That one guy who hated everyone but Mari (Review of Kiwami Tamashii Kaixa)

Oh man, I've been anticipating this guy for a while now,  having high hopes and such that he'd surpass Faiz in coolness, and in some ways he does, bringing a lot of nice features into what is primarily a heavy retool/remold of the old 2009 Faiz design. In other ways though he falls short (literally!) of what I had thought he'd be. 

He looks badass enough though, with the black, steel, and gunmetal color scheme and golden trim,  the mean-looking arched antennae and broad, pointed shoulders Kaixa definitely has a grimdark feel to him which I like. It also helps that he looks like a dwarf with his noticeable lack of lower torso.

The helmet and chest detailing  is absolutely amazing, with cracks and seamlines everywhere, the tech greeble making him look very assymetrical and such, really making it feel like his armor assembles itself in layers and sections instead of single unified pieces. The eyes are a  nice shade of dark purple, which is cool but I would have liked a lighter shade of purple, if only to enhance the ring detailing underneath the lens. 

Now this is one of those improvements in design I'm talking about, having the neck joint as a double ball post with the "meat" of the neck only acting as a sleeve really adds to the poseability of the figure, too bad the neck still ended up looking a tad short though.

 Another fun thing to note about these figures from the 555 series is that the designers paid attention to their specific personalities, providing enough mobility for them to do their trademark poses, like Takumi's pre-kick pose or his wrist flicking, or  Kusaka's collar-popping pose.  Unfortunately, no matter how well he can do it I am very very distracted by how so damn squat he looks. This is mostly because of  him almost having no waist or ab crunch to speak of. 

Going back to poseability, this figure suffers a little. What you see above is the limit of the figure's lateral motion. It's not as limited as say Blade or Knight but it really falls short of Hibiki, Agito or Faiz, at least to me. 

Frontal motion though, not much of a problem, he can do high-kicks and stuff, punching poses are also negligible.  Also another nice detail is the tech greeble on his foot soles, very nice. 

Kaixa comes with a lot of accessories, namely two sets of hands aside from the fists (yes, fists. Something faiz could have used) with hands that are noticeably more bony and claw-like, his Kaixa Gear which includes; the Kaixa -shot, -phone (with blaster mode), -pointer (which opens up for his Gold Smash kick) the -blaygun holster, the -blaygun, and the sword blade.

One fun detail I like is how the blaygun, pointer and phones all have individual Kaixa mission memories molded on them. Faiz only had it on his phone and phone blaster. Weird. 

Here's the Blaygun in action, the holster was really a great touch and I think the figure would lose a lot if they only made a peg on the side of the blaygun to attach to the waist instead of molding a separate holster part.

The Blaygun in sword mode. The yellow transluscent blade fits a little too loosely on the bottom of the gun, it hasn't exactly fallen off everytime, but it's less than snug in the mounting hole. 

the Phone blaster. I never understood exactly how the phone would look good as a swing-type phone, but the blaster mode makes a lot more sense. It reminds me of a Sentai weapon. 

Kaixa's really a decent figure overall, but there's just one teeny tiny detail that derails all of the good points about him.

The only consolation for this is if they made Delta.

What. The. Fuck.

Why is he short? Why is the greatest antagonist of Faiz (no, Kiba doesn't count. He was more of a rival, Kusaka though was an absolute dick) so damn tiny? He looks like friggin' Wolverine standing there next to Faiz. What the hell? It's not even funny how squat he looks.

Would I recommend him?

Let's recap:

Nice, detailed molding, decent articulation (slightly better than Faiz), a lot of fun accessories, but he's short. 

at 680 php ($16 more or less) he's a good buy, definitely a fun toy, and worth picking up. Get him if only for his eventual ride: Sidebasher. There will be more reason to pick him up once Kiba (Horse Orphenoch) and Takumi (Wolf Orphenoch) reach your specialty stores. 

Just ignore the height issue and you will be fine. 

Will post a review soon, also, I already modded his torso to be a bit higher, fixes the height issue I had with the figure before.

One day I shall wake up to find my house is made of cats.

Meet Derpy. He's one of the three, month-old kittens we have hanging around the house. I haven't even bothered naming the other two yet, only because I lack creativity in that department and they haven't really had any defining characteristics other than Derpy here, worth basing their names on.  

Anyway, our family is slowly getting used to owning cats, after Razorclaw, their momma moved in with us after I made the mistake of feeding her one night. 

the cat never left and got pregnant twice,  and both times we lost the litter to the outside world. Derpy's batch on the other hand has gotten on the good side of my mom, hence allowing them to stay around (but I let them out every night to avoid getting cat shit fucking everywhere), thus giving them the impulse to climb and explore everything and anything. I pray, every day that I leave the house, that they don't mess up my workshop, or leave mouse corpses on my seat with their tiny, vicious, hook claws.

I've had terrible luck with the kittens in the past, oftentimes they'd scuttle off after tipping over my paint bottles and huddle into tiny, unreachable corners to escape my wrath, climb up the table and just insist on sleeping on the keyboard whatever it is I'm reading, and hiss at me when I pick them up, or tip over a mountain of my readings or books and cause an avalanche. This new batch is no different, cats being the insufferable and unruly little bastards that they are.

why are you adorable? damn you.

And yet, at the end of the day, after many tiny cuts on my hands and arms, I still can't let these little guys go. I carry them around, pet them and play with the little guys, getting more used to them, and become a bit more patient, no matter how many times they knock shit over. 

I mean, it's just natural after all, this curiosity they have, this obsession with every nook and cranny. They're learning, and so am I, eventually this house will seem small to them and they'll be fit enough to leave home, they might not come back again but I hope they do, hopeful that one day they'll grow up like their mother and just be annoying when they're hungry and then bugger off when they're full or bored of me, or hop on the table when they need someone to scratch the back of their ears. They're not really that bad, when they get a sense of the place and the people they live with, the cats become pretty chill, and in those evening that require me to burn myself out writing papers a night before the deadline, having a cat just hop up next to you and sleep by your laptop just takes the edge off everything (to me, at least). Never mind that they've torn the sofa into unrecognizable fluff, broke a few vases and shred up the long-ass set of .pdfs you're currently printing and need to read before 3pm the following day, they will take time off their busy schedule of daily chaos to just sit next to you and thank you for keeping them around. 

No harm in starting again.

This is the start of another Masamune Shirow based custom and my second attempt at Motoko Kusanagi, this time, being closer to her Stand Alone Complex appearance, so it'll be pretty straightforward. So far the hair still needs work, and the corset might need a bit more raising on the side of the body. will wait until I get a white microlady body before I start on the legs though. 

something I threw up for Geol 1.

Just felt like sharing this, really, not really becoming an eco advocate but this was actually the first time in a while where I felt that writing was relaxing to me, despite the subject matter being otherwise. 

On “Prehistoric Greenhouse Data from Ocean Floor Could Predict Earth's Future, Study Finds”

In an article found in the website Science Daily dated October 31, 2011, University of Missouri researchers have found that certain climate patterns indicated in the circulation of ocean dated from the Late Cretaceous period might be the key into predicting the current trends of climate change in our time.

 This information intrigues me in that it supports an earlier discussion in class (notably the Daisy world experiment from the Gaia Theory) in which the cycles of warm and cold were brought up. While this study does confirm to my mind the essence of the daisy world simulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld), where everything is right with the world and we just need to sit back and wait to shrivel up from dehydration until the next alpha species comes along, (and according to something i watched on Discovery waaay back, they'll be squids.)  it is rather alarming that in the article, it is mentioned that collectively we—as human beings—are able to match the climate conditions inferred from the fossil records of fish found during that period, meaning that the heating up of the planet that took millions of years to achieve naturally is being repeated in an accelerated rate by the activities of human society and our hummers within a short span of time. Somehow,  part of me is proud of it like it was some  Guinness World Record.

 Research like this serves both as a warning and more importantly a step in the right direction in terms of formulating contingencies to climate change, by referring to what has occurred before and predicting where it could possibly lead.  Having an understanding on how the planet regulates itself and how we can manage ourselves in the midst of this event, and ensuring that we can prolong our existence on the planet--however a bother it might be for everything else on this rock-- helps me sleep at night,  amidst the constant possibility that the world might go kaput on me any day in my lifetime.

Work Cited: 

University of Missouri-Columbia. "Prehistoric greenhouse data from ocean floor could predict Earth's future, study finds." ScienceDaily, 27 Oct. 2011. Web. 22 Nov. 2011

lol hardener.

Oh boy, a whole new world of chemical fumes. 

Seriously though, I can't wait to experiment with this, I have a bunch of stuff I want to try and cast. 

Deunaneunaneunaneunan

She definitely needs Briareos to keep her company. 

Check out more figures at the Works Page.