A Package From Miss M!

So since I am still playing catch up with my back-log from last year's posts. I thought this might be the perfect opportunity to write about this terribly over-due post about a a package sent to me by none other than Miss M of "Diary of a Dorkette" fame, and my awesome co-host over at Geek Fallout! 

This was a semi-sort-of-Halloween themed package that unfortunately arrived the day after Halloween. So it didn't make it into that countdown, and it got buried under my November break, and the December countdowns for Creepmas and Christmas. But there was a hand-made card by Miss M, which I adore!

Also included were some Halloween-y accessories and decor. This awesome Trick-or-Treat sack, and ghostly bandana for example! 

I handed this item off to my daughter who hung it up in her bedroom. Dig that black cat!

Some random books and other fun items included: A Wizard of Oz LGB, a Jetsons Activity PAd, and a dart and target for Boom Co.

This Mario Bros. Wii U Happy Meal set I let my boys play with, as they are both Wii U obsessed, and love them some Mario Brothers. You fire the colored koopa troopa shells out of the Wii U Remote and into the target!

Blind-bgged mini-figures! I got Scooby Doo's Frankenstein's Monster and Cylindria from Pac-Man's ghostly adventures! I think my favorite guy is the blue ghost!

Slinky dog! This is a Burger King Kids' Club meal toy put out in 1996. I honestly can't believe that Toy Story was put out in 1995... making it a 20 year old film now. 20 YEARS.

Also included were these Mortal Kombat action figures! Rayden, Sub-Zero, Smoke, Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, and Liu Kang! All my favorites!

Then we have the Street Fighter action figures Ken, Chun-Li, M Bison, Guile, and Sagat (With a Cobra Alley Viper from 1992 on the far right).

From the old Toy Biz X-Men line, we have GIDEON!!!! armored Wolverine, and Sauron (I found a Sauron at Goodwill already, but his limbs don't move because he was a part of some display piece thing that he was glued into once upon a time. It's nice to now have a poseable one). I think I was the most excited to have Gideon since he was one of my favorite villains back in the 90's.

One of the coolest items to appear in this package from Miss M was the Toybiz Magneto vehicle, "The Magnetron". Simultaneously goofy and cool in equal measures I want you to now stop for a moment and let it sink in that Toybiz made a CAR for MAGNETO. Not only that... but a CAR with GIANT U-SHAPED MAGNETS ON IT. This thing is a work of art. A true masterpiece. 

But the items that literally stole my breath away? These fellas. From the Kenner-produced 80's toy line "Superpowers" featuring the heroes and villains of the DCU... Aquaman, Lex Luthor, and (Hal Jordan) Green Lantern!!! I never owned any of these as a kid... but honestly if I could have picked out ANY three characters to track down and own now, it would probably be these three (Although Firestorm and Brainiac would round out my top 5). I always LOVED Lex Luthor in his watermelon color-schemed battle suits. Aquaman? Yes. Just yes. And I want to see Funko put together an entire set of Chromatic Lanterns in their ReAction line. Because I and obsessed with the ROYGBIV Lanterns. So any version of Hal is welcome on my shelves.

That's it for tonight kids! My thanks to the always generous and gracious Miss M for her donations to the Geek Cave! Be sure to check out her blog Diary of a Dorkette, and to listen to her on the Geek Fallout Podast! I'll be back soon with some Geeky Goodwill Goodies... so until then, Happy Hunting!

League of Extraordinary Bloggers: Ultimate Arcade

It's League of Extraordinary Bloggers time once again kids!!! What's the burning topic this week? 

You’ve decided to build an addition onto your house, 

a rec room that will feature your very own fantasy video arcade. 

What games are on your shopping list?

Pew-pew-pew!!!

I'm not much of a gamer to be honest. I am a big original Nintendo fan, but only a handful of those games really turned into obsessions when I was younger (Super Mario Brothers, Contra, Legend of Zelda, and Metroid... my GODS the Metroid!!! I won Metroid enough times in a row to unlock the suit-less Samus myself without needing to get the cheat code from anyone else. My ONE geek achievement I was really proud of back then).

I get to play the exact same game again but with Green Hair!?!?!
Hells YES!

I played the Atari 2600 endlessly at my aunts house as a wee-bit but mainly only played the original Mario Bros. game, a defective JOUST game that would freeze up after finishing the first level, and HOURS upon HOURS of pinball simulator, Midnight Magic. 

This seriously almost ate my soul.
It looks hungry, right?

I suppose if I were filling a rec room I would start with those. I mean, I know they aren't strictly "arcade" picks, but I'd have a classic NES and an old Atari 2600 and the cartridges I loved. As for actual arcade games... I would only have one serious pick. There was only one game I played enough as a kid to want to own. Let me paint you a picture. 

It was a dark and smoky night in the bar/restaurant of my youth literally called "The Pizza Place" (That was indeed the creative, and inspired name of the establishment) and both my mother and my aunt were there with their friends, so naturally there was no one at home to watch me. I was about... I want to say 7 or 8 years old but the serpentine mists of time, much like the roiling clouds of cigarette smoke that polluted "The Pizza Place", make it hard for me to remember. I mean both of those things actually make it hard for me to remember. Probably more from the smoke honestly. I imagine I must have suffered some serious smoke-inhalation-induced memory loss from my time spent there. 

It was like this... only smokier... and bar...ier.

When you are someone's mother, and you're out on the town with your sister and your 7 year old kid, and you are desperately vying for "Mother of the Year" where do you go? A smoky bar that manages in a speakeasy fashion to hide its own nature by selling cheap pizza as a cover. And how does the aforementioned 7 year old stay occupied while he is trapped in what is surely a booze-soaked ring occupying a level of Dante's Inferno? Simple. You have him bring along some toy cars, let him try a sip of Auntie's "special chocolate milk" (Kaluha and milk), and ply him with quarters. Quarters to be spent not just the Chiclets-dispensing gum machine... but for this:

Pure. Yellow. Sex.

Ms. Pac-Man. That is correct sir. She was the one glowing bastion in the smoky beyond-the-Thunderdome  pizza wasteland that I was trapped in Friday night after Friday night (oh yeah, there were several trips to "The Pizza Place" when I was young). I knew even as a child there was something... sexy? about this version of Ms. Pac-Man. Dat ass. Dose legs. Her brightly rouged cheeks and pouty lips. Even the ghost in the picture was excited. 

I was given a stack of quarters and politely told to f--k off and go play Ms. Pac-Man or go hop in a van with a kindly stranger until my family members were done drinking and ready to go home. Oh the memories. 

Actually what I remember most was feeding that saucy little tart quarter after quarter and moving her around the maze gobbling up about a quarter of the board before watching her devoured by angry spirits EVERY TIME. That clutzy dame was always twisting her ankle and falling down in the woods just as, like THREE of those ghostly bastards were creeping up behind her. I was 7 okay? I wasn't a serious gamer. I knew no strategy. I was just hypnotized by her...

...something. Qualities. I don't know what. 

But GODS didn't it make the time in that blasted, craterous, smoldering hell-hole of a pizzeria a bit more bearable. My glassy, red-rimmed eyes would dully watch as she was tackled and eaten time after time after time, and once my quarter stack diminished to nothing? Well then I would curl myself up in a ball on the booze-soaked carpet under one of the tables and fitfully dream:

So yes. I would bring Ms. Pac-Man into my home. I would sweep her off her disturbingly shapley legs in that smoky barren world of special chocolate milk and terrible pizza and bring her into my home. My little pixellated angel in yellow and hot-pink. I never played the original Pac-Man game when I was a kid, but I did watch the cartoon show: 

Wait... what? Where's Ms. Pac-Man?
Is that Donna Reed?

And I remember desperately wanting to know what chocolate-covered Pac-pellets tasted like. We also owned this Christmas gem: 

Which featured an only slightly less sexualized Ms, Pac-Man...
If you're into knobby knees.
Which I am.

I LOVED this Christmas album. It is almost ear-bleedingly bad to listen to as an adult, but I got excited as a monkey on straight up crack when my mom would drag out this album around Christmas time. I have the entire album in MP3 form now thanks to the INTERNET. My family HATES it. Not very Christmas of them, if you ask me. 

So I would pretty much just feature a table-version of Ms. Pac-Man in our rec-room if I could find one for a decent price. I mean I got way further with Samus than I ever dreamed of with Ms. Pac-Man, but Ms. Pac-Man just always had more of a certain...

...charm I think. Yeah. 

Anyway... let's see what some of the rest of the League is feeding their quarters and tokens into this week:

- Shawn over at Branded in the 80's makes some great picks (including a sassy little sweet-tart I may have talked about here...) and he's rigged the machines so we don't need tokens! 

- Rich over at The Nerd Nook makes some awesome co-op-pop-culture gaming choices including some mighty mutants (of at least two different kinds... three if you count the 3-eyed fish...)!

- Kal of Calvin's Canadian Cave of Cool lists some truly excellent and truly classic oldies-but-goodies.

- Jason over at Rediscover the 80's wants variety! He wants it all! He had me at "neon-blacklight air hockey".

- The Lee and Linz over at Pop Rewind also feature a familiarly fetching yet flumoxing floozy! And some other pinball-y stuff too. But I'm mostly talking about Ms. Pac-Man here. 

- Our fearless League Leader over at Cool and Collected goes all Pop-Culture Pin-Ball on us!

- The Trash Man over at Pop Pop! It's Trash Culture lists his favorite cabinets. They get pretty rage-y.

That's it for me tonight kids! I'll be back soon with honest-to-gravy Geeky Goodwill Goodies soon enough! until then, Happy Hunting!

Non-Goodwill Purchases

Not everything the Goodwill geek buys is actually from Goodwill. In fact... not all of it is even second-hand. I do occasionally buy things for full-price elsewhere. Let me show off some of my recent purchases. 

Jaime Hood over at Shezcrafti tipped me off to these Bicycle Zombie Playing cards back in April. I bought them just a few weeks later for myself and I was NOT disappointed. Go check out her review to find out more about them. 

I FINALLY got a copy of Kill Bill Vols. 1&2 on DVD... and then realized for about 5 bucks more I could have gotten them both on Blue-Ray. Sigh. But I'm a big fan of these movies, so I don't really mind what format I'm watching them in. 

Picked up the first trade of Ben Templesmith's Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse: Birds, Bees, Blood, & Beer second-hand at Bull Moose Music in Bangor, Maine. They sell both new and used-but-like-new books/DVDs/games/CDs/everything. I've been dying to check out this series for a long, long time now, about a maggot who controls a corpse like a marionette in a city of supernatural characters... I haven't read it yet but I look forward to it at the very least for the art. 

Finally got around to checking out Brian K. Vaughn's new space-opera-slash-new-parent-rom-com. I feel like this first volume stumbles a bit. It feels like Vaughn is setting absolutely zero limits for what he might include in the story, which just makes every new crazy thing feel a little mundane after a while... and the bits where he shoe-horns in parenting conversations from our own modern society (statistics about gun safety, hemorrhoid jokes, breast-feeding pros and cons) feel a little anachronistic. Overall though I do like the pacing of the story and the characters have been fun. I've heard some of the controversy over the sexual content of the series and I will say that it's weird how much sex is included in a story about new parents on the run through the galaxy. It feels like the creators are trying to work out some sort of issues. 

I picked these up for a dollar apiece from some machines at a bounce-house play-palace place they have near here that we sometimes take the kids to. LOVE THEM. Each of my boys got their own Venom and Thing to play with as well. 

As a big fan of mini-figures as well as Transformers I was pretty excited to find these Rescue-Bot mini-figures at Toys R Us for a stunning 1.99 apiece. I was a huge fan of the Hasbro Robot Heroes line when that was being put out, and now that Rescue-Bots have sort of taken their place it's nice to see some of the characters still getting the mini-fig love. 

While at Toys R Us I got one of these awesome Pac-Man arcade candy tins, which I've seen ALL over the internet, not to mention over at Reis O'Brien's Lair of the Dork Horde. Incredibly cool. 

This zombie clown was .50 cents out of  a gumball machine at a locla Chinese Restaurant. 

At Target I found this set of Marvel Avengers Chibis set. They're adorable and included are all of the Avengers, Loki, Fury, Coulson, and plain-clothes Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, and Bruce Banner. There were also a Hawkeye sticker and a couple of chromed out Iron Man and Hulk figures, which I didn't really care about... but pretty. 

A couple of brand new books I recently picked up (At Wal-Mart and TJ Maxx respectively) are Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave and Libba Bray's The Diviners. I love Rick Yancey's books. I have read the entire Monstrumologist series, and the first book in the Alfred Kropp series, and been blown away by everything so far. I hope the buzz surround the 5th Wave isn't just smoke being blown. The Diviners just looks and sounds interesting. So... yeah.

Last but not least are these Slush Puppie candies, which I found in a local chain store called Reny's. Each of these were .99 cents apiece. The fruity tubes are terrible. Just horrible. Rancid tasting actually. The stuff in the middle was sort of sticky and unpleasantly gritty to chew. But I'm saving the wrapper because I love Slush Puppies and I am a hoarder. The cups are inverted lollipops (the straw and the "pile" of slush at the top) and the cup itself is filled with sour powder to dip it in. These will never be opened as it would completely ruin the effect. I suspect they probably taste as terrible as the fruity tubes though. 

That's it for me tonight guys. I'm exhausted from talking about all this wasteful spending outside Goodwill. I'm feeling dirty and guilty and awww... who am I kidding. I love this stuff. 

I'll be back soon with straight-up legit Geeky Goodwill  Goodies though! So until then, Happy Hunting!