Category: Collecting

The PEZ Factory

  • March 7, 2020

We went for a day trip today to here:

The PEZ factory! In case this is a mystery PEZ candies are those little sugar bullets that are sold in special dispensers. You flip back the head and a candy comes out. I’ve amassed a collection of Star Wars dispensers that I’m not proud of but I hate the candies and never eat them!

It was a bit of a drive away: over two hours and two states, but it was worth it.

It’s where they make the candies and package them (the dispensers are made in Europe). They have a factory and museum, but since it was a Saturday the factory wasn’t on. But the museum was fantastic.

They have an incredible amount of dispensers on display. Thousands I’m sure, in every category imaginable. Although I secretly hate them I was fascinated by the displays.

The older ones are quite crude (Peter Pan here was from 1969) but the modern ones – almost all licensed – are much more sophisticated.

They had an astonishing amount of slight variants of some of them…

Strange old foreign versions…

Super rare dispensers…

And some very old ones that predate the current ‘head-on-a-stick’ style…

They also had – to our amazement – licensed Japanese ones including Gundam and Ultraman!

But there was so much more than just the dispensers! PEZ is after all a candy (invented in Germany in the 1930s) and they also had an incredible amount of packaging and marketing ephemera on display:

And advertising posters (many featuring the ‘PEZ girls’ used heavily in European advertising):

Bizarre items such as vinyl records:

And then truly strange stuff like a calculator, CCG pack, electronic game and very old sticker:

I loved this museum! It was basically PEZ otaku paradise. I hate PEZ’s (surely they’re the worst ‘candy’ ever made?) but I really loved looking through the small but jam-packed museum.

They even had a treasure hunt going on that we completed and won a prize from:

It was absolutely worth the trip: this place was PEZ-tastic!

But I still hate the candies 🙂

In The Coins

  • February 1, 2020

I brought back quite a few Australian coins with me this trip. I’d been doing this every year and it was time to sort them!

Australia has minted many variant designs for most of its coins, especially in the years since I left. Whenever I find something new in my change I hang on to it and over the years I’ve accumulated many different coins.

These are the 20 cent coins, with the normal version in top left. Some of the these commemorate such things as the United Nations, volunteers and even the taxation office! One stands out in particular, mostly since it’s a bit hideous:

The world went crazy for that wedding didn’t they?

I’ve got seven unique 20 cent coins but there have been nineteen in total! I’ll have to keep looking in future trips.

There’s a lot of 50 cent coins in my collection! This is unsurprising since the earliest commemorative coins were 50s and some of the above date to my youth and came to America with me back in 1993! Including this one:

That’s from 1970 and was the first ever Australian commemorative coin. Others in the above picture were minted for various Commonwealth Games, in memory of wars, to commemorate federation or social events.

Then there’s this interesting example:

The normal 50c is at left, and a 2016 variant is shown at right. I only learned of this preparing this post but in 2016 to celebrate 50 years of decimal currency Australia minted coins of every denomination with variant ‘heads’! I only have the 50c, but am very interested in the others since they include the only commemorative 10 and 5 cent coins!

There’s the dollars, with the normal version in top left. There’s lots of different types, commemorating things like women’s suffrage, ‘the international year of older persons’ and scouting. My favourite is this one:

That’s actually to commemorate the first fleet, despite being an aboriginal design. It’s another coin I brought with me when I came here.,

The current gems of my $1 collection are these:

‘The Great Aussie Coin Hunt’ was a series of 26 $1 coins minted last October and exclusively available in change from post offices in Oz. I knew about them and wanted them and mum said she’d try and get some. Cagily she had told me she only found a few but on Christmas Day my gift from her was the full set! She’d collected them all in secret 🙂

They’re all whimsical, and the best is probably this one:

My $2 coins are a weird bunch:

First of all yes, many are colourized! Secondly, most of these aren’t actually listed in the list of commemoratives I’ve been referring to (and I don’t actually have many on that list). A quick search online revealed that most of these (including Possum Magic and – an Xmas gift from AW – Mr Squiggle) were exclusively distributed at one Australian grocery store during very limited periods!

I reckon it’s mostly luck I have so many of these given how limited they were, but now I want the actual commemoratives I don’t own!

In addition to these I have some ‘retired’ coins:

A set of uncirculated coins:

And a selection of special coins purchased directly at the store at the Canberra mint:

But I’m most a fan of the actual coins that are circulated; the ones I’ve collected myself during my visits. Making this post has educated me on how many more there are, so you can bet I’ll be keeping a close eye on my change for many future trips to come.

Now where is that merino ram 50 cent coin I was sure I owned….?

2019 in Games

  • December 7, 2019

Another year, another ‘Year in Games’ blog post. It’s still my #1 hobby, and in some ways I’m more invested in it than ever. But it’s interesting to see how my spending (and playing) has changed over the years, moving ever-so-slowly more toward replaying old stuff than buying new.

In 2019 the numbers dipped upwards slightly this year, with 57 games bought for 10 systems at an average cost of about $25. The PS4 led in terms of games purchased and total dollars spent, but much like last year a decent amount of my spending was for retired (and in some cases distinctly retro) systems. Here are the charts, in another new format to please my critics:

The above is a proportional plot of games purchased by system. Yes your eyes don’t deceive you: I bought one game each for the Commodore 64 and PC-Engine in 2019. I can’t play either since I don’t own either system, but both were Wizardry games and I collect them so how could I pass them up? In fact more than a third of all my game purchases this year were for retired systems, and even more if you include the 3DS which is very much on the borderline these days.

And that is the breakdown of dollars spent. The 3DS has a large block since I bought an actual new 3DS system this year (which was my sixth…), and you’ll note that even though I bought more GBA games I spent more on the C64 and PCE games. This is because one of the GBA games was a mere ¥65, which is about US$0.60! The average game price remains low since I very rarely buy any new releases these days, instead waiting 6+ months until they inevitably drop in price. On Black Friday I bought nine PS4 games – all released within the last year – at an average cost of $18!

Despite the retro gaming (I’m not mentioning here the hours spent with the NES, SNES, C64 and Genesis Mini) I sunk a massive amount of hours into some extremely high quality new games as well. The following three were amongst my favorites of the year:

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (PS4)

What can I say? Will there ever be a year a new Monster Hunter game doesn’t make this list? Iceborne – the expansion to world – added a higher difficulty, oodles of new monsters and lots and lots of fun. It was even better than World, and given they’re still adding content I doubt I’m done with it yet!

Nioh (PS4)

Imagine a hybrid of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter and this is what you get. An absolutely fantastic mission-based fuedal Japanese monster hunt, that has incredible amounts of content and oozes flavour. A wonderful, wonderful game and I look very much forward to the upcoming sequel.

Hollow Knight (PS4)

A ‘metroidvania’ set in a world of bugs. At times very difficult, but with a gigantic map and lots to see and do. I got lost in this one for weeks, which wasn’t bad for a digital game that cost me only $5!

I can’t end the year without a final farewell to the 150+ games and consoles that I parted with back in June. I ‘ve not regretted it and don’t miss them, and I very much hope they’ve gone on to new owners and are now featured on someone else’s “2019 in Games” list :