Gedo Senki Review

I first came across the Earthsea trilogy in middle school or junior high when I read a book and a half of it (The Tombs of Atuan just wasn’t very interesting to me back then, I guess.) and really liked it, aside from the fact that I never finished it. Years later, I found a little box set of the trilogy at Half-Price Books and finally, finally finished reading all three books a month or so ago. The point of this whole “I have read the books!” intro is that I’m viewing this movie from the perspective of someone who has read the books. Someone who has never read them and has no idea what the original storyline is may feel completely different about the movie than I do.I try hard not to be one of the “Raaah, they changed this tiny little detail from how it was in the books; I absolutely hate the movie now!!” people, but when this movie is a mix of the third and fourth (which I haven’t read) books, that’s just a tiny little bit foreboding.

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Figure Modeling Part 4 - Puttying and Priming

I combined the post for puttying and priming, because usually you putty all that you can see, prime it, and then notice a whole slew of pinholes that you couldn’t see earlier so that you have to go through the whole process again.
Incidentally, if you’re anything like me, this is also the part that will make you want to take your model and chuck it out of the window.

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Figure Modeling Part 3 - Pinning

While most parts have some sort of nook or bump on them to guide you as to how they fit together, these tiny little things aren’t going to do much to actually keep them together. To alleviate that problem, you have to pin them.

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Figure Modeling Part 2 - Flash Removal and Cleaning

Prior to starting all of the puttying and priming and painting, you need to fix the model up a little by removing some obvious, nasty things and cleaning it.

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Figure Modeling Part 1 - Supplies

About two years ago, I was very, very close to getting into resin kit modeling as a hobby. What stopped me was the horrible, horrible overload of girls in suggestive poses and the near lack of male model kits. I’m a girl, so stuff like this, for instance, just doesn’t appeal to me. I mean, I’d want some female models - Deedo or the girls from Rayearth or Wedding Peach would be neat - but it’s just that having to dig through tons and tons of scantily clad, big bosomed, alluringly and often anatomically impossibly posing girls to find perfectly normal ones can get sort of tiring.

As I said, there’s a near lack of male models, so I found one that I wanted. The real issue that then kept me from making this into a hobby was time - during the school year, studying keeps me from being able to do much more than keep up with fansubs, read for fun, and maybe play a video game every now and then. I simply just never got around to working on it.

That has changed, when the desire to at least finish this thing that I payed money for has surfaced, and I jumped into the whole process with vigor. I have about a week to do it before the new semester starts. I will record my progress in a series of posts and maybe even quasi tutorials, if anyone else cares. Read on for information on the basic tools I bought, which took much longer than I thought it would.

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Anime Avalon is Closing!

While I try to get through Akuma ni Onegai, the next short story in Circus Wonder, here’s some stuff I got, because stuff is always cool.

Anime Avalon, formerly Anime Planet, the only anime store that I know of here in Houston, is closing its doors. On one hand it’s sad; on the other their prices aren’t that great so I never bought anything aside from a D.N.Angel calender way back in ‘03 or ‘04. I also don’t rent DVDs, which is the other thing they’d have been useful for.

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First Gashapon Figures!

Note: I have a Zant figure left that I need to get rid of; please comment if you want it.

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Circus Wonder - Circus Wonder

Circus Wonder is a collection of three short stories by Kusunoki Kei, two horror and one comedy. This entry is obviously about the title story, which takes up about half of the tankouban. Of course it may have been wiser to pick up one of the other, shorter ones to meticulously look up all of the kanji for, but I guess it’s better than one of the longer series I have.

Circus Wonder focuses on a high school girl who ends up going to a circus which is really run by fairies and so on from a different world. They end up using her in the show and taking her away with them; their leader, a creep wearing a clown mask most of the time, tells her that she’s his sister and not a human at all! Her classmate and romantic interest, who is also the only person that hasn’t forgotten her, sets out to save her.

Detailed summary behind the cut. Pictures coming if I ever get my scanner to work.

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Mangaka Profile - Kusunoki Kei

Kusunoki Kei is a bit of a curiousity because a majority of her works is shoujo, yet she has always had shounen titles thrown in there, too, and doesn’t seem to be doing shoujo at all any more. Even when she did, her art style is very, very much not your usual shoujo fare; it looks more like what’s you’d find in a shounen manga instead. Indeed, for the longest time I thought that she was actually a man who was doing shoujo for some reason. Most notable is probably the fact that she uses pretty thick lines, at least for outlines, and the result is certainly not the whimsy, big-sparkly-eyed shoujo that you’d expect to find in Ribon in the early 90s.

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