Robot Claw – Page 256 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

The Ballad Of Dust

April 29, 2019

At first I didn’t notice,
Or pretended to ignore.
Yet the more I used the camera,
The more I saw.

A blemish on the image,
A ghostly disc appeared.
What should never happen.
What we all feared.

Something on the lens
Left a shadow signature.
I cleaned and wiped and wiped and cleaned
But still it was in the picture!

The Internet to the rescue:
Force will remove it!
I shook the phone like a maniac
But all I did was move it!

I gave not up and set to work
Shaking like a fiend.
I shook so much I near passed out
My hand incarnadined.

And then when I came to
An image I did capture…

The photo was clear!
The dust was gone!

And in this home…
Was rapture.

I’ve been sorting through our attic, opening boxes that have been sealed for decades (yes literally) and unearthing all sorts of treasures. Some of it gets resealed and put back, some discarded, and a rare few things were so curious I brought them down for a closer look.

This past weekend I found ‘shrinkydink’ plastic! It wasn’t called that of course, but that’s what it was. I had to try it!

The idea is you draw directly onto the plastic then heat it in an oven so it shrinks. Sounds boring but it’s strangely amusing, and I couldn’t wait to see how old Grimace turned out! In the oven he went, and in an astonishingly short time he shrunk:

Here’s a before/after showing the scale:

Incredible! A quick glance will show the shrinking isn’t equal in both dimensions, so old mate Grimace here became squatter after he shrunk. For perfect shrinkydinks one would have to take this into consideration of course. I didn’t 🙂

Of course I made more, taking advantage of the transparent plastic to trace:

And soon enough all the usual suspects had been immortalized in ‘dink’ form:

Here’s an action shot captured mid-shrink, showing how they curl up as they miniaturize:

At this point I could insert a nostalgic memory of as a youth shrinking chip bags in the oven (since they were briefly manufactured using this type of plastic) or even how the Australian mint almost released shrinkable currency when they transitioned into plastic… but I’ll leave such things to the commenters 🙂

Anyway I’ve got loads more of this plastic. Want a shrinkydink of your own? Put in a request and I’ll make you one!

Happy Birthday Game Boy!

April 21, 2019

30 years ago today Nintendo released their first portable game system: the Game Boy.

That’s a very early Japanese advert touting the ‘handy game machine’ (being played by young boys obviously lost/abandoned in the Australian outback)! As you see the system was very much marketed at children, but as we know now went on to become beloved by players of all ages.

The Game Boy went on to sell almost 120 million units in the fourteen years it was sold, and directly led into the followup Game Boy Advance and then DS series. Many competing handheld consoles came and went, but none made much of a dent in a market absolutely dominated by Nintendo’s Game Boys.

I’ve loved this device since it was released, and to this day handhelds (especially Nintendo ones) are my favorite game systems. Between the Game Boy and it’s followups I own over twenty pieces of hardware and over six hundred games! Needless to say the release of the Game Boy 30 years back had a direct effect on my life 🙂

I’ve written about my (original model) Game Boy collection before. You can read that here (and yes I misspelled the console name throughout). In preparing this post I dug out my collection for another look-see. Here’s a shot of a portion of the game boxes I mentioned five years ago:

And here’s another shot of all five of my Game Boys (all of which still work):

I was looking for a particular game to feature, and found these four Japanese release Pokémon games I bought to play since I couldn’t wait for the USA releases:

(Yes I ended up buying all the USA versions as well, except for Pokémon Card 2 which was never localized!)

And since my original post I’ve added a few more games to my collection, including two more beautiful Wizardry games:

And this guy, bought for ¥100 in Japan last January:

I fired up the above just now on one of my Game Boy Pockets just for some nostalgia…

It was terrible 🙂

The Game Boy may be ‘obsolete’ now, but it will never be forgotten. It’s legacy includes not just numerous followup systems, but also a library of amazing games many of which are still great fun today. The systems themselves are notoriously robust so if you’ve got one in an attic somewhere why not get it out, pop in some batteries, and fire up Tetris again for some late 80’s gaming nostalgia?