...on otakuology part two

...oldies but goodies.


this isn't the first model i ever built.

the first one i ever built was the title character of the mobile suit gundam series.

and he looked like this.

only dirty and covered with sawdust because i worked in my parents unfinished basement on models when i was a boy.

i used some old assed testors paint which went on like spackle but, it was what i could afford on a junior high school kid's salary.

and it was before i found a store in my neighborhood that carried better paints.

the unfortunate thing with gundam was this. it was my first piece and i had never put anything together but WW II airplanes (my brother and my dad worked on this b-29 in the living room and i helped by, gluing the propellors on wrong) and i globbed the paint on,

and got my fingerprints all over it,

and glue,

and crap.

so it never looked good but, i loved it and played all the time with it. because it was a robot too and that was cool when i was 11. when i was older, i tried to fix the paint on it but using thinner and it destroyrd the plastic. and i was sad about it. but i was a teenager by then so, i wasn't that sad about it.

i think that when you're older, you lament lost things from your past more than you did at the time of loss because it is only when you're older that you realize the permanence of things lost. like innocence, you'll never get it back.

and that stings.

later on during junior high, ray and i would order from a place in massachusetts called the cosmic connection, which is long gone.

and

ray and i ordered this 1/144 of full armor gundam, which didn't appear in TOS. it was more of a suit from a manga side story.

SIDEBAR: mobile suit gundam has been putting out manga about the tv shows mythos as long as they have been putting together tv series. in fact unicorn gundam which will be airing in 6 episodes over the next year or came from manga. what is manga you ask? boy, did you come to the wrong place shiteyes.

anyway, cosmic was carrying this suit and ray and i bought two. it was kind of like book of the month club, with robots. that said, it's the earliest living example of stuff i did. i have older kits that i did later. some of which are 30 years old but, i didn't buy them until later on in life.

i wonder if aside from enriching my time on this ball, if this crap does nothing more than collect dust. most of them have collect cigarette tar as well. it's a dirty business

—the bastard