In a few minutes I’ll board that plane and fly to Japan. I’m very exhausted after this past fortnight but I’ve got 10 flying hours to relax and that should be enough to raise my stamina to 200%!
What will I see and do in Japan? Watch this space to find out…
I walked down to Circular Quay and arrived about 15 minutes before the lights went on. Finally I could see some stars! The above shows the bridge before the lights…
And there it is after they flipped the switch. The lights were very bright and vibrant this year, and the bridge looked magnificent.
The crowds were thick and very excited, but my limiters are half-removed and I weaved through the throng effortlessly. I quickly ducked around the quay to see the Opera House from the other side:
You can see the projector beam, which seemed to originate from next to the bridge. The spotlights are cool as they scan the sky and I overheard a woman saying when she flew into Sydney a few days ago they could see them from above the clouds.
The rest of this post will just be a gallery of various installations, at Martin Place and Darling Harbour. This isn’t all I saw, and most of these are animated or interactive as well. There was a lot to see, and I believe this may be the biggest Vivid I’ve seen yet.
On this last pic, fire was clearly a theme this year. I saw several fire installations, and places where you could cook over open fires. I believe there was a fire juggler as well in Darling Harbour, but the crowds were very dense and I was tired so I went back to the hotel.
All told I spent about three hours running around and estimate I only saw half the installations. It’s a great Vivid, much better than last year and possibly the best I’ve seen. I’m glad I was here to experience it.
Sue and I walked Stockton breakwater yesterday, on the north side of Newcastle harbour. This is the longer of the two by about 250 m, although some may suggest otherwise!
That’s the view across the harbour to Nobby’s. The brown water is runoff from the floods of last week, and debris is still washing down the Hunter. We’d been inland earlier in the day to visit an antique store and evidence on the floods was still very apparent, with fields resembling lakes near Morpeth!
I’ve walked Nobby’s breakwater countless times but the Stockton one much less and not for several years. It was very popular yesterday since the weather was nice and many fisherman lined the northern side casting into the ocean.
Many rocks bear memorials, some simple and some elaborate like this one which is engraved onto metal. I remember seeing them in the past, but there’s many more now. I suppose this is a Novocastrian tradition?
Mum and I said our goodbyes (for the 21st time I believe) and I’m now in Sydney preparing for a longish flight tomorrow. Vivid is on, and you can bet I’ll go take a gander after dark. If it’s good, I’ll blog it later tonight!
I purchased another op-shop jigsaw puzzle:
It only cost $2, and as best I can tell was manufactured in the 1980s. The op-shop had identified puzzles that had all the pieces and this one was not included. This didn’t necessarily mean pieces were missing; just that they weren’t sure. There was only one way to find out!
So far so good, with all the border pieces intact. This is a 600 piece puzzle, twice as big as the one from last year, and a bit bigger than the size I prefer. The box was a bit beaten up, and some of the pieces showed signs of use. I’ll say it’s well-loved.
As kids we didn’t own many puzzles, but those we did own I made up many times. I wonder how many times this one has been assembled?
I worked on this in the evenings and mornings over two days. In total I’d say it took me about 4 hours, although I wasn’t as focused as I usually am when I make puzzles.
The subject of the puzzle is a medieval town in Italy named Grazzano Visconti. The clock tower is part of a 14th century castle which is rumoured to be haunted (aren’t they all?) and a popular tourist destination to this day.
And here we have the finished puzzle! In the end it was actually a 598 piece puzzle since two pieces were missing (I’ve circled them above), but perhaps the biggest mystery was that it came with an extra piece from another puzzle:
So an incomplete puzzle but it was still fun to assemble and absolutely worth the single coin I paid for it.
And if I had more time I probably would have purchased this one I saw today in an antique shop:
Yesterday I went to Charlestown Square, and I discovered what was once a venerable shopping center has now become the abode of pirates. Bootleg Labubu, bootleg Sonny Angel, bootleg Crocs charms, bootleg anime figures, bootleg Pop Marts, bootleg retro game consoles and all many of other things are sold at stalls openly by outlaws to unsuspecting (I hope) shoppers.
In the interests of further investigation, I purchased this:
This is a set of Mario Bros TCG game cards, in a lovely tin no less. No such TCG exists, so whatever is in this tin is a false product, undoubtedly peddled to me by a malefactor. You’ll note that the lower left contains the ‘expansion’ name: Scarlet & Violet Paldean Fates. This is of course false as well, because all the outlaws that made this product have done is stolen the logo from a recent Pokémon TCG expansion:
The item was listed as costing $9.99, but a sign advertised that it was 50% off and only $4.99! Strange therefore that the price tag was under the shrinkwrap:
In other words, the sale was a lie as well. It’s also worth pointing out that the tin itself had some rust on it:
They probably manufacture this on their pirate ships at sea, and don’t have the knowhow or inclination to protect the product from the briny sea air.
Opening the tin we find a shrinkwrappef pack of cards. Immediately many questions are raised, but I’ll get to them in a moment.
The product contains five foil cards (shown above), and 40 normal cards:
The quality is very low, with flimsy almost-cardboard cards that don’t appear to be coated. I’ll give them that the print quality is decent and all cards are unique (somewhat), and that they do indeed depict Mario-related images. This is the cardback:
This is sold as a TCG: a trading card game. I am inclined to challenge the ‘T’ in this moniker: are there additional cards in this game that I could in theory trade someone for? There were four different tins, but surely they didn’t contain different cards?
As for the ‘game’ part of the description… I’ve played a lot of TCG’s and have a good grasp on the way such things work but this one is puzzling. Let’s consider an example card:
I’ve put pink boxes around the four areas that (I assume) are game elements: the number in a circle in top left, the two numbers in shapes in lower right, the face (Peach in this example) in a circle in lower left and the ‘Attak’ and ‘Energy’ values at the bottom.
Naturally the swashbucklers that produced this didn’t include any instructions, so it’s left to the buyer to work out how to play this game. There’s no resource cards, so the number in top left is a bit of mystery since one obvious explanation would be a casting cost. I’ll get back to that number in a moment.
The two values in shapes look like strength and defense stats (or, to use MTG parlance, ‘power’ and ‘toughness’). This is a likely and obvious explanation, since all successful TCGs have such a system. But if this is true, then what of the ‘Attak’ and ‘Energy’ values? Do these cards have two different sets of power and toughness?
Things get more mysterious when we examine the two versions of this Luigi card. The one at left is one of the foils, and as you can see all the values are different. It’s ‘casting cost’ is 1 compared to the normal 3, it’s ‘power’ and ‘Attak’ are both lower, but it’s ‘toughness’ and ‘Energy’ both higher. Does this make it a better card? Who knows?!?
And then comparing these five cards – all with different ‘casting costs’ – we see there doesn’t seem to be any logic in any of their stats. In every way, the card costing 3 in the middle is superior to the one costing 5 at the left, so the ‘casting cost’ is no correlation to the other values. Even the ‘power’ and ‘toughness’ values are unrelated to Attak and Energy.
Let me be clear: this is a game created by villians, no doubt intended to be played in a rum-stinking moon-lit ship’s hold by buccaneers with a deck in one hand, a cutlass in the other and a parrot squawking advice over their shoulder. I’ve no inclination to believe this is an actual game and all values aren’t just random, but I’m considering the possibility that it might be.
So if you’ve fallen victim to this criminal swindle: if by bad luck you purchased this product and want to actually play it, I suggest the following rules:
As for the face in lower left (Mario or Peach), they can be safely ignored. And if you’re wondering if my rules are strangely familiar, then yes I’ve repurposed this bootleg product as Mario Top Trumps! Enjoy playing 🙂