Aya's book

Kissdum R Engage Planet - I almost feel like reading about the production of this series is as interesting as the series, also wtf this actual show. Kissdum is a 2007 Satelight anime with mecha designs by Shoji Kawamori, also it is not actually a mecha anime and I don't know what it is. It might've, at one point, been a mecha anime but it's basically the poster child for Troubled Production. Anyway, I actually want to watch this again someday.

Dive!! - this is not actually a Free! rip-off, I swear. But it's mostly-naked anime boys diving so it's... a lot of what you'd expect. This has pretty terrible reviews and I actually ended up really liking it.

VC Andrews Four-Film Collection - a Lifetime collection of Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, and Seeds of Yesterday. Are these faithful to the source material? Yes and no. Flowers was okay, but Petals is impossible to squeeze into a made-for-tv movie and they cut a lot. Honestly, Petals is a really dense book, and I never much liked Thorns... It's probably been three decades since I've read the lot of them and don't actually remember much of Seeds but it seemed okay. The actors are all pretty good.

WKRP in Cincinnati: In Concert - I had a post-it with a note on it from my father to watch this episode, and it's probably been in my planner for a year or more. This is the episode about The Who concert disaster, in Cincinnati, and it's a difficult watch. My father had a ticket to see The Who four days later and still talks about how difficult and polite and strange that concert was.

Gundam Build Divers - I'm not sure how this ended up in the basket to watch, but it did, and the beginning is still a lot of fun and the second half is still an absolutely hot mess and there's a middle in there with some interesting gunpla at least?

A strange week...

September was a decidedly expensive month, so October's personal theme involves being a bit frugal if possible. Nothing is wrong! It was a just a collision of larger bills + events.

This last week was busy: house-sat, had some grout come loose in my shower and had to acquire grout supplies and learn all about grout, got the windows washed (and finally got the screens back in), took the big comforter to the laundromat and washed it...

ficortreat is live, as is octobercest, though the latter hasn't had any activity yet. I suppose I'll advertise both in the days to come.

Finished up the... 1/72(?) Mailes Kenbu, who was a decent-enough build. I might still get the Ghost from that line.

Working on MG Astray Blue Frame D, and when I get annoyed with her, I'll get back to Zwei? No polls for awhile; I really want to enjoy the feeling of grabbing whatever looks interesting and building it. (Next MG-or-1/100 will be a Wing kit though.) I have another kit on the way as audition for Revenant's backpack since I'm not entirely sold on my current choice. Eventually I'll have to decide on colors. IIRC Reverent was mostly white and Revenant decidedly is not.

I started, as far as print matter goes, working my way across a shelf with some random floppies. I thought they were Robotech, possibly L*, but I wasn't entirely correct.

Macross II (1-6) - probably of about 10, but I actually have the collected volume so... no need to keep these. This was actually pretty good. (Also Macross and Robotech take up overlapping brainspace for obvious reasons so half right here?)

SpellBound Art Preview (Tomoko Taniguchi) - possibly one issue of this NA-original ever came out. This is a preview that's mostly art. I should really try to get that rogue issue at some point.

Princess Prince (Tomoko Taniguchi) - I don't have a full set of Princess Prince floppies and I have no idea why or how they got on this shelf. Anyway, another where I dug out the collected volume and read that instead. Princess Prince is some of my first manga and first shoujo so it's all staying put. I either never noticed or memory-holed that the last of the floppies mentions an all-new NA-original three-part story but I don't have nay of it and don't know if it ever actually came out. Hmm... Something for the research hole in the future.

Protoculture Addicts # 15 (Nov-Dec 1991) - a lot of Gundam in this issue, F91 & 0083, and long before standardized spellings so it's pretty interesting. There's an interview with Frederik L. Schodt that's hopefully been posted elsewhere at some point.

Whew, IIBB is done. It still feels a little surreal that I finished that project, tbh. Just... aaaaaaaaa for ages and then suddenly, actually done.

I had also entered the project in a tiny gunpla discord's seasonal contest and neither won nor placed and that's fine. The important part was the deadline along with the oft-painful lessons on time & project management.

That said- I can solidly say I'm at the upper end of whelmed with basically all my hobbies. So time to take a short breather and re-evaluate.

Monthly mail has gone out to everyone aside from folks in Canada.

TGS has not been overly exciting. The Xbox presentation was surprisingly strong, and I've watched bits of a few others. I briefly tuned in for the Suikoden one but wasn't awake enough.

Considering that I've not made it past the 'pre-cleaning other areas so I have space to sort' phase of cleaning the utility room, the actual utility room cleaning will be postponed until I get some other spaces under control. Nothing is terrible, just... I can see how this year has been rough in various ways.

I had been considering the cemetery walk this weekend at the big local-ish cemetery but I didn't enjoy last year's and left after an hour (during which the tour had progressed about three stops on a list of about thirty graves to visit) and also my digestive tract has not been thrilled with me for the last couple days, which I suspect is mostly a delayed reaction to the busyness of everything else.