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| More mugging than central Park in the 70’s. |
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse has two unavoidable flaws.
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| Stately as fuuuuuck! |
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March was supposed to be the slow month. The calm before the April preorder storm. And those fuckers knew it. Especially the fuckers at Hasbro Pulse, who threw a warehouse sale with 30% off a whole pile of stuff.
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| Kim-Ra, The Ever-Gromping! |
Cathy had been wanting to give me my birthday present early for a couple of weeks. And two Wednesdays before the actual day, I got distracted from feeding the cats dinner (shared household task) because I was watching Orange Cassidy and Danhausen win a Tag Team casino Battle Royale to qualify for the four-way at the Revolution pay per view.
The first picture in this series was completed on Jan 2, 2023. The last one was completed on April 6, motivated in part by the desire to finish before the Mighty Morphin’ 30th anniversary special dropped.
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So, I have this Danhausen figure from Zombie Sailor Figures, and I knew as soon as I got a Danhausen figure I’d want to take picures of him battling all kinds of shit. But the Zombie Sailor figure can only do one wrestling move - the Gorilla Press Slam. Technically he can only do the Gorilla Press, and the Slam has to be implied.
So, I figured I’d go through the collection and see how many things I could get Danhausen to gorilla press. Most of these are single pictures, by the way. I only resorted to compositing Danhausen and the liftee together once we got into the really big stuff.
These are ranked in increasing order of plausibility, so we start with fellow AEW nwrestler and occasional Danhausen antagonist Maxwell Jacob Friedman, AKA MJF. Perfectly plausible. Let’s move on.
Headset is in town but not as yet on a truck. Same with the controller charger. But my own personal launch lineup, save one, is ready to go:
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| Happy with the fake reflection on Egghead here. |
Egghead was the only new character in the most recent wave that met the criteria, which is good, because the next wave is kicking my ass HARD. But come on. It’s Vincent Price, for one thing, and it’s a weird-ass tacky villain for another.
Like the rest of the line, he’s perfectly janky. By which I mean he’s so true to the original janky design that he’s perfect. It’s even more true with the playsets and vehicles than the figures, but the line captures the camp of the show so beautifully that even as someone whose “love” for the original show is sporadic and variable, the toys are irresistible.
So don't’ be surprised when mid-April arrives and you see what I’ve added to the collection. IRRESISTIBLE, I said.
What goes into the decision to buy a toy? Well, if you set aside for the moment psychological issues like stress-based whims and weird obsessions, it’s usually a four-variable decision. My affection for the character, the quality of the figure, its suitability for possible photos, and the price point. With Deadman it was mostly a quality thing. The figure just struck me.
I’ve been wanting a Juggernaut for the collection for a while now. I really wanted the Marvel Legends one, but it was only available in a Target 2-pack with Colossus, and after a few months of watching the price on the pack creep in the wrong direction on eBay, I pretty much resigned myself to not getting it.
November, 2021.
Less than a month before this, then-independent wrestler Danhausen broke his legs in a match on Halloween 2021. Shortly thereafter, Zombie Sailor started taking preorders for a Danhausen entry in its Heels and Faces line of retry-styled wrestling figures. Of course I preordered one. Original ship date was, I believe, April 2022.
April came and went. No toy. The year rolled on. Zombie Sailor announced additional accessories to make up for the delay. Months passed. The year ended with production updates over the course of November and December. Finally, the figures shipped, and I got mine. Was it worth the wait?
Well, sort of? On the upside, the bonus accessories (jar of teeth, bag of money, hands to hold them) really make the figure shine. It’d be much worse without them. Plus, the cape is great, with a wire for poseability. And generally, it’s a well-made and well-painted figure.
BUT. I’m not a big fan of the LJN retro figure style with the weird proportions, weird scale, and limited poseability. At the time of the preorder, I thought maybe this would be the only Danhausen figure I’d have access to. But by the time the toy shipped, not only did Danhausen get signed by AEW, his first official AEW figure was announced and should be available for preorder relatively soon.
Still, this is a look we’re unlikely to get form Jazwares, so I don’t regret the purchase. And the standard hands nd articulation are good for one thing, which you’ll be seeing very soon.
This isn’t very interesting. I had a couple of figures sitting in my Entertainment Earth cart waiting for something else I wanted to tip me into free shipping territory, and then a shit-ton of Power Rangers pre-orders hit, and so I grabbed these. the Flynn is like the Infiltrator Flynn I got in that Tron three-pack, only in his correct colors and without all the accessories. He was nine bucks so it was an easy call.
Jimmy Woo is Jimmy Woo. I wanted a Randall Park figure and I’m a fan of the character and sometimes (cough cough almost finished project cough cough normal-looking people are very useful. Plus he’s doing a card trick with is ID which is a nice touch. Glad I grabbed him because this wave came and went in Target in the blink of an eye. and I never saw him on a peg.
OK. I’ve been trying to alternate new toy posts with not new toy posts but right now, I don’t have a lot else to post about. I’ve been working on a couple of big projects. One of them is getting close to done and the other is done but I have to get through at least some of the new toys before I can post it.
So: Splinter as Van Helsing. I don’t own many (any?) other TMNT toys. I don’t own many (any?) Universal Monsters toys. But when this rat in a coat was announced, it spoke to me. I don’t know why, but it did and I had to pre-order it.
So, yeah. Splinter the rat in glasses and a hat and vampire hunting gear, including stakes, a crossbow, and multiple arrows, including one with three garlic cloves shishkebabbed on it. It’s just cool-looking.
It’s NECA, so the articulation isn’t astonishing, but the legs have way more articulation than I thought once I freed up the joints. Just a nifty little figure. It also comes with a spare head that doesn’t have the hat, but if you’re a “my vampire hunting rat has glasses but NO HAT” we probably disagree on a bunch of other things, too.
I have, for some time now, been wanting to fill a Hulk-sized hole in my collection with a properly-sized comic-style Hulk. I somehow have TWO Ruffalo-faced movie Hulks, but they are small and slightly weird
So, after some time exploring a world post-Twitter (for me, at least), I’ve decided the most appropriate home for an Oldnerd social media presence is Instagram, which I hate, but Im using.
If you use Instagram and want to use that to track when new things get posted here, feel free. Link is on the left as part of a thing I finally got around to adding.
So, over the holidays, I was gifted some higher-end action figures, and I've been curious - what do 6" figures in the $50-$100 range give you (Super7 Ultimates, SH Figures, MAFEX, etc.) that figures in the $20-$40 price range (Hasbro, McFarlane, NECA) don't? The answer is... tricky.
The SH Figures Avengers Loki, for example, gives you an OK cloth cape, some nice detail, and a great deal of fussiness. There are, for example, two heads. With three faces. And two hairpieces. So there are a total of eight bits of plastic that make up the two heads. Helmet front, helmet back, helmet hair, normal head, normal hair, serious face, grinning face, prisoner face. All of which cling to each other either through a peg and hole (hair) or plastic friction (everything else). Getting it together and keeping it together is fussy, and shit falling apart is not uncommon.
The scepter is four pieces - short handle, short handle top, long handle, long handle top. This is to facilitate getting the handles through the gripping hand, but from necessity, the peg/hole system that attaches these bits is small and delicate. Add in the extra hands and the tiny Tesseract and it's just a fussy party.
Now, the result is certainly a figure that outshines a run of the mill Hasbro in terms of sculpt and detail, but at 3-4x the list price depending on whether you factor in the six years between them? I'm not sure.
Fwoosh Toys is an offshoot of The Fwoosh, the alpha and omega of kindly, reasonable, coming-across-at-least-as-decent-human-beings toy coverage on YouTube. I think. I mean the alpha and omega thing is definitely true, or as true as an opinion can be, I’m just not sure about the whole offshoot thing. There’s a review website, a YouTube channel, and a toy line, and I could not tell you with any authority which came before which came before which.
The point is, they’re either good people, or very very good at acting like good people all the time, which in 2023 is about the best you can hope for from a par asocial relationship. So, over the fall, they announced a 1/12 scale skeleton figure that was so nifty I felt compelled to preorder it.
And then, after Thanksgiving, they had a sale. A good sale. I don’t normally buy generic figures, but I also don’t generally stop myself from getting cool stuff at a decent price based on arbitrary self-imposed rules, so I grabbed two figures and a bunch of accessories for Unspecified Indeterminate Future Plans.
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The Martial Artist is, well, a martial artist. Light blue outfit, excellent articulation, good sculpt, extra hands, two tonfa, a spear, and his hair comes off, which you wouldn’t think was relevant but will come into play a little later.
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The Modern Ninja is a sort of pseudo-sane Eyes, with some swords and some guns and a teeny tiny silencer that I don’t think I’ve lost, yet but it’s only been a couple of months.
The only real problem with him is the overall low contrast - he’s all dark so the details don’t pop. But again there are options for switching him up a bit, thanks to…
Everything is painted well and engineered correctly to work with the figures, which is nice. The masks, for example, go on the Martial Artist easily when you remove his hair. See? Told you it'd pay off later.
I think the ultimate plan for both of them is Photo Goons, because they can be re-used with different accessories and poses and look like a bunch of different dudes without, you know, taking up the storage space of a bunch of different dudes. And collectively, they were a very good deal.
So, yeah, in September, we spent two weeks on a whirlwind bus tour of the British Isles. A lot of it was very structured (which isn’t always ideal but definitely what we needed last year) but but we took every opportunity we could when we had meal autonomy to seek out something interesting. And frankly, with so much else out of our hands, it was easy and fun to spend the time and energy seeking out food. So these are the five (six) most memorable things I ate while on vacation so many months ago I had to look a bunch of the details up.
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| Also pictured, a nice club sandwich. |
I can’t in good conscience put this on the list or remember the name of the restaurant or even the hotel in the deep outskirts of Dublin we ended up stuck at for two meals, but holy shit, they did Buffalo wings right. Even though correct wing sauce is Frank’s hot sauce and butter, two incredibly common ingredients that are easy to combine, for some reason, nobody fucking does this.
Well, this Dublin restaurant fucking did it, and I had them both nights we were there because, while I wasn’t homesick for American food by any means, they were better than any Buffalo wings I’ve gotten in the Twin Cities in years.
#5: Haggis, The Haggis Box
Cathy’s mom wanted to try haggis in Scotland. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, around downtown Glasgow where we were staying, none of the restaurants had regular haggis. They had haggis on a burger, haggis on a pizza, and deep-fried haggis (which she also tried at one point) but not haggis haggis.
So, since we were going to be in Edinburgh hanging around the Royal Mile in a timeframe that roughly lined up with lunch, I found The Haggis Box, the local equivalent to what in Minneapolis would be a little Skyway restaurant that served two things - haggis and vegetarian haggis. With a choice of two sauces - whiskey cream and red wine gravy. As a general rule a menu that specialized is usually a good bet and this was no different. The three of us split two haggis, one with each type of sauce, and while I wouldn’t say I’ve been craving haggis ever since, there’s nothing wrong with ground meat and grains over mashed root vegetables with a tasty sauce on top.
#4: Various, Tuk Tuk Indian Street Food, Glasgow
Downtown Glasgow didn’t have a lot of haggis, but it did have really good Indian food. Our second choice for dinner during our first night in Glasgow, because our first choice was a bar and restaurant that we were pretty sure had reverted to Just A Bar by the time we got there, but that’s OK, because this was really good. Chicken 65, chili cheese naan, golgoppa, lamb curry, and a mango lassi. All super tasty.
Sadly, it looks like the Glasgow location closed down, but it wasn’t their only location.
#3: Hand pulled noodle soup, Lanzhoi Lamian Noodle Bar
So, here’s the thing. When I’m in a strange area, doing a Google Maps search on restaurants sorted by distance, there are certain phrases that leap out at me, and “hand-pulled noodles” is one of them. So on our free day in London, hanging around Charing Cross Road, I saw that phrase and we headed over.
Tiny, with group bench seating, and I technically didn’t plan on ordering soup, but it’s the kind of place where you can screw up your order and still win. Only regret was that there was no way to take half of it along with us, because it was too much food for lunch and leaving it behind seemed like sacrilege.
#2: Seafood Chowder, Momo, Waterford
The entire run from Kilkenny down to Waterford was spent hunting for lunch on some spotty cell data coverage, but holy shit did it pay off. An unassuming Mediterranean restaurant with shockingly good food.
We also got an open-face mackerel sandwich, vegetable soup, and sweet potato wedges - most of which are not currently on the menu as it’s a seasonal/changing menu place. But without a doubt it was the best value meal we had the entire trip
#1: Grilled Lamb Ribs, Efes Turkish Restaurant, London
We almost didn’t eat this.
The plan for our second dinner in London was to try a tacky London fast casual chain to try the kinds of things we don’t get at American chains, like diner kebab and peri peri chicken. The Turkish restaurant on the corner was the backup plan.
But, when the tacky chain outlet in the neighborhood turned out to be a takeout-only hole in the wall, we went with our second choice and I realized my first idea, while sound, was also criminally insane. These lamb ribs may have been the best charred meat I’ve ever eaten. Certainly way up there on the list. Everything else was very good - bonus points to the salad which used the GOOD feta. The creamy, mild stuff, not the briny crumbles. We left very happy.
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The game doesn't always look like this, BUT IT CAN.
I’m a bit late to the party on this, I know. But I’m not a PC games and if you think my low-vision ass is in the market for a Steam Deck, you don’t know how bad eyes (don’t) work.
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