JoshB's blog

Saw this posted over at TOYSREVIL. Awesome stuff, wish it was a full length movie!

I know, you're asking where are the robots? Soon, my friends. Upcoming we have Daitarn 3, some Macross Robot soul, SHFiguarts, more SCI FI revoltech, gokin, gundam, patlabor and more! So hang tight!

Josh

I don't know what this is, but I think I want one.

Otomatone?

Toy Fair 2010 is coming up and myself (JoshB) and Adam (Atom) will be in NYC attending. Anything special you want to see? Companies you want to check out? So far, we have scheduled appointments with Hasbro, Bandai, Mattel, Toynami, Lego, Mega Brands, Kotobukiya and more. What do YOU want to see at Toy Fair?

ALSO - If anyone in the NYC area wants to get together for dinner / drinks the 13th, 14th or 15th, send us an email!

CollectionDX and Anime-Export are teaming up to give away two Revoltech Toys from Basara - Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura. Giveaway will be via a trivia question on our twitter stream sometime today.

Follow Collectiondx @ Twitter and win!

https://twitter.com/CollectionDX

Just wishing everyone in the CDX audience a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, quanza, festivus or even quaggamas! If you get good toys, show em off here!

AAannnnd we're back.

Our host, Serverbeach, switched to a new client login portal, and in the process messed up the DNS servers for a bunch of people, CDX included. Basically, DNS takes the seemingly random block of numbers called an IP address and turns it into the url you normally type in.. or something like that.

Regardless, I didn't do it!

For future reference, if CDX goes down, you can get status updates via our facebook or twitter pages:

CollectionDX on Facebook

CollectionDX on Twitter

Thanks!

Josh

As always six months behind the rest of the world, CollectionDX is now on Facebook. Not quite sure what we are going to do with it, but there IS a forum on there, so if you've always yearned for a CDX forum, maybe that's for you.

Another stop to keep you from being productive during the workday!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/CollectionDX/184958426929

JoshB here, reporting live from a smelly hotel room somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. Sanjeev, Dave, Jerilock and I are gearing up for the hour-long trip out to the auction house. We previewed it last night and there is a ton of crap to look at. Bidding will be fast and furious, we'll try to get you coverage of major events has it happens. Stay tune, here, and on twitter.

Yeah, OK, CDX was down a lot over the weekend. I never could nail down what the problem was, but it appears a temp directory that our image gallery writes to had exploded to 80gb in size. In the process of troubleshooting that I went in and added more Ram, and a PHP accelerator, so you should notice a huge improvement in speed.

Next week we're running a skeleton staff at CDX. I'll be on Vacation, with no internet, and Dan, Adam and Jeremy will be at San Diego Comic-Con. Look for a special announcement regarding that soon.

Speaking of Jeremy, I guest-hosted on Destroy All Podcasts DX. We talked about Takeshi Kitano's film "Getting Any". It was a lot of fun, so please check it out.

Thats about all.. Talk to you soon..

Josh

Here's a random YouTube find.

Tokyo. Japan. 1983. The Glen Miller Orchestra. With time to kill, band members Larry O'Brien, Mike Ruth and others Explore the streets of Japan.

Sunday was my last day in Tokyo, and as such, it was bittersweet. I had a full agenda, my feet were killing me, but I needed to persevere. On deck today was Sightseeing from the Tokyo Metropolitan Govt. Buildings, Yoyogi Park, Meiji Shrine and Harajuku.

I wanted to go to the Tokyo Metropolitan Govt. Buildings because of their free observation decks on the 45th floor. You really get a great view of Tokyo from up here and it's all free. While I was up there I was playing with the super zoom on the camera, closing in on things that were otherwise unseen.

Todays excursion brings me out to Omiya, a town maybe 45 minutes outside of Tokyo. The primary purpose is to visit a toy store (of course) but I am far enough out of the city that I might as well find some things to do while I am out there. There's a big park in Tokyo, and it's supposed to be good Sakura blossoms there, so I will do that as well.

45 minutes outside of Tokyo it still looks like Tokyo. Crowded, congested, but its an organized chaos. The train ride is smooth, clean and quiet.

I find my destination with ease, a vintage toy store called Senshutei. You can read all about it here.

From there I grab lunch in a crowded McD's and then i'm back on the train to go up two stops to Omiya Koen.

Omiya Koen is a nice, large rural park, with lots of paths and ponds. As I enter the park I see a gaggle of girls huddled around a fence. Of course, I go see what the fuss is about, all the while trying not to look like a creepy foreigner. Luck would have it that there is a traditional Japanese Archery school here, and they were in the middle of some kind of competition. It was so graceful, and oddly enough, all girls.

Today's agenda is to go out and buy a new camera, so I walk over to Akihabara in the morning and go to the only logical choice - Yodobashi Camera. I mean its THE camera store in THE worlds greatest electronics district in THE most high-tech city in the world.

Yodobashi camera is like 7 floors of store. Just imagine 7 Target stores placed on top of each other, each devoted to one single thing. Its immense.

I get to the camera floor, and there are so many cameras here it boggles the mind. Normally when I go camera shopping I take my time and research whats the best camera for me. But this time I am flying blind, not only in a foreign country, but a whole different language.

I decided to play it safe and went with the just released Olympus SP-590UZ. I've owned two other olympus cameras, and they were awesome, and the 26x optical zoom was killer. So The salesman, who spoke little English hooked me up. Have you ever tried to ask a Japanese salesman that you want a Micro SD card instead of the SD card the camera comes with? I don't recommend it.

After we were done with Takeada's house, we started back to the train station and ended up stopping into Godzilla-Ya, one of the most venerable old toy stores in Tokyo. I didn't grab much, just a few beater chogokin and some Godzilla sofubi for the kids.

We stopped for lunch at a small shop - everyone got ramen but I got two plates of Gyoza. I kind of had buyers remorse here, but the Gyoza was great, so I didn't mind. The Ramen looked good though.

From here, most of the gang had to go to meetings and such, so Jordi and I decided to go do some sightseeing.

First place we hit up was the Bandai Corporate headquarters in Asakusa.

We thought we were going to get a tour, but actual work needed to be done, so we just hung out in the lobby. We weren't allowed to take pictures, but mostly its just displays of currently released Bandai product. There was one case with nostalgic items, in it was a MIB BLACK DALTANIOUS. Those of you who care know what a big deal this toy is.