A couple of notes and remarks to kick off the new year.
First off, it’s looking very likely that I’m going to end up working on multiple builds in parallel during the month of January. This is something I try really hard not to do (for various reasons). However, one of the builds I’m planning for this month is really big and intricate, and not only do I want to take my time with it, but I can also see myself needing to take breaks from it.
The way I build things nowadays, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what to do, how to do it, what order to do it in, and all while (hopefully) not forgetting to actually do any of it. This requires a lot of mental bandwidth, and the longer a given build takes, the more overwhelmed I start to feel. I’m hoping that taking breaks when needed will alleviate that problem.
As for what this means for the blog, it may simply result in build posts being intermingled. Maybe you’ll see two posts about Build A, then one about Build B, and then one more about Build A, etc. I don’t plan on making a habit of this, as I prefer when the posts for a given build are all consecutive and in order. But for this particular month (and possibly February as well), it may need to happen for my own sanity.
Next, I want to talk about the “tense” of my build posts. This is something you may have already noticed if you’re a regular reader of this blog (I have no idea if I actually have regular readers), but I wanted to talk about it in the open. What I mean by “tense” is that sometimes I write a build post as I’m doing a build, and other times I wait until the build is complete (or near complete).
You can usually tell which is which based on the first few paragraphs of the post. For instance, you can tell when I’m doing the former if I write something like this:
“I noticed that the B runner has these weird parts. I wonder what they’re going to be used for?”
Whereas you can tell I’m doing the latter if I write something like:
“The B runner has some weird parts. We’ll talk about them more in due time, but suffice to say that they weren’t what I was expecting”
There’s a part of me that doesn’t like that I do this, but there’s another part of me that doesn’t know what, if anything, I should do about it. Because while I may not like the inconsistency, I’m also don’t think one approach is strictly better than the other.
For example, writing it as I go along is more fun. It makes me feel like we’re going on a journey together. But it also runs the risk of making me look like an idiot if my guesses or speculation at the start of the build end up being proven wrong later on.
That problem goes away if I write after the build is complete, but then the actual writing process feels dry and boring, and I run the risk of forgetting important points I wanted to make. It’s also sometimes more work; if I don’t take Work In Progress photos during the build, I have to take apart the finish model to photograph the individual body parts. Not only is this time consuming, but it’s also risky.
The other problem is that even if I did choose one approach over the other, I couldn’t really enforce it. That is, if I try to force myself to write the build posts at the same time, every time, I know from past experience that it will go horribly wrong. It would start to feel like work, and that is the easiest way to make me lose interest in a hobby. For now, I’m just going to keep on keeping on, and keep letting the tenses mix.
Official PDF Manuals
Finally, I wanted to let you all know that Bandai has a (Japanese language) site where you can look up scans of Gunpla manuals. Granted, you’ll have to either fumble around on it (or let your web browser translate the contents in order to use it), but it’s not so bad once you get the hang of it.
Also, by default the site will open up the manuals in a special in-browser reader, but you can fiddle with the URL in order to get a link to a downloadable PDF. As an example, if you searched on the manual for the High Grade Messer, you’d turn up to this link:
https://manual.bandai-hobby.net/menus/detail/500
This tells us the manual’s ID is 500. To get the downloadable PDF, we simply have to go to:
https://manual.bandai-hobby.net/pdf/500.pdf
This is relevant to the site for one simple reason - by having a downloadable PDF, I can copy the Japanese text directly into Google Translate, rather than having to rely on feeding photos into the translation app on my phone. This should result in better translations of flavor text and the like, though of course no machine translation is going to be perfect, so all the usual caveats will still apply.