Robot Claw – Page 6 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Finally, Chinese Snake Films

November 28, 2025

We spotted the above DVD in the discount bin at Walmart. A quick glance at the back revealed that one film was Thai and the other two Chinese, and since the Chinese ones were giant snake films I could hardly hand over my crisp $5 fast enough!

Let’s get that first film out of the way first. Released in 2023 in Thailand as Thesis and then internationally as Immortal Species it’s now apparently called Jurassic Croc (the same name as an older film) and hardly worth its share of the price ($1.67).

This story is about a bunch of fools that go into the jungle in search of a magical plant (because of ‘the thesis’) and eventually run afoul of a gigantic crocodile. It’s a trash piece written and directed by a jackleg and would only interest lunatics so I won’t waste any more words on it here. Zero thumbs up.

Deep Sea Python is an entirely different experience! In recent years China has been spewing out giant snake films in remarkable quantities and I’ve always wanted to watch some.

The first fifteen minutes or so were mostly incoherent, with a mix of manatees, violence and slapstick and and yes that was an autocorrection but it effectively conveys how strange the film began so I’m keeping it.

After this mad intro, the protagonist, his fat friend, and two hot girls go through a whirlpool and up on (let’s call it) ‘Monster Island’ and things ramp up considerably. Aside from the giant python there’s skull crabs and killer bees and ‘trap vines’ and all sorts of gunplay, murder, public urination and even (let’s call him) ‘Chinese Tarzan’.

Of course the effects are terrible, the giant snake suffers from scale issues (which is common even in big budget creature films) and frankly the story is so half-baked it’s raw but it doesn’t matter at all because the main heroine is played by an actress (Qian Qian Ma) so pretty it was love at first sight for this starry-eyed geezer. For her alone, this is an easy 11 out of 10.

Deep Sea Mutant Snake is the result of someone going on a bender and eating seventeen bags of Korean cotton candy and having such an extreme case of sugar shock he wrote a script that wouldn’t have been possible from a sound mind.

My best attempt at a synopsis: Chinese James Bond fights 1000 snakes on a cruise liner before blowing up the ship to protect it from a kilometer-long mutant snake. He and his party of survivors end up on (let’s call it) ‘Monster Island’ where they fight barnacles and a mega-spider and (surprise surprise) the mutant snake that survived the explosion.

The film rollicks along at a cracking pace, and there’s no film ever made or that will ever be made with more snake action that this one, but ultimately this only served to teach us that (unfortunately) snakes aren’t everything. This was entertaining in its stupidity with better effects, more monsters and a hero both bolder and more likable than in the previous film, but in the end it lacked a soul. I’d give it three snakes out of five.

There’s a world of Chinese ‘creature films’ out there now, many of which are difficult if not impossible to watch in the west. As craptacular as these two snake movies were, they’ve certainly whetted my appetite for more in this genre, and they won’t be my last.

New Japanese TCGs (Part 4)

November 26, 2025

Time for some more opening of TCG card packs, and yes most of these still date from my summer Japan trip. I’m good at letting packs of cards ‘age’ before opening 🙂

Weiss Schwarz is a Japanese game that’s been going for over 15 years now and has well over 100 expansions. It’s famous for all the expansions being based on licensed properties, and a large percentage of anime from recent decades seem to have had a Weiss expansion.

Here I’m opening packs from Goddess Of Victory Nikke, Azur Lane (both are gacha games) and Dandadan (a current anime). Each pack contains 8 cards, at least one of which is foil. The Nikke cards are shown above and are attractive, but somewhat boring as game cards.

At first glance the Azur Lane cards are very similar, and I think this is a weakness (or maybe strength) of this game, since the cards can be so alike they look formulaic. Both the Nikke and Azur Lane cards use art taken directly from the games.

The Dandadan cards use art from the anime, which I feel are mostly unattractive which is a crime since it’s such a well-animated show. You’ll note by the way that all these cards have a load of minuscule-font text, which is a feature of Weiss that is often criticized.

As for the game itself… I have no comment. Something you’ll often hear about Weiss is ‘no-one plays it’ and it’s almost exclusively a game for collectors. Whether this is true or not I don’t know, but I imagine the publisher hardly cares since it’s currently riding the highest success it’s ever had.

Here’s another Divine Cross card pack, this a licensed set based on a game called Duel Princess. As with the Divine Cross set I previously posted about, the existence of this game is a mystery to me and its choice of licensed properties even more mysterious!

The cards are extremely colourful and attractive, and the foil example (middle bottom) shines like a rainbow in the light. These are much more visually appealing than the Weiss cards shown above, which makes me wonder why this game isn’t more popular.

The answer of course is the choice of properties: Duel Princess is an obscure Japanese indie tactics RPG that was briefly famous for being pulled from the Switch story within a day or so of release. I found this out because I had planned on buying it 🙂

Hololive is a very deep rabbit hole, but the short version is that it is a collection of ‘Virtual Idols’ that began on YouTube and have since expanded into all types of licensing. Now there’s a much-hyped card game, and even more surprisingly one that has seen a US release!

The cards are a bit boring on the whole, but the special ones are very attractive. The second from left in the top row is a full art textured holo card, and if you’re a fan of that character you’d probably love to own it (and indeed it’s currently $6 on secondary markets).

But once again does anyone play this game? I doubt it. And with the cards mostly being unattractive, does this even have a future as a collectible? I’m skeptical.

Here’s Oshi Push another Vtuber card game which I think is from a Hololive competitor. This one was kickstarted two years ago and recently made it to general release. I’d never heard of the game or the characters before buying this pack. (And I may be bending the rules here since I’m not sure a Japanese version of this exists.)

I feel like a broken record in this post but the cards are a little boring. This is I feel a weakness of all these vtuber stables: with so many characters only a feel stand out and the others all look generic. There’s nothing on these cards that stands out to me.

There were two foils, with one of them much sparklier than the other. This card had a different feel as well, as if it was slightly thicker due to the foil layer. Probably not ideal if this is supposed to be a competitive game!

But again, I doubt anyone is actually playing with these cards.

And largely we have the new Godzilla card game. This was briefly difficult to find – I wanted to buy a pack in Japan and couldn’t find it in stock – but seems to have failed since it’s everywhere now.

The cards are photos from movies, and as you can see look ok if you’re a fan, but I would have preferred actual art. Indeed this game suffers from the same issue the new Ultraman TCG has, where the cards are much less attractive than Godzilla cards in other games!

I did get this card in my pack. It’s rainbow foiled, textured and has raised gold printing. In fact it’s possibly the nicest card I’ve ever pulled from an American TCG pack. I looked online and it’s only ‘worth’ $1 so it’s hardly a treasure, but were I a super Godzilla fan the chase for these super fancy cards would certainly tempt me to buy more packs 🙂

Postcrossing Update

November 21, 2025

It’s been about seven months so it’s time for another update on my Postcrossing hobby.

As of today, I’ve sent 1938 postcards and received 1926, an increase of about 300 (of each type) since my last update. My average of about 40 cards per month remains unchanged.

The top countries haven’t changed since my last update – Germany remains #1 – but there’s been a few new countries entering on the low end of the lists. Since April, for the first time, I have sent cards to Bahrain (which took 83 days to arrive) and Chile, and received cards from Chile, Denmark, Macao and Vietnam.

The variety of the cards I’m receiving are the same as always, and you can see a few examples in the above photos. I don’t have a lot of specific card preferences in my request list, and as a result I get a very wide variety of different cards.

I feel like traditional tourism photocards – one of the card types I do mention on my request list – are on the decline. I assume, much like the USA, these are becoming difficult to buy in other countries as well.

There’s been a rise in AI art cards, and I assume some of these are self-made by the senders. AI art for Postcrossing meetup cards is extremely common now as well, and I received way more of them these past few months than in any previous period:

I’ve come to find these a bit impersonal and boring, so I may add to my bio that I’d rather not received them.

The above card was laminated after the stamp was applied and obviously arrived, which makes me feel like trying this myself!

I received the above two cards on the same day, one sent from France and one sent from The Netherlands. While superficially similar the print quality on the left example is better and both came from different printers!

Speaking of advertising cards, the above two are pretty. I’ve got enough advertising cards over the years I could probably do a blog post dedicated to them. Should I?

The above was my very first ‘packaging’ card. It’s not uncommon for users to ask for cards cut from food packaging, and I was surprised to actually receive one. It seems to be a pasta product from Italy (although the card came from Russia) and I took the photo like that to show that the package even has braille on it!

Afterwards, I got the address of a Japanese girl who requested food packaging and said she was a big fan of Wednesday. So I bought some Wednesday cereal and cut a card from the box!

I received six maxicards, which are cards with stamps that match the image. Three are Australian, and the others are from Belarus, England and Estonia.

The Belarusian card had this beautiful postmark!

My three favourites these past months are shown above, all from Japan. The top card features ‘Tawawa-Chan’, the mascot of Kyoto tower, and I believe I’d sent that card to us once myself. The big one on the left shows Ken ‘Matsuken’ Matsudaira and again I’ll possibly do a blog post on him in the future. The rightmost features Sayumi Michishige, ex-member of Hello Project, a Japanese idol band Kristin and I used to enjoy (Yossie was named after a member). The girl that sent the Sayumi card was amazed I knew who it was.

Users still (on the whole) go out of the way to use interesting and varied stamps since most members appreciate that. About a year ago I added (to my bio) a preference for shaped stamps and now I get loads of them! Here’s some examples:

And some more…

And this is only about half of the ones I got these few months!

The above two were the biggest stamps I got this time, and both of them took up over half the card. I wish America printed stamps this large, since I’d welcome the chance to not have to write as much.

For the first time I’ve considered slowing down and sending less, or perhaps taking a break entirely. I’m on the fence though, and will probably continue at least through 2000 sent cards. We’ll see after that.