Rish likes to use that phrase as his joking response when someone talks about a problem in society...and there's a lot of problems in society today. This is a problem that happens only among toy collectors particularly, but a symptom of a more widespread problem in society at large. Check this out:
The Vintage Collection came out with a new stormtrooper figure recently. It's a new version that looks amazing and is more poseable than things we've had before. Except, the figure on this card that I found at Walmart recently ain't it.
That's what's supposed to be in that package. What you saw above, therefore, was what we call a swap. Somebody came in, bought the stormtrooper, went home and removed the new one from the package, swapped it out for an old crappy, worthless stormtrooper, sealed the package back up, and returned it to get their full money back. So, in essence, they stole the figure.
What's sad is that these people are obviously collectors of toys. They know what happens to toy lines that don't have good enough sales. They get cancelled and go away. Yet, they'd rather screw everyone and get their collection for free. It's not like there's any need behind this. These are friggin adult toy collectors carrying this crap out, not a father stealing a loaf of bread to feed his children. It's big time dishonesty and lack of respect for the rest of society, and it really makes me sad, but even more so it makes me fear for the future.
I find something like this at a store all the time. It's incredibly common. How much longer can our society maintain cohesion when this is what it is? Get ready for real life stormtroopers to come our way someday soon folks. The terrorists have won.
I talked about putting together Hugh Yakman in the last post. I was eager to do the same thing again. So, I removed the head off another Halo guy, and replaced it with the new Yak Face figure. Now I have two Yak Face soldiers.
So, we have Hugh Yakman and Samuel L. Yakson.
I hope I can find some more Yak Faces. I could put a bunch more of these soldiers together. Sadly, I passed up at least two or three Yak Face figures that I've seen in Ross over the last few months. I could have had Yakov Smirnoff. Michael Yakson. Weird Al Yakovich, and so on.
I'd love to collect enough to make my own boy band. They could be the Yakson Five...wait, wait, wait, I got one more...they could be the Yak Street Boys!
Okay, thanks for putting up with me. Tip your waitresses. You've been a beautiful audience.
The new episode of the Anklecast is up and available for all.
Ronnie was just looking for some antique that his father might enjoy for his birthday, but instead, he stumbled upon an item that gave him astonishing power over time. What would he do with this power? Find out in the first half of Undo. Beware, this story is dark and rough.
Afterward, Rish and I talk a little about how Big was afraid to release the story because of things that take place within.
As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.
You can find the show on the usual feed, or you can right click HERE to download the story yourself. Then again, you could just click the play button below and get it that way. It's all up to you, I guess. We're all about choice here on The Anklecast.
Hey, folks. I bet that the two of you who follow this blog regularly are wondering what happened to my writing over the last while. Back in June, I reached my goal of 304,475 words for the year. Then on July 3rd, I posted my last this month in the books post talking about how the writing had gone in June. Since then, I haven't made a peep about writing. Not only that, but I've barely talked about publishing or making covers or doing audiobooks or any of the other things I was going on about so frequently this past year.
Yeah, I pretty much took an extended vacation. I said I was going to keep going on things. In fact, here's my exact words from that post:
Now, what am I going to do next month? Well, if it’s going to be my vacation month from writing with no specific goals, then I guess I’ll do the same for audio. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to do nothing. I’m already 30% of the way into Three Vampire Weekend, so I will do my best to get as much of that done as I can. I think I can probably get all of the book minus the big novella done this month. The novella, “The Elephant in the Room,” is going to take a month to finish all on its own, so that will likely be my goal for August, when it comes rolling around.
Boy was that a load of BS. I didn't do a single thing. I stopped writing for a little while, but along with that went everything else. The only thing I managed to do was get Undo published, and that was just because I had to work my way through that to edit Rish's reading for The Anklecast.
What I claimed that I was going to do while not writing was to work on the preproduction outline of my next book, The Skeleton Crew, but I certainly didn't. I don't think I spent more than ten minutes even thinking about it at all.
In doing this stuff, I discovered a little something about myself. It looks like writing every day is the base line that I have to stick to. If I let that slip away, then all the rest of my productivity goes with it. I don't know if it will always be that way, but for now, at least, I see that it is
After being a layabout for a while, it started to feel wrong to me. September was growing closer, and the opportunity to get going with the start of a new month kept calling to me. I pulled up a fresh document on Google Docs, and started listing off things that could be my goals for the next while, and with each addition, I felt more energized and inspired.
The line from the Sting song called "St. Augustine in Hell" kept coming to mind. I found a version of it on YouTube that you can play here:
That's right, break's over. Time to get back to it. I don't think that I ever felt better about myself than I have for the last year. The only time that comes close was the last time when I did pretty much the same thing in 2019-20. Only that time, I wasn't quite as productive as I was this year. I need to get back to doing the stuff so that I can feel good about myself again.
So, starting on September 1st, I began writing every day again. What is my goal for month? 500 words? 1,000 words? 1,250 words? 1,333 words? I'm not going to make a word count for now. This is going to be another first month of the year like I had in November last year. The real goal is just to make sure that I write every day. That's what I'm shooting for. I suspect that I'll get at least 500 words a day, but if I don't, I'm not going to beat myself up.
Next month, I'll give myself a big word count goal, and then we'll go onward and upward from there.
So, I guess the point of this is that I'm back. For the last three days, I've been writing on my story for Marshal Latham's contest over at the Journey Into... Podcast. I believe the contest was called the Journey Into Journey 2 or something like that. Oh, wait, Journey Into Journey: Illustrated Edition. While I work on that, I'll see if I can't get The Skeleton Crew planned out, so that I can jump into it once I finish Marshal's story.
I'll be back on here soon enough with a post about the goals that I started setting out. I think I need to ponder them a little bit, and also plan them out step by step to see if I can't manage to achieve them all. That's a pretty important thing. You can hit big goals as long as you break them up into smaller goals that you can keep up with day after day and week after week.
I was doing really well this week, when I noticed a specific temptation
in my fridge. It called to me. How could I fight it? Did I win? Watch
and see what happened as I battled it out with a carton of creme.
This picture is from August. I had to take it, because they're back again, folks.
Of course, I don't eat that shit anymore. Not only that, but I never got these as a kid either. I think the only time I've ever eaten them was the time that Rish and I bought some to try on the show. I think that was an episode of Thirteen Nights of Halloween on That Gets My Goat...hold on, let me do a quick search...Ah, found it. Check it out if you'd like.
Anyway, despite the fact that I wouldn't eat them, I still love to see them come around again each year. Jada Toys did some action figures of the characters from the cereals, and I would totally buy those. In fact, I ran around to Rosses for a few weeks just because Rish told me that someone on Facebook had claimed to find the Boo-Berry figure there. Sooner or later, I may just pay full price for those guys. I love decorating for holidays.
It's kind of funny, I think, that my enjoyment of decorating with toys for Halloween and other holidays has led me to buy action figures for characters that I've never once heard of. Today's figure is one of those.
This figure came out in the same wave as the Jack O' Lantern that I wrote about a little while ago. That was only a month ago, yet Walmart has decided to put them on clearance. Interestingly, right as they are pulling out all of their Halloween decorations for sale as well.
I considered buying this when I bought Jack O' Lantern, but since I didn't know her at all, I decided against it. For half price, however, I have no qualms.
I like the character's look, and the masks she comes with. Apparently, the character has superpowered masks that give you different powers when you put them on. That's a pretty neat idea. I like it. I don't need that, though. Just a character in black and orange is probably enough.
Anyway, the only thing I have to figure out is where to put her for Halloween. Should I put her next to Jack O'Lantern? Or give her her own shelf? I guess when I do my post about my decorations, you'll see.
