Robot Claw

In The Cards

May 6th, 2018

I found this at Walmart last week:

‘New low price!’ meant $10, and of course I bought it. Twenty packs for that price was a steal, or seemed that way before I knew what it contained…

Here’s the contents:

Interesting mix. 11 different sets, including 4 packs of collectible card game cards. Nothing newer than 10 years, one of set (Anastasia) 24 years old! I’m guessing these have been in a warehouse a long time…

So let’s examine these in detail:

The Power Rangers cards are based on the film and are pretty boring. The plus is that each pack has a foil card, but the minus is that those foils are awful. Each card also has a strange Amerocentric trivia question on the back like this:

Can you get it without decoding the answer?

The X-Men cards have awful art, from the early days of computer-aided colouring. The less said about these the better. But what’s this on the wrapper…?

Each pack has an entry form for a contest to win a baseball card (then) worth $451k! Wikipedia informs me this card was indeed won, sold shortly afterwards for $641k and is now valued at $2.8 million!

The Anastasia cards are pretty normal for an animated film. I got one chase card (cut into an unusual shape as you can see). I’m pretty sure I’ve got packs of these in other boxes like these in the past so I’m guessing they were overprinted and undersold!

The Panda cards are unremarkable, but I got this flashy monkey card that will make a great Xmas gift for Bernard. And I also got this badass tattoo:

Fear the Fur indeed!!

The game cards are mostly garbage – useless cards from unwanted expansions for forgotten games no one played. But I got a rare token (?) from The Simpsons and some crazy gold Power Rangers card so that was good?

I’ve not seen Igor or Despereaux and judging by the cards I don’t want to! They’re uniformly brown for starters, and both seem to have uninteresting and somewhat ugly design. At least I got another chase in my Igor pack – and a Despereaux sticker that will no doubt end up on a postcard 🙂

Which brings me finally to the Space Jam cards. Again I’ve never seen the film, and frankly have always thought it’s probably awful, but take a close look at that card, specifically the bottom right corner…

Yes that’s a scratch-off panel!

My card may be a Grand Prize winner! I may have won a trip to Hollywood! It’s a shame it expired 21.5 years ago… but I’m still interested if I won? Should I scratch it off?

So that’s that! Worth $10 do you think? Or were these better left in the warehouse?

Posted in Collecting, Retro, Trading Cards | 2 Comments »

Zebra Riding?

May 1st, 2018

Many years ago when we went to Hawaii we were driving to the volcanoes on the big island and drove right past a paddock with a Zebra grazing in it. It seemed to be kept just like a horse, and it had some sort of equipment (a bridle?) on it. We were quite fascinated, didn’t take a photo (this was pre-smartphone), and had planned to stop and take a better look on the way home. However on the way back… it was gone.

Was it a pet? Did someone ride it? Apparently that’s unlikely… but not impossible.

That’s a photo of German soldiers riding Zebra over 100 years ago in Africa. In some german colonies in Africa horses were a luxury, and soldiers would sometimes ride Zebra instead. Apparently this wasn’t common (and some of the several photos may have been posed) but there are records of the beasts being trained and used as mounts. Here’s another photo from that era:

Zebras are not ideal mounts for several reasons:
– They are smaller and have weak backbones compared to horses
– They are very aggressive, even to the point of attacking humans
– They are very difficult to train
Basically, zebra aren’t domesticated, and training and riding them is a novelty. It’s difficult and expensive and often futile. But that hasn’t stopped people over the years, and there’s a wealth of curious images online if you search around.

Such as these:

That’s Baron Walter Rothschild, who famously trained Zebra to draw carriages. In the 1920s he even used them to drive him to Buckingham Palace to show them off! (He also had a galapagos tortoise mount, but thats another blog post…)

That’s another zebra carriage, this time in India in 1930. It’s a beautiful photo, but could that tiny fake horse have been happy drawing a gang of Thuggee cultists around at the end of a whip?!?

Another photo from early-20th century British colonial Africa, in which a stereotypical explorer dazzles the public back in England with photographs of his derring-do as his zebra mount jumps a stick held 10 cm from the ground. These photos seem to counter the claim zebra are unrideable, but those that have researched the topic say that methods of training in those days were brutal and cruel and cared more about the (typically wealthy) owner showing off the beast than it being an effective work animal.

That’s not to say the practise has faded away…

That was taken only 5 years ago in Texas, and you can find many similar photos online of people in America and around the world that take the time and patience to train zebra for either riding or dressage. It’s neither easy nor as effective as training horses (apparently their aggressive streak is hard to train away…) but if you’re the sort that likes to show off…

So back in 2007, that zebra we saw may have indeed been for riding! Maybe when we drove back and it was gone it was because the owner had saddled up and gone for a trot! And since zebra are very long-lived (up to 40 years!) there could be a zebra-rider trotting around Hawaii even today!

When I return to Hawaii I’ll keep my eyes peeled…

Posted in Animals, History | 1 Comment »

Meanwhile, At Work

April 21st, 2018

Some quick shots from my office…

Only two of the above we’re provided by me. The rest came from colleagues, friends or students. In time this was noticed, and other students thought it was a good idea…

So it spread! I put the four Australian ones on the side there, but again most were from others. As were…

Israel, Mexico, Hong Kong, Singapore, Austria, Norway! So many places I haven’t been (as well as some I have). Where will I get cards from in the future?

Posted in Collecting, Postcards | Comments Closed

Gun Sniper Leena Special

April 15th, 2018

I got it into my head that there were too many ‘model assembly’ posts here so cut back on them intentionally. But here I break my own rule because:

1) It’s been a while since I’ve made a ZOID.
2) This kit was a gift from JF.

The kit I refer to is this:

And here are all the pieces before I started assembly:

As usual with these kits, it seemed a bit over engineered, with 3 or 4 pieces going together to form what could have been one. But the quality control was fantastic and although more difficult than your average Gundam everything went together nicely:

Those are the legs and arms, just before I attached them to the rest of the body. It’s ridiculously articulated and I was amazed how well balanced it was:

Here’s the cockpit, complete with tiny pilot:

Yes the orange ‘glass’ canopy opens.

Now I’m no Z.O.I.D. fan (says the guy with 6 pricey kits…) so I can’t give many details about this robot but I can reveal that Gun Snipers are (apparently) semi-autonomous ‘Helic’ ZOIDs created using the ‘Organoid’ system. I’ve no idea who Leena is, but I’m guessing the ‘special’ thing about her ZOID is the ludicrous amount of weaponry it carries.

You see the above shot was only half way through. It took me at least as long again (several hours) to assemble all of the weapons:

Attaching them all to the ZOID itself was no easy task but I managed after a little bit of cursing…

It’s pretty great isn’t it! Here’s an overly-treated scale shot with a LEGO minifig:

Overall a fun build and a spectacular looking kit once complete! Thanks JF!

Posted in Blog, Crafts, Models, Otaku | Comments Closed

Videogaming Illustrated (Issue 4, Feb 1983)

April 8th, 2018

At a convention a few weeks ago for the princely sum of $5 I bought this:

It’s one of the very earliest video game magazines, dating to before the ‘crash of 1983’. It’s from the same publisher of the old sci-fi magazine Omni, and the format is very similar (silver pages, yellow pages with fiction, somewhat pretentious tone).

This was very much a magazine without an audience. The inclusion of fiction, the monthly news round up heavy on business content and the (repulsive) interview with Don Imus suggests they were going for the Playboy approach. So much so I’m surprised there’s no cheesecake photos!

That said it’s also an interesting curio from the earliest days of my favourite hobby! For instance I was surprised by the lavish adverts for Atari 2600 games:

(By the way I’m ripping off Ashens here and taking photos of the magazine on a couch rather than scanning it. Hey I’m lazy!)

And the lengthy strategy sections – which take up a decent amount of the magazine and cover arcade and 2600 games – are charmingly low-tech:

The middle one is a four page guide to the arcade game Kangaroo which was probably mostly forgotten even when this issue shipped!

There’s also a guide to third-party 2600 joysticks, a lengthy but superficial article about pinball machines, too much fiction and a lot of uninteresting (even then I suspect) ‘monthly news’.

What isn’t well-represented though are advertisements. I’ve shown some above, but there are very few in total and many of them are clearly there as part of some paid-content promotion:

That’s just one of two ads for Cosmic Creeps, an Atari 2600 game profiled and given a strategy guide in this very issue…

The other element common to today’s magazines that is almost entirely absent are screenshots! In fact, in the entire issue, there is a grand total on one real shot (as opposed to drawings of the screen) and this is it:

Can you name the game? (And yes, I suspect it may also be fake…)

Anyway this mag was sold at the con by a guy who flogs old magazines of many kinds, and at the same time I got some very old Dr Who magazines as well as a bunch of cheesecake horror mags. Why was he selling this one issue of a 35 year old gaming magazine? The cover!! It features a preview of sorts of Revenge Of The Jedi (tied to an article about the 2600 Jedi Arena) which includes this gem:

It was all mostly true, if a bit off with the date estimates!

Anyway a curio from the dawn of gaming time. This magazine would run another year and change names twice before becoming another victim of the crash that almost sunk the US industry, but from what I see here I struggle to wonder who bought it even then?

Posted in Games, Movies, Retro, Tech, Time | 1 Comment »