Category: Blog

Con Haul

August 25, 2026

This post details what we bought at the con, and the majority of these items came from artist’s alley. It was a bit of an effort to fit all this into our suitcases for the trip home 🙂

I bought a few dozen postcards, some of which are shown above. These are rarely sold as ‘postcards’ and usually called ‘mini prints’. Frustratingly a lot of creators print them on flimsy card or with glossy backs, both of which I avoid. But I had no trouble finding many great ones anyway!

Kristin purchased these stuffed animals. The top left is a ‘sea bunny’ and the bottom left a jellyfish. The guinea pig has a magnet in his mouth so he can ‘eat’ the strawberry!

A couple of magnets.

A pencil case. This is very high quality, and the seller had several different designs that were all great.

I was very surprised to see rubber stamps, and astonished to see the set on the left which uses three stamps to make a coloured impression. I used it on a few postcards and it’s a bit tricky to get it looking perfect, but I’ll get better with practice!

We bought more stickers than anything else, and this is only a selection of them. From what I’ve learned on YouTube videos, stickers are the best-sellers at most booths, and the selection is usually massive.

These are metal pins, and the three at the top are blind-boxed (and not yet opened). Pins also sell very well for the artists, and as with stickers there is an enormous variety. Some can get very big, and equally expensive!

Another surprise this year were the indie trading cards. I bought four different packs, and they all have a few cards inside drawn from a set of several dozen. The cards are very fancy with foil and etching, but I’ll let these packs ‘age’ a while before opening. I saw 8 different sets of trading card packs for sale, and the ones I skipped were indie TCGs inspired by Pokemon.

The orange card in the middle is a Magic The Gathering proxy token using a character from an anime series (DanDaDan). Several artists sold MtG proxies, which is something I don’t recall seeing last year.

This was purchased from the same guy who hand carved the rubber stamps (that I mentioned in the previous entry). As a secondary hobby he hand-makes paper cut-out art of anime characters. All the black parts in the photo were carefully cut away using an exacto knife, and since this is a fairly small piece of paper (about 6 inches on the long side) the detail here is astounding. I’ll put a vibrant colour behind and frame this one!

Kristin purchased six prints, all of which we’ll also frame and display. The first was this cat.

This watercolour (print) shows cute rabbits in the clouds. Almost every print sold by this artist was exceptional, and choosing just one was difficult.

And lastly we have this set of four seasonal prints showing a cat in a windowsill. These are about two feet tall and it will be a challenge framing them and finding somewhere to display them!

This isn’t everything we got. I bought a lot of manga, an anime figure, four t-shirts and a few future gifts I obviously won’t spoil here. Our wallets got a workout, and it was only the available space in our suitcases that prevented us from buying more!

Pushin’ Coins With Grogue

August 14, 2026

I went to Dave & Busters for the first time in years. Even if I was snooping to see if there were new cards in the Star Trek coin pusher I wouldn’t admit it. The place was dead and I was surprised by the number of gigantic gun and shooting cabinets based on licensed properties:

As I staggered toward the latrine I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this:

Holy smokes, a Mandalorian & Grogu coin pusher?!?!? What madness led to this? The film was a failure and probably shouldn’t have even been made but someone thought they’d turn it into a coin pusher?

A quick scan of the playfield revealed cards featuring all our ~~forgettable~~ favourite characters from the film. I had to play this immediately!

I instantly forgot about my need to urinate and near-ran over to the counter to get a gamecard. The pretty attendant seemed relieved she had a customer and I barely reacted when she cheerily told me the minimum cost to get a play card was $28! I quickly handed her cash and hurried back to Grogu.

Using this professionally annotated image, let me describe the ‘gameplay’. A (pink) ring of targets continuously rotates and every time you push a button a coin rolls down the (yellow) ramp. If the coin hits a target extra coins roll down the (green) ramp onto the playfield. Some targets give you other rewards, including the ability to launch a ball – pinball style – up a (blue) ramp.

You get tickets for every coin that falls into the hopper, when you shoot the ball, and if you redeem any cards at the shop. I was barely interested in the tickets, I just wanted to win all nine cards. My target was the large clump of cards right at the edge, as shown in the first pic.

My $28 got me 150 coins, which feels like a crime but is actually less than a quarter per coin. I’m one of the best medal game players in the world, so I knew with 150 attempts I’d be walking away with a pocketful of cards. I wasted no time and began my quest!

At first I was dropping coins with wild abandon as I gained the measure of the machine. About 30 coins in I fell into a comfortable rhythm of dropping coins at periodic intervals so they always hit a target and often got me a ball to shoot. Coins were dropping like rain, but the massive clump of cards was proving stubborn. This continued for about 20 minutes, with only one or two cards dropping and the pile at the edge growing over-larger.

Then – with only a dozen or so coins remaining – I won a jackpot spin from a ball shot and (as you see above) my prize was ‘party mode’. This gave me free coin drops for ten seconds. I released all my limiters and smashed the coin drop button like Takahashi Meijin! I must have dropped over 100 coins in those ten seconds and I giggled like a simpleton as the playfield overflowed with coins which led to the massive bounty of cards all falling over the edge at once.

These are the sort of moments that make you feel truly alive.

And then I was done. 150 coins – all $28 – had been given to the machine. I reached into the hopper and pulled out 13 cards, including the 8 outlined in red above, and 5 doubles. Notably, I didn’t get the ‘Mandalorian’ card, which means were I going to redeem them all for points I was one card short of 3000 tickets.

The 9th card was tempting me near the edge, but as an renowned medal game master I knew not to throw good money after bad, and returned to the store counter to see how many tickets I had won.

After turning in my 5 card doubles (for 50 bonus tickets each) my total was 1072 tickets! This was much more than I expected, and I had no doubt I’d be able to get a fine prize or two from the shop.

Alas I was only 179,000 tickets short for a Switch 2 so I browsed the other options and eventually chose these (total cost: 1065 tickets):

At only $28 for a small bag of Swedish fish and some sort of liquid spray candy I felt like I should have got a free slap in the face as well…

Here’s a better look at my winnings. The cards are plastic, have nothing except a logo on the back, and have already been placed into a box never to see the light of the sun ever again. I’ll forget them as quickly as I forgot the film, but the joy of winning them will be with me for ever!

Barad-Dûr

July 30, 2026

In Lord Of The Rings, Barad-dûr is the tower fortress of Sauron. Taller than any structure built by man, it stands in Mordor near Mount Doom and at its peak The Eye Of Sauron endlessly scans Middle Earth looking for The One Ring. It’s the domain of ultimate evil, and it was time for me to build my own:

This is another monstrous set, and since Rivendell is my favourite LEGO build of all time I wanted this one as soon as it released. And bought it I did, although that was two years ago and it has sat on a shelf all this time waiting!

The 5400+ pieces came in exactly 40 bags which I’ve needed to pile two deep to fit them all in the above photo.

The tower is built in three parts with separate instruction books. In total; there are 1003 steps across the collective 620 pages of instructions!

Disappointingly, the set also came with a sticker sheet. No one likes LEGO stickers, and for a $460 set their inclusion is ridiculous. Most of these were placed on curved pieces, and apparently LEGO doesn’t yet have the technology to directly print onto curves.

The first instruction book is the base of the tower and uses about half of the bags of pieces. There’s a lot of detail here both inside and out, with doors that open via a hidden switch, a secret compartment where Gollum hides, and various items to furnish the interior for its wicked inhabitants. The angled walls are achieved using clever building techniques and are strongly reinforced, which is a good thing considering the size of the finished tower.

Most of the included minifigures are in the first few bags, and they’re all great. Frodo has a couple of faces, but I’ll always display the one where he’s almost seduced by The Ring.

A group of orcs with a range of armour and weapons inhabit the lower level of the tower. According to the instructions much of these figures – and their gear – is unique to this set. Yes that one in the middle is grilling a sausage!

Sauron and The Mouth Of Sauron are both suitably creepy. While I’m not showing them here, believe me both are even more disturbing without their helmets on! Until rereleased in a recent set, Sauron was one of the more expensive minifigures available, selling for up to $100 on the secondary market. He has a thrown room in the middle of the tower which has a Palantir hidden being a moving throne:

Here’s the finished set:

It took me over thirty hours to build, which I did in sessions of two or three bags at a time. The last book went very slowly since I could only use one hand (I’ve recently had hand surgery) and needed to be extremely careful since I was dealing with the spire.

The Eye lights up via a light brick, and can also be moved to look in any direction:

Here’s the view from behind showing the interior detail:

I enjoyed building this so much I hardly wanted it to end. Now I need to work out where to put it, a non-trivial problem since it’s 83 cm tall! I’ve got an idea or two, but for now it remains on our dining table since it’s remarkably heavy and I’m certainly not going to move it with only one hand!

Robot Claw