Tag: Action Figures

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Of styro-stuffing, set-building, and starting to feel like home

1 min read

When we toured the house in Utah that we’ve wound up renting, the first glimpse of the basement – an area as big as the living room upstairs, but in a decidedly unfinished state without even so much as drywall in most places – there was talk of contractors coming and going for the first several weeks that we were there until the room was done.

Having come from a house that had, for several years, had bare concrete floors, I took one look and said we’d take it as-is. I saw exposed beams and rafters from which lights could be hung, places where a camera or two could be mounted, unfinished walls where I could put acoustic foam to make the space a better recording studio, and the floor was nothing new to me. I saw the studio that this space could be. … Read more

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ToyBox

Cthulhu fun funded!

Not only did Warpo, the makers of the prospective “Legends of Cthulhu” retro-style action figure line, reach their minimum funding goal, they did it in three days.

Legends of Cthulhu
See, I wasn’t the only one who thought this figure was awesome!

Keep an eye on their Kickstarter – stretch goals (which may include other product announcements) are due to be revealed soon. But what convinced everyone to part ways with their money for the greater good of Cthulhu? The answer may be simple: the visual presentation and support for this was pitch-perfect. … Read more

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Television & Movies ToyBox

At the mountains of little plastic madness

This morning, my attention was drawn to a Kickstarter campaign to fund a short-run, homebrew toy company making a new line of Star Wars action figures based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The donation/invstment thresholds at which you got Neat Stuff – including a full set of all four figures, a print of the packaging artwork free of text and logos, and other goodies – were really reasonable. I was in love! With the 3 3/4-inch spawn of Cthulhu!

(Before going any further, those interested can find the Kickstarter here.) And at the same time, I realized that this has got to stop. The boutique, niche-interest toymakers of the world have got to stop tempting me with things specifically engineered to appeal to multiple flavors of retro nostalgia at once. … Read more

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Home Base ToyBox

STAR WARS EARL JR.

Secret plansI’ve been talking for some time about tearing down my man-cave, only for a variety of reasons it hasn’t been happening as fast as I’d like. Today I emptied out, moved, and refilled one of the heaviest, most awkward pieces of furniture in my house, a 6+ foot tall bookshelf that my folks got for me, and my dad built for me, one Christmas in the ’80s. It matched a computer desk and printer table which are no longer with me. It’s still in one piece, reasonably attractive, and it’s damned solid. And yeah, the fact that I remember watching my dad build it while knocking back a beer and cursing a lot has something to do with it. I do the same thing with build-it-yourself furniture, minus the beer (though as I get older, and the printed instructions gradually become more incomprehensible, I have to admit that the temptation is sometimes there). … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Funny Stuff ToyBox

The boy and the robot

I have three days and nights off this week instead of the usual two, and as a result, I’ve actually gotten some stuff done and had some energy. In order to give my wife a break after a hard day, I decided that Evan and I should make a trip into Fort Smith to run some overdue errands and shop for some overdue groceries. Or, actually, do some overdue shopping for groceries that aren’t past their expiration dates. I thought some clarification was in order there. … Read more

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Gadgetology ToyBox

Exterminate the ice trays!

Left to right: Davros, Minute Maid Limeade, Dalek Supreme and a Dalek, presumably biding their time until they can make margaritasDon’t ask for them in your grocer’s freezer aisle: That’s right. There are Daleks in my freezer. (There’s a real and logical reason for this…which you’ll have to wait until the end of the post to see. In the meantime, my wife’s going to be pissed, looking in the freezer for some manner of foodstuff and finding evil armored mutants and stuff.)

They really like the moon: check out this link for a really cool project – a small NASA team has set up shop in, of all places, a disused McDonald’s, and they’re restoring and reprocessing raw data and pictures from NASA’s 1960s unmanned lunar missions with jaw-droppingly spectacular results. Apparently the data gathered by such probes as the Lunar Orbiters circa 1966 could be beneficial to the next generation of lunar mission planners, but hey, I’m okay with it if all we get out of it is more of these great pictures. That’s a perfectly good thing for my tax money to be going to. Be sure to check out their series of pictures showing where these open-reel data tapes have been for the past four decades or so, too! That information makes the restored data and pictures all the more remarkable, and makes me feel a little better about my own housekeeping practices. (Not that I couldn’t use some improvement…)

MobileProWoes: fifteen bucks later, I have a new wi-fi card to replace my horrendously abused one for my handheld PC…and it turns out that the wi-fi card may not, in fact, be the problem at all. It’s the port inside the machine. I’ve had all sorts of advice about what to replace the MobilePro with, but in the end I’m fond enough of the machine that I’m going to be happy to replace it with an only slightly newer MobilePro. There are fully capable laptops out there, but I’m on too tight a budget to even get into the $300 range. I don’t need this to play movies or MP3s – I just need something extremely portable for writing purposes that isn’t a Crackberry or anything of that nature. I’ll let you know how the hunt goes. In the meantime, the fact that the MobilePro won’t fire up a perfectly good new card raises the interesting possibility that I might just have two working wi-fi cards – one slightly battered and one backup.

Electric cattle pod: still working on the year’s-end best-of podcast thing, which is now looking like…ready for it?…five hours, split pretty evenly between soundtrack and non-soundtrack stuff. The frightening thing is, every time I think I’m ready to finish writing my material and start recording, some other really cool release pops up and I’m all “ooh, got to work that in somewhere!” So by the time Christmas actually rolls around and I unleash this puppy, it’ll probably be two days long. And yeah, I’m writing a script for myself; it’s bad enough that I’m going to have to listen to my own voice while putting this thing together, so I’d like to at least have the benefit of the illusion of sounding like I know what the hell I’m talking about.

Okay, okay, here’s why: I just got the Doctor Who Stolen Earth figure set, which has two Daleks, Davros and yet another Doctor (if anyone needs the spare tenth Doctor I wound up with here, give me a shout – if you can cover shipping and maybe lunch, he and his sonic screwdriver are all yours). Apparently, many of the Daleks manufactured this year by Character Options had some issues with the plastic of the ball joints behind both the “sucker arm” and “gun” swelling up; freezing them for a few hours gets things back to normal. It also works wonders for Davros’ head/neck joint, apparently. You learn something new every day, huh? Look for them wherever your grocer carries frozen genetically engineered mutants in bonded polycarbide armor. (If I was less tired, I’d totally geek out on you and regale you with the fact that freezing both the Daleks and Davros have actually been major plot points, but…….naaaahhhh.) I picked up this and the classic series Dalek 3-pack, along with the new wi-fi card, in a recent round of eBaying which is pretty much my early Christmas for this year. I picked up one other fun thing, but I got it for Evan…and you’ll see a photo of it soon enough. 😉… Read more