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ToyBox

It’s not over yet, Princess.

Olivia snoozesThe princess here is greatly relieved – and completely exhausted, which I’m sure you’ll find understandable, after her recent escape from the Death Star.
That’s right – the second box of Star Wars goodies has arrived. This one contained only two items…but these, which were also represented in my original collection, are what you might call the biggies. … Read more

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ToyBox

Rerezzed.

I’ve been taking new photos of some of my video game memorabilia and toys for a new version of the Phosphor Dot Fossils history timeline video that’ll be showing at OVGE on the 19th, and I feel justifiably and insufferably proud of this particular photo:
Tron action figures
That’s a full set of vintage 1982 Tron action figures, lit from behind/inside by a fluorescent light, with the background isolated. (If I hadn’t knocked out the background, you would’ve seen…well…my other hand holding the fluorescent tube.)
Pretty cool eh? The facial features get a bit lost, but the “cool” factor with these was always the translucency, not any great attention to facial likenesses.… Read more

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ToyBox

Peg, it came back to me.

Previously, on Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods… you may remember a while back I was trying to come up with some simple, elegant, and zero-cost solution to a photography/video project I wanted to shoot for future use in the ToyBox portion of the site. Truth is, one idea had already occurred to me, though I had dismissed it as being a bit too cheap ‘n’ cheesy. In the end, it’s the one that came closest to working. But despite some of the inherent flaws – gravity, really, being the main one – I think the results were kinda cool. Since we’ve already had one wave of bad weather blow through, sleep is pretty much out for today (pity, that), so I thought I’d try to go ahead and knock this project out. Read on to see some of the pictures – and to see what crazily cheap-ass solution I came up with. … Read more

Categories
ToyBox

Peg, it will come back to you.

OK, so I’ve got this goofy project I’d like to pull off with a minimum of effort. The problem is that I’m about as much of a handyman as my cat is. Actually, my cat’s handier than I am – he can dig a hole to the other side of the world in his litterbox while I get winded moving the same amount of dirt with a shovel. So any ideas would be welcome here.
Basically, I want to recreate, on a small scale, a portion of a retail store for a photo/video shoot. I’ve come to the realization recently that I’m way behind on opening action figures that I’ve bought, and/or there are some I’m deliberately leaving on their cards. But as a result of this, I’ve got this wild variety of different action figure ranges represented, sometimes in fairly substantial numbers – Star Wars Episode II/”blue Saga packaging,” Episode III, greeen Power of the Force, carded Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and even some Star Trek: TNG and DS9 figures still in the original packaging. I’m trying to figure out how I can mock up a section of the “pegs” these puppies would be sitting on in a store and get some pictures (and maybe some video) for a future incarnation of thelogbook’s toy section of what amounts to an impossible dream assortment of pristine product still on the pegs. And I’m trying to figure out how to do this with a minimum of cash (or, actually, in the complete absence of cash) and without having to build some permanent monstrosity that’s always going to be taking up space in the house. It doesn’t need to be perfect with price tags and particle board with peg holes in the background; it just needs to give an impression of that little slice of the retail environment.
There’s a method to my madness, and a reason for it too, but for now, I’m all ears for any ideas anyone may have. Me and my crazy ideas, huh? 😆… Read more

Categories
Gaming ToyBox

Why I’m giving up game collecting for 2006.

Doctor Who figuresAnd so it begins. That’s all I’m gonna say. 😆 With a new wave of 2-3 figures arriving every couple of months, I think this pretty much nails the coffin shut for any game collecting in 2006.
I finally managed to play a complete game of Dune 2000 all the way through last, and even with the Winamp/alternate music mix, it worked fine – and I’ve gotta brag on this one: after wiping two of my three enemies off the map, I took the final, and best-built, enemy base with…50 unarmed engineers. Again, I was playing Ordos, and this last enemy standing was Harkonnen; they stupidly had their construction yard, heavy factory, Ix research tower and two power plants built side-by-side with an unprotected bridge behind them. I just massed 50 engineers there, pre-built a gun turret, took those buildings, sold off the power plants in a big hurry, dropped the gun turret right in front of the construction yard and heavy factory (and started building more) and sent the rest of my engineers pouring into their base, taking over their buildings in rapid succession. Once I had their factory, I could start turning out Devastator tanks, and that was pretty much all she wrote. That battle was over fairly quickly and I once again ruled the world. As it should be.
But the best part had to be when the action got fast and furious, and all of a sudden, whatever soundtrack it was from, Winamp starts blasting almost polka-like Jewish music at me. I almost wanted to alt-tab away from the game to see what the heck that was from (it was something, somewhere, in my soundtrack directory), but (A) I wanted to make sure I could finish the game, and (B) I was laughing too hard. Even if I do ever figure out what track that was, and from what soundtrack, it shall henceforth be known as the Harkonnen Bar Mitzvah Jam of Doom. It was just so incongruous because everything that had been on before – some Firefly, some Babylon 5, some Stargate, Nixon, JFK, The Innocent Sleep, had all been so perfect, almost like a well-spotted movie soundtrack.
Man, I’ve gotta find a human to play that game against soon, provided that there’s a day this month that I’m not called in early. (This, by the way, is why I don’t take up any more destructive habits – you can see how hard I’ve fallen off the wagon here, and this is just a computer game…)… Read more

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ToyBox

Your Jedi mind tricks do not work on me, boy.

A visit to the MaulHopefully you’re getting your Christmas shopping wrapped up. The stores are being picked bare! I was listening to some friends recently lamenting the state of the market on the Xbox 360, and the fact that so many of the consoles – which Microsoft doesn’t seem to have made enough of – are winding up in the hands of scalpers. I also mentioned recently that I had gotten back into the Star Wars action-figure-collecting swing of things, and all of this stuff combined reminded me of a really funny and amazingly bold fellow we saw at the first “midnight run” for Phantom Menace toys in May, 1999 in Green Bay. As I’ve mentioned in the past, this event was a circus compared to a similar “midnight run” I experienced in 2002, when the Attack Of The Clones toys hit the shelves; on that occasion, it was about seven fully grown men waiting behind a rope at Wal-Mart to get a look (and yes, I was one of ’em). But the 1999 midnight run was such a cross-section of every extreme of fandom – including, again, the fellow in Jedi robes who roller-skated through the store, buying nothing and blasting John Williams tunes from his enormous jam box – that I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
There was another slice of fandom in attendance at that event: the Opportunist.
This smartly-dressed fellow – well, as smartly-dressed as one would expect someone in Green Bay to be at midnight on a weeknight – snatched up the rather slim supply of 12-inch Darth Maul dolls very quickly. He then stood between the registers and the store aisles, offering them to anyone within just-above-a-whisper range for $20 a pop.
Understand: he hadn’t bought them. He wasn’t selling them to you for $20. He was asking $20 to let go of them so you could take one and go through the register and actually pay for it there. Unfortunately, having balls the size of the Death Star didn’t prevent this guy from being relieved of his handful of Maul and escorted out of the store. That wasn’t chutzpah. Watto had chutzpah. This was just stupid. Just the fact that he was pitching his wares – which, after all, weren’t even his wares to pitch – at a conspiratorial whisper was just so instantly suspicious and yet uproariously funny. He might as well have been selling death sticks. I half expected him to wave two fingers in the air to convince people to “buy” them.
Hey, little girl, you want a Sith Lord?… Read more

Categories
ToyBox

Back into the blister bubble

Beep...beep?  Must be Earth humor.It all started with this little fellow here – well, okay, not this one exactly, but one just like him who wound up getting dropped in a full bathtub somehow; this is the one who replaced him, and believe me, somehow, my mom figured out a way to make him waterproof. But, after a fashion, this was the first Star Wars figure I ever got – heck, I even remember the store where I got him: Service Merchandise at Central Mall in Fort Smith. (That chain no longer exists, and ironically, its space at Central Mall is now occupied by the theater where I stood in line at midnight to see Episode III.) Like any geek-in-training growing up, I got as many of the various characters from the first three movies as I could get my hands on. Years later, when Hasbro revived the range, I was…well…unimpressed by the grotesquely overmuscled depictions of my old friends. (I did spring for Artoo again, however, just for old times’ sake.)
When Hasbro started getting it right, though, it was like I fell off the plastic wagon. And let’s not even talk about the Episode I toys. I was standing in line at midnight in Green Bay for those. I was so grateful for the one guy who roller-skated through the store wearing Jedi robes, blasting Star Wars soundtrack music from a massive jam box on his shoulder. I felt so…….normal when compared to that, what with buying a bunch of new toys in my late 20s.
Between that and Episode II, I got married, and moved back to Arkansas, which severely tightened my budget. (It may or may not have changed since then, but the economy in Green Bay was fantastic, and it’s truly one of the things I miss most about the place.) After my successful (and extremely geeky) push to collect all of the Episode I characters, my Episode II collection paled by comparsion. And the same seemed to be shaping up for the latest movie.
As of the most recent waves of characters, however, I’ve fallen off the wagon again. I did initially pick up some “legacy” characters, so I could chronicle the evolution of Anakin/Vader, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Padme, and so on. But with the umpteenth minor revisions of the various Jedi Knights, I felt a bit irked. I’ve got four Mace Windus already (including the Episode I preview figure that I sent off proofs of purchase for, and one from a Jedi Council Cinema Scene). His look hasn’t changed significantly. Nor has Plo Koon’s, or Kit Fisto’s. I gave up. (You may, of course, feel free to consider this comedy gold from someone who happily picks up every variation of astromech droid that they turn out.) But now that we’ve moved on to less obvious characters – relatively minor characters or folks who aren’t represented in the other films already – I find that I’m snatching up Star Wars figures yet again as budget allows.
At some point, I will give it up (freeing up my cash for all those other collections I have going). I have a feeling that sometime in the next 2-3 years, Hasbro is going to switch to a more modern, larger scale and abandon the 3 3/4″ line, which probably would’ve been abandoned already had it not been grandfathered in by previous generations (literally!) of figures and their owners. At that point, as I did with the Playmates Star Trek toys, I’ll declare victory. Or, perhaps, if you want to look at my check register, defeat. But here’s the thing: I still get such a thrill out of busting these little guys out of the blister bubble. That feeling was always one of my greatest pleasures as a child, and so help me, I still get excited about it, despite Hasbro’s attempts to reduce the experience to sheer frustration by making it approximately 247 times harder to even reach the figures. I’ve found that it’s always a good pick-me-up to go buy one of these things if I’ve had a rough week, open it up, examine it closely, admire the workmanship, put it on the shelf, and then, when no one’s looking, having an all-hands-on-deck lightsaber-duel-palooza.
OK, just kidding on that last part. So far as you know.… Read more

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Gaming Home Base

Game Room Remodeling Diary: Coda

Changes are afoot! As with any venture like this, there are bugs to be worked out of the system, and I’m doing my best to shake them out of the woodwork. I recently got a PSX trakball, and figured out a simple way to integrate it into my “arcade minus the cabinet” setup without having to move the big, bulky twin joystick. I simply turn a small container upside down (after washing and drying it, of course, to get any loose dust off) over some of the buttons on the twin stick, and put the trakball (a fancy little number by Nyko) on top of that. Also, I’ve found that spending more than 5 or 10 minutes standing a foot away from my monitor’s a bit hard on the eyes, so I pulled my “backup” video fader out of the box and set it up to “dim” the video a bit on a manual setting without having to mess with the monitor’s brightness control, which is set right where I want it for everything else. And here are the results of both additions, from a nice test session with Centipede. You’ll notice that the monitor’s dim enough not to flare out in the photos, which it normally would at full brightness:
PDF Game Room
Here’s a wider shot of the whole setup:
PDF Game Room
Without the upside-down container, which I used to use for newly-arrived, untested cartridges, you can see that this arrangement doesn’t mess with the twin stick buttons at all. In fact, for Centipede, I configure the game to use the player 2 joystick’s buttons for firing:
PDF Game Room
You may have noticed some “friends” on top of my monitors; I had to trade some of my “toy display” space for more useful storage space, and as such some of my toys have had to relocate to smaller, inconspicuous spaces. Some of them, like Dirk and friends here, are boldly standing guard next to the Colecovision where they’re not in the way:
PDF Game Room
(Ambassador Kosh, not seen, is on the other side of the Colecovision.) Meanwhile, others are hiding between the top of the monitors and the top of the rack:
These are the droids you're looking for
PDF Game Room
…and others are just sitting…well, wherever I can find space for ’em:
PDF Game Room
PDF Game Room
(It may seem silly, but I’m as proud of my toy collection as I am of my game collection. Gotta have at least a few on display.)
Also added one red rope light under my PC desk, which creates an eerie little glow; I had to brightness/color-enhance the hell out of the left photo to get this to show at all:
PDF Game Room
That’s all that I’ve really done in the past couple of weeks.… Read more