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No, I don't think it's a nock-off! I think sadly someone was lazy and put a Bandai VF-1S in a real Takatoku VF-1J box! Sad since the box is somewhat of a good shape! Maybe someday you can find the Maximilian Jenius VF-1J and put it back in this box!

I figured it was the wrong box but wasn't sure if there was a knock off with a Hikaru S in a Max J box.

Well since the box says VF-1J and it's clearly a VF-1S, I would say it was packaged incorrectly!? and also Takatoku never produced D.Y.R.L VF-1's!

I won this 1/55 VF-1S Hikaru. Anyone know if it's a matter of being in the wrong box or is it some other release or knockoff that came in a Max VF-1J box?

Masters of the Universe - Evil-Lyn New Eternia Masterverse 7" Scale Action Figures x 2

Is that a new can of spam or kept from years ago? lol Bit of regret didn't get the PF YF-19..

Awesomeness.

Nice thing about the ceramic blade is that it has either 4 or 5 flat sides depending if it has a curve. Sort of like an ink knife or mud knife for drywall. Make sense? It can’t cut your skin but at the correct angle it shaves off plastic with ease and never gets dull. I guess it can be a bit fragile and break if dropped?

That's how I remember them to be, so it's why I asked. I went to the IPMS national convention in Phoenix, AZ in 2010 and the showroom was row after row of models built exactly as they are supposed to be built. Not so much inspiration or originality. The SF section was just along one table and that was it. The IPMS club I attended once was mostly just grumpy old geezers who couldn't appreciate anything SF. I'm glad to hear that it's changed, but the contest judging remains obstinate from what I hear. My friend in Canada built a Bandai A-Wing to look just like the Ralph McQuarrie concept art. It looked beautiful with the blue and white scheme, and displayed it for the IPMS event there in Calgary or wherever it was. He was demerited because it "wasn't weathered enough." Well, tell that to Ralph McQuarrie. I'm sure that the judges know Star Wars, but beyond that they probably didn't even know what they were looking at. Anyhow, my Rei and Asuka are done. I have them both placed on a wooden plaque. I'm thinking that I might paint the plaque and print out an Evangelion or Nerv logo decal (although I honestly don't really care for the show). Yesterday it was 34 degrees C (I think that would be 91F) and last night I saw that Asuka was leaning forward. Drat! It's because of the way their feet are made, in segments. If they were just one piece, I could fill them with plaster better. As it is, sofubi tends to bend when warm. I removed the 2mm copper rod and I will replace it with a much longer one to give her leg more support. Also, the two girls have those life support backpacks or whatever they are. On Rei, I put some superglue in the wrong place and it turned out messy. It's that semigloss black section on her back. I wetsanded most of it off and now it doesn't look so bad. I'm not sure if I should risk trying to remove more or not.

Never used one, but lately everyone has something new worth trying. I’ll keep an eye out. The newest stuff I’ve tried that I love are glass files and water color pencils and both of those work great. I’ll definitely give one of these a try and see how it goes

Low viz actually works well here

Maybe I'm getting old but I feel so cynical about this show. It's like an even lazier version of Disney's Star Wars sequels. This feels less like an attempt at a real show and more like a corporate mandate of specific iconography and imagery meant to evoke nostalgia in a cheap key-jingling way for people who were fans of UC Gundam and Evangelion. I suppose it's fitting that they chose the character designer from Pokemon.

So this is a PSA from my bench. Get yourself a ceramic “blade” tool. I wasn’t sure about it but once I started using one I was changed forever. lol not only good for mold lines, it’s also great for smoothing/scraping without cutting if that makes sense?

Beautiful

It's not really the cost of the material itself that's giving me pause, it's the shipping. Excuse the rant: There's an ancient treaty from back when China was still an Empire, under which China, as a developing country, is exempt from having to charge their own customers for the entire delivery to overseas customers, because the wealthy paternalistic developed nations would shoulder the costs so the (then) poor Chinese public wouldn't have to. This translated into Chinese companies being able to send absolutely colossal amounts of online shopping towards Europe, with free shipping - company wasn't being charged for it by the Chinese post office, so they weren't charging their customers for it, and when all this mail got to Europe, the European mail services had to pick up the entire tab for sorting and delivery. They were understandably upset with this because of the sheer amount of online shopping, so they tried various methods to put brakes on it, after the deluge started in earnest during the pandemic. *My* country decided that the best method would be to apply a 7 euro (ish, we don't use Euros) flat per parcel fee, to be collected by the Customs service on behalf of the post office, for *any* out-of-EU shipping. And since the Customs Service were the ones collecting the fee, they'd *also* automatically process it for import duties and sales tax while they were at it. This makes Chinese internet shopping about as expensive as within-EU mail order shopping. But Japan Post already charges through the *nose* for shipping, because they lost their "developing nation" status under the postal treaty before WW2 I think. And the way the import duties and sales tax are levied, they're on the entire amount paid at the point of sale - so if I've paid 18 euro for a thing, they'll charge me 25 euro to ship it from Japan, 7 euro to handle the package, 20% of the 50 euro in import duties because I'm at 50 Euro or above, and then 25% in sales tax on the 60 euro up to that point, for a total of 75 euro for an item that - before this whole crapshoot started - would have been 18 euro for the item, 12 euro for the shipping, no processing fee, no import fee, and even odds on not being processed for sales tax, meaning on average 33-ish euro. (Actually, before the pandemic, some of those items could be bought straight off of Amazon with Prime Free Shipping for the Japanese prices if you were lucky). Same thing applies to packages from the US - insane shipping, and then I get our insane import duties and sales tax when it shows up.

Agreed. But you should be able to find him (at least for a little while) on Amazon, Hasbro Pulse, Gamestop, BBTS, etc. I haven't heard anything, but there is a new Tron movie this fall. Now'd be the time.

The easiest way I've found is just eBay or Yahoo Japan Auctions via a service like Buyee. It can be a pain in the butt, but good quality secondhand copies of a lot of these books are surprisingly cheap... or at least not hideously painful. Then again, after more than 20 years of importing books and magazines and DVDs and Blu-rays and so on from Japan I suspect I have become numb to the insane cost of physical media in Japan. The short story collections are going to be one of the first subjects for my new book scanner, since unlike my absolutely ancient flatbed scanner it has built in OCR so I don't have to do all the transcribing by hand. (The Windows Input Method Editor and I are the most bitter of enemies.) Yeah, Aegis's VF-19A is probably the most iconic machine from the game. Enough so to appear in other games, get plamodels, several toys, etc. VF-X-related baddies seem to really lke the VF-22, possibly as a result. Manfred's signature VF-17 in the game notwithstanding, his cyber-ghost comes at Ozma in a VF-22S and Havamal's commander Ushio Todo also has a personal VF-22.

Well, Sonic's not the only two-pack I got over the weekend. Is there a reason to choo-choo-choose the other one? It contains this guy- Hearts of Steel Optimus Prime. Let me get this out of the way right off the bat... I'm disappointed that he's a Deluxe. I mean, I don't mind that Deluxe-class Primes exist, like Devastation Optimus on the right here, but the thing about Devastation Optimus or Core-class Optimus is that they're basically G1 Optimus, when we also have options for G1 Optimus that scale with the bulk of our collection. We don't have a Hearts of Steel Optimus at scale (aside from a fragile and impossible-to-find-now third party toy), just this little one. Having said that, though, I can't complain too loudly because Hasbro kinda nailed this bot mode. I mean, if you look at Guido Guidi's concept art for the series, they nailed all the major details, even allowing for a surprising number of painted details to keep the colors right. Honestly, I think he's just missing some lines on his toes and some yellow paint for the triangles on his forearms. It's a clean figure, too, with little in the way of kibble that wasn't part of Guidi's design. And while we're looking at he sides and back, I want to call attention to the backs of his shoulders, where there's some nice molded details of gears, like you can see the inner workings there. It's a really nice touch. Prime's accessories are this gun, which is half accurate to the comic book. It's just missing it's rear, like if you imagine Megatron's fusion cannon having the barrel and mount but not the eyepiece on the back. There's also this blue rectangle. Prime's head has a ball joint, but it's flipped so the stem is in his head and the ball is in his torso. Maybe they should do that more often, because it gives Prime pretty good up/down/sideways tilt. His shoulders rotate, no problem, but the big shoulder pads do limit his outward range to about 75 degrees. His biceps swivel, and he's got maybe 120 degrees of elbow bend. No wrist articulation, though. His waist swivels. His hips can go a little under 90 degrees backward and a little over 90 degrees laterally, but due to his hip skirts he's limited to about 75 degrees forward. His thighs swivel, and his knees bend about 120 degrees. His feet have a very slight downward tilt and about 45 degrees upward. His ankle pivots are a tad disappointing, though. The actual joint is designed in a way that he could have 90 degrees of pivot, however, the side of his leg comes down so low and doesn't give his foot clearance to move around it, limiting him to something like 30 degrees. Prime holds his gun with no issues, and the blue rectangle can plug into a 5mm port on either forearm like a non-really-comic-accurate shield. Unfortunately, he lacks any other bot mode storage, which is a shame. I can live without a place to put his gun, but I wish he could have carried the shield on his back. Prime's transformation is surprisingly interesting. I mean, you can probably tell at a glance that his head has to tuck into his chest, and his arms wind up tucked behind him while his legs make up the part with the wheels. But what's neat is how you get there... you don't merely open a hatch, tuck in his head, then curl up his forearms and fold the shoulders back. You actually pull his head and arms away from his torso, and the entire assembly flips over so that when you move it back his head goes into his chest naturally. Then, because his arms aren't actually long enough to make the whole top of the engine, the backs of his legs open up to form the sides and rear. Then his gun becomes his smokestack and his shield becomes the roof. When I first saw the pictures Hasbro released I thought Prime looked a little stumpy. Actually, though, it's pretty close to the concept art, up to the panels that are made from the backs of his legs and the blue roof. In the concept art, they should both be silver/gray... because based on Guidi's concept art, Prime should be longer because he should have a trailer part. DNA, you wanna get on that? As noted, the accessories are integrated into this mode because the gun turns into his smokestack and the shield into his roof. Which works well enough, except that I mention again that I'm not a fan of the shield. But if an upgrade trailer comes along and replaces the roof shield, I really don't have anything to complain about besides the figure's size. Of course, even size is a pretty small complaint- as long as he scales with other Hearts of Steel releases it technically doesn't matter if they scale with other Generations figures, and it's not like Hasbro's charging for a Voyager here. The set's $60, and split two ways that's $30 each... a little more than a normal Deluxe price, but with more paint than a normal Deluxe, so. I think you definitely get your money's worth with Prime; good paint, solid articulation, and adequate accessories with a transformation I rather enjoy. I'd definitely give Prime a recommendation... assuming you want his partner. Which we'll discuss tomorrow.

Not sure, but you might check the settings or look for fan-subbed versions online.

Same for the most part. Wouldn’t mind the VF-11 from 7 with the awesome armor packs though

I still have interest in certain crossovers: I'd like stuff like a Spinner, a Batmobile (Tumbler or '89 or Arkham Knight), perhaps a Light Cycle, the APC from Aliens, and Airwolf, just to name a few off the top. I think all of those are iconic enough to get the crossover treatment. One caveat, however: I'd want them to be their own characters apart from any others in the associated shows or films. I know that wouldn't happen, but that's my personal want. If that really is a ML tease, then I think that spells good news for potential buyers, as just a white Optimus is only half the package. I think buyers will have to accept a lot more concessions compared to previous releases for it to work. For me personally, it'd be worth the departures from the G1 toy, which was primarily a big red slab, for it to work as armor, and it would obviously have to break up into bits and partsform onto the various apropos body parts. That would work for some fans, but not all.

This is also acceptable. Bonus points will be awarded if it comes with a campy musical number.

Or:

In all honestly, while I am fully expecting an ending to GQuuuuuuX that lands with all the grace and subtlety of a seagull that got into someone's bottle of Everclear, I will proclaim the whole thing a smashing success if... Or, as a consolation prize...