Twenty Legs

Double Feature

Last night was both amazing and horrible at the same time, for so many different reasons.  Since it is holiday season our ability to record AggroChat is going to become increasingly strained.  In fact last night both Rae and Tam were recording on location at their respective parents houses.  For some time we had been kicking around the idea of having a “Game of the Year” podcast.  The problem with this concept is it would require us all to actually agree on what we felt was our game of the year.  While there is a lot of overlap in our tastes, there is also an extreme amount of divergence.  The end result had us recording our “Games of the Year” podcast, in which each of us picked five games we felt were significant to us in the past year, and then we as a group talked about all of them.

The end result is that between last night and this morning I had over three hours worth of recorded audio to sift through.  Thankfully we totally did this on purpose as it allows me to split this one episode into two still significant episodes worth of discussion.  As such I have released part one today, and I will release part two next Sunday, giving everyone a much needed break from recording to go hang out with family and friends and not care about being home by 9pm on a Saturday night to strap into a chair and record a podcast.  The other side effect of this whole thing is that I was up until 2 am last night, and then back up this morning at 8 am to finish editing.  I quite literally just finished editing everything and uploading the first part when I sat down to write this post.  It is going to be a really long day.

Shrine to Geeks

VintageStockJoplin The reason why it is going to be a really long day, is that yesterday was ALSO a really long day.  I got up fairly early, and as my wife was getting dressed and ready knocked out yesterdays rather frantic blog post.  Then from that point until I literally sat down to record AggroChat last night, I was either driving or shopping.  We took my mother in law with us to Joplin Mo, because one it is a really cool town and two it is not terribly far from where she lives.  We had a whole bunch of things that we wanted to do, but one of them was to go to the Mall.   It really is borderline suicidal to go to any Mall on the weekend before Christmas, and by the time I got out of there I was absolutely done with humanity for the day.  One of the cool things about the Joplin Mall is that several years ago Vintage Stock went in and created this insane flagship store.

Now I have talked about Vintage Stock before, but it is really hard to grasp the scale of this place until you are actually in it.  Imagine going to a Wal-mart, where everything in the store somehow pertained to geekdom.  The amount of consoles, comics, rpgs, videos, puzzles, books, board games, and action figures is really hard to grasp.  I tried to snap a picture to show you folks the scale of this place but it extends out on either side from the vantage point I took up.  Hopefully at least you can get the idea.  On a normal day it is absolute sensory overload… but yesterday with all the people packed in… it was a bit too much for me to handle.  Thankfully we make it to Joplin fairly often so even though I did not really get to enjoy the bounty that is this store…  there will always be another trip to explore it under more calm circumstances.

Twenty Legs

20legs One of the regular themes of my blog is that we like to go to Flea Markets and junk stores.  One of my favorite activities here is to take photos of the random strange things I happen to find.  Sometimes you find an item that creates far more questions than you could ever possibly answer.  For example the above photo is a box of 20 Furniture legs… for $5.95.  While I am not really sure what the going rate for disembodied furniture is, that seems like not too bad of a deal.  The problem is… why do they have a box of 20 furniture legs…  and better yet who is going to come along and NEED a box of 20 furniture legs.  I have a feeling these are the sort of thing that are extremely specific to the piece they came off of, so unless you happen to need exactly these legs for your furniture…  you probably have no interesting in this box.  Better question is why would someone purchase furniture without the legs in order to need said box of 20 legs.

DisembodiedPeople r2d2cooler There were a ton of strange and cool things to be found.  For example I thought this Igloo style R2-D2 cooler was pretty awesome.  The inside of it was roughly the same size as one of those large drink cooler that sports teams use to dump Gatorade on their unsuspecting coaches.  While it was pretty great…  it was not $75 worth of great.  Had it been somewhere in the $20-$40 range I probably would have snapped it up, because seriously when the hell else am I going to find an awesome R2-D2 cooler.  Then there is the just straight up bizarre collectables.  The above photo is this group of mannequins dressed up in various outfits.  For starters…  I struggle to wrap my mind around why these were created in the first place.  Secondly I also struggle to imagine who decided it was a good idea to purchase them.  Thirdly…  I find it even stranger that someone thought that selling them as another really good idea.  I picture somewhere someone has a whole set of these disembodied figures in various bright outfits, because while I snapped a picture of four standing side by side, there were probably a dozen different ones in the booth.  Since they appear to be missing legs… wondering if I can somehow reunite them with the furniture legs above.

8trackadaptor Finally I always end up finding things that make me feel extremely old.  I guess that ultimately is the sign of aging, when a good chunk of the things found in a flea market are things from your childhood.  On the right we have the infamous Kraco Stereo Cassette Adaptor for your 8-Track tape player.  This was awesome for vehicles that had an 8-track deck in an era that rapidly adopted the Cassette tape instead.  I say infamous because it had a notorious reputation for completely eating tapes.  I remember using this to survive a family trip to Colorado with my cousins, and as we went across country…  it slowly mangled a Phil Collins tape until it was completely unrecognizable.  Ultimately mangled or not… we considered the ability to actually play tapes in the massive conversion van worth the risk.  I posted about this on twitter yesterday and it turns out a lot of other folks that follow me also had mixed memories of this device.  In any case seeing it hanging there in relatively good packaged condition brought back a ton of memories.