2809 We Are.

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I can’t remember if I thanked the various anonymous readers who sent me birthday presents this year. I’m pretty sure I thanked all the ones I’ve come to know over the years, but sometimes I mess people in the shuffle. I’ve been gathering my stuff for taxes and I often overlook things when that’s happening. This was one of those years where people were very generous. I often wonder what factors cause these fluctuations. It’s rarely a trickle of things. It’s usually a long period of nothing and then one year of a lot of things. In the last 4 years or so there have been few gifts, but those gifts were almost insanely large. In that respect it evens out. Many smaller things versus a few huge things. There still seems to be a pattern though and I wonder what it might be. Maybe my audience tends to be employed in areas that have windfalls at the same time.

It’s gotten to the point where I’m having difficulty finding things to put on my lists. Lego has moved away from themes I like and the price to part ratio is absolutely abysmal right now. A set that would have been a reasonable deal at 40$ is nearing almost half the size now. It feels like a waste of money even beyond the fact that it’s a toy for a middle aged manchild. Maybe things will even out after a while.
Star Wars has been ruined for me to the point that there’s only a few things I would really want to build if given the chance. Like, I’d still really like a classic Jaba’s Palace. Or even a series of smaller sets that could be combined into a larger display. They released a giant sail barge set but it’s one of those crazy huge collectors things and it’s not quite the same as the set piece that is the actual palace. You don’t really go into the barge in the film, but you get a pretty good idea of what the throne room area is like. The set they made for the Boba Fett series isn’t bad, but you don’t get Jaba, which makes sense, but I feel like they could have made it a dual set and given consumers a choice on which version to build. What I need is Jaba, Salacious B Crumb, Leia as Boush, Bib Fortuna, and Leia in her dancer bikini, as a throne room set. Then a set with denizens of the palace and some further alcoves. Five or six of the aliens you see in the background, Gamorean Guards, that sort of thing. Then a set of just the extended band from the special edition. That would mostly be a figure set except for the piano. It’s, like, ten figures though and they typically charge $5 or more per figure so it would still be pricey. Then you’d probably have to have Han in carbonite, out of carbonite, Boba Fett, and the place where he’s displayed to round it out. Ideally you’d also get a Rancor set with the monster and the Keeper, obviously. I would prefer a rancor that is a massive figure rather than a brick built one, but I suspect they’d do brick built. That’s just a personal preference. Anyway that’s the kind of thing that could draw me back in rather than another clone Wars thing, or Disney related thing. I honestly don’t know what the fandom is like anymore. Everyone I know who loved Star Wars has been driven away to the point that we never speak about it at all and haven’t for a couple of years. I was the only one who watched the cartoons until Disney plus and a couple of my friends had kids, so they tried to connect that way with them. Basically if the goal was to drive off the oldest fans then mission accomplished, you know?
I like the Harry Potter stuff, especially after the Hogwarts Legacy game expanded the idea outside of that narrative so well. But there’s only so many castle parts a person can get before you’ve pretty much built as much of it as you can reasonably be expected to. The series has run its course and I’m not sure the series is going to breathe life into it again. Maybe a person could tell stories in that setting outside of the Voldemort saga, like the game did. considering the vast amount of merch that’s still selling basically everywhere there’s clearly an audience that doesn’t care what’s happening on the internet to do with the misadventures of the creator. That’s a subject best left to other people in other places. As far as I’m concerned at least I feel like I’m reaching the point where I have enough Harry Potter Lego sets. At least until something worth exploring in that setting comes along again. For example, if they made even one set based on Hogwarts Legacy, or the inevitable sequel, I would be very interested. Especially if you had some kind of way to build your own avatar as you do in the game. Lego seems to have let that first chance pass them by, maybe the lure of money will draw them back in.
As far as generic Lego stuff goes, or in house themes, I like ghost related stuff and modular buildings. Those will always be a draw for me. Minecraft is a a low point since I haven’t played the game in a long time, and they’ve added so many little things that come in expensive sets it’s starting to seem predatory even by Lego standards. Buying a set that’s over $100 just so you can get one librarian villager, or what have you, is not cool, or fun. They have done a few inexpensive sets for getting specific mobs, so there’s at least some hope I can just add little bits to my existing display. Of course my nephew loves playing with the minecraft stuff when he visits so it gets taken apart of messed up to a degree that has kind of chilled me on the idea of trying to make an artistic display of it, as was my original goal. I’ve never gone back to repair the display since the first time he visited years ago so it has deteriorated to the point that I have a hard time justifying taking any time to deal with it. Just letting a set of toys be toys, is hardly the worse thing in the world anyway.
I very much have enjoyed the Animal Crossing theme, but I’m not sure if Lego is going to continue with it past the second series. I’d like them to at least do some more houses, or maybe a couple of sets of blind box villagers at least. I don’t know how they selected the ones they did, but I really want Ankha and some of the villagers I’ve actually had in my towns. Although, that said, I have had Fauna, Rosey, and Maple at various times. They just weren’t long term villagers like Opal, Peggy, or Felicity. With over 500 characters I do understand that it’s impossible to make every one. Well, not impossible per se, but unlikely, if we’re being pedantic.
I never got into the Mario or Sonic stuff as far as game sets go, but Animal Crossing lends itself more to the concept of building up a setting, and I spent so much time working through my mental health issues with that game I’m partial to continuing with it.
I started adding anime to my list because they suddenly released a whole bunch of old titles on DVD and blueray for reasonable prices. After years of not being able to have physical copies of anything there’s suddenly lots of stuff available. I finally got an official release of The Vision Of Escaflowne to go along with my janky ass Chinese bootleg set. Even the current stuff is pretty reasonably priced, so I picked up the first part of Frieren. It’s really crazy in a way because I’m so used to anime being something that was almost always out of reach or too pricey to actually own. I’ve lived long enough for my old media stuff to become accessible at long last.
The devastation of streaming brought me to a point for a while where I wasn’t watching much of anything outside of my very narrow interests. I’ve never been a movie buff, as strange as that might seem considering my own content, but I did used to watch movies from outside of my typical genres from time to time in the distant past. I basically can’t talk about current movies anymore from lack of seeing anything. Not that I talk to people very much anyway, but there’s no way to break the ice half the time anymore. Nobody out here is watching Kinnikuman: The Perfect Origin Arc but me. Nobody cares about the deep bond Warsman had with Robin Mask after he trained him to be a chojin hero. I don’t want to watch Outlander, or Yellowstone. After several seasons of The Walking Dead I’m tired of mean spirited shows.
I dunno. I’ve always maintained that list because sometimes people have a need to express their appreciation for what I’ve done in a more substantial way than a Patreon sub, or and email, or whatever. A lot of what I need at any given time are things I can’t leave to others to buy. Likewise the things I just want can’t be listed and obtained over time, you have to actively hunt them via preorders or risk having to pay scalpers ridiculous prices if you’re truly dedicated to getting a particular Transformer. (sidebar: I never thought I would be glad of the Michael Bay transformers movies, but they thankfully take up over half a wave of figures these days which gives me months of reprieve from trying to come up with money for whatever obscure character they’ve decided to produce after 3 decades. When they announce six or seven movieverse characters in a wave of figures there’s a moment of sadness that there’s nothing I want, then a moment of elation that there’s nothing I want.)
Anyway, I’m thinking about adding stuff like socks to the list because my socks are constantly being destroyed by my horrifying feet. I could potentially sew them back together to get more time out of them, but when does a person have time to darn socks in the modern age? The Discord server was discussing the concept of getting old enough to appreciate practical gifta and maybe it’s time for me to give that a try. My socks are almost always a disaster. Plus I always say I’m going to buy various cords and chargers and things but I can never talk myself into actually doing it. Maybe I’d actually get some of these things I don’t technically need to survive, but would improve my life to some degree, if I outsourced the transaction to some degree.

These are the kinds of weird things you end up thinking about when you’re a quasi known person. I can see how as you scale up these thoughts they would get more and more insane and unwieldy. I exist at the absolute lowest level of human fame. Just enough that I genuinely have some idea of what it must be like to be observed at scale. It’s no wonder famous people go insane. The more you get observed the more it starts to get to you. You spend hours of time describing the thought process behind an Amazon wishlist.

Years ago a reader bought me a humidifier. So I ended up with the one I bought and this spare one. Rather than send it back or donate it, or whatever I kept both. It ended up that one of them randomly broke apart. Like it didn’t break down. The housing just fell to pieces and there was no way to salvage it. Totally crazy, but I was glad of the spare, especially recently when the dust storms were going on because the humidifier put some of the dust down to the point where I could actually breathe comfortably. You just never can tell how things are going to turn out. That person genuinely improved a bad situation just by sending me an extra humidifier, like, over 5 years ago?

Anyway, I’m not really going anywhere with this, it just happened to be on my mind and the insomnia I’ve been having recently makes me a little rambley.

I bought glass files the other day, which I’d never heard of before. I saw someone talking about how you can get a really clean finish on plastics and stuff with them if you need to file down something. I tried them and they worked quite well, so I filed down a few things that were wrong on some of my stuff. I just assumed that they were for crafts and was surprised when I was telling my mother about them and she said they were for fingernails nominally. So I also tried them on my nails to see what that was like. It was pretty wild because they made my nails reflective on the edges, which I would never have expected. Strangely the friction from them isn’t hot either. At least that’s not how my fingers feel when I use them. They get colder. I don’t know how that’s possible but getting unexpected results from things gets pretty rare the older you get. It’s nice to be surprised even if it’s in a very small way. I’ve cleaned up a lot of little flaws on things with them already so it was a nice use of six bucks.

Finding ways to fix flaws on figures you buy is often the only monetarily possible way to deal with problems these days. I’ve amassed a little collection of tools to fix things myself. Things like plastic weld, which chemically bonds certain kinds of plastics back together. Or a watch repair kit for knocking pins out of figure joints to achieve various goals. A lot of the stuff I buy has a very small window for purchase and if there’s a problem you often can’t get the same thing as a replacement. Finding a way to make the defective one work saves a lot of trouble and annoyance.

A few years ago I bought a walmart exclusive Megatron figure and when I got it open they foot fell off because it just didn’t have one of it’s pins. I ended up finding a finishing nail with the right diameter and cutting the ends flush to make my own pin for it. It worked just fine and it’s still my display Megatron to this day. It came out in covid times so all the supply chains were fucked up and getting a replacement anything was basically impossible. Even getting one in the first place was extremely difficult. I wanted an anime finish version of the same mold, but they just never came to my area. Neither did the Optimus Prime of the same series. Seems like a million years ago now.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough of my pointless nonsense for now. Again, thanks to everyone who gifted me something and also thanks to the various people who donated extra money over the last few months for whatever reason. Some of you were far too generous. It’s difficult for me to believe that my work could mean that much to anyone other than me, but the proof has been filed in my taxes so I can’t really deny it. I’m glad I helped you in some small way to get by on this difficult journey we’re all on. If I managed to ease your way then that’s something I can take pride in.

I hope you all have a nice weekend. Come back and see me on Monday if you feel like it. Until then, come sail away.