Mahjongg madness, DIY Mahjongg table
Okay, so what do we have here? As you may know from previous posts or the tag-cloud we are quite into the game of Mahjongg, playing Riichi rules. What we've been missing all the time was a fantastic automatic mahjongg table. Of course it is much too expensive and huge - on top of that those beasts of machanics engeneering need frequend service - which isn't available in Europe. So we set out to build one Ourselves (of course no automatic one as we are no team of engeneers with a fully equipped work shop). Read on for details and building instructions.
Pocky The Review
Finally! We're done with all the photo taking issues. As promised, here's the review I've been wanting to write since I got that Pocky heap last Christmas! They've been lying around for so long...
Flavors are listed in no particular order. Unfortunately, I can't claim this review to be complete. Glico has released so many different Pocky and it's even harder to get everything outside Japan. Nevertheless, I've got quite a bunch and pretty pictures too 
(And I'll make sure I add future Pocky additions to this review if I should ever get my hands on more.)
Figure Buying Guide
It all started with the Konata Figma that I wanted to have and no matter how hard I looked for her, she wasn't available anywhere (you can always try eBay but in most cases you pay a high price). As ridiculous as it may sound but competition between figure collectors is fierce. Popular figures are gone in no time and people are capable of hogging sites at 4 am in the morning to get limited ones.
From what I've seen, it's easier to get figures when they're available for preorder if you really want them. Of course you can hope for sales (and they happen a lot!) but most probably those for sale aren't the ones you want.
Mina, Model-Kit Diary
As figures are somehow fun and so is tinkering. So how about combining those two? "Garage Modelkits" offer you the (IMO) nicest way of doing so. What you'll get is a resin casted model in parts, you've gotta file it, grind it, polish it, paint it and glue it together. It takes up shitloads of your time, so be careful not to let that new hobby eat too much of your time - if you decide to try it / stick with it.
Anyways, we've (as in Eefi and NebuK 
) tried our first garage kit, Mina, from the Densha Otoko opening:
Mina, our first modelkit, finished
As we've run into many problems, gear and methode wise, we thought we'd publish a small "buildlog" or "modelkit diary". Mind you, this is by no means a guide or tutorial as we've only tried to find our way into the Resin Kit World . Still if you're preparing to do your first kit this post may give you some kind of idea what you're diving into.
Saber Lion Plush
Roar~ I'm a lion!
Finally, I'm back with another plushie post ^__^/ (Ow.. the applet thing finished uploading o_o!) I made this plushie for halcy's birthday and did it just in time but I'm pleased with the result ^^. This post is for roBernd who asked for pictures since halcy's too reserved to do so :p
AmiAmi.com RSS
Maybe some of you like figures (as in figmas, nendos, etc.) and know www.AmiAmi.com - which is a great shop. It just poses one problem - it offers no RSS feed that allows you to stay up to date to whether items get available, get into preorder or are restocked. So you may miss the item you want due to the completely crazy japanese habit of buying everything that was just restocked out in mere hours.
As we have also been disstatisfied with that we wrote a parser for AmiAmi that creates a RSS feed. You may also subscribe it, it's update twice a day at 16:00 and 04:00 Europe/Berlin time every day. You can find it on:
http://ghostdub.de/~eefi/rss.xml
Maybe it'll help you harvesting the Otaku loot you want .
Itazura Neko Coin Bank
First seen on alafista.com that the preorder was open for these coin banks on Strapya. I couldn't resist getting one because the instant I saw this, I knew this is (and ever will be) the most awesome coin bank ever produced by mankind. You can still get it here :3 and it will make a great gift for children and adults alike.
Edit: They are again available at Strapya or at Play-Asia too!