Care for some more sake, Master? A few months ago I attended Sakura-Con 2014, where I attended a mini doll-meet with OhnoRaptor, jadepixel, thebobness, and perfect34. thebobness had brought his Melty in a nice kimono, which made me think that I should get my Arc one as well. I searched around online afterwards and came across Haku1923’s beautiful Kimono Sora, whose kimono I immediately fell in love with. After doing some searching around, I eventually found out about the many kimono shops on Taobao, including the one Haku1923’s Sora had. Turned out it was an older set, 花絳Ⅱ, by Infinite …

Been pretty busy lately with work and planning the upcoming Comiket/Japan trip but I finally got a chance to sit down and unbox/go through all the loot backlog that has accumulated over the past while. Normally I don’t bother posting loot blog posts, but this time around there were some pretty big items I had been looking quite forward to getting. And so, here’s the rundown, with the lovely Arc as eyecandy ^_^ Pile of loot boxes, from AmiAmi, Suruga-ya, Rakuten, Yahoo Japan Auctions, and more! Everything opened up and all together! Mostly TYPE-MOON stuff (of course) but a few …

Last weekend was Sakura-Con 2014, the biggest anime convention in the north-west. The convention is pretty big with over 25,000 attendees this year and was the biggest I’ve ever been to since Anime Expo 2011. It was also the first time I was attending an anime con with friends also interested in anime (including OhnoRaptors and Tsukikira), which made it a lot more fun since I wasn’t always the only person excited to see stuff. Attended a few of panels, including “A Helpful Guide to Anime Figure Collecting”, “Are We Live? The iDOLMA$TER!”, “Cosplay Skit Contest”, and “Lesbian-Themed Anime”. Spent …

See MyAnimeList for my list of watching/completed anime. Check out AnimeCalendar for a nifty tool to keep up-to-date with airing anime. It’s the second week into this airing anime season. All the episode ones have been watched and all first impressions made (see here for notes and thoughts on the last season). Time to jot down the notes so we can check back three months from now and see how ridiculously wrong (or accurate) our initial thoughts were. It’s a bit early, but I think I’m more looking forward to the summer 2014 season (Sword Art Online 2: Gun Gale …

This weekend I dropped by OhnoRaptor‘ place and she spend an hour or so teaching me how to use Adobe Lightroom. I was previously using Adobe Photoshop CC for all my photos but could never get any of them to look as nice as the gorgeous Dollfie pics I see on Flickr. Thankfully, OhnoRaptors to the rescue, and after being walked through most of the basic Lightroom settings and a few sample touchup edits, I was ready to try it out in my next figure review. So here’s the results, hope they look nicer now! Prisma Illya was chosen as …

Android: The Story of A Fragmented Platform (src) So even though I wasn’t planning on it, I just published yet another minor update to Beats 1.x as Beats 1.7.5b. Changelog? Added Amazon Fire TV support (Beats-style only), add more speed multipliers, removed AdMob, and fixed a few crashes. Interesting, not-so-obvious question: What do all these changes have in common? Answer: They are all related to the problem of Android fragmentation. Actually, so was most/all of the changes in Beats 1.7.4b and 1.7.3b. So here’s a rant about why. How fragmentation lead to Beats 1.7.5b Lets look at the root causes …

Could this be the True Ending? Intro A while back, following my second Japan trip, I ventured into the world of Dollfie Dreams and created my very first custom DD, Arcueid V0. It was “V0” because at that time, she was created using only standard/unremarkable parts that you can easily pick up online through web stores or hunt down through eBay/Yahoo Auctions Japan. While Arcueid V0 was pretty good, she wasn’t perfect enough. And so I went on a quest to complete V1. Ideally, V1 would include a custom faceup, custom eyes, more stylized wig, and a proper skirt. A …

So this weekend, the cherry blossoms (sakura trees) on University of Washington campus were in full bloom, so OhnoRaptors and I decided to go on a picnic + photography trip with a few friends. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to bring along a few figures for figure photography (was originally planning on bringing along Saber Lily but I realized it’d be a hassle to carry her around along with all the picnic food), so I went ahead and finally unboxed Good Smile Company‘s 1/7 Ryougi Shiki and Kotobukiya‘s 1/8 Ryougi Shiki. The place turned out to be far …

Beats 1.7.3b While migrating a bunch of old projects to GitHub, I decided to check if the old Beats 1.x app still compiled with the latest SDK and work. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t, with tons of new warnings and errors. While cleaning up the errors, I decided to revisit some of the annoying bugs that people have been emailing, and the result is Beats 1.7.3b. There’s no new features in this release, but there’s a few frequently asked bug-fixes/improvements. The game also now supports hardware acceleration (new setting in the Display section), so it should run at a smooth 50+fps on …

Happy Chinese New Year! Happy Chinese New Year everyone! For those who don’t know, January 31st is this year’s Chinese New Year, also known as the “Spring Festival”. It marks as the first day of the Lunar New Year, which is based on the lunar cycles of the lunar calendar rather than the solar cycles of the Gregarian calendar. While most of the world uses the Gregarian calendar as an international standard, the lunar calendar is still used for many traditional holidays in many asian and middle-eastern cultures (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, etc.) although the degree of celebration …