“The Itch” is back

Posted by on May 2, 2012 2 comments

As some of you may know, I used to collect designer vinyl toys. These are “toys” (often fairly static) for display purposes, aimed primarily at adults and designed by all manner of street artists from around the world. And it looks like “the itch” is back in a big way.

My collection so far is already fairly large with several pretty rare items making it a pretty pricey one as well. And it was the costs associated with getting my hands on the latest toys by my favourite designers that made me sort of give it up in the first place. At the time I was seeing this girl who, whilst always claiming “it’s your money, so it’s your choice,” tended to make me justify my purchases to her (especially the bigger ones). After a while this made collecting new toys such a hassle that I eventually just gave up and started pursuing other hobbies.

But said collection had already formed and as I was still pretty damn proud of it all I ended up making the smallest room in my house into a sort of hermetically sealed (for sunlight and smoke anyway) display room. In reality, all this meant was that my pride and joy was consigned to being stored in a room that nobody ever visited. That is, until I showed them to my girlfriend the other day.

At that point she was already vaguely aware of me having collected them in the past, as well as having seen them around town (as some “hipper” clothing stores tend to sell them). But she really surprised me by saying that she not only liked my collection, she even wanted some of her own! As you might imagine, going from having someone to whom I have to justify everything to having someone who is pretty much pushing me to buy even more takes a bit of getting used to.

So not only am I planning to buy some new additions to my collection over the next few weeks, I also want to start moving my existing collection downstairs and into regular view. This does mean that I’ll have to “hack” my iKEA Expedit cupboards by giving them see-through cabinet doors or something (whatever is both fairly cheap and keeps out the large amount of cigarette smoke drifting around my living room), but I’ll end up with a much nicer-looking “main” room with everything on display.

Anyway, what are those new additions I hear you ask? Well, I’ve always loved Joe Ledbetter’s work to death, so I intend to keep trying to complete my collection of his toys. But there are also several unrelated toys and mini-series (most larger individual toys are about 8″ tall, mini-series are generally about 2.5-3″ tall and often come in randomized blind boxes) that I have my eye on at the moment. For convenience (and to keep track myself) I’ve made a little linked list of the first few things that came to mind while perusing Artoyz (my main European store for toys now that all reliable Dutch sources seem to have vanished).

There’s plenty of other stuff I want, but if I spend any amount of time on a designer toy website I always end up just wanting to buy everything. It should give you all a reasonable indication of what kind of toys I like to collect and I promise to include some photographs of my collection once I get around to cataloguing what I’ve collected so far (which should be soon). Hope to see you all next time!

A bit more personal

Posted by on April 30, 2012 2 comments

So, I originally wasn’t going to post tonight, as I didn’t have any interesting Food for Thought to write about. But as April is officially over I thought it would be almost inappropriate not to give it a bit of a ceremonial send-off. So here are my thoughts on the past month.

April was going to be my month, or at least so I said at the start of it when I rebooted my blog. And I can honestly say that I managed to not only reach my goal, but to go way beyond it even. Because not even positive-minded me from the start of the month would’ve believed the progress I’ve made and just how sure-footed I am these days. Sure, I still get stressed out at times and get annoyed at the little things. But there’s just way too much positive stuff happening for me to stay down in the dumps for long.

April was the month my health took a turn for the better (or so I’d like to think). I can’t remember the last time I had a piece of meat (which surprised me actually), I’ve been racking up the holes on my belt at a fast but not unhealthy rate (I seem to have stopped 2 holes short of the “slimmest” one) and I’ve even been sleeping sort of regularly (except for weekends and holidays, which are more of a free-for-all). I’ve also stopped drinking, but I hardly ever drank anyway. All in all I must admit that I feel a lot more secure about myself now that I’ve not only dropped some weight (which I’ve done before) but am also looking after myself a bit more.

April was also the month that Serena and I went to see Ben Caplan in the Dolhuis in Dordrecht. This might not seem like a terribly big deal, but it was the first time I had really “gone out” in several years. And the last time Serena and I went somewhere together (concert, club, etc.) was at least twice that long ago, so it was a very special occasion. The fact that Ben Caplan is one of the best musicians I’ve heard in years (both on recording and most definitely live) just made the evening all the better. I remembered that “going out with friends” is something fun and I certainly plan to do it a lot more in the near future.

Then last and anything but least, April was the month in which I met Annemieke. Strangely enough I don’t recall ever mentioning her by name before on my blog, but she certainly deserves a special mention. Not only is she the first new person I’ve met “for real” in a couple of years (a leap of faith I’m still very, very glad I took), she also was a big part of my motivation to start punching life in the testicles (Serena being the other part). It’s wonderfully weird to hang out with someone who tends to know exactly what I’m on about, no matter how obscure my references may be at times. But more than that, in a weird way it feels like I met someone I was supposed to meet. I guess that’s why it doesn’t feel weird that I like to think of her as my Arc Reactor.

This post was a bit on the sappy side, but every once in a while I guess it doesn’t hurt to get a bit more personal than usual. Hope you all had a (generally) up-beat April as well and I hope to see you all again in May!

A lot more patchy

Posted by on April 30, 2012 No comments

That was a long three days without any blog posts, right? Well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to get used to it. I’ve decided to retire the daily updates after a weekend that became pretty much unbloggable after filtering out all the stuff I found too personal or complicated to post online.

So what am I going to be doing instead of the daily updates? Well, that’s the catch; I don’t know yet. I’ll try to start writing up some more My Favourites and Food for Thought post, but for the time being it looks like the posting on my blog will become a lot more patchy. But to put you all at ease; my reasons for doing this are of a very positive nature!

Anyway, this post was meant mostly as an FYI for my readers, so I’ll be keeping it short. I do hope you folks keep checking back regularly and I’ll keep posting anything new I write up to both Facebook and Twitter as usual. Talk to you soon, folks!

A weird form of narcissism

Posted by on April 26, 2012 No comments

There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I’m doing a daily update again, so I’m going to try something new. As my ‘About Me’ page is a little on the short side, I’m going to introduce a new category so I can talk about the stuff I like instead of having to be profound.

The first thing I want to talk about is my obsessive love for TV shows. This by itself sounds rather vague (it could just mean I’m a reality TV junkie), so it’s about time I did some elaborating. Those of you who have also read my OKCupid profile (ha!) will know that I have a penchant for comedy, but do like to watch more serious stuff from time to time. I tend to watch shows all the way through in the “right” order, but there are a couple of series that I love re-watching cherry-picked episodes from.

My all-time favourite when it comes to cherry-picking episodes is definitely Futurama. Not only have I seen the entire run of the show (which thankfully is still going) more times than I can count, but I’ve also watched all of it with the commentary on at least two or three times. Not only is the on-screen cast great, it has some great nerd-inspired writing (bordering on straight-up scientific at times) and pretty much everyone who works on it is funny “off the clock” as well. Throw in the odd (and sometimes very obscure) reference to something I adore and you’ve got one heck of a show.

Another thing I really love is FOX’s Animation Domination on Sundays. The Simpsons has definitely jumped the shark (although, in my opinion, not until season 20), but American Dad is still wonderfully weird, Family Guy keeps putting out enough strong episodes to keep me as a fan and The Cleveland Show is just wonderful (although not a lot of people agree with me on that). But out of those four, it is always Family Guy that I look forward to seeing the most; I’m a firm believer in the fact that pretty much anything can be a joke as long as you’re clear about it, so that show is right up my alley.

And while we’re on the subject of pushing the limit; another show I adore (which keeps getting better) is South Park. Not a huge fan of the tamer earlier seasons, but the show became incredibly funny once they started getting more and more topical. I’d even go so far as to say that the show contains two of my favourite characters ever; Cartman and Butters. I could write an entire post about how awesome those two are, but I should move on to the rest of my favourites.

I do like live-action as well, but once again most of my favourites are sitcoms (from both the US and the UK). And even the shows that aren’t strictly sitcoms often include a strong comedic element. Also, whenever I watch something outside my “comfort zone” it is more often than not a live-action shows (as you don’t really have serious cartoons unless you head over to Japan). There aren’t really any live-action shows that I like to cherry-pick (not counting whatever sitcom I’m watching at that point), so it’s a bit harder to actually say what my favourites are.

There’s still a bit of an obsession with 30 Rock at the moment (which I watched all the way through not too long ago) and I must admit that it forms the exception to my rule of not cherry-picking live-action shows. Then again, I do have a bit of a crush on Liz Lemon, but that might just be a weird form of narcissism. She’s even in my list of inspirational people on Facebook, which now I think of it is probably a good way of judging what my favourite live-action shows are. So I guess that the rest of this post is partly thanks to Facebook!

First up is Seinfeld, from which George Constanza has always been a bit of a kindred spirit (quite a lot of his actions seemed remarkably sound). The way the show coined terms for certain very recognizable situations (which the show is full of), as well as the great cast (especially Kramer), makes it very hard for me to switch channels when I happen across it whilst channel-hopping.

Then there’s Eureka and Douglas Fargo. A friend once told me I should really check it out and I was hooked from the very first episode. It is the most wonderful mix of drama, science (fiction) and comedy, also with a great cast of characters. My vote for Fargo is based on him being so wonderfully nerdy (not just science, but pop-culture as well), not to mention the fact that he’s a bit of a cutey.

I was going to write about several other shows (Community, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Supernatural), but I just realized that this post is becoming a bit big. So I’ll try to keep in mind to write a sort of second-parter to this post in the near future. Not tomorrow though, as I’ll be going to that concert I mentioned in a earlier post. So don’t freak out if I end up skipping tomorrow altogether; might post something with a (bit of a) delay, but I’m not making any promises. Anyway, I hope it was entertaining to read and I’ll catch you folks later!

Firing on all cylinders

Posted by on April 25, 2012 No comments

One of these days I really ought to find a replacement for all these daily updates. But as squeezing out the occasional Food for Thought post is hard enough already, I’m just going to keep playing it safe for now. Not entirely in line with my “philosophy” as of late, but I don’t mind.

I didn’t fall asleep until around 3AM last night and still managed to be awake before my alarm, so I guess I did most of my Tuesday whilst not really firing on all cylinders. I did lounge around the bed for a while though, so it didn’t take me all that long to really wake up. But I didn’t really feel like heading straight for the shower, so I first made myself a cup of coffee. After enjoying said cup of coffee over a cigarette or two, I eventually figured I might as well get the shower out of the way.

After the shower and getting dressed I headed downstairs to fire up my laptop and get myself some more coffee. The rest of the afternoon was spent lazily listening to music and having the occasional conversation with friends. I only had to heat up some left-overs for dinner and stocked up on cigarettes the day before, so as it was raining a lot I figured there was no real reason to go outside. I do like to get some fresh air at least once a day, but I don’t like getting damp in the process.

I did my daily dishes at the end of the afternoon and then called my dad over for a pre-diner chat and coffee. We listened to some music (I love tracking down his favourite old songs on Usenet, as more often than not I really like them as well) and after that I got dinner started. We (re)watched the season 7 finale of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia during dinner, followed by some Comedy Central over a cup of coffee.

Then I realized it was actually getting rather late, so my dad headed home and I sat down in front of my laptop to once again listen to some music whilst enjoying a cigarette. Not wanting to leave it until the last minute, I started on my blog post soon after that and this brings us to the end of my daily update.

With a bit of luck I should have something interesting to post about after Thursday, as I’ll be attending my first concert in years. A few weeks ago a very good friend invited me to come see Ben Caplan in her home town and with my new resolutions in mind I pretty much immediately said yes and bought a ticket. Anyway, that’s for later in the week; for now I’ll say good night!