Okay, time to pontificate:
Hope you guys understand. Please enjoy the pictures, that's really what Toys & Stuff is about!
Some time back, maybe it was last year - I forget - I made mention that things would be slowin' down here at Toys & Stuff and you may have already noticed that it has finally come to that. There's a whole bunch of reasons (or excuses if you want to look at it that way) but really, being a one-deep operation has made it hard to keep up the pace in my personal life as well as the blog. I take pride in photographing/scanning nearly everything you see on the blog, but Holy Cow, that's a lot of work! It's not unusual for me to spend 4-5 hours photographing toys - up to 600 photos a session! Then I have to go through and start editing them and then picking the ones I like best for posting. Scanning instruction sheets or smaller sized packaging is also a time hog.
I do not want to shut the blog down and can well understand those bloggers whom I used to follow when they post that 'Shop Closed For Personal Reasons' notice on their blogs. Too much blog time and not enough family time is taking it's toll. Besides, I'm no spring chicken and I ain't gettin' any younger!!! Something has to give. The blog lost - a little bit, kind of. Some of the changes I decided to make:
- Less posts per week, unless I have the energy to do more
- Not as rigid a schedule. Regular readers know that Mondays were generally for tin-litho buildings, Wednesday's were Train Time, Saturday's were set aside for Sci-Fi and fiction, etc, etc. I have enough material right now to cover quite a few Saturday's (I want to complete the Premier Plastic Flash Gordon Space Ships series) and a bunch of Sunday's but from here on out, the week will be a grab bag of posts
- Probably less writing. My original intent in starting Toys & Stuff had really been about the pictures, but somewhere along the line it also became mini-history lessons. That's a really cool thing and all, but again it takes a lot of time. I guess this will be on a case-by-case basis (aka when I have the ooomph to look stuff up)
- No more comments. I know that sounds sacrilegious for a blog, but it falls in line with our new philosophy of Internet use: unless there is a valid need to receive e-mail notifications from any given website all notifications are shut off. I can't begin to count all the websites who have been sending junk e-mails and that we have 'unsubscribed' from. Here's a good example: why the heck do I need to get a gazillion e-mails a week from Amazon.com??? If I want to buy something from them I'll go to their freakin' site and do a search. If they have what I want I'll buy it - simple!! Less clutter, less time deleting e-mails means more time to do other things. I guess one can say this is a form of Internet minimalism. Anywho, we're gonna give it a shot.
BMC Iwo Jima Playset
One of the pitfalls of being a compulsive collector is that sometimes you end up with things that just don't fit in with your basic interests. Although I do like history, the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO) during WWII was not up my alley, I was more of a European Theater of Operations (ETO) guy but I ended up with a PTO playset - oh well. BMC is one of the modern era playset maunfacturers' and produced a number of history-related sets. The Iwo Jima playset is based on the King & Country figures produced earlier. The King & Country figures were metal and their terrain piece was foam while everything in the BMC set is plastic. I did like the flag raising vignette in this set but when you look at the pictures, the terrain piece seems to be a tad small, but it does however have a lot of nice bunker and tunnel cut-outs. Of course this set would best be utilized as part of a larger display.
You'll notice I don't have individual photos of the figures, nor are there the usual set-piece photos I take for vehicles. That's because these photos were taken so that I could sell the set - which I did. There's been a number of times toys were featured on the blog which had already been sold but prior to gettin' rid of them I took a bunch of photos. Enjoy!
I used a flash on this shot making it look tan. It's not really tan, it's gray.
