Category: Miscellaneous

World Postcard Day

October 1, 2023

It’s been a year since my last Postcrossing post, which was when I passed 750 cards received. I was going to wait for 1000, but since today is World Postcard Day (did you send someone a card?) it felt like a good day to catch up.

As of today, I’ve received (and sent) 943 cards. I’m getting about 25 a month, so I’ll pass 1000 this year. There’s been no change in the top 10 countries from which I’ve received cards, but the order has shuffled a little bit:

Interestingly while I’ve received about 30 cards from Russia in the past year, I’ve sent none. I didn’t realize until writing this post that the service seems to not be assigning Russian addresses, no doubt due to the ongoing war.

The above is a map showing the locations from which I have been sent cards since I joined back in 2018. As you can see every continent is represented, with a strong concentration in Europe. If you look closely you may see one unusual one off the northwest of Africa:

That’s the island of Madeira, which is a region of Portugal. I believe that’s the most remote place from which I have received a postcard so far.

The above shows where I have sent cards, which is similar to where they have arrived from with an even larger concentration in Europe. Once again, one marker is notably more remote than others:

That’s Guam, out there in the Pacific. Although it’s counted as a country by Postcrossing, it’s a US territory and therefore I was able to send a card there using domestic postage! It also arrived very quickly, which suggests the USA doesn’t mess around getting mail to its territories 🙂

As far as cards received, the top two are notable. Both came from Australia, and both were examples of pre-stamped postcards sold at post offices. They date to 1997 and 2001, and the postage on each is much lower than what it costs today to send a card internationally. But since these are forever valid for international use, both made it here without problem. For comparison, it costs about A$3.60 to send a postcard from Australia to the USA today, but the doll one has only A$0.45 postage on it!

I was inspired by the above to test this myself when I found (in an Australian antique store back in May) a similar postcard from the early 1980s with even less postage on it. I mailed it and it arrived here without issue! If I ever see any others for sale, I’ll buy and send them for sure.

As usual I love looking at the cornucopia of stamps on the postcrossing cards, and during this past 10 months there’s been a lot of exceptional examples. I’ve only showed a couple of examples above, but the Diana stamps were unusually included on a postcard sent from Germany. I was under the impression that in most countries it wasn’t allowed to put foreign stamps on postal items so maybe this was simply overlooked by a postal worker or perhaps it’s not a problem at all. I’m tempted to try it myself…

The above show five unusually shaped stamps received in the last year. The standout is the absolutely wild owl stamp from Finland which was a Valentine’s Day issue back in 2011! It was one of five similarly unusual (but differently shaped) bird stamps, and I’m happy the sender hung on to it for so long and sent me one.

The other Postcrossing news from the last year was that for a time I was seriously facing the need to stop due to lack of postcards. It’s become impossible to buy new ones in Albany, so I used to depend on the freeway rest stop shops and used to stock up every time we took a long drive. However they have closed as well, which left only Rochester which itself has run nearly dry. Things looked grim indeed until by a happy twist of fate I learned of the existence of a dedicated postcard shop not half an hour from our house! Two visits later and I’d bought 200+ cards for about $0.25 each, most of which will be used for Postcrossing. It seems my membership can continue for the foreseeable future 🙂

A Couple Of Riders

September 29, 2023

Being so close to having watched all Ultraman, naturally my eye is turning to similar franchises. The obvious pick is Kamen Rider, which has been going for almost as long telling stories of motorcycle-riding suited heroes defending the helpless from powerful enemies.

In Japan last June I eagerly looked forward to the midnightly screenings of the 1970s serial and I loved the recent Shin Kamen Rider film. This series is definitely my sort of thing!

Alas the majority of Kamen Rider has never been released in the west or even translated into English, so it’s currently beyond my ability to fully enjoy. Hopefully one day that will change.

Until then though, I can of course admire it in other ways… such as via plastic model kits! Here’s two I recently built.

This guy – Kamen Rider Double Fangjoker – is apparently from the 20th Kamen Rider series which screened back in 2009-10. The bicolour form is due to two Kamen Riders combining into one, and this specific ‘Fangjoker’ seems to be an ultimate version. Here’s a shot of the character from the show itself:

I bought this kit since it’s striking, and I knew (from experience) that having different colour arms and legs would make the assembly a bit more interesting. That said, being essentially monotone meant the runners weren’t too interesting when I took them from the box:

Assembly was easy; Bandai has perfected the design of their humanoid kits and everything fits together seamlessly. I particularly like the unusual faceted effect on the eyes achieved Dr by combining a textured back, a silver sticker and a transparent layer:

As usual I don’t paint these kits, but this one gave me the rare chance to use one of my fine ‘Gundam markers’ to add a thin black line down the very center. It looks better than I expected:

A couple of weeks later I made the second kit I’d bought:

This is from a 2015 series featuring a main character who is a dead ‘ghost hunter’ trying to collect 15 souls so he can be resurrected and take revenge on the villians that killed him. The story sounds wild and the action scenes look great:

I have a thing for black and gold and once again I bought this kit based solely on the powerful design. It’s much more complex than I knew when I bought it, with the ability to make multiple forms of the rider himself. I went with the default, and not the wacky ‘ghost’ form.

The first thing I noticed when I removed the box contents were not one but two sticker sheets. And even worse, there were loads of stickers. I don’t hate stickers on kits as much as some do, but I prefer them in moderation. But with instructions like this I was concerned:

Happily it wasn’t nearly as difficult as it looked, and the stickers aligned well and – even better – looked great when applied:

This is one stylish character, with orange parts that just pop from the black, and nifty use of transparencies. The black also helps hide what few visible seams/joints it has. It’s a very pretty kit once completed.

These weren’t too expensive for plastic model kits (about $40 each), and I loved making both. As I mentioned Bandai has got their humanoid (which includes many Ultramen as well as Riders) kits down to a fine art, and I’m happy to see them continuing to churn out new characters.

Assembling these kits and reading about the characters makes me want to watch the shows even more. Will they ever be translated? I hope so…

Let’s Open Some Cards!

September 17, 2023

When we went antiquing a few weeks ago, I picked up a motley collection of old trading card packs for a song. In addition, I had a couple of other notable packs aging on a shelf. Let’s open them all now…

These Fievel Goes West cards date to the release of the film in 1991. This was the ‘junk wax’ era, when publishers gave anything a card set, and one wonders what the demand was for these cards? I’ve never seen the film and after glancing at the pictures on the cards never want to. The only positive I have about these: the card stock is heavy, the print quality high, and twelve cards per pack is bounteous. But I’ll be trashing these regardless 🙂

I once saw an entire box of these All My Children cards on sale for only a few dollars, and almost bought it only because it was so cheap. I’m glad I didn’t, since these cards (also released in 1991) are trash. Of the ten cards in my pack 4 of them were quiz cards with no art (the bottom two in the pic are the fronts and back of such cards) and the others are just studio photos of characters. I’d say even a rabid fan of the soap (which I have never seen) would be disappointed with this low-effort set. Into the bin they go!

These six packs of Megametal cards (from – once again – 1991) cost a shiny quarter each. I’d never heard of the set but gambled that with six packs my chance for a hologram was decent so I bought them all. The cards are decent if generic: a photo or album cover image on the front with some fluff quote on the back. What makes the set amusing are some of the included bands: have you ever heard of M.O.D., The Front, Heaven’s Gate or Dark Angel? Sets like these puzzle me, since it’s extraordinarily unlikely someone would be a fan of all these bands and would they buy multiple packs just for the 8% of cards that are Bon Jovi?

I got a hologram! A shame it’s L.A. Guns. If you want it, leave a comment, otherwise it’s heading to the trash with the rest of these cards!

A more recent pack now, from 2018. The Doctor Who card license is currently in the hands of a company called Rittenhouse, who prints high quality card sets with lovely art reproduction, loads of informative text and overloaded with chase cards such as autographs and costume pieces. The problem is their cards are too expensive, and a single pack of these Who cards retail for $10. With only five cards per pack, that’s $2 a card and they’re absolutely not even close to worth this price. It’s easy to ignore these sets right now because they’re ‘new Who’, but if Rittenhouse turns their attention to classic Who and in particular the Pertwee era, I’ll be miffed!

I picked up this pack of Bass ManiaX cards earlier this year in Japan for only ¥50 (about 40 cents). Released in 2000, this was a trading card game that seems to have disappeared from the internet as I can’t find anything on it (even the official webpage printed on the packs is gone). From the contents of this pack it seemed to have fish, lure, event and technic cards, and translating a few cards I’m guessing the goal was to catch fish – that were upside down on the table – for points.

I love buying clearance card packs in Japan because you never know what you’ll get. This is a classic example of ‘weird Japan’ (who was the target audience for a bass fishing tcg?!?) but even though the set was probably doomed to fail the production quality is high and the cards themselves feel better in the hand than an MtG card printed today.

So there we go. Five more card sets never before seen on this blog, many of which arguably should never have been seen at all! I’m always on the lookout for more, so let’s hope this isn’t the last post of its kind 🙂

Robot Claw