What I want and what I got

When I saw a PG Strike Rouge with a slightly different colorway (sans the pink and in with the black), I mumbled to myself that it could beat the crap out of Kira Yamato's Strike Gundam if Cagalli chooses to! I knew then that a MG Strike Rouge would definitely be my next kit.

I found myself back in Shoppesville's Blue Lane with the intention of purchasing Cagalli Yulla Attha's Mobile Suit. Of course, my fiancee was with me.

Wasabi Toys, was my first stop (as always). They didn't have the Rouge, but they did have the Strike. Hmmmm... perhaps I should just buy the Strike paint it a'la Strike Rouge. Not! I really want the Rouge. Perhaps, I owe it to myself that no matter how much I cover the Strike with the Rouge's colorway, deep inside I still would know that it is not Cagalli's. Besides, Great Toys was only a few steps away. They might have the Rouge.

And the MG Rouge they did have. Although I'm adding a couple of hundred bucks (against the Strike) if I was to buy it, I was quite pleased by the fact that I could get it right there and then.

I asked Melai and Marilyn, the wonderful ladies of Great Toys, for the last price they could offer. Ka-ching! The standard five percent discount for cash purchases was their reply. I reached into my jean's back pocket, handed Melai the moolah I just counted, and I bought it without any second thoughts.


Yes, I finally had in my arms the MG RX-0 Unicorn Gundam. LOL! Heck, with this in hand, Cagalli's Strike Rouge could wait a few more days!

Why the RX-0 after all the nearly obsessive hunt for the Rouge? Simple. Four hundred bucks. Adding four hundred pesos on top of the Rouge's price enabled me to get the Unicorn! Sweet!

Videos and Flickr...

Aside from uploading photos (which is why Flickr came into fruition) Flickr users can now upload up to ninety (90) seconds of video (with a 150Mb limit per video) to their account.

Not everybody in the Flickr community is happy, though. In fact there are already a number of users and groups that are rallying against the idea, which eventually became a reality today, April 10, 2008... or April 9, 2008... depending on which side of the globe you're currently in.

What gives? You can already "Broadcast yourself" via YouTube; not to mention the availability of numerous pretenders that would only be too happy to lay claim on the YouTube throne.

Sheesh... to think that I extended my Flickr Pro account for another year just a few days ago.

Flickr loves you. Right. No wonder I don't use Yahoo as a search engine anymore.

I, the Gundam idiot

Aaaaah... Gundam 00.

The final episode for the first season has been aired in Japan over the weekend, thus making hundreds of thousands (probably, millions) of viewers left with more questions than answers.

But I'm not here to talk about the latest series per se. I wanna talk about how this series got me started in Gundams... or Gunpla. No thanks to the first episode, which (if not for the sake of utter curiosity and not putting precious bandwidth to waste) I almost did not watch in its entirety, the world of Gundam was introduced to me.

I used to think that a Gundam kit or toy was just that -- a toy. Blame it on the toy shops I used to frequent wherein they would display an already-built Gundam without much of a splatter of paint over plastic, much less weathering and panel lining. Of course, the occassional custom kits by serious(?) modellers would be displayed once in a while, with a price tag that would be enough to make one utter an expletive.

Seeing as how the first episode tickled my fancy quite a bit, I watch the second episode the following week. The third episode on the next. The fourth one... well, you get the picture.

The next thing I know, I was searching for local forums that catered to fans like me. Yes, during those days, I became a fan of the Gundam 00 series. I found a couple of Filipino forums that had discussions on the said show, and as expected, I saw the Gundam kits some members have built and have arduously modelled. I literally said to myself -- "Holy sh*t! These are not toys anymore! These are effin' works of art!". Man, I want to be able to make one of those! Before I knew it, I was consuming the entire day searching left and right (up and down), browsing, reading, gawking about anything and everything Gundam -- sites, online stores and toys! It seemed like I wanted to cram as much information as I can into my brain regarding these wicked pieces of built plastic! BTW, did I mention that I was working? I read and backread the forum boards again and again, studied the tutorials intently, and window-shopped online for kits, just to satisfy the craving. There were times when I had Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE browsing different sites, each with dozens of tabs.

Yes, I was bitten by the G-bug. Hard. The following days I mustered up enough wits to buy my first Gundam kit -- the NG (that's "no grade" for us laymen) 1/100 GN-001 Gundam Exia, the main mobile suit of the current series. This is what I've been able to accomplish on the said kit:



Sanded, test-fitted, primed-white, and posed.

I still haven't finished on my Exia, and I kinda like its almost-all-white color-way, but I have bought 2 MG ("master-grade") kits since then... but that's another story. :)