Witch with a "B."

I'm sleeping with the lights on tonight.

So what the hell?

Yeah, so I haven't updated this blog in a while. I know, lame.

I don't have some fantastic personal tragedy that I can cite to explain my blogging laziness, but let me just say this: when you come home from a long day of writing other documents, you don't really feel like writing about toys in any coherent fashion.

But! But. But there is one upside for all of you. I have not been remiss on my toy purchasing duties, and have a fresh supply of blogging fodder awaiting a ship request in a warehouse in Japan. As all of you vinyl-heads know, there were three fairly major toy shows in Japan over the past month. Major toy show = lots of new releases. New releases = late night runs on YJA and Kaiju-Taro. So, while my last month has not been perhaps the most financially responsible month of my life, I got some cool shit, so it's all good. I've been putting off my mecha purchases a lot, because honestly, there has not been a lot that excites me in that realm as of late. However, the end of summer proves to be an entirely different story with a bevy of Mospeada releases and the Gundam FIX Shin Musha Gundam to be released. Wait for it!

So just to finish this off, I've seen two of the three threes for this summer: Spiderman 3 and Shrek 3. Spiderman 3, despite what you may have heard, is awesome. There is absolutely no comic-world continuity by the third movie; my memory may be failing, but I don't recall a tag-team match among Harry Osborne (Super XBOX d00d), Spiderman, Venom and Sandman... ever. Nonetheless, there is just something special about seeing Topher Grace fight Tobey Maguire. They could probably have dressed them in street clothes, given them baseball bats and put them in a wrestling ring, and I would have just been as happy. Shrek 3 was a different story. That movie stunk like the alleged stink of an ogre. I basically forced my laughter, so that I could fit in with the other people in the theater. You know those movies where all of the funny parts are shown in the trailer? Yeah. One of those. So the score now is 1 for 1. Pyrates here I come.

There you go. A blog post, no pictures. Kind of like opening up a Playboy to find Hugh Hefner's autobiography in 8-point font, yes?

[Review] Ice Scream

Well, I had a very nice article written up for this figure, but Yahoo Japan's auction counter just crashed Firefox and caused me to lose all of my work. So here's some pictures. EFF YOU YAHOOOOooooo.

Just took some quick photos, since Flatwoods will be invading my office tomorrow morning, along with a few of his friends.

This Flatwoods Monster was a recent, and stealthy, release in David Horvath's contribution to Wonderwall's Kaiju for Grow-Ups series. Supposedly it was a edition of 50, but paint mess-ups and pieces that escaped to the collection of Horvath and Wonderwall lowered that number to around 40-ish, by my estimate. So, a nice quiet little release, that was only publicized on Horvath's own blog and released in a covert drop-off at Giant Robot's LA store. I actually had to do a bit of wheeling and dealing to grab one of these- I believe they were only sold online for a few minutes, but I had mine locked down long before that. Nyah ha.

Horvath, as it turns out, is a great fan of the paranormal and strange, although few would guess this from the whimsical paradise created for his Ugly Dolls characters. I guess he took advantage of his commission with Wonderwall to release this creative urge in several fruity flavors of Mothman and Flatwoods Monsters toys. Many, if not most, of the Flatwoods were based on elements of the Flatwoods Monster encounter story. Although I'm not sure that this particular clear colorway has a basis in paranormal-reality, it does bear a resemblance to a certain Marmit-produced toy...

One thing that irks me about the clear vinyl used for this toy is that it shows off every imperfection, bubble and dust speck on its surface. On the other hand, I can hardly wait to stuff it with sparkly things, and maybe my little Marmit Flatwoods toy? Maybe when he gets back from work.

Oh, and the figure comes with a nice header and some lineart from Horvath.