Nice Thing That's Not Too Expensive

My first purchase as an adult toy collector was a Star Wars dewback with a sandtrooper riding on its back.

I couldn't say why, but I've always loved the idea of people riding horseback-style on creatures that definitely are not horses. I love tauntauns too. Dragons, I love. Hell, I even thought blurgs were cool...wait, is it not blurgs? Oh, excuse me, it's blurrgs. Welcome to Kashyyyk everybody, enjoy your stay!

In fact, to take it further, I loved the game Joust because the knights were riding on ostriches. What a great image!

So, a few years ago, when Rish Outfield made me a specially hand-painted winter-colored dinosaur as a Christmas present, I automatically thought I should put a figure on its back to complete the look.

Jurassic park toys, like that one, are big business these days. They're constantly churning out new dinosaurs that you can buy, so they also often go on clearance or wind up at Ross. The other day, I was at Ross and they had this guy for $7.

I can't remember what the name of the thing was, some kind of technical scientific terminology, but it's basically a T-Rex clone or descendant or possibly ancestor. Oh, wait, I took a picture of it at the store to send to Rish.

Skorpiovenator...dinosaur names are funny.

Anyway, that was a good price, and I thought it would be fun to bring it home, make a saddle for it, and have it be a kind of unconventional beast of burden that the denizens of Ankletown station ride around for their conveyance. Like this:

To me, it hearkens back to that first picture of the Stormtrooper riding the dewback. Seems so weird that in a futuristic society they'd be riding animals around still, but it also seems so cool to see a guy in space armor sitting on a giant lizard. I think I may need to get me some more dinosaurs.

Great Stuff Reasonably Priced

These guys are something that I've wanted to put on the space station since the beginning. Sure we can put Star Wars guys and Guardians of the Galaxy and Fortnite and Halo and Final Faction, but what about regular old USA astronauts? Behold:

In my searchings on the internet, I found that somebody over in China makes them, and I found somebody on eBay selling them for really cheap, so I ordered a pair. The shipping time was really long, so I forgot that they were coming by the time they finally arrived, but here they are, and they fit right in with the rest of my 4-inch figures like the mud spattered Penguin from yesterday's post.

I love these guys. I think they look so good. I especially love how their helmets are reflective like they are. Eventually, I'll get around to making an in scale moon lander for them to use in their travels as well. Wouldn't that be fun? A moon lander parked on the landing pads next to an X-Wing or the Slave I?

More Good Stuff Even Cheaper

I mentioned it yesterday, scrolling through Amazon I came across some really great clearance deals that I couldn't turn down. First it was the Buzz Lightyear set. Next I found the Batmobile from the Robert Pattinson movie The Batman on sale for $8. Not only that, but it comes with a Batman figure, a Catwoman figure, and a Penguin figure. All of that came for only $8. That would have been a great deal in the 1980s before inflation made the same candy bar that cost a quarter now worth $1.50.

The only issue was the weathering they'd done on the car and the figures. I can't remember much about that Batman movie, but there must have been some part that happened in a muddy area, because the Batmobile and the figures came with mud spatters all over them.

I don't need the guys to be covered in mud, so I wouldn't want to leave them that way. I could probably use acetone to remove the paint, or if that didn't work, I could just paint over it with black. So, I went ahead and ordered it.

Why would I get a Batmobile, you ask? Well, I suppose it is because of what I've seen Empire Toy Works do with some cars over on his channel.

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I want to do the same thing with this car. I would prefer to paint it a differnt color so that nobody looks at it and thinks, "Oh, that's the Batmobile," because it won't be, not in my world. Not that Batman wouldn't be welcome in my world, but if he showed up there, in wouldn't be in this Batmobile, but one of the much cooler ones he's used in other versions.

Hopefully the mud spattering won't be an issue.

Can't decide if I'll keep the tires and make it a Back to the Future-style flying car where the wheels fold up when it flies, or if I'll make it like Empire Toy Works designs with the big engines where the wheels used to go.

The cool thing is that this car lights up already, so no retrofitting would be necessary to get cool effects going on it in pictures.

I already have the police car from the same movie. It was on a big sale at a Walmart I was at months and months ago. It's not as impressive...

Much smaller and no lights or sounds, but it will probably work well to make something like this:

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That'll be pretty cool when I get to it.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, but the Catwoman figure comes with a motorcycle helmet, which makes her look like a spaceman...or spacewoman...space person? I don't know....but, she looks exactly like a person who lives on Ankletown station should.

Although it wouldn't hurt if she washed that mud off her legs.

First

Ever seen when some big deal YouTuber posts a new video and doophuses get on there and post, "First!" in the comment section? They don't have anything to say, nothing worthwhile to add, they just want to congratulate themselves for being the first person to respond to the alert that told them there was a new video. Being first isn't always a good thing, therefore. Nobody gives out a medal to the guy who was first to shit his pants or something.

I don't think that's quite the case with this post though...but kind of. Today, the first of all the sunflowers we planted bloomed!

It's pretty excited to see we finally got one. So far, here in Houston, the only sunflowers we've ever grown came from the birds knocking sunflower seeds in the birdfeeder on the ground and causing some to sprout. Every time we plant them ourselves, the die off before they ever reach adulthood, so this is pretty monumental.

This first flower isn't anything special, however. Like the dumb commenters, there's not much to this flower. It's really little. I'm excited, like the dumb commenters are, that it's the first one, but really I am excited for the even better things to come...like with the comments. I probably should never have bothered to type up so much about that dumb metaphor. Forget all the crap I said about dumb first commenters.

Anyway, I'm a freak for sunflowers. I love them. I think it's the massive size that they grow to that excites me. One time we had a flower that was waaay bigger than my head. I don't suspect that we'll get anything like that this year, expecially considering how late in the year our flowers are blooming versus the other sunflowers I've seen in our neighborhood. One thing I am excited about is harvesting the seeds to plant a new crop of the flowers next year. My wife may have to fight for space for any stupid vegetables she wants to grow.

Good Stuff Even Cheaper

Ollie's is nice and all, but I was recently looking on Amazon and they had a bunch of things marked down to drastically cheap levels, things that I thought could be really cool. To start with, there was this Lightyear set:

I've seen several people who post pictures of their own space station on Instagram use these Buzz figures to create robots for their world.

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Lightyear figures are 5-inch scale not 4-inch scale, but if they are...maybe some kind of big loader robots or something, they could fit in. Also, I was looking at them and thinking that if I cut them off at the waist and removed the arms, I could possibly turn them into astromech droids using the upper body and domed heads.

So, I bought me a set of the figures. 

It was so cheap that each figure cost less than $3, including that giant red robot. I was thinking that I might even be able to use the red robot. It could be one of the Sentinel-style peacekeeping/oppression providing robot that President Government has deployed around the space station to keep the residents in line. I may have to grab a couple more sets of these considering how cheap they were, so I can have a few robots and sentinels to use for my non-existent space station.

Maybe I ought to get started on my space station...

OMAD & Carnivore : Settling In and Making Improvements - The Journey to One-derland Week 2 Roundup

Week two has come to an end, and I'm improving every day. My blood sugar has gone from an astoundingly high number to an almost normal number, and my ketones continue to improve. I learned an important lesson last Sunday to stay away from dairy and processed meats like deli slices or sausage, and I used all of that in my choices this week. How did it go? Watch the video to find out!

Good Stuff Cheap

I was watching a toy collecting video the last week that was talking about what they were seeing at Ollie's Bargain Outlet. These kind of videos drop here and there, to the point that Rish Outfield pines over the fact that there are no Ollie's in his area. I have some in my area, but none of them are very close, so I don't go often. In fact, the only time I've gone was when they had the grand opening last July.

Watching the video gave me the urge to go visit the store again, particularly because they'd said that there were Star Wars figures there that I could acquire and add to my non-existent space station's population. So, I drove the whole way out there, which is about 45 minutes from my house, and looked the store over.

It had a better selection now than it did when I was there for the grand opening, but it still didn't have anything that I felt I needed to buy aside from some Star Wars guys. Sadly, my Ollie's was charging $3.99 per figure rather than $2.99 like they were in the video that I watched. So, I decided to only buy four of them. Here's what I chose:

I'm not much of a fan of the sequel trilogy anymore than I am a fan of the prequel trilogy, but these figures have a kind of generic Star Warsiness to them that should be pretty cool. For example, I could switch their heads out and then they're somebody totally different. Here's my Epic Heroes Star-Lord figure from yesterday's video as an X-Wing pilot.

Strangely, each and every one of these figures had a different-sized ball joint for their head to sit on, so I couldn't switch them back and forth with each other.  There are ways around that, though. People Dremmel out the socket to make the bigger ball fit, or Dremmel down the ball. Another way is to use some of that poster tack goop to fill the oversized socket and make the ball fit better when it's too small. It still can be done. 

Star-Lord fit just right, though. But I don't think I'll have his head on this body, because I want a Star-Lord in his Star-Lord outfit on the space station. We'll have to see just what kind of combinations we can make that make it look the best. These guys will mostly be background characters anyway, since they don't have elbows or knees. You can't really get them into even a normal walking pose without elbows or knees.