ガンプラ命- Z's Gundam Model Review

Today marks the first anniversary of this blog. I can’t believe it… can you? I’ve never thought of blogging for this long. When I first started,  I thought I’d probably get bored and drop this blog thing in a couple of months. Things have changed. The name of this blog, Fudoushin (不動心), have long been lost and its original purpose rewritten. I wouldn’t have imagined this blog to become what it is today ^^;

Last year, I had really bad Gunpla-itis; it would take me literally a few months to even consider starting on my next MG. Realizing this is a bad habit, I started this review blog as an incentive to build my models. By taking photos and reviewing the models, it gave me a more solid purpose of building the models as opposed to “okay, I’m done. Now what?”.  After awhile, people began to pick up on this blog and like what they were seeing. This blog didn’t start out as “home look” but just your average “my hobby, my life” personal type of thing but seeing the blog stats and feedback motivated me to change that.

As this blog’s readership inceases, I’ve finally decided a new purpose for it. Something more ambitious. And this is where the whole “home look” thing came in. I want this blog to be something like Dalong. A “second opinion”, if you will, for people deciding on what models to get. I want to be able to show fellow gunotas out there how Bandai’s models really are compared to their professionally-built ones and what they are capable of. I want to show the real deal. And so I’ve put in the effort to make this blog more of a “site” than a “blog” by making pages for each review as opposed to making a post.

Ultimately, I want this blog to be recognized similar to Dalong’s. My goal is that this blog would become a popular referral site for anyone asking for Gundam reviews or wondering if they should pick up a certain model. This will be without a doubt, a very long term goal but it gives me something to continually work toward to :). Even if I don’t succeed in that, at the very least I want this blog to be a nice place for everyone to just chill and hang out :D

I’ll continue on improving the aesthetic and everything else about this blog better. Taking better pictures, pumping out faster reviews, better layout, etc. I know my past reviews might have been too wordy so I’ve changed my review layout (instead of dumping a whole gallery at the end, I’ve changed to inserting pics throughout the review). Some of you may have noticed that the tone of my reviews might also have changed slightly from a bit monotonic/technical to a little more satirical and to the point^^;. Basically less words, more picture (actually if anything, I need to reduce the amount of photos I take…)

The Stats

Here are the stats of this blog since the month I started. At the end of each month, I always thought “wow! there’s no way I’ll be able to top that much hits again!” but strange enough, each oncoming month have beaten the previous month’s stats (with the exception of the time I was working on Sinanju where I have only a week’s worth of post the whole month). While the numbers don’t represent the real number of “unique visitors”, I’m a happy blogger knowing that some of the hits are from recurring readers ^^. I admit that I “whored out” this blog the first couople of months to different sites/forums but have since stopped out of laziness and feeling a bit shameful for such advertisement ^^;. I’m also beginning to see from my stats page that people all over the world are beginning to refer others to my blog (YAY!). I’ve seen this blog being referred to from sites in different countries like the Netherlands, Philippines, Portugal, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the US (going by the website’s language and internet domain). So I guess I’m one step closer to my goal :D.

Thank you!

I know this post is already TL;DR but I need to get this important part across. I want to thank all of you, the readers, for taking the time to visit this blog and making this a lively place. Your comments, suggestions, questions, feedbacks, and discussions have contributed to the growth and develop of this blog. Thanks to you, my modeling skills have also improved and I’m more willing to try new things. Also thanks to you, I’m willing to build all of my Gundam models! I also want to thank the other bloggers for adding my blog to their blogroll as they also drive traffic here (and I hope my blogroll is doing the same for them as well). I just want to say, thank you everyone for everything!

I’ll continue to do my best to make sure this blog will always be entertaining and worth your time. :)

The Contest

I’m sure most of you are already tired from reading/skimming through this post so I’ll save the details on it for the next post. Be ready for it ^_^