I’d been saying since the beginning of the year that, since Character Options didn’t get the Torchwood license, whoever did would win me or lose me based on the action figure of Gwen. Looks like they win.

That’ll do nicely until I can have a full-sized Gwen sitting on my desk.

The first wave is Jack, Gwen, a Weevil and the Cyberwoman, and yes, they are scaled the same as the CO Doctor Who figures; the part that bites is that you have to order the entire first wave. I don’t need a Weevil or Lisa to make my life (or my increasingly British toy shelf) complete, but I don’t get a choice in the matter. All I can say is that the other three main characters better be in wave two so I can tie off this collection; I’ve heard rumors that wave two will indeed be Ianto, Owen and Tosh, with Captain John, so that would suit me just fine.

You can get ‘em here. On a completely unrelated note, I’m going to have some Who figures for sale at OVGE, so make sure your wallet’s bigger on the inside than on the outside!

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You know, when I knew I had a kid on the way, I vowed to myself that, unless Character Options started doing classic Doctors from Doctor Who, my sci-fi toy collecting days were over and done with. Then they announced ‘em - go figure. But I wasn’t expecting them to look this good - this is a quick ‘n’ dirty composite I whipped up from the pics first published at this site. (It’s worth the click - they also have pics of the Zygon, Sea Devil, Robots of Death, the K-1 Giant Robot…)

I’ve been wanting DW merchandise that looks this good since these gentlemen were still all over the airwaves. I can’t wait to see the other five. I also can’t wait for hell to freeze over and Amazon UK ship toys outside of the UK. Needless to say, I may be saving up a few bucks and begging Mayhem for a Big Favor Real Soon.

Just a reminder - Father’s Day and my birthday are both coming up in the next few months. Just consider the above pictured plastic Time Lords added to my wish list.

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The annual “Christmas tree” is getting to be something of a tradition at theLogBook; basically, it’s a “best of” collection of that year’s Toybox toy reviews and pictorials, all gathered under the tree. As they should be. It’s a very crudely programmed graphical menu that doesn’t really give you any explicit instructions - what you click on is (God and HTML willing) what you’ll see.

In 2006, I assembled the tree and its attendant presents in Paint Shop Pro, as much out of laziness as anything. But this year, I decided to take a different route - I had all of the stuff readily at hand, and one morning I had a little bit of time, so I physically assembled all of this year’s Toybox items - most of them in their original boxes no less! - in one place and took a photo. Compared to last year’s - and a work-in-progress version for this year which was wiped out in a power bump - that’s almost cheating. But I thought it’d be a real statement of geeky cool to actually have all that stuff in one place at one time.

One cheat I’ll admit to: the Voyager and other space probe models were simply too small and spindly to be seen, so I propped up the relevant patches for their missions instead. Also lost in the shuffle may be VINCENT from The Black Hole. See if you can find him - he’s there for a reason. Also a bit sneaky is the dark red gift at the lower right corner - with a Starfleet combadge on it. This is there to visualize something for which there wasn’t a physical package…well, unless I went and found an old 3/4″ broadcast videotape from the ’80s somewhere. This was a bit easier.

If anything was wrong with my first draft of this year’s tree, it was that there was simply not enough going on among the tree’s ornaments themselves. Last year’s tree had a couple of things snuck in among the ornaments, so literally two days out, I added a couple of extra goodies - namely, the baby and Jet Jaguar (!). If these look like cheesily-pasted-on late additions…that’s because they were!

Anyway, hopefully everyone enjoyed this year’s tree. Now that I’ve got a kid who, in theory, should be taking up almost all of the household toy-buying budget instead of his dad, I’m not sure how the tree idea will play out in the future. But then again…I’ve still got a few trinkets here and there that I’ve been holding back on.

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For years and years, if my wife and I put up a Christmas tree at all, it was a tiny little tabletop tree, and the cats would promptly savage it. Most years…honestly…we didnt put one up at all. Family didn’t come to our place for Christmas, we went to theirs. But this year is a little bit different. This year we have a child of our own. He’s already fascinated by the big tree by the front window, with all of its white lights - we’re still on an incredibly meager budget, so this is one of the $30 pre-lit, all-but-pre-assembled specials one finds at Wal-Mart. For the first time, we finally had something to do with the considerable collection of Christmas ornaments we’ve been given as gifts over the years. And for the first time since I’d been collecting them in the early 90s, I finally had a launching pad for my fleet of Star Trek ornaments. Continue Reading »

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We’re diverse around here like that. I have a humorous gadget story to tell, on the day after the latest Mid South Gaming Get Together up at Brian’s (icbrkr) place. On the occasion of the first such get-together, in December 2004, Flack festooned us both with copious garage sale and thrift store finds. One of the goodies he gave me was this Radio Shack sound FX generator, complete in the box with instructions, AC adapter and everything. In fact…let me check the ol’ server…yep, here’s the original picture I took at the time:

I distinctly remember him saying that he had snagged this for a buck at a yard sale, had no use for it, and so here it was, mine for the taking. The really funny thing about it? This bought-for-a-buck-at-a-yard-sale piece of electronic fun, given to me for nothing, is now a vital cog in the video production wheel around here:

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Outpost Gallifrey sez:

Character Options have announced the first in the new Classic Series range of figures. The first wave will include four single releases and two twin packs. There is currently not a release date. The list is still under negotiations and approvals, but Wave 1 is currently slated to include:

The Fourth Doctor in his Red velvet jacket from the story Revenge of the Cybermen. This figure will include two interchangeable heads - one with the hat, one without.

The Fifth Doctor with short hair as seen in the story Resurrection of the Daleks.

The Sixth Doctor in his patchwork frock coat with short hair as seen in Attack of the Cybermen.

A Sea Devil complete with string vest.

A Zygon with the Skarassen control device.

Voc Robots from The Robots of Death. This twin pack will include SV-7 (Super Voc) and D-84 (Dum Class).

Magnus Greel and Mr Sin from Talons of Weng Chiang will be the second twin pack.

My take on it:

Okay, all this business with “with short hair” and “from the episode…” is making me nervous. CO, please attend carefully: I’m only buying one of each Doctor unless there’s such a radically different one that there needs to be a second one of [insert actor here] on my shelf. Say like a season 26 McCoy and a 1996 movie McCoy. In fact…that’s the only example I can think of, and that’s just because I like McCoy so much. The episode-specificity implied in the above statement makes me grumble a bit.

I approve of the choices though. Three of my ten favorite Doctors right off the top, and you can take Tom Baker’s head off too! I also approve of the Zygon, Sea Devil and Bots o’ death. I may pass on Chang though.

Yep, you heard me right people. I’m only gonna get the ones I want. I’m gettin’ old. And the boy’s gonna need some toys too, so I gotta be frugal. (Though if he turns out to be a Star Trek and/or Star Wars and/or Doctor Who fan, well…heh heh heh. Luckiest. Kid. Ever.)

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Nothing big to report. Did some more minor housecleaning today, and ran a lot of errands. One thing I utterly failed to get done was get the infant seat installed in the Mommymobile - the guy who does that for folks at the Van Buren PD was out of pocket when I got there. I’ll try again Monday.

There are few things as certain in life as death, taxes, and the fact that sooner or later, your Avid user settings will be corrupted. @#$%. (And this is without two other dudes using it - I don’t know what this machine’s excuse is.)

I’ve also been doing some WordPress-style remodeling on Phosphor Dot Fossils, getting the first few test entries into the system. I’m really, really happy with how that’s shaping up; basically, I’m categorizing every entry in a zillion different ways, so you’ve got a huge number of ways to sort through the database: by year, by platform, by the first letter of the title, by control scheme, even by game play elements. You want to look at baseball games only? Maze games only? Games by a certain manufacturer? No sweat. I think there’s a lot of value to the existing library of PDF reviews that has perhaps been buried without having some kind of sorting mechanism; this should redress the balance a bit. (Oh, and I’m gonna drop my customary anti-cut-and-paste code into place too, because let’s not forget that there are other folks who think that PDF is quite a valuable resource too. ) Head over there, try out the sorting options on the right-hand sidebar, and let me know what you think. It’s a beautiful thing.

Speaking of which, I have found a new use for one of the display cases I used to haul to OVGE every year:

I figured I might just need to keep these little guys under glass (or in this case plastic) from here on out. (By the way, the giant droid god on the left isn’t Andrew’s - I found my own large-scale R2 while cleaning house.)

I know these are a stupid vice to have, but they’re at least harmless. Yes, I know it’s just the same thing repainted in about a dozen different ways. That doesn’t make me like ‘em any less.

By the way, speaking of geeky stuff, I thought I’d post my wife’s score from that Nerd Test a few days ago. If you’re reading this, you’ll probably be impressed:

Read it and weep, gentlemen.

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Oh man. I love the Atari 2600 Labelmaker site, but it’s gonna put label fetishists like me out of business. Doesn’t even pay to think about what it’ll do to the next AtariAge label contest to come down the pike. Just between you, me, and the entirely metaphorical lamppost, I had to resist a momentary (and utterly mad) geeky urge to do “Atari cartridges” for, oh, everyfreakinthing on the whole site. I’ll keep that option in my back pocket if the site ever undergoes some kind of radical rethink. Anyway, it’s an awesome idea, a neat (and rather alarmingly versatile and powerful) site to have some fun with, and I sincerely hope that its maker will consider expanding the repertoire to include such things as the “silver label” style, 5200 cartridges, and so on.

The DVD review section of theLogBook has now been rolled out, WordPress-style, and I think it’s lookin’ mighty sleek ‘n’ foxy. But then I guess I would, wouldn’t I? If anyone thinks they’re detecting a mad dash to get as much of the WordPress-ification of theLogBook done before the baby gets here, they are about 1000% right on the money. There are only three sections left to be WP’ed, and we’re already deep into the work on one of those, so perhaps we can whittle that down to two sections remaining by the end of the year.

I’ve got a big Stack Of Stuff piled up at the house that needs to be sold, mainly Star Trek and Babylon 5 and other sci-fi related stuff - action figures, models, Christmas ornaments, magazines by the truckload, and so on - and I’d really like to avoid eBay. If anyone out there would like some of this stuff, please drop me a line. I’m not inflating prices or charging the gross national debt for shipping - I just need the stuff out of here. I’m still drawing up a list, but I can tell you that there’s a collection of Starlog’s dedicated Star Trek: The Next Generation magazine that, if it isn’t the complete run, it’s damn close. I also have binders full of Cinefantastique’s annual ST:TNG wrap-ups - I remember around 1990-94 when Robert and I would descend upon the bookstores to find those every summer, and we’d study Mark Altman’s well-observed comments and reviews like devout Bible scholars.

Over at NotNews, Dave has an in-depth after-action report from the Philadelphia Crowded House concert with Pete Yorn and Liam Finn (i.e. son of Neil) as the opening acts. Dave has also gotten to see R.E.M. live without having to venture to another state. Have I mentioned Dave lives in a real city? Heck, I bet Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is even playing in a theater up there somewhere.

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