Arts Raws.

If one looks hard enough, one can find anything. For example, if you look at the title of this post, you'll find an anagram for a popular movie series. If one searches within a select group of Supermarkets or Conbini, one can find these Art Cards. Feast your eyes upon them and then try and guess which movie series I'm talking about.

These are my favourites of the bunch, mainly because of the Japanese style of the artwork. Too bad the artists names are not portrayed anywhere so I could seek out more of their work.

I like the Boba Fett the best though all of them are damn good. (Yoda is a little over the top though.)

This Hildebrant poster is the only one of the lot that credits the artist. Must be a legal thing.

These postcard sized cards are printed on thick cardboard and sealed in plastic, which is why all of the pics are a little wonky so as to not reflect the light. (I really need to get my scanner operative) I hope you enjoy these; at around 3 bucks a pop, they're a little expensive but they look great.

Do Ya Feel Lucky, Punk?

I got up relatively early and head downtown for this year's Lucky Bag extravaganza (click here for previous years). My first stop was E-Beans where I was greeted by a big Monkey (this being Year of the Monkey and all that). We had a Jan Ken Pon battle and she won, yet gave me a booby prize nonetheless.

After that, I popped into to the UFO Catcher Game Centre just to check out its wares and sure enough, I landed two giant pillows that I had to haul around with me all day!

I went to the AniMate on the top floor and bought a Lucky Bag on spec, not knowing what the heck "Show By Rock" is. Within the bag were two Clear Files, 5 Sanrio keychains (market @500 yen per) and twelve similar keychains (at 600 yen per!). Not a bad haul for 1000 yen.

 Sorry for the fuzzy pics, I wasn't wearing my glasses when I snapped them.

Not much else worth buying in the building but I needed a 2000 yen purchase in order to try the "Guru-Guru machine" (at least that's what I think it's called; it's a big red apparatus like a Bingo machine that you spin until a little ball pops out. White wins the small prize, red a big one.)

So I bought two packs of Star Wars trading cards to put me over the price minimum. Alas, I landed NO cards of any interest.

I was hoping for the big Canadian coin, although any of the prizes would be nice.

This is what I won:

Ah, well.
I like the fact that you can win free stuff just by walking in a door. I got a box of tissues and didn't even purchase anything.

I didn't purchase any other items until I got to the Ghibli Store and there I grabbed two of their bags.

Bag #1 had a glow-in-the-dark Kodama coin bank from Princess Mononoke. (The bag cost 3000, this retails for 3000.)

It also included three towels

    

a bookmark,

 a notebook,

a lace bracelet,

a postcard,

and a card case.

The other bag was even better. 3 similar towels,

 a pen-case,

a couple of seals,

   

another lace bracelet,

a sketch book with a Totoro picture as an example,

and an awesome Laputa picture frame (retail 3300!).

It is definitely more worthwhile to go early in the morning than late afternoon, the pickings are far less slim.