Homu-Sexual?

Well, my Figma Akemi Homura arrived earlier this week, so time to ramble on about it for a few paragraphs

 I left her alone for a bit and found her laying like this. I laughed

Well, Anyways, the quality is what you'd expect if you've ever owned a figma anymore, the range of motion is good everywhere that isn't restricted by her clothing. In Homura's case her shoulder are restricted by her mantle, preventing them from going up above her head, though its made out of rubber so it isn't as bad as it looks. Her skirt is also stiffer plastic than usual for some reason, unlike on most figmas where its made out of rubbery stuff. As evidenced by the picture above, all the joints are pretty solid, floppy joints are not a concern here.

For Accessories, she comes with an alternate arm with her shield on it, a rocket launcher, a DEAGLE BRAND DEAGLE, a Pipe bomb, a Driver, two altfaces(For a total of happy, yelling, and her usual serious expression), glasses and the braided hair.She also comes with an assortment of hand, some of which vary a bit from the usual set of figma hands. The shield pops off pretty easily, and it makes me wonder if during development she was going to have an alternate opened version shield (Or maybe the one from nendo homu works, I don't have one to check) 

  Forgot to take a picture of all the parts, so this one is a bit rushed

Overall, I'm very satisfied with my homura, but I do have some random nitpicks that may be of interest.

1. My Homura came with a black line of misapplied paint on her unshielded left arm. It wasn't enough for me to rage at amiami and try to get a new one, but it was minorly annoying.

2. The details on her bazooka, shield, and Deagle are lazy. The Deagle doesn't have any kind of barrel, not even a black dot at the end to indicate the bullet hole, and the rear hole of the rocket launcher also isn't shaded at all.  The shield looks like it could use some panel lining.

3. She can't hold her golf club in an actual golf pose. Not that she ever does in the show, and if you've ever golfed before you know that the basic guideline is "If this feels uncomfortable as fuck, you're doing it right"

 Magical Golf

4. Someone in an IRC channel I frequent pointed this out to me, she has sculpted cameltoe. What the fuck max factory, that's fucking creepy as all hell.

What the hell Max Factory, what the hell. And I felt dirty taking this picture.

And....I'm done rambling, now for pictures and the occasional commentary.

First off, A picture of the joints on her hair. The braided hair doesn't have any joints, but the regular hair does, which is a nice change from the giant brick some figures have that makes their neck articulation useless.

All of her faces have clips for the glasses to go on, resulting in things like this, the happiest girl ever to hold a bazooka. She also has pretty good balance, note how one of her feet is hardly even on the ground.

Nero has bigger tits than King Arthur

So, the English release of Fate/Extra came out last Monday and has mostly monopolized my gaming time. Well, that is when my PSP decided to not start doing random strange things like turn off for no reason. I'm about 1/2-2/3s of the way through my first runthrough of the game now and I figured I'd rant about it on the off chance anyone cares.

The first thing I was greeted with when I booted up the game was...A nag screen telling me to update my PSP to 6.39 or better firmware. Once I hunted down some new CFW and got that pain in the ass out of the way (I was rather mad as my PSP's battery was dead, and it takes fucking forever to charge off USB- I lost the wall charger ages ago) I booted up the game, hit new game, and immediately got dumped into a japanese highschool, with an assortment of recycled bits from Fate/Stay Night and some returning cast. A paragraph or so of description later and Taiga comes in and trips in a nearly exact recreation of the bit from Fate/Stay Night. This prologue goes on for a few days of nothing particularly interesting beyond some character introductions happening before the world gets all static-y, and after about a day of wandering around with static-vision you walk through a wall and die in a church.

This is the part where you get to actually make your character (Name, Gender Select), and select your servant, Saber, Caster, or Archer. Then you get dumped in school again and get to run through another day of japanese highschool life before running through the same wall as before and getting to do the combat/dungeon tutorial. Pretty standard, you go through some tutorial battles and have some more scripted to hell stuff, and eventually get whatever servant you selected at character creation. Then Bla bla welcome to the holy grail war go kill people. They managed to set the entire game in either dungeons or highschool. Japan really fucking loves highschool for some reason, if anime and games are to be believed, the entire nation is just a giant complex of highschools, trains, and love hotels.

I picked Saber for my playthrough since she's supposedly the easiest, and I'm a lazy fucker that doesn't feel like playing on the hardest possible way right off she isnt the same Saber as from the other Fate games, and I've actually found myself liking her more than standard saber, to be honest. That and supposedly you can Newgame+ to keep some of your items and enemy attack patterns, making shit way easier the second runthrough. 

As for the actual game itself, I doubt it'll win over anyone that doesn't already like the Fate franchise, since the combat engine is rock/paper/scissors with some skills and items tossed in.  Grinding on regular enemies is entirely about guessing/memorizing their attack sequences and pattern recognition (And the more enemies of the same type you kill, the more of the enemy's attack sequence you see). The fights against enemy servants are actually interesting and fairly fun, because they have enough variety of skills and item usage in the AI that it has a more interesting dynamic than you'd expect. The regular experience grind battles are pretty uninteresting(Not that grinding ever is), though I find rock/paper/scissors to be mildly more amusing than "Mash A until the enemies are all dead".  Being unable to save in the middle of the dungeons is a huge fucking pain in the ass though, especially on a handheld, even a suspend type save would've been a huge help because I essentially can't play the game during the random short intervals (On the train, waiting for things, etc) I usually play handhelds.

The real entertainment factor for this game is the character interactions, most of the characters are amusing and distinctive enough that talking to them is actually interesting, rather than something you just mash the text-skip button through as fast as possible. The music is also pretty good, but most of the really awesome songs are one-off event songs and the background music will likely quickly just be completely forgettable.

The character interactions and boss fights make all the minor issues worth it, though. Be it completely absurd fetch quests from Taiga (Who keeps comic books in dungeons, seriously?) and things like this. (Thanks random dude that screencapped this, I couldnt get the PSP stream to PC plugin working worth shit)

Well, that was quick (And This post is like two weeks late)

I'm slowpoking like hell on this because I'm a prone to procrastination, but the tortise job didn't work out. I got laid off after two day and getting my ass all the way across the country for some BS reasons. Shit sucked. I got to see some funny places on the way down there though. The most noteworthy: A Mcdonald's/Casio/Gas Station/Bowling Alley. At least I think it was a bowling alley, it said "BOWLINGO" On the side of the building




I gotta say though, the desert is an interesting place. Its amazing how much NOTHING Is out there. Its just sand, mountians, rocks, cacti, and little shitty scrub bushes. Oh, and Rattlesnakes with venom that can kill you in ten minutes. Don't want to forget about the rattlesnakes. One of the days I was at work one of my co-workers almost stepped on one of the little bastards.

So, am I a 1st level ranger now or something?

Picked up the last of the interesting gear for my new job out in the Mojave Desert yesterday. I think I'm a sword, a rope, and a 10 foot pole away from being a DnD character. Most of the stuff is in the car being shipped cross country already aside from this stuff and a motocross helmet. Handheld GPS units are fucking expensive. I'm some combination of excited and terrified about this job, Tsuruya looks pretty excited about the whole prospect. Waking up at like 4 a.m. is going to fucking suck the first few weeks, though.

Summer 2011 Anime

Now that the season is three episodes in for most shows its time for reviews and commentary. Because having an internet connection and not being a retard makes me an expert on everything. This may contain minor spoilers, deal with it, its the first three fucking episodes, there won't be any big plot reveals this early on that matter.

Blood C: The newest installation in the Blood psuedo-franchise. To put it simply, the show is slow and mostly boring. It plays out like a slice of life show that's even less interesting than your average slice of life show, followed by a seemingly random bloody fight scene at the end. I'd do all kinds of perverted things to the new Saya, however.
Rating: Mediocre Timekiller, don't bother unless you're bored.


Dantalian no Shoka: A guy goes to his dead grandfather's house and finds a black-haired bookworm girl in his basement. Then they go to the house of the guy that they think bumped off his gramps and end up fighting wild animals and a murderous clown that came out of a magic picture book. Somehow he kills them by pulling another magic book out of the girl's chest, then they travel around capturing more books by pulling other books out of the girl's chest.
Rating: Pretty damn entertaining so far.


Idolmaster: A show based on a long running series of video games capable of stopping the publishing schedule of berserk. For the unaware, its about a production company trying to get an assortment of female aspiring idols to become famous. The show is cute girls and singing, don't go in expecting anything aside from that and you'll be fine. The cast is diverse enough to pander to pretty much any popular anime girl archetype and the opening/ending songs change every episode...or maybe just one of them did.
Rating: Miura Approved


Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi: A guy is made immortal by a clingy vampire. Some kind kills him repeatedly and seals her away somewhere until he remembers her when he gets to high school, which summons her somehow and they spend like five minutes gushing on eachother before being interrupted by the student council president who happens to be a gigantic douchebag with some kind of ditzy Mahou Shojou servant. Douchebag's douchebaggier brother shows up with some kind of big spider monster partway through the fight forcing them to team up, and for whatever reason they don't go back to fighting after he runs off. The show is minorly fanservicy and the MC is actually a pretty cool guy so far instead of some lameass otaku self insert.
Rating: Unexpectedly, not bad.


Nurarihyon no Mago Sennen Makyou: Its the second session of Nurarihyon no Mago, if you liked the first season, you'll like this one, if not...probably not. Fairly standard shounen, the manga is apparently long as hell. Has a good mixture of violence and 14 year old girls that look 20.
Rating: Keeping the ball rolling.



Mayo Chiki: A guy finds out the campus pretty-boy is actually a girl in disguise. She has to pretend to be a dude for all of high school because apparently in Japan girls aren't allowed to butler. The dude also nosebleeds whenever a girl touches him for some reason, and he gets blackmailed and threatened into keeping the butler girl's secret. Shenanigans, random nonsensical violence and fanservice ensue. The only really thing that separates this from most fanservice shows is that the main character isn't a spinless fuckwit.
Rating: Butlers girls are almost as good as maids.


Mawaru Penguindrum: A couple guys have a dying little sister. They take her to the zoo or something and buy a weirdass penguin hat. She dies, the hat reveals itself to be some kind of magic penguin spirit, rezzes her, and tells them to find something called the Mawaru penguindrum otherwise it'll let their sister die and gives no other useful details. Shenanigans ensue. Oh, and they have some smarter than average penguins that only they can see.
Rating: SEIZON SENRYAKU-Wait what. What the fuck is going on here. No seriously, what?


Kamisama Dolls: A guy moves to tokyo from his hometown in bumfuck japan. His hometown is apparently home to some kind of temple that houses psychically controlled robot things and functions as some kind of crazy shadow government or something. One of them is controlled by his sister, one of them is controlled by his childhood friend who is a serial killer that just broke out of prison and came to tokyo to make his life miserable. His apartment gets wrecked in the first episode resulting in his moving in with a chick with a huge rack that goes to his school or something for some reason.
Rating: Mediocre, Generic.


Kamisama no Memochou: A kid meets a girl that's a complete shutin hacker with a billion computer screens that solves mysteries. She lives above a ramen shop and has a cast of oddball friends/sidekicks, including a military fanatic and a gang of yakuza that suck with computers. The kid gets conscripted as her assistant and goes on solving mysteries and fighting crime. Surprisingly, this is entertaining. The mysteries aren't really anything like genius detective work, but well, its anime.
Rating: Better than expected, considering how otaku pandering it seems.

Soylent Jello

A group of scientists with Chinese sounding names have announced that they've found a way to synthesize human-based Gelatin. So instead of eating ground up cow bones when you order some Jello you can get people instead- well, actually, it'd be made by splicing the human gelatin gene into yeast, because from my experiences yeast seems to be the go-to microbe for splicing random shit into its genome. At some point all these spliced yeast genomes are going to end up in one yeast microbe and we'll have some kind of man-eating super yeast monster, just watch.

Gelatin also has medical uses and stuff, but this honestly just makes me think we'll be seeing jello-beer at some point in the next few years.

ScienceDaily

Power rangers and Nostalgia

So, Today the Dragonzord I ordered arrived. Along with something extra because it took forever to get shipped. (Not the anime girls)

Fuck Yeah.