I've been blogging for a year... Yesterday?

So I saw that Dex over at AEIOU and Sometimes Why? was celebrating his second blog-i-versary (his term... not mine) back on July 13th.

THEN I saw that Erick over at the Wonderful Wonderblog was celebrating 7 YEARS!!!

THEN... I saw that Michael Lewindowski over at Memories of Toymorrow was celebrating his 1 year Anniversary, and mentioned it on July 22nd!

And that got me thinking... I couldn't remember exactly when I started blogging about all the second-hand crap that I buy at Goodwill (and other places) so I had to investigate.

But first, I want to congratulate ALL of those guys, as I have been following, reading, and enjoying their blogs for quite some time now.

Happy Blog-Birthday, you studs.

But then I want to point out that MY first blog post was back on July 24th of last year!

The picture above is the very first picture I posted to my blog. At the time I only knew they were from a baggy I'd bought at the Brewer, ME Goodwill. They were obviously E.T. I just wanted to give a hint of the sort of thing I would be posting about on my new blog. I put out a call to help identify them and I found out they were game pieces from an old E.T. board game. Ever since I found that out, the idea that the rest of the game might have been kicking around the very same Goodwill store that day has haunted my dreams... But on that fateful day the Goodwill Geek was born! 

Bitten by a radioactive Thrift Store, the Goodwill Geek stood for second-hand geekiness everywhere he went afterwards! With the powers of endless patience to dig through piles of old, broken remote control cars and Hotwheels car-tracks with missing pieces to retrieve the awesome vintage Happy Meal toys hiding beneath! With the eyes of a biblio-phile on the prowl, picking out secondhand graphic novels, Little Golden Books, and Choose Your Own Adventure books in a sea of Babysitters Club novels! This Geek was ready to tell his tale! 

Since I've been blogging for a year, a lot of stuff has happened to me!

- I joined the League of Extraordinary Bloggers! In fact, I created this blog just so I could join!!! My first post for the League was an imaginary road trip!

- There was the time I brought home the AWESOME Toxic Crusader's Poster book! That was during my very first month of blogging!

- I featured some excellent Comic book finds including Iron Man's Demon in a Bottle and a classic volume of TMNT comics!

- Then I joined Reis O'Brien's Dork Horde!!! It was a proud day when I took the hood!

- Still one of my favorite posts was the one detailing the weird collection of art-books I've acquired. 

- I professed my love for Fisher Price's Little People! Not just once but twice!!!

- I won a pack of goodies from none other than Michael Lewandowski from the aforementioned Memories of Toymorrow! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles helped me open it when it arrived!

- I blogged about the purchase that really turned me into the most obsessive Goodwill Geek that ever roamed this Earth!

- I helped in my own small way to kick off the Great Candy Corn Wars of 2012. 

- I finally revealed the Goodwill Geek Cave for all the world to see!!! (I think I'm going to have to do some update pictures here sometime soon, as the Cave is looking very different in many ways these days...

- I also won an awesome Firefly tribute book from Brian over at Cool and Collected! 

- I showed off my Green Lantern Action League collection AND the awesome Dex-Starr custom that I traded Reis O'Brien a bunch of California Raisins for!!!

- Thanks to Eric from Toyriffic I started listening to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's Thrift Shop before it was COOL to listen to it!

- I filled a second-hand jungle with tiny Indiana Jones figures!

- I tried to identify a handful of mystery toys! (You guys were NO help by the way... just sayin'...)

These are not all mystery toys... but some of them are...

- By far one of the most exciting things to happen to me as a blogger was getting to see the movie, Motivational Growth while it was still travelling the festival circuit. My interest in the trailer drew the attention of director, Don Thacker, who gave me a two-part interview (Here's pt. 1... and Here's pt. 2), and permission to see the film. It was pretty great. I loved the film and can't wait to see where it pops up next. 

- What turned out to be one of my absolute favorite posts of ALL TIME was one of the three I did for the League's Pirate's Week. I wrote about my favorite, cheap-ass set of pirate figurines, and gave them each a name, personality, and back-story. It was one of those posts where I just let loose and write cRaZy!!!

- I started a new feature when I got my new iPod with a built-in camera called Goodwill Gone Bad. I featured pictures of items I could not picture ANYONE buying from Goodwill (I then spent time standing in line behind a woman buying one of those VERY items... so that just showed me). I then plopped my iPod into a bucket full of bleach-water and let it soak over night. So... that ended that feature. But it was fun while it lasted! I got to do 2 of them. 

 

- I also told the convoluted tale of my childhood love for mini-figures for the League... and the handful of specific characters that I carried around obsessively. 

- One of my highest-hitting posts was one where I just took some random shots of stuff in the cave! I wasn't sure how to feel about that. I've put a LOT more effort into posts that haven't been nearly as popular... 

- Not really due totally to the fact that I have this blog... but still related to it... I did a Charnel Chat over at the Grim Reader. I think I had the confidence to contact him and do one because I'd been writing on here for a while. 

- Another couple of favorites I did for the League, I reminisced about my first impressions of the Thundercats, and talked about how much I wished the California Raisins would make a come-back!

   

I've even won a couple of contests recently! I just posted about my winnings from Hake's Americana and Collectibles... and I'll be posting soon about my winnings from the Pop Pop! It's Trash Culture "One Man's Trash..." giveaway! 

  

So as you can see, it's been a very busy year! And I am looking ahead to the future! I'm still participating in the League posts week after week, and I'm discovering new blogs and interesting bloggers every day, and I feel like these are my people. What I write... I write for them. I love the blogging community I've become a part of in the last year... and I am greedy for more! 

Hot Dang! The Dork Lord of the Dork Horde Collects Little People!!!

So I was perusing my blog-roll today and noticed that Reis O'Brien of The Lair of the Dork Horde fame has started an obsessive collection of Little People!!!

Now I feel marginally justified in being so infatuated with them!!! Just for reference, my Little People collecting habits have been documented in this post and this post.

And just so I'm not posting to simply toot Reis's horn with nothing to show for it:

Here is my Little People collection as it currently stands. 

And here are my own custom Little People zombies (actually just peg-people like you'd pick up in a craft store) which I plan to continue expanding in the future. 

I'll be back soon with more Goodwill Goodies... so until then, Happy Hunting!

It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Less Like Christmas...

So I'm almost done with my Christmas posts, the final one being my actual Christmas Haul... but this post is probably one of the ones that is most near and dear to my heart. My Dork Horde Secret Santa package! I felt the D.H. Secret Santa was a personal success, because I really enjoyed getting some things for my assigned person, and I felt the stuff I received was just cool as hell. So if Reis puts one together again next year, I will definitely be throwing my hat in the ring. Between this and the AEIOUWhy Great Pumpkin Gift Exchange, and the general generosity displayed by a bunch of my new blog-network friends, this has been a great year for receiving cool swag in the mail... which I did not expect when I started this blog. So anyway... on to the package: 

I still don't know 100% who my S.S. actually is. I THINK I've Sherlocked it out at this point... but I don't remember if there was a return address on the package or not, and its long since been tossed out with all of the Christmas garbage we purged weeks ago. This is one of the only two pieces of evidence I have (the other I'll show below) to help me guess. 

So from just this... no idea. My first thought was Brian from Cool and Collected. I was his Secret Santa, but I wasn't sure if Reis would simply pair us up, or if he'd mix things up a bit more. The contents of the package certainly match up with what I might expect from Brian though, since I just bought some vintage action figures from him a while back (still need to do a couple of posts about THAT as well!) and a handful of these certainly fit that mold. Let me show you what I got though and then I'll discuss the final piece of evidence: 

First up, a BLINDINGLY BRIGHT Star Wars M&M flashlight. I discovered it's retina-melting properties while looking for the button to turn it on, shining the beam directly into my eyes. I wish I was kidding. As you can see, this is Orange the M&M, dressed up as a classic Storm Trooper. Since I love the M&M characters (actually almost all food mascot characters, especially anthropomorphized food characters), and classic Star Wars... this gift alone would have been pretty frickin' amazing. But wait! There's more. It get's more frikkin' amazinger. 

 

I'll confess, this is not my first Hot Wheels Mystery Machine. This was the one item I received that I already actually owned, and I immediately felt guilty about it. I had been desperately looking for this sucker for weeks before I finally found a handful of them at a Walgreens (Which will be my first stop when looking for obscure Pop-Culture Hotwheels from now on... as it was an unpicked paradise of Hotwheels). I picked up one for myself, one for my son, and one to give away in the near future here on the blog. I think this one will also be paid forward in a giveaway... so if you're still looking for this Hotwheels, keep your eyes peeled in the future. I'm going to make sure this goes to a good home. 

Next up, the beginning of the vintage-y goodness. Pizza Face!!! From the classic Playmates line, Pizza Face is a crazed Pizza Chef who zapped himself with retro-mutagen ooze. I had him when I was a kid, and he always confused the hell out of me. I love the figure, but I was never sure what his deal was supposed to be. But look at him. He is disgustingly awesome. He almost looks like he would have fit in better with the Toxic Crusaders line. 

Next up is Hard Hat Horror, one of the Haunted Human action figures from the Real Ghostbusters Toy Line. I am a Real Ghost Busters NUT. I had a ton of the toys when I was a kid, but I never had Triple H. I had Granny Gross, which was one of my favorite action figures of all time, but no other actual Haunted Humans to speak of at all. Seeing this guy up on my shelf with the rest of my Real Ghost Busters collection makes me grin ear to ear. But...

I think one of the best items to come out of this package has to be this Trap-Jaw figure! I was stunned when I pulled this out of the box. I honestly cannot remember if I had Trap-Jaw as a kid, which leads me to believe I probably didn't. But as I considered him to be one of Skeletor's main 3 generals (Mer-Man and Beast Man were the other two) I would have desperately wanted him if I did not in fact own him. So this... is sort of a dream come true.

Here's... where things get confusing. I feel like this is supposed to be a hint, leading me to understanding who my Secret Santa is. OR it's a deck of cards shaped like Idaho potatoes just for the same of being weird... which I just don't feel is the case. If I'm right... Then this package did not come from Brian, because he's not from Idaho. It's also not from Jaime Hood, who is also not in Idaho. Reis O'Brien? Not in Idaho. 

Once I eliminated those three (and myself) it left me with no less than 17 other possible Dork Hordites to choose from. And then... something started rattling around in the back of my skull. Something I remembered from someone's blog somewhere... some mention of Idaho. Some video about storm chasing. So I started going through the Dork Horde Membership trying to remember who lived in Idaho. I realized there was a criminally large number of blogs I was not yet following in my blog-roll. So I corrected that. AND... 

I think I found my Secret Santa. Dan from The Toy Museum!!! If I am incorrect, I am going to be so embarrassed. He's got an amazing blog, and an amazing love of toys. Dan, I hope I guessed correctly, and if I did... Thank You for my most excellent Secret Santa Package! I feel like we've crossed paths somewhere in the past, commenting on blog posts or something. Like... I should have figured this out sooner. Oh well, c'est la vie! 

Here is the entire contents of the awesome package I received. I found it to be an AMAZING haul. I hope everybody else who participated got such a cool lot of stuff! 

I'll be back soon with actual Goodwill Goodies (at some point... I still want to blog about my Christmas presents!) so until then, Happy Hunting!

The Green Lantern Action League and Reis O'Brien's Contribution to my Madness

So here goes. It's time I rejoined the blogo-sphere, and I can't think of a better way to do it than to showcase a trade I made a while back with Reis O'Brien of the Dork Horde. Back in his October State of the Horde Address, Reis posted a picture of some California Raisins that I had sent him.

Believe it or not, I did not send them to him out of the kindness of my altruistic heart. I happen to know that Reis has mad artistic skills, and I used the raisins to commission a custom figure I desperately wanted to help round out my collection of Green Lantern Action League mini-figs.

So before the big reveal, I want to show off the rest of my collection. Here's my Green Lantern Corps, including Guy Gardner, Kilowog, Hal Jordan, John Stewart, and Tomar Re, all in the Action League style. Up front there, by Kilowog, we also have B'Dg, who is actually an Imaginext figure, but whom fits in so perfectly that I had to have him. 

Here are my Sinestro Corps members, Arkillo, Sinsetro, and Low. I love that they actually made enough yellow lanterns to call it a Corps, although of course I would have loved even more. Kryb anyone?  

Here are the lone-wolves, Blue Lantern Saint Walker, Orange Lantern (aka Agent Orange) Larfleeze, and Black Lantern Death Storm. Death Storm is one of my least favorite toys... ever. I wish they had just made Black Hand and been done with it. 

I also have Red Lanterns Atrocitus and Zilius Zox:

But for the longest time they seemed terribly lonely. A duo does not a Corps make after all. I desperately hoped that after the Imaginext Oa playset came out, and they had mad a B'Dg figure... that this guy might not be far behind:

Dex-Starr!!! My favorite Red Lantern of all time! Well... so Imaginext didn't make a Dex-Starr, but they DID package THIS figure in with the Imaginext Catwoman figure:

So I got this idea... I know people on the internet now... artistic people. People who might possibly be able to customize my black cat into another cat... And so now I am the proud owner of this mean looking little fellow:

He came in the mail about a week or so ago, and I have not gotten around to blogging about him (or even thanking Reis for the beautiful job... THANK YOU REIS O'BRIEN!!!) until now. But I think he's AMAZING. 

Here he is with the rest of the Red Lantern Corps. I think they make quite the terrifying triumvirate. 

Here's everyone together on my shelf, right below my Californian Raisins collection. 

And here's B'Dg facing off against Dex-Starr. 

So Mattel: Here's what I'm asking. I want an Action League Black Hand, Star Sapphire, and Indigo-1. Throw together an exclusive 3-pack for SDCC or something. Complete my collection of Lanterns. 

Image by Artistic Enigma on Deviantart

Although I'm thinking... there is an Element Woman Action League figure:

How hard would it be to repaint her into some version of a Star Sapphire? 

Now I just need to track her down... and feed Reis some more Raisins.  

So this was a decidedly NON-Goodwill related post... but I'll be back soon with more Goodwill Goodies. Until then, Happy Hunting!