Happy Birthday To Me

  • March 3, 2026

For a time now I’d been wanting to reduce my collection of gamebooks. This was partially for space, and partially so I could concentrate on the series that mean the most to me. I found potential buyers online but the (very fair) offers received for the books I had decided to sell hardly covered the cost of shipping them. I had no regrets when I decided to toss about 200 books into a recycling bin a few weekends ago.

The silver lining of this process was that in the process of searching for potential buyers I found a store that had some items for sale I was very interested in. I hastily made a purchase, and a box arrived in time for my birthday (today). These were inside:

The core of my collection is the Fighting Fantasy series, which I have loved since childhood. I’ve got hundreds of volumes, which means many copies of each since there are only about 70 unique books. It’s been many years since I’ve found an imprint I didn’t have, so I was surprised to see the above for sale. Of course I already own each book – in fact I already had 8 different copies alone of City Of Thieves – but I didn’t own the ‘Green stripe’ edition. Now I do 🙂

As happy as I was with these, I also bought this:

I was absolutely amazed to see they had this. It’s issue #2 of the Fighting Fantasy magazine from 1985. This was a ‘holy grail’ item to me, and given the scarcity of these I had essentially given up ever owning one.

It’s a fairly slim publication, sparse on editorial content. It reprints (half of) Warlock Of Firetop Mountain with beautiful large reproductions of the art, and also contained an original new solo adventure called Caverns Of The Snow Witch:

It’s short at only 190 entries, but would eventually be expanded and become the 9th FF book. I recall when I learned this as a child being amazed a magazine existed with gamebook adventures in it!

Indeed Warlock magazine was almost unobtainable in Australia. I somehow knew of it and looked for it in newsagents but only ever owned one copy, specifically #11 (which Adam inherited from me and graciously returned to me decades later). Much later I learned the magazine was poorly distributed even in the UK, so it’s a miracle any ever made their way to Australia at all.

So you can imagine how fast I clicked that ‘submit order’ button when the store I bought the above at didn’t just have one Warlock, but had eight:

These are all from 40+ years ago, and represent about two-thirds of the entire run of the magazine (which ended at issue #13). I was so happy to open the box when they arrived, and learn they were all in great condition. Whoever owned these took care of them!

These magazines are a delightful window into the early years of gamebooks. Full of news, reviews, artwork and advertisements, they also contain many original adventures – almost none of which were ever republished.

These magazines were never distributed to the USA so I remain amazed I found them for sale at an American hobby store. I wonder if they came from the same collection, and why the owner sold them?

And if you’re wondering, yes they were expensive 🙂

The above is a photo of my current Japanese Warlock magazine collection. I’ve got almost all of them, and you can see the magazine survived much longer in Japan than the 13-issues it ran for in the UK. Here’s a photo of the first dozen issues in two different languages:

Just holding and flipping through these brings a big smile to my face. Happy Birthday to me 🙂

Fading Memories

  • February 26, 2026

Our memories are fluid, and our brains change them as we age. Days and months and years get grouped together, and specific are lost as events become generalizations. We also tend to remember happy events with more clarity than sad ones. As a result nostalgia – the reminiscence of past events – becomes increasingly positive, and we typically remember our youth as better days.

Our brain sometimes fabricates memories as well, and since they are ‘stored’ in the same parts of the brain as real memories we have no way of determining which are real and which are fake except by comparing with others. This process can happen surprisingly quickly, and some specific details in the memories of what you did yesterday may even be incorrect!

I have a childhood memory of visiting a mall far from home. It was with Bernard and dad, but I can’t recall if mum was with us. We did take one or two vacations during school holidays with dad only, so perhaps this was during one of them. I recall the mall as being much bigger than the ones I was used to in Newcastle, which at the time was probably just Kotara Fair since I don’t think Charlestown Square had been built.

While walking around the mall we spied – from an upper level – a cluster of arcade games in the gallery below. We went down and played some, including one I had never seen before (or since), which involved shooting spiders on webs. Doing some research now the game was probably Spiders or Frog & Spider, both of which were released in 1981.

Perhaps one reason I remember (parts of) this visit so vividly is because we were each allowed to purchase an action figure from a toy store, and both of us chose a Star Wars figure. I picked ‘R2D2 with Sensorscope’ and (I believe) Bernard picked an Ugnaught. Both figures were initially released in 1981, but remained available for several years afterwards. We opened them both in the car afterwards, and I’m sure we were both very excited.

And that’s it! Only fragments of this memory exist, and to me it’s notable they are related to video games and action figures. If this was 1981 then I hadn’t started buying books yet (this began with Warlock of Firetop Mountain in 1982), and my world would have revolved around games and toys which is why they’re so strong in my memories.

But as for where we were, and exactly when this occurred, I don’t know. Are these real memories or fabricated? I don’t know either. But since I can close my eyes and picture the view from the gallery to the games below, if this didn’t ever actually occur then my brain has done a wonderful job making it up 🙂

‘Poop Pals’

  • February 22, 2026

I purchased the above in Japan. The name seems to translate to ‘Poop Pals’ and each of the two animals is talking about playing with poop (I think). Obviously their heads resembles the poop emoji.

What the heck is this?

It’s a model kit! The above photo shows the entire contents, and you’ll notice instructions and runners common to other plastic model kits. There’s also two bags of what the kit calls ‘clay’:

This is weird stuff. It’s very lightweight, and feels more like foam than any clay I’ve ever known. It’s also a little oily. For the Australians reading, it has the texture of those old banana lollies, albeit fluffier.

Assembly of the animal bodies is trivial, so I’ll focus on the heads. The poop clay is softened by kneading it, and then stuffed into a mold. A lid is then put on and rotated to flatten the base, and then the final poop-shaped head is complete. It’s easy and works surprisingly well. I imagine kids would love this step.

Then you put stickers on the facial features and your animal is complete. Don’t you agree my cat look wonderful…? Here’s the bear:

The clay/foam apparently dries solid after exposed to the air, so I imagine these things would last a while. But as a model kit it’s quite poor, with ill-fitting pieces (which is very unusual for Bandai) and clay that isn’t adhesive enough for the ears and eyes to stay on.

You get enough clay to make three heads though, which of course I had to try:

I think the above is a ‘twisted bear-cat’. It’s my masterpiece!

This was fun, and were I a drooling child I imagine it would have been lots of fun. But it’s also weird and imperfect, and therefore not surprising that it cost me only ¥99 (about $0.65). We saw it for as much as ¥2000 during our recent trip, and at that price it’s not even close to worth it.

So it was fun while it lasted, which was less than the time it took me to write this post 🙂