Lat Miku

More aptly known as Hipster Miku, this is another figure to add to my stack of Miku figures. To think that at one stage I firmly believed that one figure per character was the way to go. The timing's pretty good since my Tony Miku is in for repairs (turns out that pose is a bit hard on her feet) and I've got a spot on the Miku shelf in my cabinet that this new figure will fit nicely into.

No shots of the box, because I'm lazy like that, but it's just the normal sort of box with photos of the figure all over it.

Flights! and anime

I finally booked my flights for my trip at the end of the year, so it looks like going to C81 is definitely going to be happening! I'm hoping to have enough money saved by December that I can enjoy lots of good food and drink there as well as funds for assorted doujins from Comiket.  My plan so far is to fly into Tokyo on Boxing Day, go to Comiket, stay for New Years, then take the train to Osaka and spend a few more days there, checking out all the nearby places like Kyoto and Nara as well. Exciting stuff - it's a shame I have to get through a couple more months of uni before I can go.

Since the anime season is essentially over, I think I'll comment on a few of the shows I've been watching as well.

Usagi Drop - Just finished this one last night. I hadn't read the manga, although I had been spoiled as to its ending, but the spoilers didn't turn out to be relevant to the anime thankfully. I really liked this show. Rin was positively adorable throughout, and it was heartwarming watching her and Daikichi, especially as he adapts his life to fit Rin in. The art style was great, with everything looking like it was painted rather than drawn, and this was the only show this season that I watched the OP/ED on every episode for.

Steins;Gate - A great show as well. Then again, I don't really see how a show about a mad scientist (IT'S SO COOL!), time travel, and an evil organisation could be bad. For the last episode I went hunting for Dr Pepper - I ended up finding some in an American sweets import store - and put on my lab coat just to get myself in the mood. The VN has apparently been extremely quickly translated, so I'm looking forward to that.

Kaiji 2 - It isn't over yet, but I was amazed last episode when I saw that the bog arc remains unresolved, again. The show is glacially paced and I'm convinced it would be better told in half the episodes. It's still not over, and I don't know whether Kaiji ends up winning or not, but there have been so many contrivances so far that I can't bring myself to be too excited.

Tiger & Bunny - I liked it more in the first half when it was a monster-of-the-week show with interesting characters, and some development shown between episodes. The latter half all just seemed a bit silly for me, with some important story points being led into extensively then resolved very quickly and unexpectedly (sometimes off-screen).

Nichijou - Very hit and miss. Having said that, Yukko was a good character and scenes with her interacting with Mio or Mai were pretty funny. I didn't like the Professor so much. The animation was nice, as expected of KyoAni, and the OPs were great. It just wasn't a very consistent comedy.

The only show I'm watching that will continue into next season is The Idolmaster. I had no expectations for this, but it's been very enjoyable so far. I'm not sure what other shows I'll be watching next season, but I'll probably post about them when I decide.

Anyway it's mid morning and I'm hungry, so I'm going to go make some pancakes. Take it easy!

Busy

I haven't been able to take it easy all week, since I've had to spend most of my free time studying. My inner NEET keeps telling me to just procrastinate, so it's a constant struggle between my notes and the myriad distractions out there to actually get anything done.

After a few days of varying productivity it was Friday, the day of the exam. I had to be up early since, due to the usual administrative incompetence, I had a tute scheduled that morning as well. It was the usual group session, where we run through the various steps of a case and try and sort it out. It was my turn to read out the material for the group as well, which led to an awkward situation. I'd read out the background information when another person commented that I should read more often since I apparently have a good voice, and several others agreed. I appreciated the compliment, but damn I really don't know how to respond in that sort of situation. I sort of laughed it off and kept going, but perhaps I'd have been better off blushing profusely and stammering "s-s-stupid...". My image isn't very tsundere though, so I stuck with laughing nervously.

It could have gone worse

After that finished, I had my exam. They're always stressful because the questions tend to be obscure as fuck rather than being about the important key issues we've been learning. It wasn't organised very well either, with all 400 odd students crammed into the one lecture theatre right next to each other. Cheating would have been extremely easy, except that I don't trust the people next to me to know the answers any more than I do. It went alright though, and it was only a midsemester exam so it wasn't worth many marks either.

With the exam out of the way, my weekend has been going great. Minecraft 1.8 got leaked, so I've been playing a lot of that on a friend's server. The changes are making exploring a lot more fun, specifically the ravines, extended caverns and abandoned mineshafts. It's a shame a lot of the patch's features have been gutted and delayed for a future patch, but I kinda expected it. Minecraft doesn't have a great record for delivering important features on time, so I'll take what I can get.

And of course there was the Starcraft. The show matches before the finals were extremely funny, with Losira (T) vs MC (Z) probably being the highlight. Lots of joking around, good-natured trashtalking, and funny builds with offraces. For the finals themselves, I was very sure MVP was going to win. So sure, in fact, that I decided to bet a small sum of money on it. The odds were well in his favour but I still made about $20 off it, which is a pretty decent return. So yeah, it's been a good weekend.

I was going to take some pictures of Lat Miku but my camera's mysteriously drained its entire battery just sitting there doing nothing. I've got it on to charge, so I should be able to take the pictures in a day or two.

Some new music

Some of those music CDs I ordered have arrived. The rest haven't been posted yet since they're waiting on one of them to be released before shipping. It's a bright sunny Spring day (the weather's wasted no time changing seasons), so apologies in advance for the intense glare on the photos.

tabgraphics works summer 11 (from C80)
So it's not entirely CDs, although the artbook from this is mostly just a beefed up CD booklet with a few extra pages.