Yesterday, I got back from Greenhills with two more books in tow from the Horus Heresy series. I managed to snag both of them in a hobby store in Virramall, Greenhills. The bloke who I believed owned the store asked me if I’m collecting the series and when I said yes, he had one of his salesladies bring out this hard-bound book called Horus Heresy: Collected Visions. I was aware of the book but it was more for the art of the game and the story than anything else. I told him, I was more into the novels and completing the novels. He said “ah well yan, kumpleto na yan” (well, that one’s the complete story already). I don’t think the poor bloke got the message into his head. If I wanted to get a picture book to begin with, would I bother hunting for the novels? I don’t care about the damned pictures. I could easily hunt for those over the net. I want the detailed story through the novels. Anyways, swallowing my scorn and bitter retorts, I just smiled and said yeah, that’s nice, gave him the payment for the two books and walked away. Definitely not buying books from there again. I mean, sure, he knows more about the game than I do, but I absolutely hate this holier than thou attitude towards people who bother with the story but not with the game itself. If he wants to spend his money on figures and stretch measuring tape for hours, then that’s his own trip. I’m for the novels, the story, the nitty-gritty details of Horus’s fall from grace and the beginning of this awesome civil war, and I don’t give a hoot about his hardbound picture book.

So yeah, I got back and on my way home, I decided to pick up some plastic sheets to cover my books. I wanted to really thick ones so I asked a local bookstore if they had gauge eight plastic sheets and they said the thickest they had was gauge six. Seeing what gauge six was, and how much thicker it was compared to what I had earlier used for Horus Rising just so I could lug it around without damaging the paperback cover, I went and bought a roll. I haven’t covered all the Horus Heresy books I had purchased earlier except for Horus Rising (which is taking me forever to finish reading, btw) so I decided that it was high time to give it a decent covering.

So there! The beginnings of my Warhammer 40K novel collection. Once I get to complete the ongoing series of Horus Heresy, that’s when I’ll start collecting the Omnibuses. Damn, now have almost 20 books in my reading backlog. I have other novels waiting to be read. Which reminds me, I need to dust off that mini library before the new year rolls in.

What have you been reading lately?

No pictures on this blog entry because I’ve been borderline sick for the past couple of days that I could not be bothered to bring out the camera and shoot even just a starting image for my blog entry and no, I will not go down that road and nab some image in Gelbooru just so I have an image to represent my blog entry.

As for the title, this was brought about by a discussion between me and Chil regarding how much Christmas has changed in both our families’ households over the years and how it has changed for the both of us from the time we were kids until the present. Now I know it may be different with you guys in your respective households and families but here are some things we noticed through the years.

Anticipation For Gifts

As I grew older, the anticipation for gifts went down several notches. Maybe because the stuff I would want to get for Christmas or see underneath my Christmas tree are things I cannot expect my parents or relatives or even friends to give me for Christmas. Either they are too expensive or they would more likely buy themselves those things first before they could be bothered to buy it for me as a Christmas gift. I appreciate the small tokens that my friends and colleagues give me for Christmas but do not bother looking at my Christmas wishlist. Only my girlfriend (and a few select friends who share the same interests) is willing AND able to give anything from that list.

Thus during Christmas time, I do not bother looking under the tree anymore or wonder how many gifts I have or if the largest box there has my name on it. Either I already have my gift already in my person, or it is standing proudly at my office desk. Either way, I do not really bother with getting gifts on Christmas.

Christmas Dinner

Back in the day, there were two major meals on Christmas. There’s the midnight meal on Christmas Eve when you’ve just come back from midnight Mass (for Catholics) and you’re ready for that nice, hearty meal with the rest of your family. There are the staples on any Christmas table: the ham, the pasta, the fruit salad and everything else that was in between, depending on what the kids wanted to have for the year’s Christmas.

This year, ours was pretty simple. We did not go home to province to spend it with the rest of our relatives since both my grandparents are already dead. The entire itself was financially tough. It was not that we could not be bothered to spend the holidays with our relatives there. It was just that we chose not to, this year. So right after Christmas Mass, we went straight home, had a light dinner amongst ourselves. I mixed some drinks, did the dishes and that was it.

There none of the fanfare of Christmas dinners back in the day when we were all still young and although the truth about Santa Claus had been revealed to us, we still very much looked forward to that dinner our grandparents would prepare for us.

Now, it was different. Very different.

This led me to think that Christmas really is for kids. They are the ones who look forward to all these things with wide-eyed anticipation with little to no regard about what goes on behind the scenes. They work really hard to be good for the couple of months building up to Christmas hoping that the toy they have been visiting every weekend at that toy store would miraculously show up underneath the tree.

Or what about when it is that very moment when the clock chimes twelve and the kids rush to the tree to grab the biggest box with their name on it in the pile of multicolored gifts and rip open the package to discover that their wishes had come true? During these moments, all the focus is on them. The adults will open their gifts and will go “awww, thank you” but really, most of the time, those are items they could buy if they could just be bothered to go and ACTUALLY BUY THEM. Whereas for the kids, the joy of it all was in the satisfaction that you’ve completed yet another Christmas for this innocent young soul.

I remember Chil telling me that she gave gifts for everyone in her family but when it came to opening up the gifts, all the focus was on Craig, the baby boy of the house.

I did not give out gifts this Christmas. My expenses went to the Christmas dinner and drinks.

Of course my resources were already mildly depleted by toy expenses for this month. But that does not deduct the fact that I still got awesome gifts this Christmas even though they were not wrapped and tied up with a ribbon waiting to be opened underneath the Christmas tree.

This year, my gift to Chil was a Nintendo DS Lite. It was a very early Christmas gift and to make things more fun, I bought one myself for multiplayer galore: something that was further reinforced during the Christmas luncheon at a relative’s house where Chil met a good number of my relatives for the very first time.

Chil’s gift to me (with a whole bunch of fanfare and an entire cover-up story to boot), was a figma Drossel. This was an action figure I have been meaning to get ever since it was first announced but never got around to doing so. And as I had already mentioned before, as with every single toy that my girlfriend buys me, the fact that she was the one who bought it made it far more special than any Dengeki or WonFes exclusive. No amount of poverty in the world will force me to sell the toys that she gave me to save myself. They are worth their weight in gold in my book.

I am a child and so getting these gifts left me in wide-eyed wonder when they were first given to me. But I was not a child in the sense that it did not matter whether they came in during Christmas or any other time of the year.

Do I look forward to Christmas? Why yes of course! Does it matter that my gifts come in or are opened on Christmas Day? Not really. What counts is who gave it to me and what was the significance of the gift, how long it was planned, how rare was the item no matter how small, how hard was it to acquire. And the difficulty does not lie in the financial aspect of it. A first book in a series of novels has more value for me from a couple of friends than a 30″ widescreen LCD tv from a person who wouldn’t even wince at the pricetag. I would value the fact that my girlfriend saved for a pre-ordered toy that was I so interested in more than a rich friend buying me an expensive item.

At hindsight, Christmas is definitely for the children. They have the wide-eyed wonder on Christmas day that has more or less faded upon stepping into adulthood as men and women got jaded by bills, expenses and all the hulabaloo that went on behind the scenes. The only glory left for the adults is to enjoy the wide-eyed wonder that shines in the eyes of children as they unwrap the fact that dreams do come true. Some adults still nurture that inner child. But most of the adults these days are too bothersome to give gifts to unless of course they are the appreciative kind where any small token means the world to them. These days it is so hard to find gifts for adults.

It is the kids who take every gift as a blessing. Maybe we should learn from that. If we do, perhaps life would not disappoint us as much.

Dropped by Mikatan’s blog and the figma blog to see if there was anything new from their end and boy was I happy with what I saw.

Mark (Coffeebugg) and I had ordered the Queen’s Blade PSP game that had a figma exclusive included with the game. All this time, all that was shown were images of the master model and no image of box contents and stuff. The figma blog showed a couple of actual merchandise shots of the box containing the game and the exclusive figma.

The box reminds me of the Saber Lily PSP game box with the exclusive figma that came with it.

I was trying to figure out how Max Factory was going to pull off the torn outfit look for this figma and with this, it looks like the decided to toss in an extra torso to do that. But a closer inspection of the extra torso shows that it seems to be fixed in a certain position. I’m actually not too fond of that discovery. Aside from the melee weapons that we’ve seen in the earlier master model shots, this figma comes with two extra faces. And that’s it.

But I still wanted this because it’s a nice figma design. The detail is awesome.

And torn panties. Yes. Continue Reading

I’ve always been to fantasy/sci-fi novels since I was a kid and when I started working, I began collecting the books that I’ve always wanted to own particularly those from the Dragonlance series. I have a sort of mini-library at home containing a good number of Dragonlance novels as well as some other books outside of the genre. But they’re mostly Dragonlance or fantasy stuff. After Dragonlance, I became a fan of RA Salvatorre’s work. I’ve collected most of the Legend of Drizzt but I still have several books missing. Even if I haven’t found time to read what I already have, I still want to collect the rest of it so that when I DO find time, then they’re already there and I don’t need to hunt them down before I get to read them.

For this Christmas season, my good friends at the office bought me a single book that triggered my book-hunting habit once again. It was the first book in a series that chronicles the history of Warhammer 40,000: The Horus Heresy. Emrys was the first one to talk to me about it when I saw him bringing in Warhammer figurines to the office. The tone is quite different from the fantasy novels that I’ve been used to. Although there was still the element of the arcane, Warhammer 40,000 was a very militaristic storyline.

Due to my interest in the series, I started reading up on the Horus Heresy online and was able to read through most of what has already been novelized. From then on, I knew I had to own the entire series. It wasn’t complete yet. There were a couple of novels that will come out this coming 2010 but I had a lot of hunting to do since eleven books were already in publication/circulation and the hardest to find among all of them was the first book: Horus Rising. Continue Reading

Since I’m still talking about meishi or namecards, I figured I’d feature something I did as a favor to a good friend of mine. Mark aka Coffeebugg (yes it can be a bit tedious having the same name since it sometimes seem that I’m talking about myself in the third person when I mention Mark (see?) so I’ve always called him Coffeebugg in my blog).

He recently designed his personal namecard. He ran into some issues with getting them printed so we’ve both decided that for his next batch, we’ll be using APP to do the professional printing for us since I was extremely satisfied with their printing results and service. Continue Reading

Remember my gripe about Xprint’s lack of a bleed area when they’re printing out namecards/businesscards? I was so dissatisfied with their work that I went out to look for another printing company that would deliver the results that I wanted to get with my personal name card.

I stumbled upon Aladdin Print Philippines.

They seemed very professional and they had a lot of options to offer for those who were interested in having them make name cards, business cards or other printing needs. Plus their prices were very reasonable…far better, actually, than the amount I paid for Xprint’s work. Continue Reading

Was fiddling around with the bits and pieces from my GFFs and I figured one of them sabers from the GFF Blue Destiny Gundam would fit in Drossel’s hand. The left one was a bit too tight but the right hand was a perfect snug fit. Thus this series of photos where our resident office desk princess discovers the power of beam melee weaponry. Continue Reading

When I started collecting Japanese toys, my starting point was robots. I was into the super robot genre before anything else (Voltes V, Daimos, Combattler V, Mazinger Z, etc.). As I grew older, I moved towards the real robot genre because the technology was more realistic than the super robot genre even though the entire concept of robots being used for war was still very much out of this world or that the technology to power such large 20-meter units was still very distant.

Old school mech + steampunk design = AWESOME

My first serious acquisitions of Japanese toys were Gundams. Gunpla to be specific. And as my budget increased, I was able to afford larger model kits. I started with a few HGUCs (High Grade Universal Century) and then moved to MGs (Master Grade) and finally, when I could afford it, purchased my first PG (Perfect Grade). But as my work life got busier, I had less and less time to spend on building and painting gunpla which was really sad for me since I still had a lot of model kits that I wanted to build but just didn’t have the time to do so. My work shift also did not allow me to conveniently build and paint model kits after work (I get off work at 12mn since I work during Europe hours but live in the Philippines). Continue Reading

I am so frustrated over the fact that I missed out on getting this particular exclusive release. So frustrated that I’d be bothered to write a separate blog post about it.

When I first encountered this Nendoroid in some site I could not remember, I first thought this was the older Nao Nendoroid release with a mish mosh of other Nendoroid schoolgirl parts.

Looking at the timeline of when the pre-orders should have come in, those were the months I was least active in hunting for items which was probably why this one slipped past my radar like a slippery eel.

Now if anyone can point me towards a seller that is trying to earn off of this Nendoroid by less than $80, please point me towards him/her and I’d readily fork over the cash…or at least find ways to get the cash as soon as possible. *remembers the shitload of other Nendoroids coming in in the near future*