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All, Figures

Figure Spotlight: Plachta

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This past April, I went to Sakura-con 2019, an anime convention in Seattle, where I found an in-box and sealed figure that I regretted missing out on when she was out for pre-order last year: a 1/7 scale figure of Plachta from the game Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book, released by Alter. She was beautifully sculpted by Makio Munetoshi, and my goodness, she looks amazing!

The box: frontal view.
The box: angled from the side. There is a little of bit of damage on the corner.

Plachta is also the first figure that I have in my collection where I had no context of where she was from. Before getting my hands on her, I had never played the game that she came from. It was only until I got her that I bought the game off of Steam, and now I’m going through the game.

For several months, I’ve been keeping an eye on her through MyFigureCollection, and on many occasions, she was selling for ~$200 USD (before shipping): some new, and some opened. Other online shops seemed to list her at ~34k JPY, which was about ~$410 CAD at the time. I managed to pick her up for $225 USD, which came out to a little over $300 CAD. Comparing this with the the original retail price of 19,224 JPY, plus additional costs for shipping and import taxes, it seemed alright, given everything else I saw at the time. Nonetheless, it was still quite up there in price, but the detail on her is just amazing.

When unboxing her, I had the option of swapping her hand parts with books.

Plachta out of the box, but still surrounded by plastic. Swapable hand parts included.
Plachta is mesmerized by her books on alchemy.

Anyways, like I said, the amount of detail is amazing. For example, the book she holds in her right hand has a detailed front and back cover. Bookmarks are also protruding out from the top and sides, and the book is also partially opened.

A closeup of Plachta’s book in her right hand. It is very detailed
The stack of books on her left hand. They also look carefully painted.

Viewing her from the back, no effort was spared. Her flowing hair was captured beautifully, along with her back spinal line. Her arm sleeves and hair are also slightly translucent as well. A neat little touch, if you ask me. In addition, her hair accessories are detailed as well!

A view of Plachta’s back. She has flowing hair.
Plachta’s hair accessories are really neat, too!
Full back view of Plachta from the left side.
Full back view of Plachta from the right side.

Back to the front, her clothes have been faithfully recreated from the game. Her belly button is clearly visible, and the rifts on her kneesocks and skirt are defined. Her chest piece that holds her arm sleeves up is also there. Her kneesocks are also detailed too; stitch-like markings add another layer of realism to her.

Frontal view of Plachta’s clothes
Some garters visible on her legs here, as well as her skirt-like belt.
Plachta’s right leg. Look at that detail!
Here’s another photo of Plachta’s right leg.
And now her left leg.
Her underskirt has been sculpted really nicely, too.
Her shoes and her butt have been really nicely sculpted too.
Top view of Plachta. Her hair lines are also well defined.
Another top view.

Overall, I was very happy I found her in the end. Makio has done a great job sculpting her, and Alter has made sure that Plachta maintains the high standards of figures that they release. Adding her to my figure collection was definitely not a mistake!

Overall view of Plachta.
<3

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed those photos of Plachta as much as I do! There’s more information on her on MyFigureCollection and on Fandom (there may be game spoilers).

~Lui

Room Diary

Room Diary: May 2019

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I used to do this a lot on facebook, but I haven’t recently, so I’m going to bring it back here instead. Enjoy some photos below.

This is how my room looks today. I’ve gotten most of my posters from anime conventions. The ones above my window I self-printed way back in the day. The larger ones are part of calendars that I’ve bought over the past four or so years.

View of my room from the doorway.

Here’s another angle in my room. I have two bookshelves shown here. Realistically, there’s only one shelf that has books. The other ones all hold figure boxes. I’ll need more room in the future as I collect more figures, but I’m somewhat managing now.

Another angle from inside my room.

Anyways, I have the majority of wall space covered in posters. There’s just one exception right now, and it’s this wall below. It’s hard to find ones that fit that narrow strip of space, but hopefully I’ll find some soon. 🙂

View of the other side of my door.
The bookshelves are mostly filled with figure boxes, with calendar pictures and wall scrolls hanging from them.
My battle station setup.
Some of my desk figures that I look at while working. Have to dust these frequently.
Maekawa, Miku figure from [email protected] CG:3
Sakuma, Mayu figure, also from [email protected] CG, along with some acrylic stands from Chroneco
Here’s one of my many Rem figures, and Suenaga Mirai to the right of her.

I do have one wall in my room that is slightly NSFW. I’ve contained it on that corner of my room, and so far, it hasn’t spread, and I intend to keep it that way for the foreseeable future haha.

My Sisti daki on my bed: the safer side.
The slightly NSFW corner consisting of many catgirls from artist Syroh.

UPDATE: I was also asked how I put my posters on the wall. I use bluetac that you can find at your local dollar shop, or an arts supply store. It looks something like this:

Bluetac that I use to stick my posters on the wall.

If you do use bluetac, I suggest that you put tape at the back first, as I’ve had some of my posters get stained from the tac being on for too long.

For the ones hanging off of my bookshelf, I use some big and small clips. I attach the big clip to the bookshelf itself, and use two smaller clips, manually connected to each other, and clip one side to the bigger clip, and the other to the poster.

Clip method of attaching posters to a bookshelf or another solid object.

Similar to the blue tac scenario, if you don’t want to damage your posters, you can also tape the back of your poster first. After that, attach a small piece of cardstock to the back of your poster on top of that tape. This way, you can just clip it to the cardstock instead of the poster directly without leaving clip marks on your poster. And since you taped it on top of tape, you can easily remove the cardstock attachment later if you don’t want it.

Taping a little piece of cardstock on top of tape, which is stuck to the back of a large poster.
All, Co-op Adventures, Lui's Life

In My Spotlight: Co-op Experience #2

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Although not so recent, I did a second co-op during the summer of 2018 at a local software company. It was my first ever job being paid to write code, so it was very exciting for me. It was a valuable experience for me to share.

During my time working there, I was blessed with an amazing mentor that gave me a lot of freedom to explore the code base within the company. On-boarding consisted of me following this one document that gave an introduction to the various systems that they had in place for developers to code. I had seen source control before (namely git), but they were using a different system called Perforce, so that was something new. The one thing that was really cool was that all coding was done on the command line using your favourite text editor, whether that be vim, emacs, nano, or whatever else is out there. Since the terminal was all I had, it took me a little bit of time before I was used to using tmux for multiple windows, and vim with their various key commands. Heck, even now I’m still learning new things left and right.

Nonetheless, their on-boarding was pretty cool. Back to the freedom I had, I felt that I really thrived off of that. I got to explore things, and our CTO even encouraged us to try stuff out and not be afraid of breaking things. After all, we couldn’t really break things as we can try stuff out in an isolated environment.

Another thing is that I felt pretty included and could express myself at work. I brought my figures to work, not only to keep myself calm, but to serve as a conversation starter if anyone wanted to ask. One of my mentors did ask me, and we talked a little bit about how the hobby was expensive, so that was kind of neat. It was also a sight among the other co-ops.

The small subset of figures I brought to work while on co-op

I also had the ability to work from home, which I did sparingly where needed. For example, there was one time in August where a local anime convention spanned Friday to Sunday. Since I didn’t have any time off, I asked my mentor if I could take the day off in exchange for working from home the previous Sunday, which I was allowed to do. That was pretty cool, and gave a totally different feel from the workplace. This is totally doable when working on individual tasks, but I still like working at the office, since it’s easier to ask questions when the need arises, or for meetings.

As well, I’m very lucky to be able to go back after I finish school for full time. Co-op, or work integrated learning, is a great way to try out different jobs to see which type of job is suited for you, and it also allows the employer to hire someone that may potentially come back for full time. If you’re not the right candidate, so be it: you’re only there for a short period of time. If you fit in, then employers might want to hire you back: you don’t need extensive on-boarding later on. It’s a win-win for both sides.

I also did some informational interviews with some engineers there, so I’ll post those later. They give some insight into what technical skills and whatnot employers look for in technical interviews, which is applicable to those in computer science or engineering.

Anyways, that’s all I wanted to share for now. Until next time!

~Lui