How about some WIPs?

It's been a little while since I posted some minis, hasn't it?  How about some works in progress?

I haven't abandoned my Plague Dogs.  I've just been taking a break from them.  Here are my two latest subjects, one standard marine and one Plague marine.

The standard one on the left is built using all GW parts, but his head had some pretty heavy mods to remove the horns he had.  The Plague Marine on the right us only using a GW torso and shoulder pads.  The arms are Anvil Industries, head is Maxmini, legs are Kromlech, and the gun is Forge World.  It's a little hard to tell, but the arms have a built in stock, so he'll be holding a fairly unique looking rifle when he's finished.  Those Kromlech legs are great, too.  Very detailed and very good casts.  They've teased me on Dakka Dakka by mentioning that while they haven't designed any Plague Marine torsos (at least not yet), they have designed some heads.  I can't wait to see how those look.

Up next are some Mantic Enforcers.  I'm working on these guys in preparation for my Deadzone Enforcer army.  This is more or less the studio paint scheme.  I'm sure it isn't a coincidence, but the studio color scheme is an almost perfect match to the colors used by Cerberus troops in the Mass Effect games.  I've based my scheme on the actual Cerberus scheme.  I used an image of a Cerberus assault trooper as a model.  The main difference between this scheme and the studio one is that there is more white and there are more yellow stripes.

This is sort of a progression image here.  They are in order of oldest to newest and I used a slightly different technique for each one.  It is a little hard to tell from the pics, but they don't actually look the same in person.  You may notice the darker lines between the white bits on the two on the left as compared to the one on the right.  That's because I used a black wash on them and a dark blue one on the far right figure.  I'm actually most pleased with the newest figure as his paint is much smoother.  The other two have a lot of splotchy streaks on them.  I really tried to thin down my paints, but it didn't seem to do much.  The one on the right was painted with drybrushing, white bits first.  This actually resulted in the smoothest paintjob, but it needed some touchup afterwards.  Still, I tihnk he looks the best.   When I finish him, the gun will mostly be black with white paneling on top and probably some glowy bits towards the front.

My Enforcer box came with 10 guys.  I'll be doing 5 in the Cerberus colors as test models and the other 5 will be receiving woodland schemes.  Here's the wip for the first trooper.

I know some paint from other projects seems to have gotten onto him.  I'll clean that up later.  I've debated as to whether or not to add brown to those tan spots.  I'm not really sure right now.  I do like how this is turning out and it is certainly easier to paint than the Cerberus colors.  These guys may wind up being used in Mutants and Death Ray Guns.

I'm back and here's some pics!

I got back yesterday and spent the day at my parents' place.  I just got back to my apartment a bit ago and got some pics from the trip formatted.  So, how about some pictures?

Since I didn't really do anything touristy, I didn't take many touristy pictures.  What I did take pics of though is a good majority of the food I had.  So, one of the first places I ate out at was Mos Burger.  I'm not really sure what would be a good US equivalent.  The place seems kind of higher quality than most US fast food places.  Most of their burgers are fairly normal, but I had to get one of their weird ones.  They have a trio of rice burgers, which is probably as weird as it gets.  I got the Seasonal Vegetable one.

Fully vegetarian as far as I could tell.  This picture makes it look small, but it was actually quite big.  At least as big as a Big Mac.  The "buns" are made of sticky rice and the "patty" is made of a seasonal vegetables melded into a tempura patty.  This burger was actually REALLY good.

One the second day, we had lunch at a French Restaurant that was on the campus of Nagoya University.  The meal was fairly well priced.  I believe it was under $10 and came with two courses.

 First course was a fresh salad and a cold potato soup.

Main course was this lovely dish:  Salmon, quiche, pasta, bread, and an olive sauce.  Very tasty and all together, just about the right sized portions.

That night we ate at a place called Hara Kitchen, which is a sort of healthy, organic cafe that's located in the women's clothing section of a department store.  Odd, huh?  The place has a small, but very good menu.  Here's what I got.

 This dish was tofu with ocra, cherry tomatos, seaweed, some kind of beans, and rice with a sauce of some sort.  Don't remember what kind of sauce, but it tasted really good.  Came with a salad and miso soup.

 This was my dessert.  Not pictured is the donought that I had with it.  This is a tofu ice cream and yogurt parfait with banana, kiwi, and grapefruit. 

On Sunday, we had a quick breakfast at Sakai.  We went to a sort of mini family restaurant in the station called Komeda's Coffee.  Here's their logo.

My brother had been informed by co-workers that the place wasn't very good.  I would have to disagree, I didn't think it was bad.  Then again, we didn't really have the regular breakfast items.  This is what I had.

I had to have kakigori at some point, figured I'd get it then.  Look, they even included toast!  This is green tea flavored shaved ice.  The stuff on it is red beans.  This stuff tastes amazing and this combination of red beans with green tea is a great flavor.  They also had some funky drink items, like melon soda served in a boot shaped glass and milk shakes that are served in these funky looking jars.

We wound up having bento boxes for lunch that day, but I didn't take any pictures.  From the afternoon to night we spent the rest of the day hanging out with my brother's co-worker.

There was a lot of beer.  Not pictured are the nachos the guy's wife made, which were really good.

This is his dog, Doogle the Poodle.

That night we went to an Indian/Nepalese restaurant.  I got a vegetarian curry with a three star spiciness level.  I probably could have gone the full five stars.

 I had to get a picture of the Naan bread they served.  It was HUGE!  I had to include a shot of my hand in there for scale.  It should be noted though that I'd already eaten part of the left side of it.  I held it up next to my niece and it was bigger than her head.  We were pretty much the only ones in the restaurant for some reason though and the staff was really nice.

 On Monday we had lunch at the school's cafeteria.  This is the only time I actually got some ramen.  So, I had to get the spiciest that they had.  It's a spicy miso ramen and only cost about 340 yen.  Very cheap, but a very good portion.

 And for dinner that night, we ate at a very small restaurant that was in Sakai in the basement of an office building.  Unfortunately, I do not know what the name of it was.  I ordered flavored, grilled mackerel.  The "flavor" part of the name comes from the fact that it was grilled in miso.  This was good, but it had the bones in it, so it can be tricky getting them out, but basically you just pull them all out in one go.  Every time I've had grilled fish in Japan, it has been some of the absolute best I've had.  Everything included in this meal was:  fish, sauce for dipping fish, rice, seaweed, pickles & raddish, tofu, and miso.  Plus this place had what's known as a drink bar, which means you can get refills.  That is extremely rare in Japan.

Tuesday, when I left, my brother accompanied me to the airport and we got a surprisingly fancy lunch.

I probably should've looked at the prices before we went in, but honestly, it was all worth it.  So, what's in the bowl you might ask?

Eel, that's what.  It's kind of funny, this place had a specific method and order in which you're supposed to eat.  First, you're supposed to mix the eel with the rice and set aside your portion in that bowl on the left.  You may eat it like this.  Next, you are to add the dried seaweed (in the silver package) along with the three things on the bottom.  you may eat that.  Finally, when you only have a bit left, hot water is poured into it which essentially makes the dish into ochazuke, which is a sort of rice soup.

Not pictured, on Friday my brother and I did some bar hopping.  We hit three, one together and two with one of my brother's co-workers.  The first was pretty good, it was a working man's bar with fried food.  Second was a very small bar run by a K-1 fighter.  He was very impressed with the Ghouls & Ghosts shirt I was wearing.  The third one almost felt like a diner and had a bunch of puzzles at the bar.  The funny thing was that at the two final bars, all of the customers and proprietors knew my brother's co-worker.

leaving Japan

I didn't post about Sunday.  It was kind of a busy day.  Basically, my brother and I killed the morning by doing some shopping in Sekai.  I wound up picking up the , model of the Valvrave from the anime of the same name as well as another Danball Senki model.  After lunch, we spent pretty much the whole rest of the day hanging out with my brother's coworker.  He was actually pretty cool, in a nerdy way.  He dedicated a room  in his apartment to his collection, which included vintage Star Wars, old movie posters, Machine Robo, Microman, and Diaclone.  The fact that he had a boxed Microchange series cassette (the motorcycle one) I found to be very impressive.  Vintage Microman is not cheap on the secondary market.  We spent a good chunk of the day playingnold Famicom games.  The guy actually has a pretty sizeable collection of vintage games and consoles which included, of all things, a Japanese Intellivision, with box!  After that, we had dinner all together ar a very good Nepalese/Indian restaurant.  My brother's coworker also has a Poodle named Doogle.  Doogle the Poodle, that's pretty awesome.

Now, today was pretty low key.  I didn't do too much except for some shopping back in Osu, mainly at Mandarake.n I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to buy.  They had some of the Robot Damashii web exclusives that I've been wanting, but they were all more than I wanted to spend  I wound up with thw Robot Damashii Tallgeese instead.  Not much else though.  We had a pretty good Japanese dinner tonight.  I had grilled mackeral with some assorted sides.  It is difficult to remove the bones, but the flavor was great.

I'll be leaving Japan tomorrow afternoon.  I will try to post some of the pics I've taken (it's mostly food) when I get back to my apartment.  It has been a good trip and its been nice to see my brother and his family.  I am kind of sad to have to leave after such a short time, but work just doesn't give me enough vacation hours.  Probably for the best though, as I don't need to be spending any more.

Another day ending here in Japan.  Today we did some shopping in Osu, which is where the Nagoya Mandarake is.  We wound up having lunch first at Nagoya university.  We had French food, which, while portions were small, was actually quite good and cheap.  I hit a couple of toy/hobby stores in Osu, one was a Joshin and the other was a Volks hobby store.  The Volks store had a pretty good selection of stuff, not just their own garage kits.  I hadn't seen their Five Star Stories models in person before, but they're huge!  From them, I picked up one of their modular V-Locker robot action figures.  They're somewhat like revoltech figures, but a bit more simplistic.  Still, the one I got is pretty cool.  Pics to come when I return.  From the Joshin,I almost bought a Votoms AT hauler cargo truck.  Those things weren't exactly common when the line was actually around and the price was most certainly right, but getting it home would've been a pain.  It could be kind of useful in games of Deadzone though. What I did wind up getting was the new Gundam zeta HGUC Messala, a kit I've been waiting for an hg remake of for a while.  It's big.  I'll probably build it when I get home.  The other thing I got was the latest Danball Senki robot and a model building tool set.

Definitely a busy day.  Plus it rained.  I also got some clothing from Uniqlo and Muji:  a new jinbei, a Metal Gear shirt, and some shorts.

Okay, so I made it to Japan.  Expect typos since I'm posting on my tablet.  Anyway, it is the first day and I was able to do a little exploring.  It is hot out.  Found the local Toys R Us and only spent about 1000 yen.  Didn't get anything too wild or crqzy.  I figure I can dobthat later in the trip.  What I did buy where a pair of cheap, funky Japanese toy cars.  I'd say they're both about Hot Wheels sized.  But, I'm not one to just buy toy cars, no.  These transform.

I took pics, but they won't upload from the tablet.  Anyway, one is called a Diarobo. Nyou can guess what he turns into.  I was a little disappointed in him because he looked like he was die-cast, but actually, it was just plastic.  Good articulation though considering his small size.  The other is from Bandai's Voov libe in which vehicles transform from one vehicle to another.  Mine goes from police car to sports car.

lack of updates

I realize I haven't been updating in a while.  Well, that's because I was house-sitting for the last week or so and haven't really had the opportunity to upload new pics.  I do have new pics and I have been working on some minis.  I'll try and get a few up this weekend for sure.  I'm sure not many of you would be interested, but I will be uploading pics from Memorial Day weekend when I took my dog to the dog park for the first time.  The only times she's been around so many dogs has been when she'd had to go to the kennel while we were on vacation and back at the rescue when we first got her, so I don't think she enjoyed the first trip too much.  She generally hung around me.  But, she was very well behaved and didn't snarl, snap at other dogs, or even curl her lip when some of the others were being a little pushy.  I'd taken her again last weekend and she seemed to be doing a bit better.  She even almost tried to join in chasing some of the other dogs, but pulled back before she got too far from me.  I'm going to try again this weekend and hopefully she'll be more willing to engage the other dogs.

Also, next week, I'll be heading to Japan.  I'm not sure if I'll be able to upload any photos or not.  If I can, I will.