Adios and his “Evil Qee Army of Doom”
My wife’s birthday was Monday, and there is a new Tokidoki bag in the house as a result.
No, I’m not a good enough husband to go out and buy her one - she had to do it herself.
I will submit, in my defense, that she is quite picky about print placements and thus if I’d picked her out a bag, she MIGHT have CLAIMED to love it, but in reality she would forever be thinking to herself “if only THIS character was centered instead of being cut off by the seam…”
Anyway, she got a “Trasporto” thingy. I think it’s a “Stellina”, but don’t hold me to that and it’s not important anyway.
What is important is this: Every other bag she’s ever gotten has come with the same little “Qee” figure, which is a cute little bear. This new bag came with a different “Qee”… and it was added to the collection of Qees she’d already gotten, exposing a horrifying truth:
She’s been building an army. I just didn’t realize it until she added the leader.
My days are numbered.
Japanese LeSportsac Store
For those of you who are coming here from clicking the Tokidoki tag… I don’t really have much to offer you.
But here’s a blurry camera-phone picture of a LeSportsac store in Japan, at the frightening-to-men “Women’s Theme Park” mall, Venus Fort.
As an aside - if you think Tokidoki bags are expensive in the US, they’re crazy expensive in Japan. The few I saw looked to be about 25000 yen ($210?) for bags that are about $130 in the US.
That’s all I’ve got.
Hope it brightened your day, now you can go back to looking for photos of the newest prints or something.
It’s my birthday, and I wants it.
A couple of weekends ago, when we were in Los Angeles, we stopped at Westside Pavillion so my wife could look at the stores there for Tokidoki bags. My primary mission, of course, was to talk her out of buying any.
Side note: She didn’t buy a one. Her self-control is magnificent.
It did show that, even though I think of Portland as a pretty decent-sized city, it’s got its shortcomings. While I myself am not a fan of the bags, it was disturbing to see how, across different stores in the same chain, the Los Angeles stores got a much wider selection of styles than the Portland stores. I suppose we simply don’t rate.
That aside, there was also an anime goods store in the same mall, and they carried some of the other character goods, including the PVC Mozzarella figure I’d admitted was my one point of weakness regarding the franchise.
I am a pain to shop for, so when my wife saw it, she declared it my birthday present. Meanwhile I’d found a Saki-in-Cosplay figure from Genshiken that needed to come home with us… in the less than spacious carry-on bags we’d brought so we wouldn’t have to deal with checking luggage. It wasn’t going to happen. We asked the friendly shop owner if he could ship them to us, he agreed, forgave us the sales tax, charged us some extra for shipping, and put them aside.
We left the store, me with some misgivings, and eventually made our way back home.
A week passed with no sign of them. I called. Explained the situation. Got promised it’d be checked in to and I’d get a call back. Waited a day. Called again. Found out that, in what was I suppose a perfectly reasonably goof-up, one of the other employees at the store had seen the set-aside figures, decided they were stock that needed to be re-shelved, and shelved them. Fortunately they hadn’t been sold, especially since apparently they still had the receipt from our purchase attached to them.
Eventually they arrived, and it triggered an orgy of depackaging that extended to two figures that had been languishing in their plastic sarcophagi since their purchases in Japan back in December of 2005, and now I share pictures with you that point out (a) my rampant and horrible fanboyism and (b) my urgent need to DUST before I take pictures and put them up on the web.
Mozzarella, guarding the top of a speaker.
Saki and Nene
A “Mon-sieur BOME” Bunny-girl figure. For reasons I do not properly comprehend, the figure’s name is “densha bunny girl”, which is probably a reference to the Densha Otoko saga, and I am simply not cool enough to get the reference or some such.
I’ve really been pretty good about not buying anime-related figures recently. There are tons of them out there these days, and some very high quality ones, but I already have way too many cool figures confined to their packaging and am bad about making space to display stuff and cycling toys in and out of storage.
An unfortunate pattern.
When something happens only once, it’s possible that it’s a unique event.
When something happens more than once, it starts looking like a pattern.
That’s about as “deep” as I get in the morning.
At any rate, the pattern in this case seems to be: My wife suggests we go to an outlet mall. I grouse about the inconvenience, the crowds, the lack of parking, the sheer banality that the very concept of outlet malls embody. Eventually I break down and we go to the outlet mall, wherein somehow I wind up walking out with a shopping bag of my very own.
In this case, she wanted to go to the “LeSportsac” company store in Tulalip, WA. Since we also have a good friend who lives in Seattle, we had two reasons to drive up north (about 220 miles, each way, a bit rough for a day trip but doable)
I groused, I kvetched, I tried to get the “outlet mall” portion of the trip canceled in favor of spending more time hanging out in Seattle. I did not prevail.
The LeSportsac store was a scary place, but I have to admit that the prices there were only mildly insane as compared to the full-on-insane prices that Tokidoki products command at regular retail establishments. My wife wound up with two bags, and since I do not remember the names other than that they were italian sounding and started with a “C” and a “T” I will name them after pasta. If you are, like her, a twisted Tokidoki fan, you will know what I am trying to say when I say she bought a “Cannelloni” and an “Tortellini”, in “Paradiso” and “Inferno” respectively. If you are not, then the actual product names won’t matter and the only effect this should have on you is to possibly make you a little hungry.
Moving right along…
I have an unfortunate attraction to the combination of “black” and “shiny” objects and as a result I have been lusting after a Movado watch since I first became aware of their existence. This is something of a sad comment on the effects of advertising on the weak masculine mind.
The downside of course is that, since the Movado people are apparently well aware of the effects of “black” and “shiny” on the weak masculine mind, they charge a bloody fortune for their watches. I am not going to say they’re overpriced or anything, because that’s a judgment call I don’t have the authority to make, but they’re well outside my price range.
On the other hand, when your wife takes you by the hand and drags you into the Movado company store at the same time as they’re having a 70% off sale on watches…
Look, even 30% of the regular price of one of these is 3 times as much as I’ve ever spent on a watch. Since I’ve bought one other watch in the last 15 years, that means that this one has to last me 45 years:
But it’s …black AND shiny…
After putting that on the Visa bill - and I’ve already logged on to my bank account and sent Visa the payment, first thing I did after having a nice cup of yogurt this morning - we finally drove back to Seattle to meet our friend and check out her new house, which is a really amazing 1920s era house that she’s turned into half living quarters for her / half a day care / preschool center. Both sides are really impressive - The amount of space she has gave us some serious apartment-dweller-envy and the school looked like the best parts of every kindergarten classroom carefully cut out and assembled into one space.
We hung out for a while, I did my best to break her computer in the name of being “helpful”, we went out for some rather nice sushi at “Blue C” sushi near UW, then we drove home, arrived at 2AM, and crashed in the manner of hard crashing things. Good times.
A confession…
As much as I have publicly mocked my wife for her succumbing to consumerism and the wiles of psuedo-Japanese fashion…
…I actually think this tokidoki-designed figure is kind of cute. Much <3 for the heavily armed cow.
My wife is insane.
4 days ago, I had never heard of “Tokidoki” or “Harajuku Lovers”, and all I knew about Fossil was that they made watches.
Then someone handed my wife a 20% off coupon for Macy’s, good through today.
Since then…
Two “Tokidoki” bags. One is a “Portotelefono”, but that sounds like something you should put a cellphone in and this thing is big enough for about 3 cellphones. The other is a “Buon Viaggio” which I’m guessing means something like “good vegetables” in Italian.
One “Fossil” bag, wallet, and I’m not sure what the last thing is, it looks like a thing you put credit cards in but for men that’s a “wallet” - do women have different kinds of wallets?
Two “Harajuku Lovers” purses, one of which is being pressed into service as a very stylish case for her DS, and the other I don’t think has an assigned purpose yet but has a kitty print on it so it had to be added to the collection, and a “Harajuku Lovers” cellphone case. That last is actually only sized for one cell phone. I don’t think it has a cool name like “Portotelefono” or anything.
Neither “Tokidoki” or “Harajuku Lovers” have anything to do with Japan, other than cashing in on japan fangirls, but they’re cute and have good names and that appears to be enough.
The collection of shame:
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
