I've been looking at this item in the seasonal area at the store since the Easter merchandise was set. Last night I bought a 4" one with a bow on top, and the bow was held on with a few loops of thread. Cut the thread, remove the bow, and you have a perfectly acceptable plush of the bird from Potemayo:
The plush from Target is named "Chiyo Chiyo". I would wager that the idea for this thing came from Potemayo....
Anyway, for $3, I got a "good enough" bird plush. And it's even to scale; if I set it on my head it's exactly the right size.
The one in the picture is the 14" version, which is $10 and freaking huge. But you don't have to remove a bow or anything from that one.
Admittedly it's not as nice as a Guchuko plush would be.
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Speaking of anime, I was surprised to learn that AnimEigo has allowed its license on Kimagure Orange Road to lapse. Live-eviL is fansubbing the series and so far they've done through episode 12. Unfortunately, most of them are only available via IRC, and I have no freaking clue how to download via IRC. I've tried to work it out before, and I have never managed to do it. (If anyone has any suggestions regarding IRC clients and such, please lay them on me.)
I own two copies of the KOR TV series, subtitled by AnimEigo...on laserdisk. Since I don't have a working LD player at the moment, that does me approximately zero good, and I never saw the last handful of episodes. That's a story in itself.
You see, when KOR TV was first released, DVD didn't exist yet. I paid $$$ for the LD box sets. And a friend of mine, despite the fact that she didn't own an LD player, also paid $$$ for the LD box sets. We watched the series together, but somewhere along the line it fell by the wayside and we never got to the last disk or two.
This friend moved in with me for a while, and then I moved out, and when I did her set--which was utterly frickin' useless to her--went with me. So I have two sets of KOR TV LDs with hard subtitles. Whee.
...and when AnimEigo offered their LD trade-in deal, where you could turn in your KOR TV LDs for a discount on the DVDs, the discount was paltry and I was unemployed anyway, so I couldn't spend literal hundreds of dollars on a series which I already owned. *sigh*
So here we are: in legal terms, I own two "licenses" for KOR that I effectively can't use. In terms of copyright I think I am on pretty solid ground when I claim that I should be able to download fansubbed KOR eps and not be called a "pirate" or "thief". (It's fine in the case of the other anime I DL. Just not KOR. Clear?)
Of course, the MPAA and RIAA don't see it that way. The fact that I paid hundreds of dollars for a series in a format that I can no longer use, that's irrelevant; I should pay more to get the new format. I also should not be able to convert the outmoded format to a current one, either, they believe.
Screw 'em.
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...so I guess I'm going to have to get schooled in IRC. *sigh*