Hunting the Elusive

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Any self-respecting lurker at /hr/ and similar boards will be familiar with the work of ImperialBoy (Teikoku Shounen 帝国少年), who is famed not so much for his characters, but for his amazing drawings of cities. His characters, while not bad, are nothing compared to his imaginings of urbanscapes. Most, if not all of ImperialBoy’s illustrations found floating around on the Internet, are sourced from the gallery on his website, where he provides mostly normal resolution illustrations, monochrome stuff, and a few high resolution colour drawings. As an primer to this artist, I have collected most of the illustrations on the net in an archive.

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For those who have not paid attention to my repeated harping about this, Sora no Kioku is a background art book by Makoto Shinkai. It covers "Byousoku 5cm", "Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho", "Hoshi no Koe" and the 15 second spot he did for a newspaper. This book arrived rather later than I expected, but it’s all good. As I have mentioned repeatedly, even though I got multiple copies of this book, I will not be debinding and scanning as a release for a few reasons. However, here is a review of the book along with evaluative pictures.

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Well, as many people might have guessed from the previous post, this one is going to review the second Kureha figure I received some time ago, and this is the authentic 1/8 PVC of the Tony Taka-created character. It was a bit less popular than the Max Factory one, in that it is still in stock. It definitely takes a different approach, however. First of all, the pose is much more dynamic, and secondly the face and the hair denotes a character rendered less "mature" than the previous Kureha.

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This will be the first of two consecutive posts, each of which will cover a Kureha figure I got recently. By doing this, one will have a better grasp of the differences in approach between the figures. This first part will be a review of the E2046 version of the Max Factory Kureha. Scale 1/7, sculptor Shunji Hagii, completed and painted garage kit.

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This particular issue of Etsu was released some time ago, and I guess this review is long overdue. The thing is, like Magicu and other magazines like it, Etsu never really "expires". Stuff like regular Megami, for example, only covers series which are current. If you went back and looked at an issue of Megami a few months on, it’d look retro (that’s if you keep up with the latest in anime). Not so for Etsu, possibly because it doesn’t base itself on anime trends.

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This post was meant to be something more substantial (visually at least), but I just realised  I have quite a lot of stuff hosted on the server which is not mentioned on this blog. Most of it is stuff which was released during the Dark Ages of this blog between October’05 and July’06 when I stopped posting. I’m not sure why the blog died during this period, since it was such a long time ago. However, I had continued my activities on HF-Network.

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I am still a bit shocked, actually. It appears someone has gone to the trouble of downloading all the pictorial digital releases off this site and torrenting it. I’m not sure if they got it from an imageboard, or from here directly. Apparently, it’s over three thoooooouuuuusaaaaaand, and the torrent is 11.16GB. Well, that puts any plan of mine to back up my server out of reach, doesn’t it (I have relatively low download quotas)? Considering there are more than 40 leechers reported by deadfrog as of writing, I guess that’s more than 400GB of bandwidth saved by DH. I am a bit puzzled why some of the figure photography stuff went in the torrent as well. They’re pretty shit. Again, I’ll reiterate that my scanning techniques are under constant experimentation so some of the stuff in the torrent might be of dubious quality. Anyway, I am touched by the dedication displayed by the torrenter and I will work harder to bring more moe to the net. Despite running out of stuff to debind, I will be going through my collection and doing scan-reviews of the books. It won’t be as good as digital releases, but it’s the best I can do now.

Takeshita Kenjirou is the proprietor of the rather obscure Garou Kissa Hapido circle and is the illustrator for today’s release. This calendar came as a kind of random thing with my previous previous previous deputy shipment (I think) and was totally random, but I decided to scan it. It actually took me some time to track down the site of the illustrator. [Download: RAR][Directory]

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