Blaugust 2024

Whoops, I Dropped the Blaugust Ball

I’m skipping “Creator Appreciation Week” here for “Staying Motivated Week.” There are no rules anyway, you can’t stop me. Apparently I dropped the balloon Blaugust and have missed days.

Which is fine, really. I mean it’s 100% fine.

I never intended to “post every day” to start with, it just sort of, started happening. My first “miss” was Saturday, which was a “What I’ve been playing” post. These are basically the only posts I can’t pre write, and I was busy Saturday and tired, so I just, didn’t. Plus it was just, “More Overwatch and Sky.” My wife and daughter are working on opening a shop so we spent all day moving shit for that and I was exhausted.

The next “miss” was Monday, which is a bigger annoyance because, I have that post written, I just needed to pull some images online and post it. It was supposed to be Lower Decks for my little “Star Trek Write Ups” series.

It’s probably for the best, I don’t have one really for next week anyway. I have some notes from when I watched The TOS Animated series a while back, but I am not sure I can pull that into a post with a mild refresher.

As I pre write THIS post, I am reminded that I also have Tuesdays post written, for Transformers Tuesday, but it needs some photos. And Wednesday kind of has photos, but needs written.

So instead I am doing this post, for Thursday (I mean, “Today”), because it’s just an easy rambling thoughts write up.

It also just, doesn’t help that lately I have been feeling unmotivated in general again. It comes and goes, though the motivation in general tends to be in spurts with long lulls in between. It’s annoying and frustrating.

Toy Story 2 Dynamic 8ction Heroes DAH-074 Al McWhiggin

Aug 14th, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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As a toy collector, this felt like a figure that was a weird requirement to own. It’s also a figure that feels less likely to get a lot of toys. He was the villain for Toy Story 2, for the most part, but Toy Story toys tend to revolve around the Toy characters, who are all “toy sized.” Plus he is just kind of a goofy weird design in general.

I was a little warry because I don’t really know anything about the company making these. Buying from lesser known companies isn’t always an issue, and neither is buying from companies that may or may not be making unlicensed toys, though in this case, Al here is probably licensed. There are a lot of Disney characters available when searching for “Dynamic 8ction Heroes”. They seem to make slightly less mainstream characters from popular properties.

My other big worry, and probably still my bigger annoyance, is the weird 8″ scale. As implied by the term “8ction”. I mostly try to stick with 1/12th scale, but for a lot of stuff that is closer to whatever 5″ is I can sort of fudge it as height differences and whatever 7″ would be actually works better for a lot of non human characters. This guy is really big though. Way to big to “fake it”. Even way to big to “fake it” with the few 7″ figures I have. I imagine sticking to this size is part of whatever licensing deal they have, kind of how “Super 7” is all “7 inches”.

He does look alright next to Revoltech woody though. I know Woody wouldn’t be anywhere in scale, but it some how does work, which is fine, because in the end, Woody is the only one he really needs to display with. I don’t have a Buzz to pair up with him though.

There was plenty I do like about this figure though. He has cloth goods clothing for starters, which is always my Achilles heel for toy likes. Al’s clothes fit and work really nicely too.

The other fun bit is the ridiculous Chicken Suit. It’s actually, mostly kind of functional. You shove the figure up in this large rubber chicken suit, and cover his feet with some little cloth chicken feet. There is also a piece of soft material to help stabilize it all. Maybe technically you are supposed to not use it, but you can’t see it and it helps everything stay together. The overall effect works really well. It’s goofy and I love it.

Another neat bit is that he has poseable eyeballs, which, appropriately, match the poseable eyeballs on Revoltech Woody. Both of the faces have the poseable eyes. He also has several alternate hand styles and small versions of Woody, Jessie, Bullseye, and Stinky Pete, though they are not removable from their little display trays.

Overall, it’s admittedly, kind of a weird piece, but it seems like an appropriate one for a toy collector to have, since his character is a toy collector. On another side note, the box for this guy is absolutely humongous.

My Gaming Journey – Part 2 – 16bit Era and the Game Boy

Aug 11th, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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The natural progression from the NES of course was right into the SNES. I think the SNES may still be my favorite console, mostly for the graphics. There is such a perfect simplicity to the sprits of the SNES. It was just enough power and memory to make larger complex titles, but not overly complicate them. I enjoy modern pixel graphics games, but they are always much higher resolution with so many more colors. It’s just not the same. After the SNES, consoles became much more about polygons and 3D graphics.

In case you didn’t catch it, I had a SNES growing up. My friends had a SNES, one had a Genesis, but we were all basically cemented in as “Nintendo people” at this point. The SNES somehow ended up being a different experience as well, less multi player gaming and more solo playing together. We did play multiplayer titles, Super Street Fighter 2 was one for sure, and of course Mario Kart. Everyone loved Mario Kart.

But a lot was solo gaming. The SNES was also when I started really getting into RPGs. The SNES had so many good RPGs, and specifically, the Final Fantasy series. I’ve probably played through Final Fantasy 2(IV) and 3(VI) a dozen times or more. It was everything I loved of the first game on the NES, except the stories were so much more. It’s a love that would continue on for a long while.

I wasn’t only a SNES person though, my grandparents had a Sega Genesis for us to play when we visited, which was fairly often despite that we lived 2 States and an 8-hour drive away. We didn’t have as many games for the Genesis but I absolutely loved Sonic 2 and Aladdin. Eventually, I did get a Genesis for our house though as well, or maybe we just somehow ended up with the one from my grandparents. It never quite dominated my game-playing like the SNES did. It always felt a little off graphically I think, like everything with just kind of “dirtier” somehow. The SNES was a crisp cartoon world, the Genesis felt like it was trying to reproduce a real environment but ugly.

It’s probably worth noting, even though it’s not a 16 bit console, I also had a Game Boy around this time period. I think the Game Boy was just as played as the SNES. I’ve always been really partial to handheld consoles for sure. I had the gigantic HandyBoy attachment that would split out into a big mess of speakers with a magnification screen. I think it was bigger than the Game Boy itself. My brother had one too, I think part of why we got them was to keep us busy on car rides when traveling, which we did fairly often. My parents liked to go to my grandparent’s home, and we went camping a lot.

Final Fantasy was a big favorite on the Gameboy as well, with the Final Fantasy Legend series, though I would later learn these were technically part of another series called Saga. There was also a lot of Tetris too. I got really good at Tetris in the early 90s.

Solo Play – Escape from the Space Station

Aug 9th, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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I picked this solo game up on a lark because it was on clearance at a Kohl’s and the clearance was 75% off or something, so it cost me a couple of dollars. I really didn’t know what to expect from it but it sounded interesting with it’s enticement of puzzles to solve, and my slowly growing interest in playing more Solo Games. Then I sat on it for a few years not actually playing it.

The box contains:

One Scenario “read first” note
3 trifold papers with information about the station
2 cards of punch out tile pieces
10 Puzzle cards
1 Solutions Paper (sealed)

The Puzzle cards and punch out cards are made of thick cardboard material. One thing that became apparently after inspecting the contents was, this game is essentially meant to be played once, only. I didn’t really want to destroy the game, in case I wanted to ass it on or maybe play it again, though there is zero replay ability here really. I instead too photos of the cards, and marked them up in a photo editor, instead of actually writing on the cards and papers themselves.

The basic premise is, you are trapped on an out of control space station and about to collide with an asteroid belt and you need to find a missing part in order to fix the station and save yourself. You have to do this by solving puzzles and finding clues to translate symbols in a “Universal Alphabet”, then translating a secret message.

Initially I was a little disappointed, a lot of the puzzles on the cards are super simple. You shade in parts of a grid, or fill in some simple word puzzles, or do some easy math. Though apparently the math was not that easy because in the case of the Pyramid addition puzzle, I messed up my math and I had the right idea to solving the puzzle, I didn’t have the correct total to start with…. twice….

Addition is hard, ok? Especially with a calculator.

Anyway, where the bigger puzzle comes in is figuring out what the clues actually mean. Some are very straight forward, others are not. I didn’t manage to solve two of the puzzles, the previously mentioned math error, nor one of the word association cards. I did puzzle things out by completing enough of the alphabet to be useful for translating the hidden message. There are no instructions for how a lot of it fits together, and you end up using almost every piece of information given in some way. There are clues hidden in surprising places, places I had been kind of ignoring as simply being “flavor text” at first. Also, the methods for translating the symbols vary, it’s not all just “Hey, the one with the squiglies here is the letter E because this card told me it was directly.”

Overall, I found the game enjoyable, and the latter half was more enjoyable than the first half led me to believe. I would say it actually took me a couple of hours of casual play over a few days to get through everything and find the missing component to “escape the space station”.

Who Am I, What is Lameazoid?

Aug 8th, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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Part of Blaugust involves some, optional prompts, and one is an introduction post. This is one I have done before many times and it’s probably mostly all there on the About page linked above. But I’ll recap a bit here for those just joining in.

Welcome to Lameazoid, my first blog that I keep dragging along behind me. When it began life on Geocities it was The Chaos Zone but I did a sort of rebrand when I moved to Livejournal in the early 2000s. It’s technically all the same.blog, though I have purg d and restored content on it probably a dozen times. The name was sort of a retro inspired riff on not being cool, inspired in part by the name Freakazoid.

Last year I did Blaugust on my other blog, [Blogging Intensifies]. Where [BI] is about my “nerd content” about programming, gardening, food, and music, Lameazoid is all about my “geek hobbies”, my toy collecting, my game playing, my TV/movie watching. Though there was a brief period where the Toy content was on its own blog called Ready Set Geek.

I am your host for this month on this blog, Josh Miller, aka Ramen Junkie. Ramen Junkie is a name I have used for ages now, I like to joke that I have been known as Ramen Junkie for more of my life than I have not been known as Ramen Junkie. It’s a name I started using back in the late 90s on Use etc, primarily alt.games.final-fantasy, which I am the duly elected “Supreme Dictator For Life.” Whatever that means, I honestly don’t even remember if I actually won that “election”, it’s just a dumb meme at this point.

The name was picked for several reasons, I like ramen noodles, at the time I was a poor college student and ramen was poor college student food, also, ramen noodles are “hacker food”. I also picked it to poke fun at the common Usenet trope of people using Japanese Anime names as handles.

Anyway, welcome to the blog.