Brought to you today by the fact that I can barely swivel my head in here without my eyes falling across some kind of Puchimas! related plush(*), although having one perched ontop of both my television and my PC monitors goes some way to rendering that incredibly likely where-ever I look. Seriously, though, those things were out in force in the Otakon dealers hall this year, and it makes a nice change from the dominance of Love Live crane figures that most anime conventions have been straining under for the last few years (though it did mean I was able to pick up the Starpiece Ritsuko figures. There’s still not enough Ritsuko figures). There was something of an upswing in the amount of iM@S merch in general, honestly, though that’s probably as much to do with the increased number of prize figure releases as it does anything else. I shudder to think of the consequences of the same happening at UK events, though.

This post is also, somewhat more obviously, brought to you by the number 11, which is the number of years which this blog has been sat in this corner of the internet. This is the point, one supposes, where the number of years of existence is getting alarmingly close to surpassing the number of posts made in a given year (even if the average still puts me at over 100 per annum). There’s little other than plain laziness to blame on that front, I guess – at the minimum, it’s not like it really takes a whole lot of time to hammer out a couple of hundred words about a tangerine box popping up in a show or anything, and I’m sure there’s other things I could actually be writing about without too much effort being involved. Must try better, I suppose!

(*) I have fullsize Chicchan, PiyoPiyo, Io and Evil Harukasan, and small Koami, Komami, Chicchan, PiyoPiyo, Hakurasan, Chihya, and Takanya right now. I also have a photograph of me wand Chicchan with satirical Japanese office-lady electro-rap duo Charisma.com, but I’m not the sort to share pictures of myself in the internets.