Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021

First post of the year! It's been a crazy past year. Covid. Me getting Covid. Biden vs Trump. Trump trying to overthrow the election. Definitely been crazy.

Thanks to my sick leave due to Covid, I got quite a few posts in 2020. 😆 Probably won't have another productive run like that for some time to come or at least I get more leave time. I'm planning to do some actual spring cleaning for 2021 so I might take a few pics of the stuff I throw out. Or not, we'll see. I guess the main highlight is that I've finally started to actually give and sell stuff away. The selling had it's ups and downs and I feel I'll probably feel more comfortable just giving away most of the toys and stuff I don't want. Selling just takes too much time and effort for too little money. I'd rather spend that time doing something else. Like playing Genshin!

I've been playing Genshin Impact since early December. It's a freemium open-world action RPG that takes a lot of cues from Zelda BotW. Of course, once you get into the game, it's quite different and in some ways, even better. The graphic and art style is very nice especially the environment and bgm. This is definitely a game where you might want to just take your time and just walk around in. You can run, swim, climb and even glide all around the world of Teyvat. The characters and storyline definitely have a heavy anime influence on them. That can be a plus or minus depending on your taste. Probably the best thing about this game is that you can play on your phone outdoors and then continue the game on your PC at home; the only thing you need is internet access. Either way, won't hurt to try it out; it is free after all. It's available for PC, Android, iOS, and PS4. Just make sure you have at least a mid-tier device that can run modern stuff like LoL, Fortnight, and Overwatch and you should be good to go.

This is an actual screenshot featuring my ace all-rounder Jean. The entire backdrop behind her can be explored including that mountain you see in the distance. And while there's not much color since it's night time, the scene bursts with color during the day. And yes, there is day night and changing weather even. Playing a game like this for free? Seriously? The developer, Mihoyo, is raking it in however due to the gacha system. I might give them a little something since Google's Play Store currently has a $2 discount going on right now. Currently, I just finished the Mondstat arc and will now focus on side quests and stuff before moving on to Liyue. Might also see if I can tackle Dragonspire for some bonus stuff before moving on.

The 2020 holiday season has been good as far as stuff I was able to buy for myself. There's been several purchases such as a Freeing 1/4 Bunny-Style figure and a tritium watch from the Afterburner series by Armourlite. The big highlight for me though was scoring a Nerf Rival Prometheus from Tuesday Morning of all places for just $50. In a nutshell, the Prometheus is a Nerf Rival version of a chaingun. It holds over 250 rounds of ammo and rapid fires them at roughly 6-8 shots a second on full auto. It's by far the most powerful Nerf Rival on the market as it tops all the other unmodified guns in both speed and power. I could not wipe out the wide grin I have on my face every time I fire that thing. Original MSRP is $200 and even in the secondary market, it runs over $100 used so I was very lucky to find mine new. If you can get this gun for $100 even, it is 100 percent worth it; that's how much fun it is.

I think I've said all there is to say for now. 2021 likely won't be quite as eventful but we'll see.

Current status

So anyone who follows me on Twitter should know I got COVID-19. I'm at the end of my 4th week and I'd say I'm 80-90% recovered. Probably be another week or 2 before I'm fully out of it. I suspect I got covid from my mother, who I currently live with (just so there's no misunderstanding, I'm the one supporting her, not the other way around :P), but that's a conjecture at best and there's no way to be sure how I got it. Fortunately, it seems my mother is one of those asymptomatic people who don't have any symptoms despite having the disease. My own symptoms, while fairly severe at the beginning, don't involve the usual symptoms like fever, difficulty breathing, and severe coughing. Mine involve hallucinations, headache/nausea, diarrhea, loss of appetite, partial loss of my taste receptors, sore joints, loss of energy/stamina, dry mouth, and just a occasional mild cough. My symptoms started with severe diarrhea and initially me and my doctor though it was some stomach virus/flu. But a week later, I started suffering severe headache and hallucinations as well so my doctor sent me to an ER where I was diagnosed with covid. Probably the most disconcerting thing for me was that everything started tasting weird and there was an ever-present smell that I had dubbed "the covid smell". Right now, my remaining symptoms are the occasional cough and taste. My taste has mostly recovered but up to a week ago, combination pizza still tasted somewhat off to me. I plan to have another one this weekend and if I can enjoy the combination pizza this time, that will mean my taste pretty much fully recovered.

Me having covid meant that I got kicked out of work. Fortunately, it's government related so I'm unlikely to be fired from it but it will take a while before I'm re-instated. This also means I get a lot of free time in the meantime so I've been using it to go through my room and start weeding out stuff I no longer want and stuff I've yet to open. This is reflected in my recent blog activity being much busier than it's been in a while now and likely will continue until I'm working again.

One of the things my recent activities have made me realize is that I really do need to make my posts immediately after taking my pictures and that I need to take my pics as I go through my unopened stuff. One of the things I recently opened is LBX Z-mode Ikaros Force and Zero. Those interested can check out peaugh's review below.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of my unboxing and it turns out the set was a bit much for me and once I went through it, I wasn't in the mood to take any pictures which I normally do after unboxing so all I have are the pictures of the front and back of the box and a pic of the bots on the shelf.

Frankly, I'm only interested in Ikaros Force's weapon mode because that one is a huge ass sword compared to Zero which is a couple of much shorter, less impressive curved blades. If I get around to doing it, I'll post another picture but this is pretty much it for now. 😑

My room...is a mess...

And another year comes and goes...LOL. orz

Arguably the main reason for leaving the blog on the side for so long is that most of my free time had been taken up by the mobile game Puzzle and Dragons which I'll cover in the next post. That and reading manga on Comico which I'll also cover some time...maybe. Thanks to PaD, I've left a whole bunch of stuff to the side, Anime to watch, toys to open up and play. My room's a mess due to unopened toys and too much toys left out in the open. I might have to either sell or throw out some of my toys depending on how bad I feel the situation is.


Boxes of stuff...orz




Transformers toys has been a hit and miss across the board. I'd say the movie line for the most part was a miss and Generations line more or less a hit with the Combiner Wars and now Titans Return series.

My work has more or less stabilized for the time being so that should allow me to better manage my time so I can get to doing some spring cleaning and blog posting. Things always like getting in the way though...like myself. *dies* orz

Wow...

It's been over a year since my last post here...hahaha...*dies*

What have I been doing...the usual I guess? Work has tired me out so I never got in the mood to do another post but this week I'm looking after my mother since she had surgery on her foot last week so I took the week off. I'll be back to work next week so this might be the only post here for a while... *croaks*

Recent developments...I finished watching Wake Up Girls. I've watched both seasons of IdolMaster, Love Live, and WUG. They all have their charms and weaknesses, it's hard to pick a favorite. ^^ I'm also sporadically watching Rinne No Lagrange. I love Rinne's 1st season OP, it's been a while since I've been so into an original anime OP. Great stuff.

Speaking of great stuff, I used Great Stuff for the first time this week. It's a insulation foam that solidifies and seals cracks and gaps. It's fun but it's also tricky to use. I don't think my first job using this was that good at all but after watching a few videos, I think I'm starting to get how this works. ^^;

Kinda got side tracked there...um...yeah, eroge! I'm currently playing Otome ga Kanaderu Koi no Aria. I've finished 3 heroines so far and I think I'll give this a B-. It's cute but nothing outstanding. I've already bought Otome ga Irodoru Koi no Essence but I think that's going to be the last Otome game I buy for the time being. Oh!, and Kei-sama is the best! Hahya! *explodes*


edit: Amazon links removed.

This is a steal!

I am sooooo tempted. Daitarn 3 is one of my favorites of the old era classic robots so I am seriously considering this even if I don't have any more room! Hell my room could be completely jam-packed and I'd still  consider getting this! Hell, I might even be crazy enough to get one for play and one for viewing and one for storage! Nah, at the most, maybe one for play and one for storage but I think that's still crazy enough! XD

This kind of deal only comes once in a very rare blue moon so if you like Chogokin and/or classic robot, I recommend to totally go for this. Plus free shipping (remember to enter code if you  not Premium+ member). For heavy toys like Chogokin, that's a very nice extra gravy on top. I'm gonna go order right now...

Today's figure purchase

So I was looking through today's Crunchyroll sales. Some of the stuff in their email for today like Figuarts Red Ranger and Cu-Poche Amami Haruka for about $10 each were not available. Not sure if that mean they sold out or the staff flubbed and they weren't available to begin with. In their place, there's was some different deals like loli Sonico and Kawamura Yu for $25 each. I'm a bit miffed that it's all for more expensive stuff but okay, I can take Kawamura (plus I already have a Cu-Poche Haruka anyways :P) so I bought and when I went back to the original product page, it reads "Out of stock". WTF?! Did I buy the last one or did they only have one to begin with? Don't know if I'll ever find the answer to this one... :P

How I lost 2 hours time

Step 1: I decided I wanted to change how my Twitter page looks.


My old Twitter background. I took it from Parasol's official website. I took measurements from both the image and Twitter to see where the cutoff points were for certain items.

Step 2: Choose new background. I started off with something a bit more smutty. My first attempt was Nogizaka Haruka in lingerie (Yes from that dakimakura cover, that dakimakura cover by far my favorite dakimakura image and I will probably never tire of it until I die. I swear that image is god, wtf am I saying but it's true it is full of ero and cute.). Anyways, I then switched to Azuma Hatsuki in tentacles but I ended with something more all-ages. I think this better choice.


My initial Hazuki choice was the highlighted one.

Step 3: IrfanView & GIMP. Each has their own advantage and limitations but without both, image editing would be much more pain in the ass. IrfanView is great because it is easy to size image parts down to the exact pixel, something I can't easily do in GIMP. But for serious image effects, you need GIMP (or Photoshop). GIMP is a pain to use though. Half the time is looking up how to do this and that in GIMP.



Step 4: Seeing how it looks on Twitter. I post each of the results I ended up with (including sexy Haruka and tentacle Hatsuki) and see how it looks.


I think final result looks okay. But I don't use Twitter that much so this maybe very waste of time. orz

My Twitter btw https://twitter.com/Bubbag02. Doesn't seem like it shows the custom background when viewed by others so seriously what's the point? orz

First world problems?

These were taken from a Toys R Us back in summer of 2014. Last month, the Lego Fireman was still there.

    

And now for what I really want to talk about. :P I'm finding that I'm taking more stuff than I can process whether it be buying toys and eroge or deciding what anime to watch. There's simply too much stuff I want to play or watch. So I'm going to have to painfully hold myself back on each of those fronts until I'm at a more comfortable state. It'll be easier said than done since I still intend to get the TFs I really want but the rest of the stuff (outside of what I've already pre-ordered) should hopefully be skippable. I've been busy updating my foreign purchases through MFC and it should be relatively close to a complete look at my current collection.

I lose steam too easily. I get an idea, prepare to write about it, get distracted, then lose the idea or the inspiration to write it. I fail at life.

One of the anime I've been catching up on is Idol Master. Just watched episode 20 and I saw a bit of myself in Chihaya when she withdrew from everyone. Unlike Chihaya however, I didn't have a Haruka to turn me around and ultimately I pretty much clawed myself out of that darkness. Probably because of that, I seem to have a somewhat of a "twisted" personality. Of course, I try not to let that show very often, lol.

Testing, testing

This is just to test the embedding from OneDrive.


This is from a nearby park.

This is from inside the Houston Galleria.

Unfortunately both embeds are quite small and there's no option to adjust their size to be bigger even if their original size was bigger.

edit: It seems clicking on them will redirect to OneDrive's site with access to original size. Also rather than directly embedding the video, the first image above is just a thumbnail that links to the video on OneDrive. It's a far cry from YouTube. :p

Cheap toys!

I was helping my parents stock up on water at a local Walmart when I noticed they had a clearance tent set up outside. So I took a look and bought the following...

A Hexbug Scarab for $1....

And a Mega Bloks WoW Barrens Chase set for $3.

Tested out the Scarab and decided to a take a brief video of it using my phone. For some reason, the phone didn't record the sound racket caused by the Scarab. orz

I don't play with Hexbugs all that much myself but they're excellent for entertaining any random kid that may come over for whatever reason (such as the nephews :p).

Happy Holidays!

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a good holiday season. I had Xmas eve dinner at my bro's and there was a good family get together. Plenty of noms for everyone. :)



It's been so long since the last update! I thought work would slow down after the summer season but things picked right back up and before I knew it, holiday season was in full swing. Thanks to holiday sales at HLJ, Amazon, and other places, I racked up a lot of toys but due to work, I hardly have any time to open and play with them! On top of that, there was simply too many unopened toys in my room and so on Xmas, I went and packed away maybe half of them and put them in the garage attic to open at a later time. So my current goal is to open up all of my boxed Nendoroids and figmas before spring season rolls around because I want them to be indoors before they get subjected to summer heat. Same with the Shinkis and other toys although they get to stay in my room for now.


My unopened Shinkis. Quite a stack to go through...

Since I have so many unopened toys and left my blog to rust for much of 2012, my focus for 2013 is to get those toys opened and post more content. That's going to be tricky since I have so much to do but I'm sure I'll work it in somehow.


A hint of my next post, driving with Shinkis! Laters!

Waning interest?!

Recently my interest in figma seems to have taken a dip. This has somewhat to do with the fact that while they're posable, they're not really meant to be played with like you can with a typical action figure so I can't quite toss them on the bed to play with like I can with a Transformer figure. That said, I still have a few figma preorders still remaining, namely Samus and the Strike Witches couple Sanya and Eila. On the Nendoroid front, I have preorders for Yamada Aoi, Shinguuji Sakura, and Saber Zero.

Speaking of preorders, I've noticed Strike Witch's Barkhorn is up. The good news is they've finally changed the stands to the moveable type that's standard on almost all recent Nendoroids, something that would have been nice had they done it with Charlotte.

I still think of this blog as 2D-ism. Old habits die hard. I've quit my 2nd job but it seems my primary job is starting to pick up. Just when I thought I'd get more time do do things like finally opening my toys. orz ^^;

(all images stolen from GSC website)

Ew.

I was at a local Asian supermarket a few days ago and noticed they not only sell live frogs but turtles as well for cooking. They had both hard and soft shelled turtles. Eek.

ComiPo and other comic creating software

I tried out the ComiPo trial download. You can find more details about ComiPo at their website.



A test comic using the Comipo software. Cool stuff is that you can drag & drop all sorts of special effects and backgrounds. The biggest disappointment OTOH is that it lacks basic text formatting features such as center justification and word wrap. Funny thing is it's easy to see why as Japanese tend to use just a single style of justification and because of that don't use word wrap either so the concepts are foreign to them. Another disappointment is they don't make all the features available such as importing your own pictures which is rather important. I want to see how that works out before I throw down any wad of cash and they pretty much screwed that up.

I've also tried Comic Life and Comic Life 2. Comic Life I was kinda disappointed with because all it does is help with text balloons and panel layouts. CL has no special effects function whatsoever so I'd still be reliant on GIMP for the fancy stuff. CL2 is a mass disappointment because it runs SLOW. I'm surprised I was able to get anything done, it was that bad. The first CL runs circles around CL2.

All that's left for me to try is Comic Creator, a software I found at the local Microcenter. It seems to feature what I'm looking for which is a way to quickly create text balloons and add special effects. We'll see how that works out.

2D-Ism is now "officially" 2DToybox

I've come up with the title "2DToybox" a while back but I had kept the name of 2D-ism because I liked that name (don't you?). However, it just doesn't fit the main theme of my blog so I finally got around to changing the blogspot domain name. Another thing is that I've moved some of the blatant mature content posts over to http://ecchi-ism.blogspot.com/ which will be dedicated to the rare ecchi merchandise that I get or watch. If any reader still finds a post in this blog that may need to go to that other blog, please let me know in the comment section below or in the comment section of the offending blog, thanks. Other changes I've made include the fact that I'll be making pretty much all my blog posts here as opposed to before where I've tried to split it between a toy-themed blog and a somewhat personal blog. Ultimately, it didn't make sense to keep it separate as there wasn't enough content plus they eventually wind up crossing over anyways. :P So now everything will be posted here...not that there was much posted on that other blog to begin with... orz


On to other news, the past month has been huge on import purchases. I haven't even started unboxing stuff from my last shipment and I'm already getting a ton of new stuff... orz Anyways contents listed below...


Nendoroid Mio
Nendoroid Homura
Busou Shinki Lirbiete
Busou Shinki Ianeria, Dengeki ver.
Ultra-Act Mirror Knight
Ultra-Act Jan-Bot
BLK Huke artbook w/ BRSB figma
figma Append Miku
figma Homura
figma Index
figma Tsuruya
figma Mirai
BRS curry BRS ver
BRS curry DM ver

BTW, I've tried the BRS curry...and it tastes like crap, LOL. It's really black too, scary... At least the charms are cute.

I've also started work on my long-dead photocomics, yaaaay! \^o^/ Expect a strip in about a week. It's funny because I've been out of work the past year and you'd think I'd get on it then but no, I get on it after I found work. Go figure. :P Anyways, that's all I have to say for now, cheers!

Confessions

I have some confessions to make. First off, I missed out on getting Nendoroid Elsie. Even though Mikatan blog hinted at it, I didn't expect her to get released before the end of the month and sell out at Amiami shortly after. While there are other avenues of getting her, buying her from Amiami would have been the least expensive option (especially considering there's a few other things I wanted to get from there as well). Next is that I bought too much toys this holiday season. Again. I'll be going over those purchases in the next few weeks to come but I definitely need to spend more time with my toys. Also I've been letting a FB game take too much of my time again. I would think I'd be over it by now but it ain't so easy after all. orz.

The biggest confession is that I've been spending more time reading about toys (whether through reviews or blogs) than I do playing and taking pictures of the toys I bought especially this year. It was quite a shock when I realized it so hopefully, this will cause me to pay more attention to my own toys especially since I have a few that's not even out of the box yet.



As mentioned, I went on a spending rampage this past couple of weeks. Not long after I bought the Shinki figures from Mandarake, I've bought some more import toys thanks to HLJ's BF single price shipping sale. I've also bought a few more stuff from Mandarake as well as some more brick toys including the Lego TRU truck ($25), Mega Bloks Halo Battlescape ($26 from Target), and the big Kre-O Prime ($30 from Amazon). I'll have a lot of boxes to open this holiday season... :P

Cocktease

Mikatan Blog is such a cocktease sometimes. Even though there's no way at this point for anyone to order any more of Cheerful Miku figma, they proceed to parade it around on the blog like it's going to change anything. Doesn't really make any sense to me but maybe someone else can explain the meaning behind it all? :P

Hongfire withdrawal

Hongfire's been down this entire week and I'm suffering withdrawal symptoms. I don't know if this was a planned or unplanned outage; either way I'm not too happy about it. While I'm busy trying to deal with the loss of my favorite method of wasting time online, I'll yap about this summer.

This summer has been pretty good to me as far as me finding great steals on brick-related (IOW Lego, Mega Bloks) stuff and because of that, I've also bought more brick stuff this year than all previous years combined. Let me list the brick deals that I've gotten this summer.

Bionicle Baranus V7 $15 @ Walmart (original: $39.96)
Dragons Universe Dx Dual-Blast Dragon Hunter $7.48 @ Target (original: $29.99)
Dragons Universe Rapid Fire Dragon Fighter $4.98 @ Target (original: $19.99)
NFS Porsche 911 GT3 RS $13.74 @ Target (original: $54.99)
Kreo Starscream $7.48 @ Target (original: $29.99)
Kreo Sentinel Prime $9.98 @ Target (original: $39.99)
Hero Factory Fire Lord $9.98 @ Target (original: $19.99)
Hero Factory Von Nebula $13.00 @ Walmart (original: $19.99)
Covenant Phantom $39.99 @ Target (original: $79.99)

All of the Target stuff were from the same store which leads me to wonder what's going on with their pricing/clearance department especially considering the fact that the Kreos have only been out for a brief period while the NFS Porsche and the Phantom are brand new releases. The Phantom is frankly a bit over budget for me so I'm not sure if I'll keep it or not. I'll be doing a post on the Baranus, Dragon Fighter, and Porsche within the next couple weeks.

There were also some other deals which I'll post about later but at this rate, I might as well rename this blog "Cheap-ass Toy Box"... :P

 

On the anime front, I've watched Sora no Oto and Asobi ni Ikuyo (Bombshells From the Sky). Sora no Oto, I liked a lot, maybe even more than K-On! Asobi ni Ikuyo, while enjoyable, doesn't exactly move me much but that kinda goes with most harem anime in general. Haven't watched much anime lately but that might pick up depending on how I spend the next few months. Haven't bought any import toys lately although I'm considering a few purchases in the near future. The high yen has really dampened my want for imports so future purchasing plans are really uncertain at this time.

Speaking of bricks, I had recently got the Lego midi-scale Star Destroyer for half off but I found it to be too delicate and crumble too easily so I returned it. The engine parts in particular were easy to fall off if not careful and then there's that unsightly gap through the front middle of the ship. It just didn't work for me. :/

MARS Converters

They suck! That is all. :P



My main problem with the one I got was that all joints were loose and the shoulder joints popped out too easily. It might not be bad if it was cheaper but I rather get something that looks and plays better even if it's not as big. Yeah, they probably should have made it a bit smaller as well. Bigger doesn't always mean better especially with toys.

I returned him, BTW.