Sayonara 2008

Well, it's 2009 already in most of the world, but I'm still stuck in the past. I got lucky and these two figures arrived this morning, just in time to be my last arrivals for the year. This ends my first year as a figure collector, and I'm ending the year happy. Figma Shana and Nendoroid Miku Hatsune have made themselves snug and warm in my cold living chambers. Maybe Shana can warm the place up a bit. Nendoroid Miku marks my very first Nendo! I have one coming in January and another in February. Well, I'm not really going to be doing anything special to bring in the new year as far as I know, maybe watch anime or something. I don't drink or "party", been over that stage for a while now. I am NOT going to add up my figure expenses or whatever for the year, I don't even want to know so I definitely don't feel like sharing it with others. Anyways, I really don't like making new years' resolutions, but I think instead I'll just list a few goals that I should be able to accomplish. So here goes.



My goals for 2009.

To stop procrastinating and actually TRY to learn Japanese, by learn I mean to read, write and speak it fluently. I don't have to master the language, but I want to do the best I can instead of slacking off. I need to buckle down and study seriously.

To get myself in better physical shape. That means more frequent exercise, but not too much, too fast because I'm way out of shape.

To shed some of my hikkikomori ways. You might wonder how one can be a hikkikomori and be married and have a son, but believe me it is possible. I've lived here for over a year now and I haven't been around much, or met many people. More outings, more often. I might not seem to have a problem, but that's only because I don't talk about it much.

To cosplay for the first time, and go to my first convention. Yes, I, as an anime fan, have failed to attend even the smallest gathering, largely in part to the above factor. Why would a hikkikomori go somewhere where there's lots of people? Anyways, I'm going to make it a goal to drag my butt to Nan Desu Kan in September, I'll be posting more about that one of these days. I also have a few different ideas for cosplaying now.

To spend my online time more efficiently. Get more done in less time, and spend less time vegging out in front of games. I've already been doing this but I want to do it more. That means no more MMORPGs or at least, a hell of a lot less. Really this isn't a problem right now, but if I find another game who knows how much time it will eat up, and/or money. This goal also means being a better blogger.




Alrighty, that's probably enough on the goals. We might be moving the blog to Wordpress sometime in 2009. We've been messing with it for a while now, and we've been considering the move. The only thing holding us back right now is money, because we'd like to have a host. For now, we'll be sticking with blogger until the time is right. We have a nice list of future posts to work on, so January looks like it'll be pretty busy here on Animaticfigmation. So to all our readers, have a safe and happy new year! May 2009 bring us closer to ourselves and make the world a better place.

Non figure images from Gelbooru.

Happy Birthday Rin & Len!

Well, I might be a day late in some timezones, but for me it's only the morning of the 27th. December 27th marks Rin & Len Kagamine's first birthday. I figured I should do a birthday post for the Kagamine twins since I did one for Miku. So I present you a small gallery of pictures and a few videos. Happy Birthday Rin & Len! If you haven't seen them before you might be interested in my Figma Rin & Len posts, or perhaps the Figma Vocaloid2 group post. There's also the Crazy Kagamine Video, and Vocaloid - Kagamine Twins post for more pictures and videos.

Click pictures for higher resolution. Images taken from Gelbooru

Christmas Week

Christmas is already over and we were too busy with family and the normal Christmas festivities to really do a post, so here is a little bit of what we did this week. First off, we all went to the train depot and took a short ride on a train a few days before Christmas. They had Santa Claus in a train and hot cocoa and cookies for everyone. I got some pictures of the trains and stuff around there.











Any idea why this might be written on a train car? Found it amusing.



We received a package from a friend of ours in the mail a day before Christmas Eve. Yummy Japanese snacks! Neither of us have had the pleasure of any kind of Pocky besides chocolate, strawberry and Almond Crush until we got this. She also sent us a Japan Rail Pass from her last trip to Japan, and some face wash and honey lip gloss for Riiana. I thought I'd take some pictures of the snacks since most of these are impossible to find around here. We're trying to savor them instead of munching out right away.





Do not buy pre-made Gingerbread House kits from stores. We learned our lesson this year, and next year we're definitely going to make the whole thing from scratch. The pieces looked fine on the front and back but in the middle they were all broken. So for your pleasure: Gingerbread House Fail.



And here's our little Christmas tree before the little guy opened up his presents. Perhaps in a later post we'll show you what we got. Most everything was for our son though. We went back to the train depot again for Christmas dinner, it was quite crowded and Santa was a bit creepy this time. He was good with the kids but he triple-eyed up Riiana before asking if she was good this year... was very awkward. His face kinda looked plastic too, but he was real. So, overall we had a good Christmas. Our son got a NES thing so I've been playing some old school Nintendo games with him, bringing back the 8-bit nostalgia. Sorry we didn't do a post on Christmas day but we were busy spending family time.

The Re-Introduction of Riiana Doon

みなさんこんいちは! I am Riiana Doon. I am the waifu of Persocom-san. I'm an animal loving otaku who likes a wide variety of anime and manga. I enjoy collecting figures whether action figures or PVC. I also like to play visual novels. I'm very much into gothic lolita fashion, and I very much want an Alter Saber Dollfie. My dream is to one day move to Japan, or at least go there for an extended period of time. I look forward to writing mostly non-figure related posts as that is my Persocom's specialty. I will be covering a wide variety of topics including cosplay, anime reviews, voice actors/actresses, and Jpop music, and maybe a game here and there.



I am really happy to be blogging along with my Persocom-san. I hope you find our posts interesting, we will try to keep them coming regularly. Right now we're preparing for Christmas, but afterwords we'll be posting more frequently. You can see all of my old posts on here as they have been combined in this blog.



Here are links to some of my old posts that will help you get to know me a little better. You'll also find some pictures of me there.

Tama Tiger Tattoo
Very first attempt at Cosplay
My 27th Birthday
What's In My Bag?

Images taken from Gelbooru, and me.

When Blogs Collide

As you may or may not have noticed, this blog has grown a bit. My wife, Riiana Doon, has decided to combine her blog into mine, instead of us having two separate blogs. She will be posting now alongside me. All the links from Animeholic, her old blog, are in the process of being moved here, we'll be going under some construction for a while so things might seem strange for a few days. We are hoping to have a fresh new look and get things organized by the new year. Expect more content, more frequently. Riiana will be doing a post soon to introduce herself to those of my readers who might not know her, and you can now find the past contents of her blog here. Hope you enjoy the changes and we look forward to blogging together in 2009!



images from: gelbooru

Snow Daze

So a few days ago it started snowing, and it finally stuck around instead of melting. I thought I'd get some pictures, unfortunately the mountains were covered in cloud when I went out to get pictures of them, so none this time. It snowed for a couple days, still have some left over but a lot of it melted today. The temperature has been just below zero for the last couple nights, during the day the it's more bearable. That would be just fine normally, but the 2nd day of snow, our gas furnace died. It didn't just go out, we had a furnace guy come over and estimate the cost, and he said we're better off getting a brand new one. We still haven't gotten it fixed/replaced yet, so we had to have our son stay over at grandma's at night until everything is taken care of. We set up space heaters and have been using the stove to keep warm for now... Were hoping to get it fixed today but it didn't happen. It's really just bad timing, as we've already done our Christmas shopping. But, worse things have happened. I really didn't even want to blog about our little crisis at all, and rather just post nice pictures of snow up. We're making due though, and hopefully tomorrow everything will be back to normal. Luckily it got warmer today and tomorrow is going to be even warmer, so things won't be so bad. I would have more pictures but I haven't been in the right mindset to get much more than this. Hopefully after the heater gets fixed we get some more snow though, it usually doesn't stay very long around here, and I really want to make a snowman with my son this winter. This wasn't enough to make a snowman, we tried. The snow doesn't pack all that well either.




One of these days I'll get some pictures of the mountains, they look great after a good snow, especially Pikes Peak. I'm still not used to living near mountains though, since we've only been out here for just over a year. I planned to take more figures outside for pictures, but my camera decided to not function properly when I got to the second figure, and then my son had friends come over and play in the yard so I figured I'll just hold off pictures until another day. I really don't care for snow too much, but it's not as common as where I used to live so I'm starting to like it more. Summer here was just thunderstorm after thunderstorm, at least snowstorms are pretty. This area misses a lot of snowfall because the majority of it gets dumped in the mountains. Where I come from, winter is a lot more harsh than here. We'll be lucky if there's any snow for Christmas at all really. I guess that's all I have to post for now. I thought about doing a series of "A week in.." or "A Day in.." posts but I'm not sure it'd be very interesting here.

Ryoko Asakura Figma

Ryoko Asakura is a character from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and this lovely Figma arrived about a week ago now. I just hadn't gotten around to taking pictures and reviewing, but she's been gracing my shelves (as you may have noticed in my last post). I got her from Hobby Search as usual, and she cost 2,261 Yen, not including shipping. She's still in stock as of the time I'm posting this, so if you like you can buy her here.






I'm pleased to say that I found no flaws in this figure. She came with 11 hands, 2 faces, one head of Taniguchi (a male character from the same series), and one knife. The knife itself could have been done better, only because the blade is a bit too flexible. I'm sure there's a good reason for that though. Ryoko took a little longer than most of my packages, US Customs held her for three days. Something told me a girl with a simple knife like this would get held longer in customs, they probably had to check her for real weapons *roll eyes* Since I don't have any male figures from the Haruhi series, I just decided to use his head in ways that were befitting of a knife wielding psycho woman.





I like how aside from the two knife wielding hands there's another extra hand included to hold the knife blade itself. This is no doubt to recreate the fight scene between Ryoko and Yuki Nagato. I was going to attempt that myself but I figured I should wait until I get Kyon too. Yeah, I'll probably end up getting him but not for a while yet. Sorry, no Taniguchi in one piece pictures from me. Anyways, Ryoko is another Figma that I suggest fans of Haruhi, blue hair girls, or crazy women with knives pick up. Until next time!




And here's a little accompanying video.