I took a break from my usual Warhammer shenanigans and tried to do something completely unhinged: enter the Gunpla Builders World Cup (GBWC) after only about five months in the Gundam hobby… with just 30 days before submissions closed. Bandai reached out and invited me into a content creator subdivision as well as the main competition, which basically felt like being in two competitions at once. So I did the sensible thing and panicked, looked at previous winners, got deeply intimidated, and then decided I’d have to play to my strengths: painting the life out of everything. My concept was a full transition piece—half “real” hobby desk, half in-world Gundam diorama—where Aerial (my favorite girl) is summoning her shield parts out of the hobby side into the scene. I brush-painted the entire mobile suit like a Warhammer vehicle (no airbrush), went heavy on weathering, then built the landscape with expanding foam and my beloved polyfiller. The real headache was the desk illusion: cutting mats, clippers, brushes, paint pots, labels—everything painted to look real, including tiny Japanese text (and yes, I nearly broke the rules with a third-party logo and had to paint over it). In the end, I somehow landed second place in the content creator subdivision, which still feels completely unreal.