Wow!

This is it!  This is my first official toy review on my blog.  Believe I never give reviews like these before.  Been wanting to do this for months since I got the toy months ago.

So bear with me.  I’m going to have to give a go.

When I first purchased this in November, I knew I was going to send myself up for a big ugly surprise with the BIG spendup.

The shipping fee was just nasty shock to deal with as well… Nevertheless I went on and check out my goods and see how it fares.

I have the following item displayed here.

After working on putting the entire package into one super awesome robot in just under 2 hours, this is what it turns out to be…

I must say. I was really quite impressed with the entire process of unpacking, assembling and finally ‘piece’ them all together.  All of the 5 coloured lion pieces were easily ‘configurable’. Meaning they were easy to fold up. Nothing difficult to move the internal structure around with those lions.  It was a just matter of getting used to listening to the ordinary clicks when putting them altogether.

The entire body

Black Lion Head

Black Lion Body

Red Lion

Green Lion

The lion legs..

Blue Lion

Yellow Lion

Now comes with its reputable sword and shield!

Voltron…. DEFENDER OF THE UNIVERSE!!

Voltron charges for battle!!

I must say. I’m liking this toy quite a lot. I like what I’m seeing this toy provides for an old school mecha love like myself sees when having a big toy put into your bedroom on display so people can see what an amazing toy construct it stands up.

All two-thumbs up to Toynami for producing this great toy collector’s edition!

Thanks for stopping by, reading my toy review!  I hope to do more of these in the future.

Astro Boy

Is this for real? I couldn’t believe this! After waiting patiently for several weeks since the New Year’s,  they’re not going to deliver this?!?

How on earth could New Zealand cinemas decide not to have nation-wide release of this film? I was so looking forward to its Australasia release.

BUT IT NEVER HAPPENED?!?

Why?  Could it really be that bad when Imagi had it screened overseas that they had to turn it down? Because it wouldn’t produce enough considerable amount of profit for SkyCity and Hoyts cinemas? It’s just doomed to be super time-waster for cinema goers, as they thought it was?

This is definitely not that cool. And I was really hoping that things would have worked out.

After reading this post in twitter,  I started to think myself how can the guy in the video really want to take over with the world with this so-called giant robots.   If you’re really planning to take over whole world with giant robots, then start working ahead towards being an actual scientist, rather than be a make-believe giant robot scientist wannabe! :-/

Source: Tonydyson.com, Youtube.com

Well. It’s that time of the year.

The end of 2009 is almost drawing to a close and a new year is just around the corner. Gosh it’s amazing to know how quick the whole year has gotten by. Many things to cast plenty of reflection on what things should or should not happened this year such as do many people lose jobs due to redundancies, businesses taking several cost-cutting measures to save businesses, and more and more people facing lines of unemployment, hoping to find work so they can get back up on their feet again.

Just like myself. I too heard the words of redundancy crept up in my ear as soon as I found out my services were no longer required by my company and they could not keep me anymore…

It was an unfortunate fact I’m part of that statistics.

It was difficult….

The year 2009 was certainly the most difficult year to date for many businesses and ordinary people like you and me.  And there are many times where I find blogging can be struggle when you have distractions like these.

But despite what happened, I convinced myself that I will get through just like everybody who went through as well. Everyone’s gotta move on and learn that this ‘experience’ will make them stronger along the way. With my current work as a contractor (which I found less than 3 months ago after I was made redundant), it’s allowed me to look at so many broad options how I want to lead my life forward along with my work on my anime blog.

So let’s forget all the toils and troubles everyone’s gotten through this year and focus on bringing new hopes and dreams of the new year.

I know I certainly do! For there will be exciting goals and dreams to look forward to attaining, everybody’s gotta keep their chins held up high.

So with that, I’d say it’s easy to admit this year hasn’t been easy for anyone whether you’re student studying for job you’ve always wanted but couldn’t get it or you’re worker recently been left out of work for a while due to companies’ restructure etc, etc. We all need our friends and families more than ever to keep them by your side.

They’re the ones who will always help you when you need them. To pick up your feet and move forward. Moving forward to a bright future.  Onwards to more great anime blogging.

And what better way to do this is celebrate yourself a great Christmas with your family and friends.

With that, I wish everyone Merry Christmas and have a safe holiday!!

This from Generation Mech’s blogger.^^

Merry Christmas Everyone! See you all next year in 2010!

Hmm.. Great.

Just when I was gonna make plans this evening to upgrade my Wordpress installation, I got a report from my web admin window that I’m already approaching the maximum capacity of my disk space capacity of 100 megabytes.  I was a bit stunned how on earth, I’ve managed to store this much after only just started blogging for a few months.  Until I figured out that I’ve been uploaded lots of images and media files that come with considerable sizes.  Which also means I am starting to get a lot more “resource-hungry” than before when comes to uploading media.

Oh dear.

What a interesting predicament.  Don’t think upgrading my blog would be such a good idea since upgrades do take considerable amount of my disk space.  Looks like I need to ‘upgrade’ my plans before my wordpress can have its own upgrade….

A little over a week ago, in my last post, I mentioned about endeavouring to find this great rare book online since it’s out of publication for the last 11 years.

And by jolly gosh, I found it! There’s someone on Ebay that’s actually selling this out-of-print copy. So I quickly rushed in and ready to make the purchase of USD $22 (excluding shipping cost) rather than bidding. (Okay so I was pretty desparate that I didn’t want to wait for its bidding period of 14 days 55 hours to be over despite there’s hardly anybody bidding for it. But I don’t care! :p).

However, as soon as I tried to purchase it, I was stopped short in the next screen when it asked me to for my ebay account information.  And… I just realised right at that moment I forgot what my password was and I remembered I had trouble registering my Ebay account with them a few days back and I never got it to work properly. So because of this, I ended up struggling for almost 90 minutes of my life trying to create another account. But Ebay refused me to proceed! What on earth was going on here???

Clearly, I was left pretty flustered, confused and a bit frustrated that I couldn’t get my hands on it anymore…. So I hesitantly gave up and try another avenue instead.

Which I did after 20 minutes later…..

I discovered this on Barnes and Nobles.

The other Super Robot Chronicles Book

Okay. It’s a little different to what I originally wanted. Nevertheless, the theme of the book still revolves around Japanese super robots and the robot toys in the 70s and 80s. And after reading its little content summary on Barnes and Noble pages, it’s confirmed that all the super robot series from the early 70s and 80s are included there such as Micronauts, Diaclones and Shogun Warriors. Interesting they mentioned that the authors of the book who are very passionate with Japanese robots, especially in the toy collection space and that one of them worked for a company called ToyBoxDX that specialises in collecting the Japanese toys from previous decades until today. Apparently, they do have a website that comes with blogs as well. Hmmm… Maybe worth to pay a lengthy visit.

Anyway, I purchased the book online, filled in all the details, and have the order processed. Done and dusted. At least it’s better than nothing, right?

The order is expected to arrive within 7-21 days. Its retail price went for USD $18.95. The shipping fee came up as USD $12.95. The total was USD $31.90. So if you translate that in NZ currency terms, I’m expected to pay around 45 bucks, which is okay IMHO. The book comes paperback after all with 250 pages inside. So it’s a good spend with a great service from Barnes and Noble. :)

Now I wonder would it be worthwhile for me to check out Ebay again for that original print?

Source: Barnes And Noble

Just FYI everyone.

There’s been a new upgrade of Wordpress for a while, version 2.8. Currently, mine is on version 2.7xx.
The upgrade version has been out for quite sometime. Thought would be nice to start make the change…
I did an upgrade test on another blog and it turned out okay.

But I’m very anxious to do on the main site as the total file size is very huge compared to the test. And lately this afternoon, I seemed to struggling to get this upgrade process working. So I reckon t’s best to leave it till weekend when it’s much quieter…

Hope it’ll go okay. <Fingers-crossed>

After I finished browsing online shopping details of Voltron Masterpiece 25th Anniversary edition, I stumbled upon a strange cartoon character that looks so ‘pouty’ in roundness.

I thought it’s big circular round hands and feet, my next best guess was going to be Doraemon (a popular classic Japanese robot cat for kids) that could match this description perfectly. But to my surprise (and my amusement ^^), it turns to be a like this….

Hello Kitty Voltron

The artist chickenpoppod certainly have the humorous imagination in order to come up with something like that.

But wait! That’s not all. How bout this?

The Original Voltron

Now that’s classic! :)

Source: The images do not belong to me.  Courtesy of fan artist chickenpoppod from Fanpop.com

While I was away in the process of recuperating myself within the 48 hour timeframe over the weekend, on that dark Sunday morning (this is like hours before the crack of dawn!!), I couldn’t get back into sleep as the jetlags experienced on the flight heading home had a tremendous impact on my sleeping pattern that it put me out of sequence, different from everybody else in my family.

Since those jetlags have been unforgiving lately, I decided to have fun with this instead…

Then I unpacked the goods…

Reading the manuals…..

Having done halfway….

Almost there….

And finally, we have our end product.

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Not bad for 4 hours of effort into this.  Helped me to kill my time during the early morning hours and understand a lot better on how mecha models are constructed and ‘glued’ together to get some-what real-life size.

I bought this at the Anime Exhibit in Auckland back in early July this year.  The price was paid for NZD $86 (USD $59).  It’s considerably not a bad price for a 1/144 scale model of the actual gundam.  Overall it was really fun.

I can also get it from my local store as well.  The gentleman who sold this to me showed his business card, and the shop is just around the corner  of my neighbourhood.  I’ll look forward to see that store (and the gentleman) once again and see what else they have in the store that’s really cool and awesome to have.

Hi good people,

Just dropping to say ‘Hello’ and I’m just letting you know that I’m planning to go on a holiday trip to Europe/UK for about a month.

A month!!  Wow! And you’re thinking that’s a long stretch.  What’s up with that?

Well…

Basically. I’ve been planning to have this trip for a long while but I never figure when’s the best time to do this.  I’ve working in an IT profession for a very long while and I thought this would be great opportunity for me to start travelling. On my own!   I figured August is the best time because over there, the summer is still going on and I’m planning to get away from all this winter blues I’ve had for the past couple of months.  So I’ve been pretty busy with making arrangements with my travels arrangements, bookings, travel accessories, travel docs etc… Hence my blogging hasn’t been that much frequent for the past few days since the start of August.

But nevertheless, I keep you posted during my travels, if permits.  The tour company I’m with,  stop at certain places or accomodation (where I have my night stays) that may or may not have computer facilities so it will be fairly difficult for me to gain any computer access for blogging, let alone a hotel that has no internet connection. :-/

Nevertheless, I’ll do my best when I arrive there, so feel free to send me any emails if you have any queries about regarding my wonderful world of mecha blog, during my travels.  I will endeavour to answer them as soon and as  much as I can.

In meantime,  here are the places I’ll be visiting when I get there, just in case for those of you that are travel-curious.

London

Paris

Amsterdam

Germany

Vatican City

Rome

Who knows? I might run into mecha fans over there, if I’m lucky to find any over there. Maybe in Italy or Spain(though I won’t be heading to Spain, sadly :(). Till then, catch you all soon!