Dakimakuras anyone?

Here's some links for you:

http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=320757 (need account if you don't already have one)

http://blog.xn--er-573a1isbf1441e2hs87j.jp/?s=%E3%83%9A%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88%E5%A8%98

https://twitter.com/paintmusume

It's worth noting that since it's censored in the link I provided, the anatomy on the link you provided could be a good bit different from what the bootlegger has; she's can be pretty explicit at times. That isn't necessarily the case, but I can't say since I don't own that particular cover of hers (as beautiful as the art is, I'm not a fan of short hair.) I think Zengar owns it though, so if he does I'm sure he'd be willing to provide pictures (if he hasn't already done so in this th read.)

Yeah, like I said man, bootlegs can compare to the legit products, but it's usually in the details. Without looking too hard, this can be seen if you compare the legit/bootleg of the cover you like; the bootlegs colors are very dull and the little accessories and such are lacking much detail at all (the potion bottles and feather on the legit have a very unique shine to them.) In the end, it's up to you if you're willing to spend that much on a cover, but I'm obviously of the opinion that if I'm going to drop $80+ I'd want the best product available.

Materials are very complicated. In general, these are the basics:

2-way tricot (2WT) - This is generally considered to be the best material, regardless of manufacturer. Very smooth, generally great color/print, stretches a good bit.

2-way roika (2WR) - Often almost exactly the same as 2WT, but can have some variations depending on the manufacturer.

Smooth Knit - Usually only smooth going in one direction, this material is pretty similar to 2WT/2WR in other respects, but pretty much considered a downgrade.

Peach Skin - Used (almost) exclusively by bootleggers. This is obviously the material you're most familiar with, so I won't go too far into the details on it. In my experience, the print/color quality on 2WT is much better. This is a material that a lot of people seem to be fine with, but I personally don't care for it much.

Then there are some different ones that you'll run into less often:

SK Suede - This is only made by the manufacturer P80. It shares many traits with peach skin (it's designed to be a budget material), but has excellent color/print at the cost of a little softness.

Polyester Twill/etc - I'm not familiar at all with these materials to be honest, but you'll see a lot of companies (Cospa) offer this as the low priced material option.

The other bootlegger materials - Rayon, Velvet, etc..


Then come the manufacturers: 2WT is generally pretty similar between manufacturers but they do have some differences so you could rate them differently. If I were to do a list based on my personal material preferences it would probably go like this:

P80 2WR
Seiren Pearl Roika
A&J 2WT
(P80 2WT is my favorite material in terms of comfort, but it has fairly poor image quality, so I'm not ranking it... regardless, it would probably be in the top 3.)
Other 2WT
Smooth Knit
SK Suede/Peach skin

I think most people usually rate A&J's 2WT as the best, but I could be wrong there.

Well, I put my order in for one of the Lilith covers and three Harthnir covers: one of each of the new versions in 2WT, and a double in microfiber so I could get the bonus items (had to order three covers to get them).
That is going to be a scary ass invoice. Merry Christmas to me?

Jesus, I feel like grabbing a brown paper bag to hyperventilate into. *breathe, just breathe*

EDIT: LOL Excuse me, sir. I think that there may be an error...

wow... well now you have extra reason to hyperventilate until that gets sorted out..

Man, so many covers coming out with so little money. D: I really like the pen Nanoha and Fate covers and Evening Call is offering 1500 experience if you order them during this short period (I expect like all other event covers that they'll do a longer order period, probably in January.) And there are a ton of other good things coming out... I'm just flat broke; monthly AmiAmi invoice just came in yesterday and I'm running behind on some SMJ invoices. :(

My best "slightly scary but mostly funny" moment with SMJ was when my account was suspended over a $0.00 invoice. Some of you may remember a few months back when they didn't include some bath posters I had ordered into a shipment and they said they had. They found them a few days later and shipped them to me for free, but I guess since their system is mostly automated, they also sent me an invoice for the $0.00. I didn't think it was a big deal and thought it was pretty amusing, so I just let it go (I didn't have any invoices due at this time so I didn't send them any money that probably would have taken care of this invoice too.) Every Saturday, which is when they send all of their account notices, I'd get the overdue invoice message. Finally, after the three 14 day windows that they give you to pay an invoice (with late fees each cycle), I got an email saying my account was suspended because my account was overdue by $0.00. I panicked a bit but shot them an email and it was fixed within the hour.

At least you didn't try and pay it, that could have been a disaster.

How would you even be able to pay a 0.00 invoice? I mean, I could imagine some errors popping up with that? Possibly. Maybe not. Still would be weird.

@Kobun, yeowch. Good thing that it's the holidays so you have at least some sort of mental excuse. Hopefully it won't be as scary once it's sorted out...

The way SMJ's system works is you either send the money via Paypal with a note including the invoices you're paying (so if I had an invoice for $180 with the $0 invoice too, I could have included a note with $180 paying both of those invoices), but I didn't have any other invoices to pay at the time, so I couldn't have sent $0 obviously. Or I could have authorized a credit card payment by sending them an email, but I actually did have another invoice or two up that I wasn't ready to pay at the time (due to lack of funds) and I didn't want to put it on my credit card; usually they're pretty good about charging only what you want them to charge, but one time they charged two invoices when I only requested that they charge one, and this caused me to go over my credit limit. That's only happened once, but I've used Paypal 99% of the time since then.

Kobun's invoice will be a a lot easier to handle once they fix it. It looks like they just tacked on an extra zero ($120ish versus $1200ish), but it's still painful when you have a ton of orders that are all 12k yen. T_T

ADP really screwed me over, and are continuing to. I was informed that the site was not in error, and that they had not shipped out the Nymph 2WT yet. What really irked me was, they sent me an email without even an apology for this. The email simply stated that they just forgot to send it out, and they'll get around to it next week. It was enough for me to ask them to just cancel, since I don't want to do any business with a .com that thinks that's an okay way to treat customers. But to make matters worse, my letter of complaint and request to cancel never received a response. If they try to send it out after several days have passed since I asked for a cancellation, I'll be rejecting the package and asking for a refund. Simply being informed of an "oops" and nothing else even in the manner of information is not exactly good customer relations.

In any case, HobbyHeart has been very cooperative with me thus far on my recent 2WT order, and my eBay listings are getting at least a little attention, enough that they should, at the very least, sell. I tried selling them to a friend of mine for about 75% off what I paid, but he doesn't seem interested. Which is lame, because I much prefer dealing locally than online.

In any case, while I initially thought peachskin was actually pretty okay for my needs, after a while I'm starting to feel like it isn't. It requires constant attention to deal with wrinkles, and that's no fun at all. I'm thinking that the added elasticity of 2WT will become a standard for me.

And some, well, some actually make decent hugging pillows instead of just displays. This one's become kind of a favorite for me:



I'm not sure what it is, exactly, that makes some of these a bit hypnotic. I'm not even a particularly big manga/anime fan, and I don't keep up to date on those sorts of things. But I'm very glad I started experimenting with buying and selling Dakis for fun, especially because I've found that some are worth keeping for their original hugging purpose.

this is the only reason why i buy these lol

How did you come across ADP to begin with? As I mentioned, they've been spam/fake promoting figure and anime sites, but as far as I could tell no one had ever actually ordered from them. I'm a moderator on the Dakimakura subreddit and as soon as they posted there, I banned them/removed the post. A few days later someone posted a topic asking what happened to the thread and asking if the site was legit. I told him that I wouldn't recommend buying from there as they're untested and they're falsely promoting their site. He refused to believe me when I said I wouldn't recommend trying them out and I think he did end up ordering from them, but I haven't heard back from them. So I have no doubt that their spam promoting works to an extent, I just wish people would actually do some research before ordering from a site no one has ever heard of. I disdain bootleggers, but I will give Hobby Heart credit that they at least seem to treat their customers well and have a decent product for a bootleg.

Yeah, a good 2WT doesn't wrinkle much at all; it may have one or two creases coming right out of the packaging, but those disappear pretty quickly. 2WT is the only material I could see myself sleeping with. I dislike peachskin/sk suede, but they're moderately okay for display if you can sort out the wrinkles, but I wouldn't sleep with either of them. I'd consider Smooth Knit depending on the manufacturer, but I have plenty of 2WT covers to choose from.

If you enjoy Hobby Heart's 2WT, I'd still absolutely recommend trying out at least one legit dakimakura cover to see if it's for you. Because if you're moving onto 2WT anyway, you're already closing the price gap quite a bit between legit and bootleg products, so the price gap isn't so large anymore.

It's an expensive hobby, but there's certainly a very enjoyable aspect to it. I actually enjoy the "hunting" aspect of the hobby sometimes. The main difference between bootlegs and legit covers, other than quality, is that legit covers have limited windows of availability. It's hard to explain, but there is no greater feeling than a cover you've been looking to buy for a year just randomly popping up on Mandarake for a reasonable price.

Bing search. I generally don't socialize on the 'net, so I never saw anything like what you mentioned. They just showed up in the list of retailers when I was initially trying to get stock of who appeared to be the major players in the bootleg industry.

Yeah, my previous post wasn't really directed at you but more at the guy I was trying to tell that he shouldn't try an untested bootlegger out; he was insistent that he'd be fine and wouldn't have any problems with them. Other than you and him, I've never spoken with anyone who has seriously ordered from them but I've seen posts by 2-3 accounts. You can see a good example of what I'm talking about below:

http://www.figure.fm/en/profile/burnjai


It rubs me the wrong way because a lot of people don't have the slightest clue about dakimakura covers. It's easy enough for someone to do a Google search and find a bootlegger without being aware that they'd be buying from a bootlegger, but to come across it on sites where the community generally looks down on bootlegs (at least for figures), is a bit frustrating.

Didn't we cover this already? My next purchase might be a custom cover from a bootlegger because I have not found any covers featuring them. Btw I have a tendency to like a lot of unpopular characters who don't always get a cover.

Latest dakimakura loot haul:
http://www.figure.fm/en/post/44705/Late+November+Loot.html

Figure FM loads slower than shit, and scrolling up/down on that site is even slower.

Hmm it loads super fast for me both from home and at work. Scrolling is I guess related to the relatively high resolution images and your pc being a bit old perhaps? It's a bit chuggy scrolling on my work laptop at times.

I guess the larger images may be what makes it load slowly for you too.

Figure.fm is pretty hit or miss lately; they seem to have a lot of downtime/slow periods, so it could have just been the time he was looking at the post. I think the post was a bit slow to load up for me the first time, and I had some trouble a few others times when the site was down/slow, but the few times I've opened it up since then it has been fine.

Hmm guess I've just been being lucky and avoided that then.

Hmm yeah seems fine now

Holy shit,can't keep track of stuff moving here anymore.
What's new?