Major Focker

hase has never done gerwalks. i'd be smiling ear to ear if they did.

alright, alright. thanks for the heads up. i just need to recover first from watching Gravity. it floored me.

speechless

what david and anime52k8 said. i think it's simply due to storytelling cues/aesthetics. similarly, the lead will always have red and sempais will always have yellow. if you want to go technical, i really don't think 3 toes are necessarily more advanced looking or that they actually confer better technical benefits. for example do planes with canards always look more advanced than those without? some would think so, but an equal number would likely think they look cludgy. and that balance of opinion is likely very different depending on other aspects of the planes in question. which leads me to my next point, other aspects of the design (engine output for one) probably impact its performance much more than the number of toes. and each design element is selected to be harmonious/or traded off with other design options such that they achieve the desired/required performance envelope, which itself varies from plane to plane depending on the role it's supposed to play. the F-22 for example does away with canards in favor of thrust vectoring, while other designs opted to go for canards (sometimes in combination with forward sweep main wings), and some do both canards and more limited thrust vectoring. all are equally valid design choices but ultimately, how they meet their respective performance envelopes depends on how these choices play off with other design aspects of the plane. if you ask me, the YF-23 looks more advanced, and in some ways it probably is, but ultimately it lost out to the more (relatively) conservative looking YF-22. if you want to go the evolutionary route, look at ostriches and horses. there was a time when horses' ancestors had spread out toes. over time, the advantage of stability and traction from this toe configuration was phased out because having 4 limbs proved sufficient to compensate and made for more efficient sustained running. ostriches kept the toes because the stability aspect was vital for a 2-limb configuration and the traction proved more useful for making quick dashes rather than long distance running. an ostrich can easily out dash a horse, but the horse can maintain a faster sustained speed. their designs diverged but remain equally valid for their respective needs and environment.

why would it be so strange? designers borrow from earlier designs all the time. in fashion for example, designers take cues from the 60's every now and then, and up to the present. that's roughly the same time difference between the SV-51 and the VF-27. i expect 2 decades from now fashion designers will still be using polka dots as a design element. if designs were never used again, we might have never been blessed with miniskirts and bikinis in our generation

that might be the case for fast selling, low value and/or widely available items where Mandarake has a "buy from seller" price range and they set the selling price. but for rare and/or high value items, i think it's more like consignment basis. the seller brings in the item and specifies a desired selling price and Mandarake takes a % cut if it sells. i posit this because i've observed items that have no apparent or significant differences in condition (in many cases MIB) being posted with different selling prices, sometimes very different prices. Sheryl Nome figures for example can range from 15 to 25k yen, and the even rarer ones have been priced as "cheap" as 60k and as high as 120k

Hasbro only licenses the molds from Takara. then they can produce them wherever they want at the specifications they want (eg. kind of plastic, paint application) and set their own QC standards. so yes, Hasbro products are produced separately from Takara.

gorgeous and so are the pilots (not the one on the right of course) and these are just glorious edit: one more Yamamoto and more Yuki

ooh, those seem like gashapon sized. even more conducive to getting in large numbers btw, who's making them?

sh1t hits the fan in episode 8, and through to 12. i find it hard to imagine anyone will be able to stop at that particular point. you might also see the characters a bit differently after that stretch.. i'll write a bit more about it later, but suffice to say i find it easily recommendable to fans of mystery anime.

that one might get you a one way ticket to the dog pound having said that, the face sculpt and overall finish on that one is much better than the pole dancer figure. i would buy it if it wasn't so damn big. 1/6 is my limit. Koto also showcased these but have no idea who they are: edit: and this might be my first nendoroid to be anime consistent i should get 10,000 of them. but maybe i'll settle for a dozen

what's the bonus?

fantastic work! would be interested in build-up pics

i wonder if Hase will do super/armor/tornado. OT, anyone know of a 1/144 VF-25 in styrene or resin?

new foldbooster confirmed at Japan Mokei Hobby Show

nice. don't know her either, but she reminds me of Feiris from Steins Gate

+1 +1 +1 +2

she's from the Fairy Tail anime/manga series. while i'm not as into Erza as the fan who made the screenshot montage i posted above, it's still a head scratcher for me. imagine if there were only a handful of SQ or gashapon sized Sheryl Nome figures and the first 1/7 or 1/8 figure was made 3-4 years after the anime, and she's wearing something from an obscure poster rather than any of her iconic costumers from the anime. of course Sheryl in bikini is insta-buy for me, but still...

it's already in my HLJ private warehouse and was considering returning it, but those diorama pics changed my mind.

me too!

i've used Rinkya and ShoppingMallJapan and have done comparison shopping for other providers. i now almost exclusively use Buyee.jp Rinkya service fees are highway robbery. $15+1$/1000yen, minimum of 20$. most other providers also charge a mix of base fee+fixed rate for every 1000yen above a certain threshold, but in effect they all tend to range to being 10-15% of the yen auction price. using Rinkya's own example from their webpage, a 10,000 yen auction will be $25 commission. yep, effectively 25% and it only becomes competitive (ie. translates to 10-15%) at around 30,000 yen or higher, and of course on the other end, you will get charged $20 for a 2000 yen auction. yes, you read that right. it effectively doubles the item price. plus they have their own forex conversion which is guaranteed higher than your bank or paypal's, and a slew of "other fees" on top. SMJ has more competitive service fees and they have a few perks like waiving some of the fees when you buy multiple items from the same seller and free package consolidation service. however, they also do their own forex which at times makes them uncompetitive, their system is less transparent (eg. you don't get to see how much they charge you for the shipping from seller to their warehouse), and they require you maintain a balance with them which defines the upper limit of how much you can bid. they do have a neat feature though when several SMJ customers are bidding on the same item. if you have the current winning bid say at 10,000 yen and your max bid is 15,000, and another SMJ customer puts a max bid of 12,000. SMJ will not post his bid on yahoo and instead advise the other buyer that he needs to bid higher than 15,000 (your max bid). if he revises and bids higher, then it gets posted. if he backs away, then nothing gets posted and the auction stays at 10,000. Buyee is far simpler. 10% of auction price with a minimum fee of 500 yen, plus 200 yen bank transfer fees (which other proxies also charge). just copy paste the auction URL onto their website and from there you can bid in real time. other proxies also have this feature, but Buyee (and a few other proxies) do one better by displaying the calculated fees associated with your bid amount, and gives you the total alongside the "Confirm Bid" button. your account page will itemize all the fees for auctions won, each item will have their calculated international shipping cost and they're the only proxy i know which also tells you the package weight for each item. extremely handy when you want to optimize your consolidated shipping. for those conscious of import taxes, their system also let's you specify the declaration value for each item, all done on your shipping page without having to email them. naturally though, you have to agree to their terms that Buyee cannot be held liable for misdeclared items. Buyee charges your credit card or paypal directly and doesn't require a deposit. but the big plus for me is that they charge you in yen. this is significant because: 1. proxy forex rates are rarely, if ever, better than paypal or your credit card/bank, and in many cases significantly worse. 2. if your home currency is not USD, a dollar denominated proxy will take a margin when they convert yen to USD, then paypal/CC/bank will also take a margin converting from USD to your home currency. and these double forex charges apply to your total shipped cost 3. some proxies do not display their forex rate, or they do but changes it daily/weekly making it difficult to track just how much you'll be charged. my gut feel is that they "time" their invoice to you when their declared forex is even more in their favor than it already is. for example, if the prevailing bank rate is $1:100 yen and the proxy posts their forex as $1:95 yen (ie. +5) during the week when you bid. if next week, the bank rate is $1:97 on a particular day and the posted proxy rate for the week (or day) is $1:90 (ie.+7), you will likely get invoiced at 1:90. but if the bank rate was instead 1:103 and the proxy rate is 1:100 (ie. just +3), you will likely be billed at 1:95 which was the rate when you placed your bid. or some proxies might honor forex rate at time of bidding but "optimize" on when they charge you their service fees and shipping. of course there are permutations when both you and the proxy benefit (eg. when the yen was rapidly depreciating earlier this year and proxies were using higher than usual spreads to insulate themselves) but in my experience this is much rarer than cases when it is at buyer's expense and proxies make a little extra. you can sometimes counter this if you use paypal and play the odds by paying the following week. but if they have access to your CC then you are defenseless. this forex business might seem trivial but this is easily +/- $20 or more when forex is on the move, and worse if you are subject to #2 above. i think it's fair game that companies play the forex, but it should be at least neutral for the customer when they decide to play for extra spread. the drawback for Buyee is that they charge for package consolidation (some proxies do it for free), they only ship using EMS or UPS for very big items or those with lithium batteries, and each transaction is handled separately even if it's from the same seller. having said that, i've rarely (just once) bought multiple items from the same seller, and when you're consolidating packages EMS is often actually cheaper than SAL parcel once the package reaches a certain size/weight (which is easily the case when you have more than 2 small to medium items). for buying directly from webshops, their parent company Tenso is one of the big boys in the parcel industry, hence expectedly, one of the most competitive. so the only japan shops i can't buy from from are those that only do fax/mail/phone order, or when the account sign-up and shopping cart pages cannot be translated by google chrome. fortunately, some very kind MW members were able to help me out then. apologies for the Rinkya-rant and if this reads like an advertisement for Buyee. nonetheless, hopefully some of you will find this useful. i'm not a bean counter really, and in fact i'm more prone to foolish impromptu purchases and/or getting carried away with bidding just for the thrill of winning. but it helps to know that i've done my homework to minimize the damage from my lapses in purchasing judgement

i concede it has its merits, and that i'll likely get it anyway. but i'm still miffed at the other options they passed over

it took a very long while for a sizeable (1/8 or bigger) Erza Scarlet to be produced and they chose to do a bikini version when there hasn't yet been a "normal" version of her wearing her characteristic armor and despite the fact that she has multitude of very interesting armors/costumes. yeah, i'm grumpy

thanks. i'll queue it up. i like ambiguity and "show, don't tell", though arguably, Ergo Proxy was at times too ambiguous for its own good. if Texhnolyze does indeed surpass Ergo in that aspect then that's fair warning that it might be a challenging watch. hopefully the payoff will be good. right now though, i just can't put down Zetsuen no Tempest. i started around noon and i'm now halfway at ep12 (my work inbox is now screaming!). the writers must have been fans of Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes.

yup, both of them. one could say they're made for each other