Hot Button Baseball

November 8th, 2020

I bought this a couple of weeks ago:

It’s a product from 2005 and yes, I paid $7.99. I found it in the budget bin of a weird store that sold toys and sports memorabilia. It caught my eye because it seemed to have a Barcode Battler vibe, and for that reason alone I needed to know more. Here’s the back of the package:

And here is the device itself unpacked:

Lots of buttons and what I originally thought were sensors lined up down the sides! It’s fairly compact and had promise. But how did it interact with the cards?

Speaking of which the cards themselves are plastic and transparent, with an amazing amount of littles codes lined up on each side. The backs have stats on the players, so (I suppose) they would be of interest to sports cards collectors as well?

The game is played by making teams with a limited amount of cards (the rules for making teams ate simultaneously restrictive and vague), then slotting the cards into the device like I have here. Then you…. well you just push the red button and watch lights flash randomly.

Randomly choosing a light is all this thing actually does! There’s no score keeping, no bar code reading, no calculations or anything. You push the red button, a light randomly lights, and then you decide what that means in the context of the baseball game yourself. In the example above ‘Go’ was lit, which means something different from if anything else was lit.

All the other buttons? They toggle things on and off on the screen for scoring purposes. It would be easier and faster to just use a piece of paper!

So this thing is just a random number generator linked to a bank of LEDs. A curiosity perhaps, but hardly a compelling game.

I packed it away into a box, never to be seen again 🙂

Posted in Toys, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

Inktober 2020

November 2nd, 2020

Another year, another one-drawing-a-day Inktober! This year my efforts were stymied by a lengthy power/internet outage and then my drawing app being crippled after an update. But I persisted and produced 31 works of art during the past month. Here’s seven of them, mostly selected by KLS as her favourites.

The usual motifs of light and dark returned often. This was an early attempt to show depth in poor light. Once again it took a while to get used to the app. As before this was all done on my phone, even though using the Apple Pencil on the iPad would have given me much more accuracy.

I’ve drawn a few maps on postcards this year, always more detailed than this. If you haven’t received a map and want one, leave a comment!

Everyone can draw Grimace from memory, and this one was inspired by me doing exactly that during lecture (yes, I drew grimace on Zoom)!

A tribute to Voyager. It looks simple but there’s many layers in that space background.

Art should tell a story, and the above was one of my attempts. I was going to do a followup showing the body which revealed it wasn’t human, but… I didn’t.

The above was drawn while sitting in the car at the drive in. That’s not a beverage coming out of the bottle, it’s a green slime (a monster).

Video games are another common theme, and there were several pieces this year inspired by them. This was perhaps the most obvious.

When I first did Inktober it was a silly joke, but now I’ve done almost 100 drawings over three years! I wonder if I’ll do it again in 2021?

Posted in Art | 1 Comment »

Happy Halloween!

October 31st, 2020

On Kristins birthday a few weeks ago we went pumpkin picking!

We drove to a farm about an hour away and they had a few massive fields full of pumpkins of all shapes, sizes and colours!

Kristin searched for just the right pumpkin for Jack-o-lantern carving, and I just grabbed any old vegetable 🙂

With raw material secured, it was time to carve some Halloween decorations:

As you can see Kristin is quite proficient! My attempts were comparatively modest. Here’s the finished display:

That was 3 weeks ago almost to the day. And now we arrive at Halloween, and our pumpkin buddies haven’t fared so well. I took a photo every few days to document their aging process:

As you can see they’ve been nibbled on by savage beasts and infected by some evil rot. Both are now full of poisonous liquids and smell of death. In short: they become the perfect Halloween decorations!

Right now we’re at the drive-in for their Halloween extravaganza (two films, cider and donuts and some sort of special stage show!). I hope your Halloween is as much fun, and you’re not too scared by monsters 😉

As a bonus, here’s a two-month ‘timelapse’ of a chrysanthemum we bought for our front step:

Posted in Blog, Family, Home, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Postcard Contest: Halftime

October 19th, 2020

Bernard and I are currently competing in a postcard design contest!

The rules are as follows:
1) Each of us selected 4 one-word categories.
2) We each designed (and professionally printed) one postcard per category and sent them once per week to each other.
3) Each pair of designs will be presented to a team of five elite judges who will select the best card each week.

The judges were not selected until after we’d made the cards, so as to avoid choosing designs to cater to a particular judge.

As of today we’re four weeks into the eight week contest. Four cards judged, four to go. Here’s the current results…

Category 1: Android

The first category was chosen by me, and both entries are shown above. Mine is the lovely shot of Cara D in a chrome suit, and Bernard cheekily chose Aegis in an effort to confuse the judges and maybe nick a point! Neither of these are technically androids, but there’s no rule that said that the cards had to adhere to the categories.

The votes were 3-2 in favour of my card. Here’s one judges comment: (She) has strong eyebrow game, and reminiscent of my purple rock star Barbie growing up!

Category 2: Computation

Bernard chose this category and his design – some esoteric code – is on the left. I chose an artistic shot of Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry at the American Amiga launch in the 80s. As with all my designs I tried to make cards you’d see on a rack in a postcard shop, and this one certainly fits the bill!

Once again the judges favoured my design 3-1 (with one tie!). One judge said: While I appreciate the mathematical notation, which in this font resembles an ancient inscription, I cannot go past Andy and Deb “using” an Amiga.

Category 3: Gold

Once again this was my category, and it was a difficult one to choose an image of! I rejected many options before coming up with the cozy shot of the golden loo. I thought it was funny and would certainly buy such a card myself. Bernard on the other hand forgot to make a specific card and instead chose a flower card he has (coincidentally) printed and sent it as his entry 🙂

And… the judges chose his in a landslide 4-1 win. They were strangely quiet about their decision, so we can only guess as to why they preferred the flower to the toilet!

Category 4: The Holy See

Bernard chose this not-quite-one-word category, and I think both of us regretted it since it was very difficult! He went with a safe choice – the Vatican flag – and I went with a too-clever choice of Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. This was of course because it was used as the cover of a Sisters Of Mercy record, but I wonder if the judges would know that?

They didn’t, or perhaps they just preferred the flag, since once again Bernard won 3-2! Two judges commented on how they preferred the flag since the Bacon art was scary 🙂

Halftime Score: Tied!

So after four cards the score is even Stevens: 2 points each!

Four cards left! What could the categories be? Will the judges remain as unpredictable as they have been? What about the fourth rule not listed above since it hasn’t come into play yet?

In a month, all will be revealed…

Posted in Art, Postcards, The Unknown | Comments Closed

Trash in the Attic

October 18th, 2020

Prices for collectibles of all sorts have skyrocketed during Covid. There’s many theories for why and I’ll not speculate here, but I’ll say it’s made me look at my game collection in a new light.

But the other week I read an article about how old Pokémon cards in particular have seen insane price rises. To explain: Pokémon started (and continues) as a game series, but about 20 years ago become a collectible card game as well. When it did we bought some cards but never really played them, and our cards had languished in a box ever since.

Prompted by the article I got them out for a stickybeak…

In addition to several hundred loose cards I even had some sealed product. These would have collectively sold for quite a bit had I kept the packaging, but as is were worth very little.

But within my loose cards I found a few gems:

Some of above are promos and I no longer remember where I got them. One was a game pack-in card and one (the top right) was pulled from a pack I bought at Target on a whim about 17 years ago. These four shown were worth about $150.

This was my true gem. Note the ‘1st edition’ symbol on the left side: that increased the value significantly. If I had paid to have this professionally graded and sold it myself on eBay I may have got $500+ for it.

But I didn’t do that. In fact I sold the cards to an online store since I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of selling them myself. Aside from the work of sorting it all it was fairly easy just packing them up and waiting for the cheque to come.

And yesterday it did, for $389.92! Not bad for cards I didn’t have any attachment to that were sitting in a box in a closet!

All told I sold them about 75 cards, and about $350 of the value was in the five shown above. The remainder of my cards – hundreds of them – were worthless (less than $0.003 per card) and I trashed them.

So if you have any mint condition 20+ year old Pokémon cards in your closet it’s time to check them; you may be sitting on a nice little payoff 🙂

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

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