A Trade With Adam Nori!

You know how I'm always cracking wise about how "timely" my posts are... like when I post about Christmas a month after the fact, or Valentine's Day in April or some crap? Well, yet again, this is one of those posts that are WAAAY past due, and this time it is almost criminally negligent. 

I received a package from Adam Nori of Who Ya Gonna Collect, as well as the author of a book, Adventures of a Ghost Hunter, in which he details some of his career as a professional Ghost Hunter! It is safe to say that Adam has a bit of an obsession with 1) ghosts and 2) Ghostbusters. 

I don't originally remember what put Adam and I in contact, but as happens with the many folks I interact with online, a trade of goods was discussed at one point. So we sent each other packages full of junk, and you can see what Adam ended up with over on his blog. 

So I received my package from Adam sometime last SUMMER. Like in JUNE. So this one is WAAAY overdue. I genuinely owe Adam an apology because this one got forgotten about and I hate to think that he for a second thought that I wasn't INSANELY grateful to receive this package:

First off, kudos to Mr. Nori for repurposing his Nerdblock box for this package! He made a lot of stuff fit in this space! Let's explore.

Comic books, trading cards, and VHS tapes are all standard-issue staples for these sort of trades. A lovely assortment was included, and if I'm playing favorites, that pack of Rocketeer cards had me drooling at first sight!

There were some awesome fast-food and cereal premiums in the box, including this Guardians of the Galaxy bag from Subway, and these Dinosaurs toys from McDonald's! In an ultimate act of heresy, I removed the hoses from Fran and Earl and used them as figurines on mt Henson shelf (they go back in pretty easily, so I'm not too worried).

So many toys!!! Here's the first of three pics detailing all of the toys included. If I had a gun to my head and had to pick some faves from the picture above, I'd single out bendable Shaggy, the Inspector Gadget figure, and the two Busy Town cars in the very front. But there's so much here! Muppet Babies! Toy Story! LEGO!

This fleet of vehicles is AMAZING! from some awesome Hanna Barbera characters, to Fraggles, Rugrats and Robin... But again, if I'm being super honest, my absolute FAVE in this shot is Snaps of the Burger King Kids Club riding a purple cricket/grasshopper/locust/something. I already have Kid Vid riding a scorpion and I/Q riding a millipede, so now that I have Snaps, I only need two more toys to complete the set! (Jaws riding a Spider, and Boomer riding a dragonfly, if you're curious...)

Finally, I sorted out some of the crème de la crème of the package for this final shot. I now officially own one of the movie-Turtles which I've been eyeing but not pulling the trigger on. The C3-PO is a bobbler and looks great on my Star Wars shelf. Solomon Grundy, Snap from Rice Krispies, a McDonald's Changeable, Snoopy in his flying Ace outfit, a Rizzo Disney Vinylmation Muppets toy, a Mr. Burns from the Burger King Treehouse of Horror line, and a couple of DC Scribblenauts, Blue Beetle and Bizarro are all welcome additions to a bunch of other collections I have stacking up in the Geek Cave.

This package was SUPER generous, and full of fun! I can't thank Adam enough for sending me these things in exchange for the box of junk he received!

I'll be back soon with some Geeky Goodwill Goodies to share! So until then, Happy Hunting!

Randomly Received: Trade With Mason of D.I. Treasures

All right... the time has come. I am officially getting ready to delete the content from Really Rather Random Guy (dot blogspot dot com) and in preparing for that, I wanted to import a bunch of the content that I know will then be lost forever, by bringing the posts over here to Goodwill Hunting 4 Geeks (dot blogspot dot com). So, with that in mind, I thought I would preface these entries with the fact that they are indeed OLD blog posts from an OLD, now DEFUNCT blog, and cross my fingers and hope that folks will still want to read them.

This post was originally published back on January 20th, 2014.

A while back, before the Holidays... I set up a trade with Mason of D.I. Treasures fame. He noticed that I had an extra mace that I had picked up in a recent MotU find at Goodwill, and he wondered if we could trade that mace for a battle-ax he had for He-Man. This sounded acceptable to me, but then I upped the ante to make this interesting: I asked Mason to pick 5 other small items for trade and I would do the same in a sort of blind-box package swap. You can see what I sent him over at his blog, since he did a good job of actually posting what he received before Christmas got here. The reason this is significant is that the items that Mason sent me were all sort of subtly Christmas-themed. Let's take a look at what he sent me: 

Here's a group-shot of everything he sent me to start. A nice, colorful lot to be sure, you can already see the holiday cheer bleeding through. 

I mace ax you a question? Mace I ax you... no... I give up. Puns are hard.

First up let's talk about what got this whole thing kicked off. Here is the beautiful baby-blue battle-axe that Mason sent me in exchange for a mace for his Moss-Man. It is now in the hands of He-Man as he sits astride his loyal Battle Cat. And all is as it should be. 

Next up we have a Z-Bot! This is Turbine and he was actually a Burger King Kid's Club meal premium from 1994. I don't remember Z-Bots from when I was a kid... but they would have come out right around the time I was ending my love-affair (for awhile) with mini-figs. Which, knowing me, is kind of a shame because these look like they would have been right in my wheelhouse. At roughly the same size as Battle-Beasts a collectible line of little robots seems like something I would have obsessed over. I love the look of this little guy in particular, and it isn't hard to see why Mason included him, since the color scheme not only screams Christmas with all that red and green... but that drill arm looks like it could literally be a Christmas tree. Mason also knows how much I enjoy collecting little robots as well, so this is perfect. 

Next up we have a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robot thumb wrestler. This guy fits down over your thumb and one can only assume that there is a blue counterpart out there somewhere for an opponent to wear. This guy is great! Again, since I love robots, it makes sense that someone would give me one of these... and in this festive red it's no wonder that Mason included it. 

This is Lenny, the wind-up binoculars toy from Toy Story. Specifically, it's a picture-viewer toy from a Toy Story 2 Happy Meal premium. This one hits on many different levels for me, such as the Toy Story connection, the fact that it's a view-master-style toy, and the fact that it's a Happy Meal toy. The one thing I couldn't figure out was why Mason might have considered it "Christmas-y" and I came up with nothing. I think this one was just included for the neat-o factor. 

The penultimate toy of the pack is this Power Rangers Megazord figure. I'm not a Power Rangers fan at all, but I can appreciate a nice giant robot toy. messing around on Google I see a lot of references to this megazord being called "OhBlocker". It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out why Mason included this one, as there's a giant star in red, some green and gold highlights, and overall, he feels pretty Christmas-y. 

Finally, we have Mr. Strong from the Mr. Men series! This is a kid's meal premium from Arby's whom I absolutely adore. The Mr. Men and Little Miss characters are all pretty geometric and basic in design, and that kind of aesthetic is just awesome to me. I could see myself tracking down more of these. And of course, Mr. Strong here is done in red and green, because Christmas!

So, I'd like to finish up by first apologizing to Mason for not getting this up on a blog for people to see before Christmas got here... but also a HUGE thanks to him as well for obviously putting so much time and thought into his selections. I had such a fun time discovering the contents of this package! Be sure to check out Mason's blog over at D.I. Treasures.

I have a couple of other packages to feature here in the coming days, so keep your peepers peeled here folks!