I picked up the Monster High Create A Monster packs as soon as I saw them. Extra heads, different colored bodies, surely I was in customizer heaven!

…sorta. I have 3 major beefs with the CAM sets:
1- A lack of Torsos. And the torsos that are used are ones that match standard gray/pink bodies and not the ones with awesome mods (seriously, just pop the head off of a draculaura or a ghoulia!) like the dragon girl or the deep blue sea-monster girl. And the add-on packs don’t come with torsos either!
2- the body parts (exept the heads) cannot be combined with other monster high dolls.  So say I wanted to put the forearms of my skeleton girl on Cupid and swap out their heads?  No, sorry.  I don’t get why the CAM elbows have different sockets than the normal dolls.  Both are supposed to be detachable, so what gives?
3- THE WIGS.  ALL OF THEM.

Anyway, I now have a fully assembled bee girl, aka Queenie.  In supplies, she cost $31 USD plus tax, so hm… say $32.60 or so.  That’s 1 CAM full set (need that torso!) and the bee set.  Eek.

I started off by spraypainting the torso and upper arms/thighs of the gray CAM parts black.  It’s really cold out, being January, and I think that was fucking with the paint process because it did not go very well.  Krylon Fusion is usually dry to the touch within minutes, but this stuff remained sticky for at least a half hour afterwards.

Then I dyed the mohair, and put together a wig.  I decided I wanted her to have black bangs with yellow everything else, which meant I had to adjust the pattern.  The hole on the heads for the wigs (which are CRAP!) did not make the gluing down process easy, either.  I think I may give her pig tails at some point in the future.

I also airbrushed the underside of the head, beneath the jawline to get a gradient that was black where the head met the neck, and then fades out to yellow, like on her arms and legs.  This was probably more trouble than it was worth as you can’t even see it in the picture, but in person it makes her look much better.

Also, sunglasses on a doll with no ears?  Err… good thing the mohair holds them in place…

No faceup.  Just assembling a doll that would have been MUCH EASIER if she just came with all the goddamn parts and a half-decent wig took 5 hours.  FIVE HOURS.  I like her and all, but she was not worth 5 hours, $32.60, and the mess in the kitchen I still haven’t cleaned up.

CAM vertict:  If you don’t mind having a doll with multi-colored body parts and nasty ass wigs that give them dome heads with an obvious plastic rim visible 1/4″ past the wig , they’re fun.   Otherwise, might want to think twice.

So. Wanna hear the sad, sad (and embarrassing) tale?

Here goes: Sometime during the first year I began customizing pullips, I had a bait Serpant Namu. It was my mission to make Namus look less…Namu. I hit on a plan to make a Phantom of the Opera Namu where I could sculpt a mask with more pleasing features, and have a scary Namu underneath. Perfect!

At the time, no one in the MLP or Pullip community had discovered Apoxie sculpt, and the only air-drying clays I could find were nasty paper-mache type things. It was basically sculpey or nothing, if I wanted to have the mask ‘fit’ the face.

You can bake a pony in the oven with sculpey. It makes the pony somewhat jiggly at full temperature. I didn’t want to risk full temperature, but I also knew that I had two other options open to me: boiling it, or baking it at a lower temperature for a longer time. Boiling water seemed more risky than a slow bake at 180 degrees Fahrenheit, so I decided to try a slow bake first.

The mask was sculpted over the doll head after I’d wrapped the head with plastic wrap, popped it in the oven, and checked 5 minutes in. No problems! The head was still hard at that heat, the clay was curing (slowly) so I let it go another 20 minutes.

The next time I checked on it, the clay was still obviously not done, but the weirdest thing happened: cracks were forming through the mask. The head still looked fine. I took it out, patched up the cracks, popped it back in the oven, let it go longer, took it out and…new cracks!

I’d never had anything like that happen before, so I took it out and let it cool to see if the clay had just swelled in the oven. It was definitely too big for the head. The head, after 40 minutes or so in the oven was still perfectly hard but it looked off somehow. I thought it might have deformed, so I tried to fit it to the backplate and…

…it was about 1/2″ smaller in height. The head… had shrunk. Whoopsie!

So yeah. I threw it out. I am not aware of any ways to enlarge plastic, and without a back plate that fit, it would never be a doll again. And I’ve never put a pullip in the oven since, no matter how low the temperature ^^;

This time I picked up Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein.  It’s been a while since I read something more sci-fi than fantasy, and I heard this one deals with a premise of a future society based on community service, which sounded very interesting.

Usually, I try not to give any spoilers when I do reviews.  That won’t be hard in this book, because there are no spoilers.  How can a book have no spoilers?  When it has no plot.  There is a plot.  It’s pretty much boy-joins-military.  That’s it.  Most science fiction is heavy on politics, and I’m used to it.  This wasn’t like that.  This was more like a series of  thinly veiled political lectures set in the future so you won’t catch on.

The part about it being about a future society based on community service is wrong.  It says community service, but it’s all military.  The author even has sections devoted to how things that in the past that were done in the  military are now done by civilian contractors so that 100% of a fighting force is a real fighting force and not a bunch of pencil pushers pretending to be real military.  So… military.  This was a bit disappointing, because a society where former military personnel run things is not as interesting.  There are and have been plenty of variations through history about societies based on military service.  In fact, the first democracies arose as a result of military service (Sparta).  This is a result of the principle “If all of your citizens are armed, you don’t want to piss them off.”

But anyway, the premise of this book is that sparing the rod spoils the child, democracy, and society as a whole, which results in retired military personnel taking charge and getting everything back into order again.  Only people who have served their term are allowed to vote/hold office, and this makes the world a better place because by serving in the military, a person demonstrates that he/she is willing to put the good of the many before themselves.

The good: It wasn’t badly written.  There were no gaping plot holes.  Some of the premises were well thought out.  It was engaging enough that I finished it.  Of course, I also read it while waiting for and on various planes.

The bad: Military =/= community service.  I wouldn’t hold this against the author, except I went and read up on this book afterwards, and the author makes a later claim that in his future world in which the book is set, 95% of the community service jobs someone could perform to become a citizen (and have the right to vote, hold office, and take certain jobs) except I really can’t remember there being a single example of a non-military job.  One character went into R&D, but the station he worked at was later destroyed in a war, which makes it fairly obvious that it was military R&D.  All ‘community service’ recruiting is done by the military.

Characters were uninteresting, one-dimensional, and mostly interchangeable.  The logic employed was overly simplistic and naive: bad people are a result of bad parenting.  Bad parenting is a result of not using corporal punishment.  In the future, both parents and society use corporal punishment as a deterrent, so everyone is as wholesome as…well, even 1950s sitcoms had some villains.  Alien insect invaders are non-characters and therefore cannot be villains.

Final vertict: It wasn’t bad.  While I wouldn’t go tell someone to go read it, I wouldn’t tell them not to.  I would have enjoyed this book more if there was a plot/characters/conflict.

There is ‘a’ Harley Quinn custom on ebay right now with fairly small/few pictures and a pretty vague description.  Since I’ve already been asked, I just want to clarify that no, that one isn’t mine. Mine currently lives with Pullip Junk and she is not selling.

Harley Quinn is a DC character, not mine (Duela, on the other hand, is based off of a DC character that is a redhead, doesn’t wear clown face, and in general doesn’t look anything like my custom) so there’s a) nothing wrong with and b) to be expected that there’s another custom out there, especially now that there’s the comic-con Batgirl and Catwoman pullips.

Tom is $500 (handmade dreadlock wig, guitar, teddy bear, skittles, Rock Hard F*ck safe band shirt and other clothes) and Bill is $750 (he comes with 4 handmade wigs, one in the “Schrei” style, one in the “Fluffy Lion” style, one in the short-lived Dreadlock style, and the current mohawk, plus a full wardrobe of 4 tops, 2 pants, a jacket and other clothes based off of his actual clothes plus all his tattoos). Both have piercings, airbrushed makeup, and the usual bells and whistles. Nothing was spared in making these boys as authentic as possible–Bill cost over $300 just in supplies to make, and took over 200 hours to make–his tattoos alone took 10 hours!

So. Go to animadness. See the insanity of the most obsessively detailed dolls I’ve ever done, even if you’re not a Tokio Hotel fan. They also have lots of other dolls, as well as a complete run of the Petit Luxury furniture, aaaaaand

REEEE-MEEEENT!

Ok, now the embarrassing story part.  I decided to buy some of the re-ment in this set to track down what I thought were asian-style donuts.  Which are delicious and light and fluffy.  So I bought 5 sets, went out to dinner with my husband, and erm, eggs, eggs, eggplant, daikon, puddings.  No donuts!  So we went back, and I bought 5 more.  No donuts.  More eggs, though!  At that point the Animadness guys took pity on me and deboxed THE REST OF THE REMENT to find me donuts.  Which turned out to be potatoes.

…Anyway, as a result of their awesomeness and my donut-hunt, there are now multiple no-longer-blind-sets of grocery re-ment at the store.  Including the secret set, eggplant.  I think this is awesome, because personally I love re-ment and hate blind-boxes.  So if you want to go pick up the whole set, or just a few of the pieces and not waste your time on, say, 3 sets of eggs, go for it!  (though now I’m going to take some of my extra eggs and paint them like easter eggs, so in the end it all works out)

The current dolly selection.  They also have HTF rares like Noir, Bianca and Fanatica.

Ok, my desktop is back online, and will hopefully stay that way.  Now, between the computer and my wrists, my ‘to do’ list has been very, very, VERY backed up.  I have 1-2 hours/day I can devote to dolls, max, and so the time has come to make some hard decisions.

Do I customize, or do I pic-fic?

I hate leaving a story open-ended, and I’ve promised that if I ever do give up on finishing All My Pullips that I will write up how the current storyarc ends.  But pic-fics are not told nearly as well in text, so if at all possible, I’d like to avoid that.

I also have more than a dozen dolls lying around waiting to have something done with them.  They take up precious closet space.  I would like to get the on-hand amount down to maybe 1-2 taeyangs, ~2 pullips, and a dal.

Voting is taking place through my flickr account.  I don’t want to have voting going on elsewhere because multiple polls could skew the results.  So: If you want more pic-fics, go here.   If you want more customs, go here.

…wait, no.  See, my computer had a random freezing error, and the motherboard was the only thing aside from the processor that I hadn’t taken out and tested in another computer and worked a-ok.  Sometimes my computer would start up fine, and sometimes it would not detect or take a while detecting one or both drives on startup.

All this I told to the tech guy when I was trying to get the motherboard RMA’d, which took over a month just for someone to respond to me, and I included all the details and system specs in my package when I sent it back.  What’s the reason for the RMA on the return form? “No power on.”  WTF?  NO!  ARGHARGHARGH!

ASUS RMA hotline, BTW, is useless.  I called it for a week straight at all hours of the day, got busy signals constantly, and finally got through and then gave up after 3 hours and 4 minutes ON HOLD.

TLDR:  Still no working computer.  No pics, no website updates, no new tutorials.

…delightfulfreak! (as we know her on flickr and in various forums)

She’s been eyeing Puddles ever since I started making her and was one of the people helping me decide on the face designs, so I’m very happy Puddles is going to a good home. And she only bought one ticket, so fortune was on her side!

Dexter is Delicious is the 5th novel in the series by Jeff Lindsay, which the tv series Dexter is based off of. They’re fairly similar through the first book, start wandering much further apart by the second book, and are pretty much different creatures after that. But I like both versions.

The good: Entertaining story, and the author does the audio book quite well. The risk with audio books is that if you get a bad reader, it makes the book impossible even if it’s a good book, but if you get a good reader, the book may end up being even better. A great example of this is the audio book version of Stephen King’s “Just After Sunset”, the short story “N.” which was done so spectacularly by the reader that that is now one of my favorite Stephen King stories. Jeff Lindsay did a much better than average job, and he didn’t try to girly up his voice into falsetto when he did female characters, which I was very, very grateful for. But back to the story: Standard Dexter romp. Not too predictable, but not too surprising, either. No gaping plot holes, and it was entertaining enough to keep me interested and even giggle out loud a couple of times.
The bad: A couple of characters were a bit on the overdone side, becoming more charicature-ish than real, made only worse by the overdone voice portrayals. But a lot of the humor from the series comes from exaggeration, so I can’t complain too much. A few aspects are a little too much to be believed (I.E. a police officer who had both his hands, feet, and tongue removed coming back to the force in any capacity, even with prostheses and a voice box) but that’s still on the nit picking side.
Overall: I didn’t mind spending 11 hours listening to it! And it really made traffic more tolerable. I think I’ll still prefer sitting down and reading the next ones, though.

…wtf? I like Gloomy Bear. The collab is the dal dressed up like the boy gloomy bear is often trying to eat/maul, so you could interpret this doll as being the gloomy bear having eaten the boy, who is looking out of the bear’s mouth with a confused kind of expression. I think that’s what they were going for. It amuses me. But I have absolute zero desire for the doll. The outfit is cool, and I’ll probably try and pick it up at some point.

On to Vocaloids!

Megurine Luka. She was spotted months ago in prototype pics, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing ‘real’ pictures of her ever since. I don’t generally like collabs, but I do like the vocaloid dolls because they have nicer designs than most of the other collabs, or maybe they just translate better to pullip. Sweet outfit, pink hair, what’s not to like? My only concern is that her wig looks frizzy in the prototype pics, which never bodes well for final production.

Kaito is a really nice design, too. The colors in his face, the way his lips, eyes and eyebrows are done are all refreshingly non-standard.

The outfit… er… a little disco for my tastes. And like with Luka, the wig looks a little bit suspect.

This is one of the things I’ll never understand about pullips. Presumably, they get all their hair from the same place, so it should all be the same quality, but release to release and even within each release, the wig quality varies hugely from “eee silky!” to “baboon’s ass” You can only cross your fingers and apply a conditioning treatment as soon as you take them out of the box if you don’t automatically rewig.