Fireworks Shopping

  • July 2, 2023

These past two weekends we’ve driven interstate (to PA and NH) to buy fireworks for our annual backyard (in Rochester) celebration. As always, it’s a lot of fun seeing the variety of product available and imaging the fun of setting it off.

The above – 16000 little firecrackers (what we used to call ‘crazy jacks’ in my youth) – is about as big as the wheel on your typical car. Imagine the noise and smoke as this thing went off. Wouldn’t it be incredible?

And the above – an $860 assortment – is 60 shells that would produce effects similar to what you’d see at a professional show. It still amazes me that in some states you can just buy this stuff and let it off in your backyard. While we bought a few launching fireworks, they’re very tame and neither go high or produce much noise.

Speaking of noise: 750 missiles! This thing takes more than two minutes to fire all the missiles, and each missile whistles and then bangs in the air. While it would be spectacular, I imagine this would be the sort of thing that may have the neighbors calling the rozzers in our suburb (since these sorts of things are currently illegal in our county).

The packaging of the bigger fireworks is always wonderful, and here I focus on a few of the genre ones (although in 2023 a reference to the ‘Majestic 12’ is a bit esoteric). Here’s a few others:

Can you spot the blatant copyright infringement on two of the above? If it’s not obvious, here’s some that is:

The label designer obviously have fun with these products (which, remember, are designed to be set on fire), and every now and then there are head-scratching examples like this one:

We bought a bunch of items from several shops, and our ‘show’ promises to be a good one. At Joyce’s request we tried to only buy low-noise fireworks, and that included this selection of fountains we’ve got:

We’ve had one or two low noise fountains before (they mostly make a low hiss due to the sparks coming out) so it will be interesting seeing what these are like.

That said it’s possible that some of the fountains we got may make a few crackles, but for obvious reasons how could we pass on…

…a skull and a spinning snake?!? Imagine if such things had been available when we were kids?

I also can’t resist a good sword (handheld fountains, basically) and you know there was no chance I’d pass up this lightsaber firework!

And this is just a selection of what we’ll be lighting up on Tuesday. As usual I’ll try to catch the excitement in pictures and maybe video and follow up later in the week 🙂

Let’s Make A Crystal

  • June 28, 2023

I didn’t bring much back from Australia, since I wanted near-empty suitcases for Japan, but I did come home with this:

I ‘won’ this via the points I got spending too much on a DC Comics card-redemption machine in the arcade at Westfield Kotara. I actually got two sets, and gave one to Sue. I wonder if she’s made it?

Considering the quality of the items they usually have in these arcade shops, I had little expectation this would be good or even work at all. But I followed the instructions to the letter to find out.

Start by adding the powder to hot water and stirring until the mixture is clear:

This suspension will form a crystal via evaporation, but a substrate (on which the crystal will grow) is needed, and that’s the little ceramic cone that came with the kit. The instructions were to wait for the mixture to cool, place the cone in it, then let it grow for a week.

The above shows the growth process, with the photos taken about two days apart. As you can see, the crystal grew well and by the last picture some crystals had also formed on the sides of the container. Here’s what the crystal looked like once removed from the mixture and allowed to dry:

It was a little trick to take a good photo since it’s so transparent! It’s also very fragile, and even touching it can cause the crystals to break off. It’s vaguely semi-spherical and about an inch in diameter.

So far so good for the crystal growing part, but does it glow? I shone a torch on it for 10 seconds or so and and turned out the light:

Holy smokes! This thing is positively radioactive. I’ll spare you the details about how this works, but it’s not just glow-in-the-dark, but even acts as a fairly bright green light source:

This little kit far exceeded my expectations. It was simple to make and worked perfectly first go. I’ve paid for worse kits than this one, so this easily gets two thumbs up 🙂

  • Posted in Crafts
  • Robert

Japan Pickups: Wizardry (Part 2)

  • June 27, 2023

I bought 38 books home with me from Japan, and the vast majority of these fell within two categories. Here we’ll look at the Wizardry books!

The above are guidebooks for the first Wizardry game. The left is for the NES release, and the right is more generic and covers the original version of the game, which the book itself reveals was released on the following systems:

Both of these guides are full of maps and tables and monster data, as well as detailed strategy on how to navigate the dungeons. They both seem like extremely useful guides to what is a famously difficult game.

I love also that the NES guidebook was obviously used by someone, as is evidenced by an attempt to complete some of the (partial) maps. This is also present in some of the other guidebooks shown here.

Here we have two different guides for the Famicom (since it was never released on the NES) version of the third Wizardry game. Why are there two? My assumption is simply that the license was granted to more than one publisher, especially since both of these contain official game art. The book on the right in particular is a beautiful tome, including not just screenshots of but also the official art of all the game monsters.

Here we have five guidebooks for the Game Boy ‘Gaiden’ games. As you can see I have three different books for the first game (Suffering Of The Queen) and one each for the second two. Once again these are impressive books (especially for their small sizes), chock-full of art and maps and tables and even featuring lots of color.

The above is a shot of how monster data is presented in the books for the first, third and first Game Boy games in the series. You can see how the books began to include official art, and then for the Game Boy versions the official art became the showcase!

I can still recall playing Wizardry VII when it came out, and I would have killed for a guidebook like the one shown above. It’s very thick (300+ pages) and seems loaded with game info but it also – based on adverts inside – seems to be one of four different guides for this enormous game! The book on right is the for the much-maligned Wizardry ‘adventure’ and is full-color and mostly screenshots. It’s a good way to get an idea of a game I’ll likely never play.

These two are a mystery. They are for the same game (seen in my previous post), and published by the same company within one month of each other. Both books seem more or less the same in terms of content (maps, guides, monster and item data etc.) but it’s presented differently in each (both are quite fancy and full of colored pages). It’s as if the same publisher published two unique guidebooks for the same game at the same time?!?

Here we have a Wizardry novel (based on the second game and published in 1990) and volume two of a Wizardry manga! There have been at least three manga series over the years, and I believe this one (from 1989) was the second.

The art is of-it’s-time, and based on an old review I found (and translated) online the story is derivative of other fantasy series that were popular in those days (like Lodoss War). I actually saw this entire series for sale (8 volumes) but it was pricey and (more importantly) very heavy so I didn’t buy it.

The last half-dozen or so pages of the manga contain this weird pseudo-magazine, which is itself referenced in a couple of the hint guides shown above. The Wizardry book rabbit hole seems to run deep!

If you were following my blog during the trip you may have seen a photo of the above. I hesitated at first due to its extreme cost, but on the last day I bought it since I didn’t want to regret. It’s a book from the official Wizardry ‘TRPG’ (think Dungeons & Dragons) which was released in Japan in the mid 1980s. From what I can tell this was a somewhat popular game, had quite a few books released, and has had two rereleases since.

The manual contains loads of material, including a few short adventures. It’s delightful to see it seems to be a literal translation of the game into a TRPG, with dungeon maps and monsters that resemble those from the games.

Speaking of the official Wizardry table-top game:

I saw these in January and regretted not buying them, so I was happy to see Mandarake still had the set! To my surprise it was still brand new and sealed. Of course I had to open it:

It’s five monsters ostensibly from the game series. They appear to be made from pewter, and are fairly detailed for their sizes:

I’ll never paint or even use them of course, but their fun treasures for my collection. You may have seen in my recent trip I saw another in this series, but the box for this set reveals that there were an incredible 24 sets of Wizardry miniatures?!?

It was fun finding and buying all the above during the recent trip. Yes some were pricey, but some weren’t as well. I’m positive I don’t even remotely have all the guidebooks for this series, but I probably have enough at this point. Now it’s time to dive into the GB versions and put some of these books to use 🙂