I talked about my Lightyear ship squadron that I am building up in a previous post. Today, I got another ship. It was available on Amazon for less than $5, that was my ceiling, so I picked it up.
It's the XL-09. It was on my list of ships that I didn't have yet, so I grabbed it, but it's probably my last. There's four more ships that I don't have, but from what I can tell, those ships are just plain impossible to find, so I suspect this will be the extent of my squadron.
That's a lot, however, so it's not like ending my collection here will be a problem. Eight ships makes a pretty good bunch. Let me give you a better look at them.
Which is your favorite? I'm thinking that the new one might be my favorite. It's got a really cool look. Besides that, I love the XL-03, the XL-07, and the XL-14. Pretty cool bunch of ships. I need to make that space station so that I can put them somewhere.
Where I work, nobody wears a costume on Halloween. It's pretty sad. However, when baseball season begins, everybody wears their Astros gear. So, today I had the chance to wear my costume and join in with the crowd. Happy opening day!
My collection of traffic pictures is growing. Last week wasn't even that bad, but I still added several pics to my collection. I even missed it once, because I forgot to take the picture where the traffic stopped me. It's always the same place every day.
If there is traffic in the same place every single day, then something probably needs to be done about it, right? I'm pretty sure the fix will be put in place sometime around 2050. Then again, it may not take that long...if I move out of town before then, then they'll implement the fix the day after I leave. That's how it always works.
I just posted the newest episode of the Anklecast which includes the story "Sepia Tone Prison" over on Patreon.
If you're not a patron, then it will show up on the regular feed in a week or so...I often forget to post them after a week, so I make no promises...or you could come over to Patreon, join for as little as a dollar a month, and get the episodes ahead of the hoi polloi. It's up to you, but as I mention in this month's show, that's less than you pay for a candy bar or for any single item that you can buy at the dollar store, because those have all been inflated to $1.25 these days. It's quite a bargain.
I went to bed early last night because I was tired, but if you hit the sack three hours before you normally do, you can expect to also wake up in the morning three hours before you usually do as well. Laying in bed with nothing but your thoughts can be strange. It can be enlightening. It can be difficult. It can be frightening.
I finally couldn't handle it anymore. Even though it was very early in the morning, I got out of bed and came in here to write up a post about the things that had been tumbling around in my mind while I waited for the sun to come up and the others in the house to begin stirring.
Life is a bitch. It's a constant struggle, and I'm not so naive as to believe that it should be any other way. I realize that I have to head to work every day whether I want to or not, because I don't want to live the kind of life I would have if I didn't. Is my job fulfilling or satisfying? Do I feel like I've reached my full potential by way of it? Not really, but I don't necessarily expect that. I like it enough that I can keep at it and keep earning that paycheck, and hopefully it will continue to be enough to pay the bills.
I don't expect my career to fulfill me. Instead, I try to get that fulfillment outside of work. That's why I do podcasting.
That's why I write my stories.
That's why I love to travel to places like national parks with my family.
That's why I collect toys.
That's why I like making arts and crafts.
...and so forth.
Except, I often let things get in the way of that enjoyment and fulfillment. Sometimes it's laziness, sometimes its disorganization, and I think it might surprise you to hear that it's often my addiction to sugar and carbs that keeps me from being happy.
That last one is pretty stupid, and yet here I am. I'm about as defeated as I could be, and it really sucks, because I know what to do, but I just can't seem to manage to do it.
For a little bit of history, I was really active as a child and a young adult. I thought I was healthy, because I was thin and athletic. That didn't last very long into my adult life. I started putting on weight, and I assumed it was because of my own moral failings. I was unable to control myself and just eat one.
Once I popped, I couldn't stop.
And so on. Before I knew it, twenty years had passed and I'd been overweight and unhappy the whole time. I struggled against it, but it always won. Then the doctor told me I had type-two diabetes, and I would be on meds for the rest of my life, never actually controlling it, but rather slowly declining until I died much younger than I would have if I hadn't had that problem.
But then the heavens parted, and I learned that I didn't have to be depressed and fat, barely surviving on pharmaceuticals until I died.
Seeing this video from Sarah Hallberg started me on a journey of discovery that completely rewrote the "knowledge" that I had relied on my whole life about health. Turns out that pretty much everything the government had told me about health was wrong...not only wrong, but pretty much the exact opposite of what I should actually be doing. There was a reason I was 100 lbs. overweight and constantly tired and depressed. I was abusing the hell out of my body with the things that I eat.
I set about changing that, first going Keto, then incorporating intermittent fasting. Then realizing that even Keto wasn't good enough, and taking it all the way to a nearly zero-carb carnivore.
I did pretty well, lost a lot of weight, and was in a really good spot when my dad died at the end of 2019. I allowed my first cheat in, and I've never been the same again.
I fell off the wagon, and gave in to my addiction, and discovered just how bad my addiction was. I tried to restart over and over. This blog has been a record of many of my attempts. Every time, though, I wound up going back to sugar and carbs like the worst alcoholic or drug addict.
So, here we are in 2023, five years after I first started this process, and I'm no better off than I was to begin with. In 2019 when my dad passed away, I would never have guessed that I could be in this situation. In fact, you could say that I'm not only no better off, but possibly a little worse off that I was when I started in 2018. A lot of that is bound to happen. If I'm not taking care of my diabetes well, then I'm going to deteriorate.
And oh man have I deteriorated. I'm in such crappy shape. I have really hit rock bottom. Well, not quite rock bottom, but as far down as you can go before the permanent problems begin...or become apparent, they've probably begun already.
So, yeah, I'm feeling super crappy, and I want to change that, but I just can't manage. Every time I try, I fail. I wake up and say, "today's the day." Then I go out to the kitchen to make breakfast, and find that there's cake in the fridge and I eat that instead of what I should, and then it's on, and at least for the rest of the day, I go hog wild.
Back at the start of March, Marshal and I were doing things right. Eating carnivore in the healthiest way. I was getting relatively freaked out, because I decided to break out my blood sugar meter, and found it in an unacceptably high state. I checked it day after day, and even though I wasn't eating any carbs, it stayed high. Was I past the point of no return?
If someone was in a state of worry like this about their health, you'd expect them to stick to the no sugar eating plan like glue, but not me. Soon I fell off the wagon, and started eating garbage again, despite the certain damage I was inflicting on myself.
That's the main thing that makes me feel so down in the dumps. I'm just at a loss. The addiction seems to be unbeatable, and I'm going to eat myself into an early grave.
So, I failed, but I didn't know if Marshal had similarly failed. We'd texted about it back and forth when we'd started, but those texts had dried up, and I hadn't heard from him in a few weeks. So, I decided to check up on him.
His response:
That was what I thought. I always disappear and stop communicating when I'm doing poorly, so it doesn't surprise me that he did the same. My response:
Marshal's a religious guy, so he's not going to agree with me there...although he kind of did.
Yeah, that is exactly what we are doing. Sugar is killing me softly with his smile. Except it's worse, and I couldn't help but point that out.
It wasn't disguised.
That started a really good discussion between the two of us, and I think we've developed something that might work. I feel good about it anyway.
Here's my video that introduces the effort:
I'm excited, and I believe this might actually work permanently. We'll see come 2024.
My local Walmart put a few things on clearance at the end of January or so, but it wasn't much of a clearance. In fact, I think they went back and marked everything up to the most expensive price that had ever been asked for each item and then marked it down 10%.
There were several items that I thought I would be willing to buy on clearance, but when I saw the price, I just laughed out loud and walked away. I could have gotten those things for ten bucks cheaper the day before they put them on clearance.
Everybody else felt the same as me, because these things stuck around for a long time. They marked things down another level, and all of us turned up our collective noses. Then they took them down another level, and I said, "Maybe if they drop one more level, I'll finally be willing to grab one of those."
Well, that day finally arrived. This ship from the Lightyear movie dropped all the way down. It used to be $40 and now...
It's made for five inch scale figures, but I think it will work just fine for the four inch figures that I've been collecting to make a space station for.
The cockpit will need a little bit of modifications to work. It's made to fit one five inch figure, but it should easily be adjusted to a two-seater for four inch figures.
My nephew, who is a huge collector of the original 1980s GI Joes, told me that he has a box filled with broken vehicles for use in just this kind of situation, so maybe I'll hit him up for some cockpit seats that will work with this ship.
It'll be fun to customize this ship. Over at Empire Toy Works, he customized the five inch scale Lightyear Armadillo, and it looks pretty rad, so hopefully this one of mine will be just as cool.
Some bumper stickers age better than others. I want to say that this one is more out of date than the Brendan Fraser Mummy sticker from my earlier post.
Then again, there are some people who want to stay masked and apart for the rest of their lives, so maybe this isn't out of date for this person.
I decided the other day that I would go back to the Marshall's I mentioned in my earlier post and get the two Lightyear ships that I hadn't bought the first time I saw them there. Then, by chance, I saw that two other Lightyear ships were on sale on Amazon for $3.50. That was even cheaper than what I paid at Marshall's, so I ordered them too. Now, here's what my collection of ships looks like.
They're all numbered. XL-something-something. They are numbered for each of Buzz's flights that he made trying to save the folks of his planet. So, I've got XL-01, XL-02, XL-03, XL-07, XL-12, XL-14, and XL-15. They have numbers on them, and you can see the number on several of the ships.
There's something fun about collecting all these different ships. Up until a week or two ago, I had no idea what each of the ships looked like. Now, I'm compelled to try to get them all if possible.
My book, A Fire at the Center of a Million Universes, which I wrote last year, has been coming to mind. In the story, there are a group of mercenaries called Valkyries that have spaceships they use to fight off the imperial forces. Up until now, I had the Valkyries using Colonial Vipers as their ships, but now I'm thinking it might be fun to change it up to the Star Command XL series.
The various Valkyries could be like gearheads here on earth, fighting with each other over their preferences for various models, customizing their ship with its own paint job, or possibly even tricking them out with the stabilizers or guns or engines from different models, and so forth.
I have to go through and do a second draft soon, and I think it's a change I'll make on that next pass. Maybe by then, I'll have one of each of the various ships, although I'm thinking that will be unlikely. I haven't checked at the regular stores yet, but I haven't seen even a hint of the ships that I'm missing elsewhere. Ross only ever had the XL-01. Marshall's only had the XL-02, XL-12, XL-14. The others I had to get from Amazon, and even Amazon, the world's largest collection of commercial products, don't have most of the ones that I don't have yet.
I refuse to buy them at full-price though. If they're not at least $5 or less, then I won't bother at all. So, It remains to be seen if there's any possibility of getting them all. It won't really matter if I do or not. If I never got another one, I'd still be happy. I'm going to go in and add weathering and dry-brushing to them all so that they match the other ships on Ankletown Station, and we'll see if we can't do some customizing on them as well. That should be a lot of fun when I get around to doing that.
I'll see if I can't make Dawn's ship...although we never see her get to fly one in the book. Maybe I could make her best friend Naz's ship as well. There's something really satisfying about making a physical representation of something from a story you invented in your mind.
I've been doing covers for Rish Outfield for a little while. Not too long ago, I was talking to Rish, and he jokingly confessed that his endgame for this process of me doing covers for him was for me to take over and just start finding the new picture myself and making a new cover for all the bad old ones that he has on Amazon.
Looks like Rish wins, because today while I was looking at his published stories, I saw the cover he had for his story "Popcorn Movies." It used to look like this:
It's not a bad cover, but it could be better. I mean, it has that awful drop shadow. I thought I could quickly find a picture and improve it, so I went on Unsplash and found this shot.
I cropped it, added the title and author, and had a similar cover to the one he had but with better typography.
So, without even doing a thing, Rish has another new cover. His plan has come together...and weirdly, I want to make even more and more of them. He might as well have used some kind of Emma Frost mind powers.
In his continuing quest to update the covers for his stories that are on Amazon, Rish grabbed a new photo for me to use to create a new cover for his story "Rest Stop." It used to look like this:
Which isn't terrible, but it's got the usual Copperplate font green text with an ugly drop shadow action going on. I'm not a fan of it at all, so I was happy to throw together a new version with the new style of fonts that I've been using for Rish's stories.
For one thing, I think the picture Rish got is much better than the old one. I also find that the title is much more readable up in that spot in the sky there, which wasn't real estate that was available in the other picture. It's a really cool looking cover now.
One important thing about a cover design is how it looks when it's the tiny little thumbnail version, because that's how most people will see it. It has to be readable in that size for it to work. Somebody has to click on the thumbnail to see the cover at a larger size. This thumbnail looks pretty good.
I have to admit, that I am still learning about how to make a better cover. Many of the ones that I made for Rish in days past aren't as good as I'd like them to be. I'd like to go back and redo a lot of them. I'm not happy with how many of them came out, even though Rish likes them and thinks they're better than the covers he would have made or did make.
On top of that, I'd like to take all of Rish's covers and make them have an overarching style that makes you see his cover and know that it's a Rish Outfield story without even having to read the author's name on the cover.
Or maybe I should worry about getting my own stories published. I don't know. I guess we'll see what happens.
I've been talking about my plans for a 1/72 scale space station a lot recently because a lot of toys that are more or less in that scale have been going on clearance lately. You know what...I was just thinking that this talk of scale ratios might sound like Greek to you. Let me quickly explain how scale works.
I normally collect 1/12 scale figures. They are approximately six inches tall, or half of a foot tall. If we take the average size of a human being as six feet tall, then a one foot tall would be 1/6 scale. Six inches tall is 1/12. Four inches is 1/18 scale. And so on, on down to what I'm talking about, 1/72 scale, in which a human being is approximately one inch tall.
Anyhow, a while back, when I first came up with the plan for the space station, I was looking into what toys at that scale were available, and I saw that Hot Wheels are supposedly very close to 1/72 scale. The internet says they are 1/64 scale representations of cars...although they vary a little bit from car to car. Not all of them are exactly 1/64, but they're all pretty close, and that's very close to the scale of my space station...slightly larger, but not really enough to tell.
However, Hot Wheels are so small, and I had a hard time believing that they really are that scale. So, I asked my kid to bring me one of his Hot Wheels cars so that I could compare it to some of the little one inch tall figures my Star Wars spaceships came with.
Turns out, however, that he and his mom just went through all of his toys while cleaning up his room, and packed them away. He doesn't really play with his Hot Wheels anymore. He didn't want to throw them out, but he was fine with packing them up and putting them in the garage. That meant, however, that I either had to dig around in the garage to find them, or come up with some other way to compare them.
The great thing about Hot Wheels, is that, for the most part, they're very cheap. They only cost about a dollar a piece. So, today, while I was at Walmart getting some lotion, I swung by the toy aisle, looked at the Hot Wheels, and picked one that looked pretty futuristic. It cost $1.18 I believe, which is slightly cheaper even than the dollar store, which hiked its prices up to $1.25 per item.
I brought this car home, and pulled out my box with my 1/72 ships in it, and pulled out that same Luke Skywalker X-Wing pilot figure that I had in my earlier posts. I stood it next to the car. What do you think?
Looks perfect, right. Maybe even slightly too large, if it's out of scale at all, but I don't think so. It looks just right. I'll have to see if I can't give it a paint job and help it fit in in the lived-in universe of a Star Wars-style space station.
The car needs one of those stupid bumper stickers that says, "My Other Car Is An X-Wing," or something.
My son has a bunch of those tracks that you can run Hot Wheels in, like the one that Buzz Lightyear uses to fall with style.
And I wonder if I could use them to make roads running through the space station that these little cars could drive on...or maybe I could use Hot Wheels to create a monorail train that runs through the space station or something. I like it, either way. It'll be fun...some day when I finally get around to it.
Here's another cover I helped Rish with as he goes through re-publishing his stories with new covers. It used to look like this:
This is the audio version of it. I think there was a book shaped cover for the eBook as well. He had me take a swing at it. He gave me a new picture of a wolf, and said that he mostly just wanted to see the eyes. So, I darkened the picture of the wolf until we didn't see much, then I restyled the title and author name with some less standard fonts. Here's what I came up with.
What do you think? Is it any better? Are you more likely to buy it? I hope so. If you didn't know this story existed, and never had the chance to buy it before, here is the link to the Amazon page for the story. Swing over there and grab it. It's a nice long story, surely worth the pennies that you'll toss Rish's way if you pick it up. I don't even get anything out of the deal, except the good feeling that you liked my cover enough to buy the story now but you didn't before the cover was changed.
I mean, I get this amazing view pretty much every weekday. Who wouldn't find that fun.
I was thinking that maybe I ought to take a picture each day as I stop at this same spot. I could make one of those videos like the people who took selfies every day for a year or whatever.
Should I? I guess you could see the cars change to more modern ones when I get to the ten year mark and stuff...
We were at Ikea the other day, and they had an interesting item on the menu.
Just like that line on Splash:
"Welcome to the Statue of Liberty. The statue is a gift from French citizens. It has come to symbolize hope for naked women everywhere...bocce balls!"
I know there's nothing dirty about the phrase bocce balls, but it sure sounds dirty when the guy yells it. The same thing goes for the phrase plant ball sundae to me. That sounds like it has to be something with a definition on Urban Dictionary.
Or, even if it isn't that, it still sounds gross. I'm sure it's something like mashed potatoes with gravy, but it sounds like it would probably be served with caramel and chocolate syrup instead.
Besides, you're not doing yourself any favors eating a meal like this. If you want to be healthy, eat fresh meat mostly, and above all avoid processed foods like this. These various vegetarian options masquerade as a healthy option but are always the most processed things possible.
If you read my post a week ago about finding an Avatar power loader on clearance or the other one about how I found Lightyear toys on clearance too, then you know about my ideas for creating a space station in 1/72 scale where a bunch of little ships from various sci-fi properties can come together.
Well, that Avatar toy was the only one I had in that universe that I had so far, and I thought it was the only one I should probably get. The rest of what I'd seen weren't ships, but rather dragons and whales and stuff that the Na'vi used. They didn't really fit the aesthetic that I was going for. But then I happened to look online at what they had in the line, and saw that there were a few other ships that I ought to check out the next time I went looking for toys.
So, during this week's rounds, I went to the Walmart that had those Avatar toys on clearance at half-price. I looked behind the boxes in the front, and what do you know, they had some of the other toys. Like this one:
It's a crab robot submarine thing, but with some slight adjustments, it could easily be a spider repair drone mech thing instead. I would just have to turn the fan thing on the back into a jet engine instead. That shouldn't take a lot. Oh, and I'd have to take the figure out of the driver's seat and replace it with a smaller figure, because the ones in these toys are about twice the size of a 1/72 figure.
I went around the corner at the Walmart to look at the rest of the toys, when I saw that they had more of these Avatar toys there as well. Apparently, they really over ordered them. Ain't nobody wants these toys, so they were on clearance in two separate areas. Over at this second spot, they had the other final machine-based toy in the line. It was marked down to $10, so I thought it was cheap enough I could grab it.
This one is pretty good sized, and pretty nice. It obviously couldn't go to space with the X-Wings, but it could be a good ship for local transport. Again, I'd have to adjust the cockpit for smaller figures, but that should be fine.
Except, when I got them out to the car, I was shocked to find that the cockpits one both of them did not open. I couldn't believe it. I never expected that. I pulled and pried, and managed to get both of them open and remove the figure inside. I broke them a little bit each time, however.
The breaks aren't really noticeable, and I've learned a few things that can fix problems like that pretty easily, so it won't be an issue.
I may just paint black over the cockpits in black so you can't see that they are made for larger figures...and that there's nobody in them. Who knows.
I love the crab bots so much though. I'd like to get one more of them, and use them as the repair drone things in the station. It would be so cool to see them hanging off the side of a building with a big panel of metal or something that they are fixing damage to the station with. I probably need to get another one of those power loaders from the other post too. They would be really good as the machines loading things on the docks at the station. Maybe I could paint them yellow so they'd look more official.
The funny thing is that I have so many other things to do before I'll ever get around to starting on this space station that I sometimes wonder why I even bother. It'll probably be years before I even start. Maybe I never will at all. I wouldn't put it past me.
I would really like to be able to have something like this of my own to share with people though:
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