It has been a while since my latest figure review because most figures released lately weren’t falling in my DO WANT category. Unlike this figure here which was pretty much love at first sight. After several months of waiting (including  2 months delay) Kiriko finally arrived here last week.

The original character was obviously designed by Shunya Yamashita for an anime/manga/figure/ novel/drama-CD project called “Enka Ōdō Dai Shōgun” from Studio Anima. Studio Anima did the animations for Metal Gear Solid 4, Valkyria Chronicles and Ninja Blade so this could turn out quite well.

More details can be found on the official homepage which is unfortunately only available in Japanese. http://www.studioanima.co.jp/dai-shogun/

The didn’t go with the original, purple colour scheme and used a light-purple-ish one instead. I guess this works far better for such a large figure after all.

The sculpt for Kiriko was done by Yoshizawa Mitsumasa better known as “Reflect”. (He is currently working on a really awesome Asuka figure by the way!)

Kiriko is manufactured by Yamato. Now this can be a problem quality wise, as some of you might know. Not this time! The quality is really great and justifies the 145€ (+shipping & customs) I spent on her. The retail price is 11,800 Yen but even a few days after the release Kiriko was already sold out at most online shops, so I guess by now she will be worth a zillion Yen already.

If you didn’t notice it yet: She is really standing ~340mm tall from head to toe.

After comparing her to some other figures, I guess Kiriko is around 1:5.

Some comrades over @ tsuki-board where worried that Yamato would frak up her face, but it looks like they did a good job after all. Isn’t she gorgeous?

What I really like about her is that she doesn’t need to flash her panties, she doesn’t need DFCs or F-sized oppai to get your attention like all those other bitches half-naked figures. Nope, Kiriko just needs to be herself, a classy Ninja girl. ^_^

Quite a simple pose but I guess it’s exactly that simplicity that  gives her some sort of elegance.

Although some said that her bottom isn’t fat muchi muchi enough for them, I don’t see a problem there. She is a ninja, ready to rip your head off before you even notice it which means her body is thoroughly fit. Nothing wrong there.

Rawwr, great looking ponytail.  Her hairpin can be removed by the way.

Kirikos armour is quite well done. Love those read bits mixed with the black armour.

Her sword comes separately and needs some squeezing to put it in place.

While the tassels (Have those things a certain name?) are made of PVC the cords are made from real fabric.

The base comes with a nice iMac-effect mirror-effect, great to observe some figure panties on the shelve above her.

Unfortunately nothing is 100% perfect in the 3D world.  There is a small problem with that base. Kiriko doesn’t stand completely upright. It actually looks worse on the picture but she is slightly leaning to the right. I’m wondering how I should fix this, maybe glue her to the base?

The first promotional pictures showed her with a wooden base. Maybe she would have been more stable with that?

Overall this figure will be among my all time favourites from now on for sure. At first I was little bit shocked when I unboxed her cause the armour had some white smudges. Turned out to that this was just some white dust, so I guess it was something left over from the the production process.

Yamato and Reflect did a great job and I’m really looking forward to see more from Enka Ōdō Dai Shōgun. Wondering when we will here some news regarding the anime.

My next blog post should follow in a few days and contain a certain black box, a high-tech Japanese cooling solution, a just released Gigabyte main board and more. Yes, it’s finally time to upgrade my rig!

Welcome to my new blog!

Finally got around to set up a self hosted WordPress blog. Thanks to Yonasu, who recommended one.com as hoster. (He also helped me with some coding stuff. Thx man!)

I signed up on Monday and got a server with 3000 MB space, unlimited traffic, unlimited e-mail accounts, virus- and spam filter, photo gallery, WebEditor, FTP-login, Statistics, PHP5 – MySQL, daily backup, the domain, Google Adwords, Live Help 24/7 and what not for… FREE for one year!

As far as I know this offer is only available in Austria, but the regular 1,25€ per month aren’t bad either.

Those of you familiar with my former blog will notice that the layout doesn’t seem that different first. But there are lot’s of improvements underneath.

The most important changes for as readers and for those who added me to their blogroll are:

• Obviously the URL was changed to austrianotaku.com. Please change this link in your blogroll.
• The feed changed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/austrianotaku. You can subscribe by simply clicking on the RSS icon on top of the right sidebar.
• You may notice that there’s also an “Email feed” icon up there for those of you who would like to receive updates via email.
• Last but not least: The Twitter icon. A quick way to follow my tweets for those who still don’t do it for whatever reason. ^_^

Some other features are:

• On the top of the main page you may have noticed the “Featured Content Gallery” which is like a best-of from my former blog You might see some older posts there too, but I think it’s a good opportunity for new visitors to discover what was going on here a few months ago. If you click on the text” Featured content” all of the featured articles show up as thumbnails.
• You can now edit your comments or request a deletion of them.

• Web 2.0 buttons: At the bottom of every post you will see “Tweet this”, “Stumble This”, “Plurk this” and a lot of other options. If you like an article fell free to share it!
• A feature mostly interesting for myself. Google Analytics. To monitor how many folks searched for “loli pantsu” on my blog and other important statistics. (^^;)
• IE6 upgrade notification: Yes I’d call that a feature. Folks who are still using this 9 year old piece of sh.. software will see a bar on top of the page telling them that they might see some things messed up. They will also get a bunch of upgrade options ranging from Firefox to IE8.

Known bugs: (Yes, I know there are some.)

• Unfortunately comment nesting doesn’t work at the moment. It looks like the theme I’m using has some work around code to disable comment nesting. But I think its not a bad idea anyway.  because nesting can be confusing if you use more than four levels. When you click on “Reply” the text “@[Nickname]” will be added to the comment field now. Might be a little bit old school but considering that discussion are often more than 5 levels deep it could be better that way.
• Messed up comment order on imported posts: I imported all posts from the old blog but it seems like the comment order wasn’t imported as it should have been. Noticed this on kodomut’s blog too when he started the self hosted blog. Is this a common problem?
• Another bug you may notice is the not clickable header. Actually I have no idea what’s wrong with it but if you have any ideas let me know!

I tested my blog on the latest versions off Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer. But there are so many configurations out there, so please let me now if you notice any problems!

This layout is not the final version but let me know if you have any suggestions.

Besides messing up my CSS I have to do something else soon too:

Finally got HoiHoi-san yesterday. I’m wondering why it took that long this time with EMS.

That “much” parts are aren’t a common sight for me, since I haven’t build a plamo kit for years.

I’ll let you know more about the progress soon… now I have to spend some time on my latest addiction:

Rori golf!  (If you don’t hear something from me next week, I probably died of blood loss after getting a sukumizu for Kooh.)

Finally I found some time to blog about my newest gadget:

An iPhone 3G 8GB!

Why did I get one? Well, I need a gadget which is able to keep me connected and up to date wherever I may be in the most geeky way xD

No pictures of the un-boxing process available as it took only a few seconds, couldn’t await to check out my first Apple product.

Got a “cheap” rubber cover for the iPhone but I guess I will look for a more stylish one in the next days.

Safari, Mail and Fring (a multi-messenger): A few of the most important things if you are away from home during the week.

As the 3G comes with an built in GPS Module you never get lost again wherever you may be.

Want to check out if you are able to open the curtains in you hikkikomori room without fearing some sunlight?

There’s an app for that too!

Or are you going to mount another shelve for your waifus? Get a level bar for your iPhone!

Although I’m using a 60GB Creative Zen Vision M: Having your fav-songs on the phone is quite nice.

Or do you hear a song on the radio for example and you don’t know the artits, title and so on?

Get Shazam!

Unfortunately the data-base seems to be not-otaku-friendly, cause Shazam isn’t able to tag most of my Anime or random J-Pop songs. But mainstream stuff works fine.

iPhone cam test shots:

Not that bad for a mobile phone in my opinion. (The pic remindes me that I forgot to take a GSC FSn meido photo session oO)

I guess I don’t have to mention that I’m completely satisfied with my iPhone and it definitely wasn’t the last Apple product I purchased xD

Especially as I’m looking for an laptop. Maybe my second screen has to wait a little bit longer. But why is this stuff so overpriced?

The shown apps are just a few of my installed ones but it’s quiet tricky to find the best ones as there are already over 15.000 apps available in the App Store!

Any fellow-iPhone-using otaku out there who can recommend some useful apps for my iPhone-chan?