Phil's Thoughts

Picked up a box of some of my various Star Wars tidbits yesterday. I managed to make a complete Snowspeeder out of it, along with a few playsets that were mostly intact. The Snowspeeder I kept; the playsets went to a friend. The remaining items were thrown out. They were broken toys or random odds and ends that couldn’t be sold on ebay last year. It was nice getting to see these things again, but my time with them has passed. I was happy to get the Snowspeeder back, though – not two days ago I was regretting letting it go! I’m still dealing with an overly developed sense of nostalgia.

One year.

Trying my best not to go overboard with Star Wars merchandise. I’ve got an idea for what I want my figure collection to be, and I’ve largely stuck to that. Now I’m dealing with what vehicles deserve a spot. I think I’m mostly there, but I’ve left myself vulnerable to bad thinking – “I have an AT-AT; I need a Snowspeeder to go with it!” Yeah, that sort of thinking gets me in trouble.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the things I love best about updating the YoJoe archives is adding in all the various merchandising that featured the archive figure or vehicle. It’s also the most frustrating – outside the toy archives, YoJoe can be a bit scatterbrained when it comes to mentioning what is actually featured. Sometimes it’s mentioned; most times it isn’t. So it’s a bit of a scavenger hunt, tracking down the various ephemera, or scanning in my own. But in the end, it just makes me smile to see so many disparate items come together to showcase one particular toy. It’s why I keep doing it. After all, putting together these sections sometimes takes just as long as photographing and editing the figure or vehicle archive photos!

As if my own habits of collecting Joes wasn’t bad enough, I now have gotten into getting foreign figures! From all over, too – Europe, Japan, China, India, South America. There’s a lot of figures that were made for other countries that never made it here. And they’re all a little pricey. Looks like I’ll be making up for lost time in not getting these years ago. I’m in real trouble now!

Finished updating the 1983 YoJoe archive! Now we’re on to 1984. While I’m generally better prepared for this one, and half of them are updated already, there are still a few that will be difficult to complete. Spirit is the obvious problem at the moment. His blue shirt has a tendency to discolor, and the gold paint of his bracelets scrapes off very easily. I’ve yet to track down a pristine example that isn’t exorbitantly priced.

I can’t see anything when I type into the text box for these posts, and I can’t select categories or tags, either. I know I have to reinstall wordpress yet again, but I can’t back up my database right now, either. I might have to add in a few months’ worth of posts by hand. This is gonna suck.

I have a steady job now, but I lost a big part of my life before that happened. Here’s hoping for a better 2016.

This wordpress interface is really screwed up right now. I can’t modify anything – I can’t even see what I’m typing. The text is white against a white background. I really need to figure out how to fix this.

I’ve been picking up Annuals for the English Action Force comic book. Action Force started as a parallel concept to the 3 3/4″ G.I. Joe in England and Western Europe, and eventually merged with G.I. Joe when Hasbro went global in the late 80s. The Action Force comics not only present an alternate interpretation to G.I. Joe, but it also created profiles for many characters that didn’t get them over here. I don’t know why I like the profiles so much – they’re just page-size versions of the filecards generally speaking, but I enjoy finding them and sharing them online. Gotta find what makes me happy, right?