Merry Christmas and Loot!

It’s been sometime since I got back from Japan after watching Eva 3.0, and I sort of promised a loot post so here’s a brief one :) Actually spent quite a bit this time, but the stuff are nice so.. totally worth it? Unsurprisingly, much of the expenditure went to Eva stuff. There were truckloads of em thanks to it being movie season. We found Eva posters, goods, and themed snacks all the way up in the mountains of Hakone – true story. Fear the Eva marketting machine. But yeah, watching the film totally got me into Eva-sucker mode. I bought the guidebook (? of sorts?) at the bottom right from the theater. They had other merchandises on sale there too, but the snaking queue was so frighteningly long I just went with the book (which had a separate, much shorter queue) instead. The rest – the two Rei-Asuka figures, the wall calendar (that’s the tall sheet at the back), the black hoodie jacket (the one with the Rei/Asuka picture print), and the two moonruned T-shirts – were acquired from Akiba. The two figures were from a shop in Akiba called Hobby Tengoku. Some of the (2nd hand?) figures you can get from the plastic box displays there are the cheapest I’ve ever seen anywhere. Both figures here together costed just a little under 1000 yen. The hoodie in contrast is one of the most expensive items in the picture, and it’s even a little tight. L size in Japan is apparently a little on the small side. Thanks to that expenditure, I bought the two moonruned T-shirts because I was feeling too cheapo at that point to buy the more expensive picture-printed ones. The moonrunes are episode titles from the original Eva by the way, the white one reading “The Final Messenger” (Episode 24 I believe) and the black reading “The Beast that shouted I/Love in the Center of the World” (Final episode).

The two little boxes under the white T-shirt and the figures are Idolm@ster stuff. The one on the left is an imas station radio show special disk thing that I bought on impulse and later regretted – a little, haha. Anyway it comes with a CD with some of the seiyuu’s antics and some unusual sounding songs, as well as a DVD recording of more seiyuu antics. The black box on the right is the DVD recording of the 2010 Idolm@ster 5th Anniversary live concert, and is the other most expensive thing in the picture. I’ve always wanted one of these, but I was too cheapo to buy the more recent concerts that were more costly, so I went with this one. It’s still 2 full DVDs though, with some minor extras like a photo booklet. The counter girl even had the nerve to point out that this was the DVD version and ask if I was sure I wasn’t going to get the Bluray. Thanks but no thanks, pretty sure I’m not ready to be a hobo yet.

And finally there is the cascade of cheap doujins in the mid-bottom-left. It was one of those buy 6 for the price of 5 things, so I just went ahead and got 12. All non-erotic because the erotic cheap stuff are almost certainly nothing but porn. The non-erotic ones on the other hand can be pretty cute and interesting. For example, the guy who made Nyoron Churuya-san also made a doujin called “Buu buu Kagabuu” – a 4koma which follows the adventures of Kagami (Lucky Star) who had inexplicably turned into a pig plushy. There’s also “YukinkoSOS” which portrays Yuki Nagato as a secretly super-dere girl constantly terrorized by her scary onee-chans Asakura and Emiri. In general really fun stuff :) There was also an “Azusa After” doujin portraying, I think, YuixAzusa in a Clannad-After like setting that I was considering getting, but that one was pretty darn expensive, so in the end I left it for another day.

And that about covers it! Japan was a pretty awesome place in late fall, cold enough to be fun but not quite enough to freeze, and seeing fall foliage for the first time ever was a huge treat. The people, too, were as nice as ever, and that in particular is something I thought really added to the experience there. I’ve always sought to avoid the weaboo stereotype by focusing on otaku subculture, but I think I’m ready to admit that I really kinda like Japan now. My friend likes the place too, so we might make yet another visit sometime next year.. when our finances recover. We’ll see.

It’s been a long and eventful year for me, where I was able to do a good bit of stuff that I wanted to do, but that left a truckload more stuff in the backburners. I hope to get to them in a timely manner. Thanks to the whole Mayan catastrophe thing being apparently false after all, a whole new year yet stretches ahead of us all. Here’s to it being a good and exciting one.

Merry Christmas from Between Linux and Anime. May your loot be plentiful in the coming year.