DBZ Loot

It's about time I got around to make a post about the greatest love of my life, Dragonball! Which has, to my shame, been greatly unrepresented in this blog, but if I have to find something to pin the blame on, I'd blame the poor availability of the franchise in Finland. It is surprisingly difficult to find any DBZ merchandise (except the video games and the manga) without having to resort to buying them from abroad. It seems every time I order something from abroad, there will guaranteed be a problem I've to deal with to the point that I'm sick of it! ...... Well, anyway, I was super happy to find the following items in  my homeland, without having to deal with any post shipping mayhem! ^_^

To the left we have Dragon Ball GT Adventure Pack Series featuring Goku, Trunks (with Giru on his shoulder) and Pan. I can't find any markings on the figures and the slightly poor paint job would lead me to suspect these might be bootlegs, but I can't be really sure. As far as Dragonball Wiki can tell me, the manufacturer is unknown and the release date as well. Shame really, because the sculpt itself isn't bad, the paint is just a little "off" overall.
Top right, we have two stickers that came on top of a round bubble gum box lid. The best before date on the back of the box says 2002! I vaguely remember this bubblegum being sold in a few selected cheap stores back then. I recall buying this same brand, but the "gift" was some rub on tattoos instead of stickers. The bubble gum wasn't anything special that I can remember.
Down right. What are these? Game chips, tokens or coins, whatever you like to call them? It doesn't translate to the picture very well, but the red color is metallic and for whatever reason the Krillin one is slightly "shinier" than the others. On the back there's a star motif and it says "official"  and they all have different numbers. Krillin is labeled 5, Vegeta 4 and Raditz 2. They are made of thick plastic, so you can't just bend and break them easily.

Awesome Stickers!! With scenes not only from the series, but also TV specials/ movies! Hmm.... "gum lollipop" doesn't sound that good to me. If I would be picking my favorite sticker out of these, I'd choose number 25, Vegeta!

Assortment of collectible cards and game cards. There were so many of them game cards I didn't bother to photograph all of them. After all, I do prefer the collectible story cards instead of  the card game I will never understand the rules of. My favorites are the cut-in-half Freeza and possessed Piccolo <3

These ones definitely have to be game chips, because on the back side there are points, numbers and stuff. These are made out of much thinner plastic that could break much more easily than the black coins above. Favorites here are Tapion, "farewell" Goku and Super Buu smacking Goku and Vegeta on the head!

Kid Goku, Super Buu, Emperor Pilaf, Fortuneteller Baba and Grandpa Gohan DX Vinyl Series by Banpresto. When I first laid my eyes upon the Buu figure I naturally assumed that it was portraying Kid Buu, but it turned out to be Super Buu in chibi-style for real. I'm a little disappointed, I wanted Kid Buu! XD Anyways, all of the figures are very neat, and I'm very happy to add my very first Pilaf, Baba and Gohan pieces to my collection! I've found a whole new love for Pilaf ever since Battle of the Gods came out, he is so darn cute in  the movie!

Piccolo (Ultimate Figure Series?) and Trunks with his arsenal of switchable hands and faces. Yup, none of the figures came in their original packaging so I don't know the exact series they belong to, like Trunks here, despite my quick google search. It's obvious which one is the higher quality out of these two. Trunks isn't by no means my favorite character while Piccolo on the other hand is. That' why I'm sad to say that it's quite ugly! The green color of his skin is all wrong! Unfortunately, Trunks wins this round, all the little details of the sculpt are astonishing and not to mention they got his colors right!


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Not related to this, but I'm fighting the urge to change my banner again and maybe also the background, but I'm kinda busy with other things now so that'll have to wait.

Ginga background character celebration

A while ago, I took the time to re-watch both Ginga Nagareboshi Gin and Ginga Densetsu Weed series with the focus on finding some background characters with interesting designs, (although, some minor, named characters also slipped in...) because why not? I purposely left out any single colored dogs without any noticeable markings, 'cause such dogs are usually cannon fodder in the series anyway. Probably just the nostalgia taking over again, but I think GNG wins in this "better looking background characters" regard as well.

Ginga Nagareboshi Gin

Please right click and open in a new tab for a larger view.

Ginga Densetsu Weed

And as a bonus, I also compiled all the images where the collie with the elusive name appears.  :D

Animecon XII 11.7-12.7.2015 Kuopio

I wouldn't like to say this, but this year's trip to the Animecon left me very disappointed and sad, but to be fair the reasons for my disappointment are not the convention's fault, but rather my own. This was going to be the first time I was going to cosplay, but I'd to give that up because the damn post office failed me.

I like going to different panels, but this year, none of the panels sounded interesting to me, so therefore I didn't go to see any except for the guest of honor, of course, which was The Nostalgia Critic (Doug Walker) by the way. Both of his panels Movies Everybody Disagree with You On and TGWTG Q&A were fun and enjoyable until the last 15 minutes of the latter where one statement made by one of the fans that I thought was really out of line and hurtful, but I doubt anybody else felt that way in the room except for me. I left the convention immediately after that, thereby missing out on 5 hours worth of programs, including Walker's autographing session. I didn't want to be there anymore.

The Anime concert also started off with very unfortunate news, they were not going to play the opening theme of Attack on Titan for some unexplained reason, they did show an AMV with the opening music instead, which probably was the best consolation the audience could get. Like last year, my favorite part of the concert was actually the encore song which this time around was the Kirby's Dream Land theme.

Since I wasn't listening to that many panels this year, it left me with too much time to go on a shopping spree (which I am regretting deeply right now). I'll make a separate post about the figures I bought, but for now, here is something I usually don't buy at the convention's (that might change after this).

Ramune peach flavour (carbonated soft drink)
Many years ago I tried out the strawberry one, I don't remember liking it too much, but decided to give the drink another go. There were far more flavours to choose from this time around than what I remembered and so, I went ahead and chose the peach taste. Surprisingly, it wasn't too bad, it was actually pretty good! Thanks to this, I think I'll have the courage to try out other flavours in the future.

Pocky Cookies & Cream (chocolate biscuit stick coated with milk flavour confectionery and crushed cookies)
Similar to the Ramune drink, I've only tried a Pocky pack once before and I wasn't impressed. So I never understood why these were so popular, seeing people walking around with their bags full of Pocky packages. Why not give it another go? After all, they were conveniently sold at the same station where the drinks were and the queue was long and slow which gave me enough time to choose which flavour I wanted. I deliberately chose the one I thought looked the most delicious and oh yes it was! It's like you can't stop eating them one after another once you take a bite! I definitely will pick up more of these in any following conventions.

Meltykiss Fruity strawberry
That is all I can read on the package because the rest is in Japanese. I wanted to try out something I've never had before and this one seemed safe enough, because all the other sweets drowned under their cute mascot characters and lacked a proper image of box's content, which this one does well. They did have green tea flavoured Meltykisses as well, but based on my experiences with the actual tea itself, I knew to stay away from it. There's a very thin layer of chocolate covered in chocolate powder and I'm guessing that the inside is some sort of strawberry cream filling? Whatever it is, it's quite good. I don't believe I'll be buying any more of these in the future, even though there was nothing wrong with them. The overall experience didn't match up to the price.

Digimon Collection

Digimon!? Where did that come from? Yeah, I haven't even mentioned Digimon until now, and after this I'll probably never mention it again. As a cursed materialist that I am, I have wanted to do a "collection" post like this one for a while, but frankly I didn't know where to begin. It was too much of a daunting task to start off with one of my biggest collections, so I thought it would be easier to start with something smaller. I'm not sure if I should even call this one a "collection", because I haven't bought any of these for the sake of collecting. These are just stuff that has stuck around because I've a hard time to throw/give/sell anything away. *coughhoardercough*

Anyway, back in the days Digimon was a little bit "controversial" around our playgrounds, you had to either like it more than Pokémon or absolutely hate it. Whenever I was asked which one I liked better, I'd say Pokémon of course. Which was true, but that didn't mean I hated Digimon. Okay, for a brief time I did hate Digimon, but that was before I watched any of the episodes (then I secretly liked it a little). Looking back at it now, I'd probably say that the Digimon anime is better that the Pokémon anime.
So if I wasn't that much into Digimon, how did this stuff come into my possession? Mostly because my parent couldn't tell the damn difference between Pokémon and Digimon >_> but that was probably the case with most parents. So here is my very modest collection of Digimon merchandise.

16 Trading cards 

The only foil ones are Gabumon, Devimon and MegaKabuterimon.

Lillymon figure 

I believe there was some sort of a stand or platform that you were supposed to put the figure on (as it is right now the figure can't stand on its own at all) and I have a vague memory of a profile card or something like that, but I'm afraid those have been lost through time.

Double sided Poster 

I think it came in the same box as Lillymon. It's all folded up and not much larger than a regular comic book.

Comics (Digimon Tamers)

I got interested in Tamers because of Renamon, who I thought was an insanely cool looking Digimon because it resembles Mewtwo (or Lucario....) and it's (Digi)evolved form is a beautiful nine tails. To my disappointment the comic got boring very quickly and with that, my interest with Digimon died. 

Gatomon & Gabumon 

I suspect these two came in a random toy bag that came from a flea market. Poor Gatomon is missing its tail. I guess Gabumon would talk if you moved it's arms around or something because it has a build in speaker on its back. I never bothered to check what kind of batteries it requires, so I don't know what it is supposed to say.

Gatomon bean bag plushie 

This one is an exception because I intentionally bought it, despite that it was a Digimon. It is too damn cute :3 Gatomon or Tailmon as I better know it, was my favorite Digimon from the series. Wonder why the gloves are yellow on toys, but in the show they are green?

*Update 07.03.15

Apparently I have a few stickers as well!

*Update 20.05.15

Found a Patamon plushie at a flea market!

*Update 15.09.15

Found a  tiny Gomamon at a flea market!

*Update 02.12.15

Found both Gomamon and Agumon plushie at a flea market, and apparently I have a few more stickers as well!

There you have it, but I'm not done yet! One other thing you had to love about Digimon was the opening and ending theme songs!

The first Digimon opening Butterfly done with Pokémon? Awesome!


Finally, there's nothing quite like taking a nostalgic trip by listening to the Finnish dub of the Digimon Adventures opening. We have The Bad dub and The Good dub. Both which are pure gold in their own special way. XD