Anime Festival Asia 2009 Day 1

I just got home from the first day of Anime Festival Asia 2009 and here are the photos I’ve taken. First things first, this year’s event has been way more commercialized than the last with booths selling stuff everywhere and tons and tons more people. Cosplayers were also larger in number and dispersed randomly making it hard to take photos when you’re trying to do it among the crowds and the SLR-equipped folks. Nonetheless there are 132 images in the link below, so enjoy and please forgive me for some of the sloppy hit-and-run shots. As with my previous event coverage, click on the images for larger-resolution versions.

What I really hate about WordPress is how you have to manually insert every single photograph into an entry despite having bulk upload capability. I’m glad I churned out a little piece of code in MATLAB to help me automate this during the time it took to upload the photos muahahaha one thing from school that’s useful.

So besides the heavy commercialization and crazy crowds, I also forgot about Danny Choo’s appearance on stage. I did catch the last few minutes of his talk though. After that I was camping out at the concert venue with some of my party members to leech some music but got chased out by the organisers in the afternoon. So being dissatisfied that I forked out SGD$20 for a pretty unsatisfying day I roamed around to see if I could at least buy something from the event.

I hate to say it but you really get to see a lot of stereotyped otakus around – the kind that put people off or even in rare cases disgust them. Of course, it’s not as extreme as the OMG HUNCHED FAT SLR-EQUIPPED SCARY LOOKING FAT DUDE PHOTOSHOPPED WITH SPECIAL FORCES picture but it’s getting there. You also realise that because of the otaku lifestyle, some of these otaku have developed many interesting social behaviour patterns, one of my favourite being decreased social inhibition. I’m not saying it’s bad to be forthcoming in a largely reserved, inconsiderate and apathetic society that most Singaporeans belong to, but if a stereotypical-looking otaku went up to a complete stranger and his/her party and joined their conversation in such a “forthcoming” way, the stranger would be creeped out. No wonder otakus get such a bad name.

Later in the evening there was a line for the public audience to view the concert but it grew so long so my party gave up and had dinner instead.

I’m going to AFA! :D

Screw the exams, I’m going to AFA!

MG 1/100 RX-78-2 Gundam Ver. OYW0079

My exams are around the corner but I managed to get some time to install Photoshop and deal with these photos which were taken back in September. This model was built back in April 2007, long before I had an airbrush. Some parts were hand-painted, with panel lines done using Mr. Color Flat Black and sprayed with Mr. Super Clear Flat. I only applied the given dry transfer decals and did not use the provided stickers except for the camera at the back of the head.

Please excuse the bad modeling but I like this iteration of the RX-78-2. How can a Gundam fan not have the First Gundam – father of all Gundams? I think I’ll have a separate category apart from my more recently completed ones. Maybe someone could give me ideas on what 1/100 kit to work on when my exams finally end.

Lack of Content

Sorry for the lack of updates. It’s been almost a month since my last post. My final exams are less than a month away and I don’t have the time to build a model now. Also, without an income I have to control my spending, so I’m holding my money for some toys that have yet to be released.

I took a few photos of my older, non-airbrushed Gundams for filler content but I don’t think I can upload them. I also haven’t got around to re-installing my old Photoshop onto my laptop as I recently upgraded to Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I was relieved the installation was quick, smooth and too user-friendly for my taste (I couldn’t find the option to format my hard disk).

Once my final exams are over, I should have a month of vacation and hopefully I can resume posting here.

Stand up to the Victory!!

(Ngee Khiong) MG Victory Gundam Ver.ka spotted at the 49th All Japan Plamo Radicon Show. This is too awesome to not post.

More pictures at Toy World which has a collection of photos from Hobby Stock and amiblo (1), (2) (possibly overwhelmed by traffic at the time of posting)

Figma Hiiragi Tsukasa

Hiiragi Tsukasa is one of my favourite Lucky Star characters and it was nice to finally be able to obtain a figure of her. I’ve looked through several online stores and all of them are out of stock and resorted to buying from Ebay instead.

Another Get…?

This time round, could it be a 12-pack carton of coffee-flavoured CRISP CRUNCH???

Over a year old! / Get…?

Just realised I’m several weeks late – this blog is over a year old already! I just looked at my first few entries and most of them were pretty much just news snippets of upcoming toys. So for the blog, I hope I can continue sharing reviews of toys and Gundam models, and possibly increase my skills if I ever have the time to build them. Right now I’m in the midst of mid-term tests, and having not gone through education and examinations for almost 3 years, has made this a very taxing period. I cleared 2 insanely tough tests already; one more looms this Saturday and another in mid-October.

Anyway, it’s too late for celebratory photos, but what is this box doing on my desk?

I wonder what lies inside it…

Night out

I’m joining the bandwagon of “live blogging”. Instead of using an iphone, I’m equipped with my E71 and free wi-fi (can’t afford hefty data charges). I don’t have any figures or anything to spice up my pictures, so no posting on figure.fm

Right now I’m hanging out at Arab Street famous for shisha. But my friends and I aren’t smoking it (yet). We’re watching soccer now (stoke city vs manu, but I’m not a soccer buff).

Life with Braces 4: Pain Returns

I just came back from a trip to the dentist. He made some slight adjustments to the bridge across the roof of my mouth as I complained that one side of my tongue was pressing hard against it. The shape of the bridge is imprinted on my tongue, but it hurts a little on that side. He also clipped the rest of the brackets in my upper jaw as not all of them were completely clipped to the archwire. For the lower jaw, he added a second archwire. The pain is back.

Actually I posted this to see if my RSS feed was working. I’ve just started to use Google Reader to manage my subscriptions and it’s an awesome product by Google. It’s more convenient than bookmarking feeds in Firefox as I can see everything in one screen like a LiveJournal Friends page. So I was looking at my own RSS feed and noticed that the previous post didn’t show up. Not that I’m expecting people to subscribe to my feed, but I was curious to see what conditions resulted in a post not showing up in the feed.

I haven’t built a Gundam kit for a long time. In fact I have this crazy craving of wanting to spend on so many things. :3c (now hopping onto the bandwagon of people who love this emoticon)