve been thinking of getting a macro, but I’m lazy. Speaking of lazy, I really got hooked on the OP and ED (“Don’t be Lazy”) for K-ON, one of the reasons I like the show. The other reason: Japanese school girls + rocking out just seemed like a cool idea. Especially after watching Linda, Linda, Linda.

Alright, Yui, play us out…

Hot Off The Press

Posted on June 21, 2010 by AlbinoGrimby

Well technically it’s been more than a few days. If you remember I talked about writing a novel and all the trials I did to complete that little task in the space of nine months. To make it more real for me, I had to get it printed out. This is in preparation for “Phase 2″ of my plan. I wasn’t about to waste a ton of printer ink and paper to make that happen, so I choose Lulu.com to handle the task for me. All I had to do was upload a PDF of my work and I could put together a book project and make it a reality. Not to sell mind you. Just to print myself out a rough draft of the story.

So here it is in its plain glory:

Nine months worth of work split into 3 parts. I didn’t bother giving it a nice cover. It’s just supposed to be for my reference anyway. As you can read from the cover, the top one (first chunk) I called “The Stars Shine for Akako” and the last one is called “Akako Save the World.” The middle chunk is named “The World Is Burning, Akako.” It’s not really indicative of a trilogy. It just so happens I had 3 TXT files over the course of the writing process and I wanted to maintain that. Each chunk is double-spaced so I can annotate it later. It’s also spell-checked — at least spell-checked. I prepped everything using Pages. I didn’t even try to read over it. No editing. No worrying. Just print the damn thing out with all its nasty plot-holes, ill-conceived metaphors, and horrific word choice. I’ll sort it out later.

The biggest issue I had was with Lulu.com itself. It wants PDFs for book submissions and hey, Macintoshes natively handle PDFs. Guess which type of PDFs Lulu.com dislikes. Yeah, ones made natively on a Mac. After I finished editing, I couldn’t just have Pages print out a PDF and submit it to Lulu.com’s site. I had to download and install OpenOffice 3.0 and have it export to PDF. Turns out Lulu.com wants all of your font choices and such embedded into the PDF, that way they can print it one-to-one with what you specified. So, that’s definitely good that they care about things like that (it being their business, after all), but it wasn’t so fun when I had to jump through hoops to get what I wanted.

Another route you can take with Lulu is to upload a word DOC formated file. It’ll build a PDF for you. Hey, Pages can export to Word 2003. It would be perfect and for the first chunk of my rough draft, I did just that. The second chunk didn’t go through. I don’t know what kind of formatting I had but Lulu hated it and wouldn’t accept it as a legal format.

I love Pages. I’m alright with OpenOffice but it’s really glitchy graphically, but often I feel that this reinforces Word as the standard application of choice. Lulu’s happiest with that, even says so in their FAQ. I’m sure if I used Word for everything it would have worked just fine. But, I hate paying for Word. Oh, yes, and I know, they’re in the Cloud now. Who isn’t?

So why print this out? I’m going to build myself a care package to open in 6-9 months. More likely 9 months. So by then I can have forgotten everything about it and revise it with a fresh eye. It’s also a decent excuse to procrastinate on the novel for as long as I can. I’m taking this time to work on some other little projects and get some short fiction written. I feel like that’s something I can pursue with the intent of publishing whereas this novel will be an investment for the long run, and even if not, it’s a dream come true for me. I finished what I started. I’ve got something nobody in the world has. You can’t beat that.