Monday, February 29, 2016

We Are Eight

Hard to believe that this blog is now eight years old.


Look at him, he's grown so much. So what have I been up to since my last entry? 

Well for one thing, I finally got some of my pesky wisdom teeth taken out last week.


I'll spare you from what the actual teeth looked like, but they weren't pretty. I only got the two teeth in the right side of my mouth taken out but I have to say I feel much better now they're out. This was something vibe been putting off for years, Lower Righty's been giving me pain for ages ever since it fractured some time ago. Yeah, it's been hurting so bad there were times where I was planning on taking it out a la Tom Hanks in Cast Away. You know, that bit with the ice skate? That was me for a while. But anyway it's gone now and the spot where the tooth was is only slightly sore. That's a win, I guess.


I also visited the "new" Nintendo NY store in Manhattan. Well, it's pretty much the same Nintendo World store that's been there, but with a better layout. They've added big tvs to demo the WiiUs, so people can watch you suck at Mario Kart 8 on a screen that can be seen from the Today Show studio. It's a big change since this store opened up when Gamecubes were the console they were showing off, so this was quite an upgrade.


This was cool / I want it. I've seen Master Swords before, but that's a Master Swird you can actually cut someone with and sadly I have to add it to my "crazy crap I'd buy if I won the lottery" list.


The Nintendo Museum they have on the top floor got some new display cases, this one themed around Super Mario Maker. These are the actual layouts from the original Super Mario Bros. From all my time playing Mario Maker, making these simple, yet iconic level designs is a lot harder than it looks.


A better look at a few levels designs, these are from Super Mario 3. Slopes are tough to implement, I guess.


I want to steal this and hang it on my wall, and I know damn well I wasn't the only one there that was contemplating sneaking back in after hours.


And of course Pokemon has its own corner of the store, this being one of their many plush displays. All of the Pokemon you see here were modeled after Beanie Babies, with normal and sleeping variants. What excites me was that almost all the Eeveelutions had representations here, save for Umbreon and Eevee itself. Vaporeon is my favorite, so of course I was excited to see that they were the most popular. Yeah, the Slowpokes and Charmanders were almost gone but screw it, Vaporeon's getting love and of course I picked up both versions.



I don't know how much this giant Substitute cost, but I wasn't willing to lug it around the city for a few hours, plus the train ride home. I know I've seen weirder things around the city, but I didn't feel like carrying anything that day.



And of all things, Kirby had a pretty impressive display, getting the same amount of floor space reserved for the likes of popular, yet nerdy games like Splatoon and Animal Crossing. Kirby, being a round pink ball, lends himself quite well to plush dolls, so seeing plush of ANY character aside from him and popular characters like King Dedede and Meta Knight is a rare sight. Sure there was a Waddle Dee but Chef Kawasaki here is just so esoteric of a character (appeared as a miniboss in ONE game and its remake, in addition to a minor role in the Kirby anime) that I decided to buy it on the spot, even before I got to the Vaporeons.


Here's some old Game & Watches. They're a mainstay at the displays in this store, but I've never seen a few of these before. They look like weird, mutant calculators but they play simple monochrome games. But apparently these two are Super Game & Watches and they play their games in color. Since these are from the early 80s, I'm gonna guess that color was green.



Back during Valentine's Day, I spent the day as I always spend that day: feeling bad about myself. But even that gets old after a few hours so I went down to the local Dairy Queen and got their Singles Blizzard. If I remember right, it was peanut butter ice cream that had caramel and fudge and loneliness. It turned out to taste much better than I hoped, and since it was Valentine's Day, getting my hopes up by ice cream would definitely be the highlight of not only that day, but the entire month. 



And speaking of food being a highlight of the day, I managed to snag the lone strawberry glazed doughnut at a work meeting. There's always one in every assortment and it's usually snatched up before I ever get to the box. Since I've got a good 15 years on most of the other people I work with, I was the only one who cared about it. Either way, it made that meeting glide by, nevermind that the sugar from the doughnuts I ate exceeded the amount of doughnuts I usually eat, which is zero, was probably what caused it.


And now I'm going to counter the good food with...this. This is Burger King's Buttery XL Cheeseburger. Remember the Good Morning Burger from the Simpsons?


Well, even though they promised rich, creamery butter, the reality was that it was just a weird, wide burger BK made to fit on a chicken sandwich bun. It says it was buttery, but it was more like it was coated with globs of what I hoped was mayo, so I can't really say that there was any false advertising going on here. All in all, it was pretty good, butter or not.



I know that I said that I reached Peak Stuff and that still reigns true, but I couldn't resist getting John Oliver's Funko Pop. If you haven't seen Last Week Tonight, I strongly urge you to do so. With all the shows the Daily Show  has been responsible for siring the past few years, this is the one I feel is the closest to recapturing the Jon Stewart-era greatness. Samantha Bee's Full Frontal and Colbert's Late Show are steadily getting better, too, but Last Week Tonight has been firing from all cylinders from Day 1, the latest Best Thing is their coverage on Donald Drumpf.
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Oh yeah, I ended up buying about four more over the past month, most of them variants of BMO from Adventure Time. There's like 7 versions of him and the only one I'm missing is the Glow In The Dark one from a few Comic Cons ago.  It's the only one that's worth over $100 and I'm hesitant to pull the trigger on it right now. I'm hoping for some eBay miracle or something.

Until then, I'm done with these Pop things for now. Until I browse eBay at 2am again so...expect to see me update on another new pile of stuff next month.

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