I originally planned on posting this earlier, but things have been busy lately. Had some problems that needed taken care of and never got around to this. I picked up 5 volumes of xxxHolic manga last week from Barnes and Noble, and decided to finally get myself a membership since I plan to buy a lot more from there. Now, I'm up to date on the English xxxHolic releases so far. Been eying up quite a few manga series lately.
Also a couple days ago my Riiana picked up an issue of OtakuUSA for me, it's pretty decent. It has a fold out Gurren Lagann poster in it. Also picked up Chocobo Tales and My Japanese Coach for the Nintendo DS. I know I'm already using iKnow for learning Japanese but I figure every little thing I can do to strengthen my knowledge will be useful. I'm waiting on Nendoroid Yoko to arrive by early next week as well. I apologize for such a short post after a long wait but there will be plenty more soon.
I finally got one of my most-wanted figures. I just posted earlier this month about 3 figures on my must-get list. One got pre-ordered, one I still need to figure out how to acquire, but this one I managed to find by accident, or is it coincidence? Anyways, I was looking around Ebay for something non-figure related and just decided to type in Misaki for the hell of it. I've looked for this figure many places and many times before with no luck, but this time I found someone selling it. I needn't say I payed much more than the figure is worth, so this could be considered a purely blind figure purchase simply for my own pride and joy and not looking towards value or even quality. Misaki Nakahara from Welcome to the N.H.K. This is the only known figure from this series, and it's a limited edition figure that came with Volume 04 of the original Japanese manga. The original price for the figure/manga in 2005 was 1,800 Yen. I'm not sure just how limited she is but I know it took me a while to manage to find her, and I'm proud to finally have her in my possession.
Considering she was released in 2005, before I even became a figure collector, I can't really compare her to other figures from those days. I bought the Welcome to the N.H.K. book a while back and watched the anime series and it's one of my personal top 10 anime. Back to my purchase though. I bought from a seller in Japan, and I received my order via EMS (I'm impatient enough to spend a bit more for shipping), unopened and packaged nicely. I was a bit surprised at the size of the figure, as she's a bit smaller than I expected, but I don't mind at all. The manga came in the box and has a nice cover (which I used for my background shots). Her cast off feature does show like most of those type, with a crack that is obvious, and I think especially so since the figure is older it's more noticeable. It doesn't bother me in this particular case. Misaki comes with 2 arms for when she's in cast off mode, an umbrella (in two parts), an extra hair piece with nekomimi, a postcard and the manga. As a N.H.K. fan I'm quite happy with my purchase, even though I'm a total baka and spent more than I should have. This is probably the last figure post you'll be seeing this month, but I do have one more impulse buy that should have been here by now.
A size comparison to Nendoroid/Figma so you can get an idea of how big she is.
If you haven't seen the anime, read the manga or the light novel, I can highly recommend you take the time to check one or all of them out. Perhaps it's not everyone's cup of sugar but I fell in love with all versions of this story. The original author of the book is Tatsuhiko Takimoto. I'll throw in the videos to the opening and ending songs just for good measure.
Well it's a few days after my birthday now, but I never did show what I got that day besides the figmas that had arrived early. I think I went a little overboard on spending, but at least my wife and son got stuff too. Here's my stash of goodies that I got. So, the Dirty Japanese book the wife picked out, but once I read some of it I couldn't resist, gah! Survival Japanese book is really cool, having the Kanji/Kana and Romaji and even proper pronunciation of many useful words and sentences. I'm pretty sure I mentioned before that I'm trying to learn to read, write and speak Japanese basically on my own. Along with my Kana de Manga book, and numerous bookmarked websites these books should help. So my mom came over and switched my DS's default language to Japanese to mess with me, I think I'll keep it like that though :P It doesn't affect the actual games so why not. I only have one game so far, and only got it cuz it's been ages since I played a Zelda game. Anyone know any good games for Nintendo DS? I know I saw some Kanji games in full Japanese for people that have 1-3 years of language study on J-list. I'll wait a while before I get any of those though, I want to be able to actually read them first. So is there much in the way of anime related games for the DS? I've heard a little but any suggestions are more than welcome.
My wife ended up getting a cool looking Japanese doll too, that I found in a really old looking bookstore while walking around downtown. I'm sure she'll post it up on her blog eventually.
So my wife and I went to Barnes & Noble a few days ago and picked up some manga and they just happened to have one copy of the Chobits art book so I had to pick that up too. As we were arriving there by bus, a storm came in and we got caught out in it on the way home, cuz we missed the last bus going to our side of town and had to walk a nice distance. Luckily a neighbor of ours happened to be at a store that we stopped in to get out of the rain and was kind enough to offer us a ride the rest of the way home ^^
If you're wondering about Sgt Frog, it's for me to read to my son while he looks at the pictures, until some day he can read it all on his own. He's recently taking a liking to Keroro after watching a few episodes of the anime, and even I can't help but randomly say kero-kero-kero-kero from time to time now. XD
