Anasazi37
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Everything posted by Anasazi37
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Our luck has been all over the place, just reaffirming that we can't predict what's going to happen during PO Madness. NY opened early, several of us who've never landed POs got them, AE completely melted down. Cats and dogs living together. When will the madness end?
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We scored them from the same places! Yeah, I wasn't in the mood to leave anything to chance, so AJ is shipping mine to Tenso and I used PayPal for Nin-Nin. One false move and I would have been cart-jacked. (everybody drink!)
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I saw that AE went down a few minutes after 4pm JST. At first it struggled and you'd get the occasional error message, then it just turned into a dumpster fire of sadness and poor web site design. HLJ did the "can't add item to cart" thing with the Hikaru 1S, too. This somehow feels worse, though.
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Managed to grab one from Nin-Nin when their page opened up a few minutes early. Grabbed another one from Amazon Japan at the same time. Smooth transactions for both. That never, ever, ever happens. I've been trying to get a PO for years, and failed every time, so now I get...two? Maybe it's karma. Good luck to everyone here. I'll keep monitoring sites for a bit longer and will post if I see one opening up. Now back to my 18-yr Sheldaig Speyside Scotch. Here's to you, sempai!
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Yep, always a good idea to keep some Bushmills around. My wife and I became fans after a trip to Ireland many years ago. I used to live in Tennessee and the local Bourbon selection was amazing since Kentucky was right next door. I don't have that here, but what we do get isn't too shabby.
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I remember when we all warned you that this would happen. You were like, "nah, I can resist the temptation." (very much teasing in a positive way)
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Well-played, sir
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Definitely grab the Monster if you can find one for a decent price. Be prepared for higher-than-expected shipping costs for a toy of its size, though. It's on the heavier side due to its solid construction. For several of us on this thread, the Monster was our "gateway toy" for the HMR line. Once you get it, you'll tell yourself, "maybe I can justify a VF-1A CF or a Destroid, too" and then it quickly turns into collecting the entire line because they're well-built, relatively affordable compared to other lines, and fun to play with. Prices on sites like Mandarake and Jungle more or less represent current market value, and both sites are very stringent on quality grading (with rare exceptions), so they are great options. I've built out at least half of my HMR collection using them and haven't had any problems. That included a few gambles on "B" rated toys that turned out to be perfectly fine except for some outer box damage, which I don't care about. I saved myself about $100 on a VF-1S Hikaru Strike that way. As @vladykinssays, patience helps. You'll start to see cycles of availability on the sites and if you time it right, you can get great deals. For example, right now seems pretty good. Last fall was a bit of a drought. It took over a month for me to track down a Missile Effects Set at a reasonable price.
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I was just on the site a few days ago and everything was fine, but I just had to reset my password, too. Appreciate the heads up. Could they make their site more useless? Even the search capabilities are worse than before.
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Speaking of HLJ, did anyone else notice the changes they made to the site when they went offline for "maintenance" yesterday? They managed to find a way to make the site even less helpful. You used to be able to order search results by when items were added, to quickly see new stuff (not really secret sauce), but now that option is gone. It does seem like their database is much faster now, but that doesn't help if you can't quickly find the item you want during PO Madness.
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A colleague at one of the organizations that funds the work of my team makes it a point to introduce every one of my new staff members to The Machine. He'll end meetings with "I AM THE MACHINE!" until the new person, puzzled as to why the outburst doesn't phase anyone else, inevitably asks what he's referring to. Then the link shows up in their inbox and their life is never the same.
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Agreed that HLJ has great customer service. They've consistently come through for me--once I manage to order something through their poorly-built site. The front end is fine, but the back end (especially the database) has some serious problems. I don't bother looking at them for PO Madness anymore, but I tend to order a lot of other less-popular stuff from them because I know that I'll be well taken care of. The original head isn't great, but the Captain Canuck resin cast one is pretty nice.
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Or even just how many units are exported by third parties in general, and what fraction that is of total sales for the toy. For TWE items, that might be a little easier to figure out, but for general retail items, where someone can grab 25 of them, keep 1, and sell the other 24 online, it would be difficult. You'd get some sense of it by tracking various auction sites, stores like Mandarake, and online marketplaces both in Japan and in locations like Hong Kong, but it would be messy and incomplete. That could be a full-time job for someone to put a tracking system together and stay on top of it. Hadn't heard askhole before, love it. Happens to me a lot, too. @Shizuka the Catdoes an amazing job of keeping us informed, when her schedule allows her to participate in PO Madness. Anyone else notice that for the recent YF-29 Full Set Pack PO many of the stores that reliably post items for PO right after 4pm JST didn't do so? I think HLJ, AE, and several others took their sweet time. On the upside, it did allow some MW members to get a PO at stores that normally sell out in seconds because the scalpers had already moved on. That was made possible by MW members posting updates throughout PO Madness in the YF-29 thread. Maybe the delays are the new normal? I don't want to get my hopes up. The downside is staying awake for several hours in the middle of the night instead of giving up in frustration after a half hour....
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The consensus here seems to be that, at least for Macross, Bandai doesn't care about customers outside of Japan. Just look at all of the countermeasures they put in place to keep us from directly placing POs for Tamashii Web Exclusives. Part of that stance is likely related to the legal nonsense with HG, but they're also playing to their domestic otaku base. Maybe this one's for us and they figure we'll find a way to get our hands on it, but I don't know. I hadn't considered the extra hype as a way to compensate for what Bandai might see as less demand for Roy domestically, but that's an interesting idea. Either way, it's not helping our chances if more people know about it and scalpers think that we'll be willing to pay extra for it. I'm a big fan of the term snarchasm, which combines snarkiness, sarcasm, and the gulf of understanding between the person making the comment and the person receiving it.
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I tried a few times, failed, then retired after doing the math on how much a good night's sleep is worth to me. Bandai seems to be hyping Roy a bit more than Hikaru, even though Hikaru is arguably more popular in Japan, so that does make me think that release day prices could be north of 30,000. I don't want that to be true, but I'm preparing myself for it. The included stand probably won't help to keep the price down. Also make sure that the billing and shipping information for your existing accounts is current. I got cartjacked on HLJ for the VF-1S Hikaru because I had to momentarily pause the checkout process to update my information.
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Did Bandai ever reissue IMAI's 1/72 variable Hikaru 1J kit?
Anasazi37 replied to Anasazi37's topic in Model kits
Huh. I guess I never noticed that the plastic on the Bandai reissue VF-1S is grey. I just looked at both of mine and, sure enough, grey. I also looked at my Imai VF-1J Hikaru and even that plastic seems to have a grey tinge to the white. -
EMS is definitely not back to normal yet. My package, which sat in limbo at the Tokyo airport for two months, was "dispatched" eight days ago and still hasn't left the country.
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Did Bandai ever reissue IMAI's 1/72 variable Hikaru 1J kit?
Anasazi37 replied to Anasazi37's topic in Model kits
Dang, that's cheaper than you normally see it on Mandarake, where it goes for about $50. It's also cheaper than the Bandai reissue, which goes for about $25. -
I still occasionally print sets, mainly to correct injustices like Plamax's 1/20 Gerwalk kit, which cost $300 (before shipping) and only came with stickers. Plamax eventually followed up with two expensive add-on decal sets that didn't contain all of the markings on the sticker sheet. Did someone re-release the X-Wing kit?
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Depending on what the actual Roy release ends up looking like, I may just have to put a general DX set together to cover missing details (ejection seat, skulls behind the canopy), incorrectly reversed modex numbers on the vertical stabilizers, and a TV/DYRL Roy conversion.
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Glad to hear that yours made it to Tenso! I received my shipping notification from AE last night. Nothing is showing up in the Japan Post tracking system yet. They're taking their sweet time with my sets, apparently. Maybe they just printed the address label so they could mark the order as shipped, and will actually mail it later, which is straight out of NY's playbook. I'll report back as soon as I have an update.
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Yes. That's how many of the commercial operations do it (or something very similar) and why they require a minimum order size (Microscale's minimum is 250 sheets) or an extra payment (not small) to cover design and setup costs. Screen printing is complicated. Before there was on-demand t-shirt printing available online, that industry worked the same way.
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Yep. MD-5000. The last "main" one I had died a few months ago, causing me to break out my backup. And I've resorted to getting cartridges direct from Japan. Sometimes I can find a good deal. The few US sellers remaining on eBay have really jacked up the prices and at least one of them imports and repackages Japanese cartridges without telling you. After that happened to me, I decided to cut out the middleman. White toner cartridges, where you substitute them for black cartridges, are a decent option if you're looking for white-only markings. You can sometimes get away with printing color on top of them by running the decal paper through again, but the alignment between the layers is a real problem for small designs. It even happens with the $6000 OKI printers you see advertised as specifically being able to print white. They aren't set up for "two pass" printing, where it holds onto the sheet after the white pass, sucks it back in, and then applies the color pass. That printer costs *a lot* more, on the order of $25,000. I've never seen an actual price, but people who have them say they cost as much as a decent car.
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It means a lot to me that the MW community appreciates my work--thank you. I still print the occasional set for special projects, but it's getting harder and harder to find the ink I need and I'm now down to my very last printer. Once it dies, it will be the end of an era....
