Backed-Up Pictures

 I'm back! You won't know about this, but last week my laptop blue-screen-of-death'd with some kind of corrupted .dll file, and I basically had to wipe the thing clean back to the factory fresh blank slate in order to get it to work again. Windows 10 and everything, which needed upgrading back to modern standards. It was quite a hassle. So the good news is that I didn't have to buy a new laptop! But I was unable to recover a lot of my picture files, which were not backed-up. Why am I sharing this? I don't know. Just to make a record of it for no reason. And to maybe share the lesson of backing up your files regularly to an external drive or whatever. Don't worry, I still had a lot of Minty Pictures on my phone to transfer back, re-sort, and comment on.

Is this an appropriate picture for my computer crash story? I don't know. Not really gossip. Unless it was [this person] who did it?! No! [That person] would never do that! There. That's more like gossip.

Maybe my computer was hexed by a witch? This little witch looked rather hand-made out of clay or something. Which is neat for a witch type of merchandise. Really makes it feel a lot more enchanted-able. I couldn't think of a good word to use there, so I made one up.

I laughed out loud in the Lego Store when I overheard a group of girls looking at this set, and one of them said "Jafar? Why is that a figure of Jafar?" And I was thinking... Did you SEE the movie?! Sorry that the Lego set super-spoiled the ending of Aladdin for you!

This bed supports me! Both literally and metaphorically!

Um... why is there a Star Trek game about the Battle of Wolf 359, involving away teams and Borg drones? Wasn't Wolf 359 a massive starship massacre? Also, there were NO Federation survivors. So.... why even make a game when you know the outcome, from the TV show? I know, I read the box, the game is for after the battle, I was just being snarky about the title of it.

A medieval game about drinking, drinking glasses included. Sounds like a complicated way to be drinking alcohol, but I guess it might be fun.

Chomp! We've always liked that word since the McRib commercials from the 80's. McRib.... CHOMP!

My Hero Academia is an anime show about kids learning to be superheroes. Girl Power is a cheeky title for a card game expansion set, but it's clever and appropriate, if you know the show.

My friend is a sucker for booster packs. At least we can share pictures of some of the cards. And it gives me an excuse to plug the show. It's full of all the cliche super hero nonsense you could think of. Like, in the best way.

Nothing about this label says it has any seafood in it, but the little octopus character is telling me otherwise. My friend seems to not like any kind of seafood, for some reason, so sorry your little character scared him away.

I'm not crazy, I've seen them have McNugget-style dipping sauce packs for Big Mac Sauce. While travelling, I asked if they had any, and they didn't, but they instead surprised me with a bunch in a box instead! That's some extra-level service from a McDonald's, cool! So many stories about Fast Food service are bad, we need to share more stories like this.

Looks like the old sign for "Savage Taxidermy" is faded away. I don't think they've been in business for a long time now, but the sign was a funny landmark to pass. It wasn't just taxidermy; it was SAVAGE Taxidermy. Ouch! Hahaha. Oh well, I remember what the sign once said.

The brisket! We drove all the way down to visit the family, at least they fed us the good brisket. Oh yeah, family, too. I'd rather take a picture of the brisket. Just kidding, you know I like to keep this blog anonymous. Would anybody like pictures of the family?

It's a summer time mash-up of different birthdays, Mother's and Father's Days, various other holidays, whatever. Don't make us buy another Carvel Ice Cream Cake for each one of those. One day to celebrate is fine.

Did I mention bad Fast Food stories? Sorry Arby's. Your shrink-flation portion size reduction has removed you from my lunch rotation. I always used to get the French Dip, which is super tasty, but the last several times I went, the amount of roast beef in my sandwich has gotten smaller and smaller. They understand I'm paying for FOOD, right? It wasn't just one time this happened, it was several. Arby's commercial says "We have THE MEATS" they need to add "we didn't say how much; it's not much. But... we have them."

She got a Stella! Gotta be proud of little Anya Forger from the Spy Family anime. A perfect example of figure collecting, every time you see this, you'll remember the moment from the show and smile. Worth it.

My friend really liked the Darkstalkers video game, which was made by the same company that did Street Fighter 2, and came out at the same time, but was never quite as popular, for no reason. The characters were all generic movie monster types, and the cat-girl Felicia was one of his favorites. You can find a few good figures for it, at least.

Clever that they do not put a date on this shirt, so you can wear it each year. Free Comic Book Day is the first Saturday in May each year. You might think you are getting free comic books, but most of them are small lead-ins to other big books; basically ads. But hey, they're free! So why not get some anyway?

My Little Pony in Oz! Cool. Pay no attention to the pony behind the curtain.

How cute is this? They sell little rooms sized for your figures to fit in. Who else wants to make little stop-motion movies with this? You could make your own little sitcoms.

If I had the money for it, I would totally collect these Bishoujo statues. They make anime-style versions of non-anime figures, like this awesome Starscream here from Transformers. Fun trivia fact: the original name for this character was "Ulktar", which was rejected by the Hasbro executive, and the character background info was assigned to the other guy who basically named and developed all the first-round Transformers characters in a single weekend.

Here have another picture of Starscream outside the box in the display cabinet. Spoiler alert: They "killed" Starscream in the movie, but the character was so popular that they made him a ghost and eventually brought him back in the cartoon series. Several other characters were killed in the movie... and not bought back. Which was kind of a big deal for kids at the time. They wanted you to buy new figures, but ouch... you don't need to KILL the ones I already have!

They did not have any booster packs for the Spy Family expansion for Weiss Schwarz card game, they were all sold out, no surprise. I don't play the game, but I totally would have gotten a few packs, just to see the artwork and take a chance at getting some cool cards.

Plenty of packs available for another great series; Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure. It seems like an impossible task to make card game cards out of the characters in the show, since most of them have amazingly over-powered abilities. That's the charm of the show, how they figure out how to defeat a guy that can um... freeze time for 10 seconds. You can do a lot in 10 seconds to a helpless opponent!

Roger roger! The Star Wars Battle Droids were so charming. Nobody questions the phrase "Roger Roger" as a modern-reality phrase from military slang for "RR" or "Received and Recognized" shorthand speech. Who cares? It's just a movie. You're not supposed to think about things like, why would droids know that.

Check it out. It's anime Luffy vs Netflix live-action Luffy. Both of them claim they will be King of The Pirates! To be fair, I tried watching the anime, and it was very... hard to watch. Yet somehow, the Netflix version is AMAZING. I say skip the anime and watch the Netflix version, if you want to give this a watch.

Awwww yeah. Cheese fries at Fuddruckers. How many times have I taken pictures similar to this? Too many?

The porch screen makes this look like an old-school video game screen! There's a woodpecker on the bird feeder. It's content to just eat the seeds and not like, peck the thing open. Woodpeckers are a lot bigger than I thought they were. I mean, it's not huge, but a lot bigger than the other birds that we usually see here.