https://www.facebook.com/SurugayaJP/photos/a.612221602143502/2452832728082371/
My favorite shop in Japan now can sell and ship direct to U.S. customers without needing a middleman!
Rumination commencing...
I guess I need to post a thought or two here.
Suruga-Ya's website appears to be back the way it was so my habit of scrolling and looking over their wares has resumed. So much stupf lust.
A very long time ago, I received a bunch of built-up 1/72 airplane models--including FIVE F4U Corsairs. (One Airfix, two Heller [now SMER] and two old-production Revell, to be specific.) They were all in bad shape and poorly built to begin with, so I stripped the paint off, carefully disassembled them and started looking for alternative parts.
My search is a little more serious now.
If High Planes did a detailling set for F4U-1(A), F4U-1D, F4U-1C and/or FG-1D, I'd be all over them. As it is, I may just get some F4U-5N sets from them, "impossible variant" be darned.
FP
https://www.kashi.com/our-foods/cold-cereal/kashi-golean-crisp-cinnamon-crumble-cereal
Got a big box of the above cereal a few days ago and am trying it out. It's a lot less sugary than what I've usually been eating for breakfasts.
In my travels today: an action-figure scale pickup truck and an action-figure scale police cruiser in the toy aisles of two different shops.
I'm stepping back from the brink. The money I have in pocket might need to last for a while.
On Saturday I played the demo version of the new Team Yankee permutation of Flames of War and again I want to build an army in the worst way.
Years ago I could have gotten diecast tanks in the right size/scale for the game, but now they seem to be scarce, which means I'll probably troll every thrift store I can find in five or six counties for the things, if there are any to be found. Most of the ones I'd seek would have been made by Motormax or Polyfect, specifically the Cold War designs. (I'd bought the Motormax Sherman, Churchill and T34-85 for the WW2 version of Flames of War, but I since have gotten rid of those.)
As I climb the first hill along my regular hike, both sides of the path are dominated by a plant with glossy, three-lobed leaves. They're so exuberant and cheerful, I'm tempted to caress them, even rub my face in their bright greenery. But I refrain, because they are poison oak. One touch would cause my skin to break out in an inflamed rash that would last for days. I encourage you, too, to forgo contact with any influence in your own sphere that is metaphorically equivalent to the alluring leaves of the poison oak.
I am now in possession of a gift card for my favorite hobby store. But I'm in perhaps the roughest stages of rumination as to whether I should buy something off the shelves now or wait for a bargain to come along. It is wonderful and horrible all at once.
Continuing to imagineer the Gundam RedLegger, and threw myself a hurdle I didn't need. A couple years ago, B-Club had a series of resin Gundam bust kits (as linked in a previous post) and I was particularly interested in the one for the GP04 Gerbera. While Gundam fans know that the GP04 eventually became the Gerbera Tetra in 0083, the bust design appears to have a lot more in common with the Alex Gundam of 0080--with some improvements that aren't seen in other Gundam family designs. So it lent itself very well to my project--if I could get one and if it was hardware compatible with the pieces I already had or could get.
And I can't find one for sale...on any side of the Rim.
My alternatives in the same product line include the Prototype Zeta #1 and the GP00 Blossom, but I'm not as excited about either. The Blossom isn't much different from the Zephranthes/Stamen family which followed it, and the Prototype Zeta just looks too strange and implausible.
My more practical side is trying to tell me to just build what I already have. It may come to that.
FP
For all I know they still could have some Korean knockoff kits, but they aren't on the website.
I spent another fruitless while yesterday in the Bargain Basement of Books Warehouse in Pigeon Forge yesterday. The place is a shambles with tens of thousands of books in bins or on shelves with very little in the way of organization. It's impossibly difficult to find anything specific.
My thinking there went in this direction: if I had one of those quadcopter drones that could carry a camera, or perhaps carry my smartphone and have it act as a camera, I could photorecon the whole space and then have a computer program determine all the books it saw. Then I could virtually search that data and see if there was anything I wanted or needed.
I feel it's probably a good likelihood that somebody's already thought of something like this.
http://k-hobby.com/shop/item/1144-%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%83%88%E3%82%BF%E3%82%A4%E3%83%97z%E3%82%AC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%80%E3%83%A0%E3%80%80%E3%83%90%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%82%A2%E3%83%83%E3%83%97%E3%83%A2%E3%83%87%E3%83%AB/
http://k-hobby.com/shop/item/1144-rx-78-%E3%82%AC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%80%E3%83%A0-gp-04%E3%80%80%E3%83%90%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%82%A2%E3%83%83%E3%83%97%E3%83%A2%E3%83%87%E3%83%AB/
http://k-hobby.com/shop/item/c-o-v-e-r-kit-7%E3%80%801144-hguc-%E3%82%AC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%80%E3%83%A0gp-01-fb%E7%94%A8-%E3%83%AC%E3%82%B8%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%82%AD%E3%83%83%E3%83%88/
B-Club garage kits are vanishing from the market, as the division of Bandai stopped putting out new products two years ago and shops are selling off their remaining stock. It's becoming a chase for me...even though I expect I can't afford to get the ones I want that are still available.
I won a $50 gift card for Amazon.com in a sweepstakes over the weekend, and I'm looking forward to spending it.
Because of the event, I decided to look at a bunch of quasi-gift cards I received from car dealerships for GoShoppingMall.com and selectyourgifts.com (which are one and the same company!) that I've had for years. They're still "good" because I hadn't "spent" them.
The business model of American Sales Industries is kind of hard to grasp. You can't exactly buy direct from them like a normal retailer...you have to have been issued a prize card, usually from a car dealership sales event or some other such promotion. The dollar amount shown on the card doesn't mean an actual cash value: it's quasi-credit for inflated prices on the catalog of items, whose actual retail value matches the "shipping and handling" fees, which the consumer has to pay out of pocket (the prize amount then only sets a limit on what you can buy, but doesn't go towards buying anything!). So to actually get "$500" of use out of a prize card, you'd have to spend probably $50 to $100 of real money yourself.
So what's in the catalog? Basically the same kind of stuff you find in the tourist-trap stores like Golden Eagle and Lily's...but not as many of them. Steak knives. Travel mugs. Little tool sets you can keep in your car. Chintzy jewelery and cheap watches. Tote bags and gunny sacks. Obsolete electronics and software.
In theory, my "$1550" in collected quasi-credit would get me 38 of their RC model cars. But I'd have to spend about $645 in real money for the shipping and handling. That's why I haven't used the cards yet.
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momijizukamori
