Saw the music industry sued another 500 downloaders today, sucks to be them. But for really guys, if you’re still using some kind of crappy centralized P2P app – what can you expect? Last night I stayed up until 1am for no apparent reason. I was ripping CDs and listening to the results, and writing like I am now. Tonight I went on a solo run around 10pm, so now I’ve got some juice keeping me awake.
Ben and I were talking today about all the toys we used to play with as kids, and which ones were our favorites. I think the whole conversation started around Legos, as we were both discussing the large tupperware container of random Legos we had as kids. You know, it was a jumbled mess of your standard primary-color Legos, some brown pirate-ship ones, and maybe some gray moonbase-five ones as well. My brother and I could have hours of fun with Legos. We’d dump out that tupperware container into a huge pile, and build crap for hours.
Also ranking mutually high on our lists were G.I. Joe, He-Man, and Transformers. I guess those were just the toys to have back then. I remember getting Castle Greyskull for Christmas the same year my brother got Skull Mountain. We had a lot of cool toys. The Rancor, the Millennium Flacon, the self-destructing Ewok-carrying Speederbike, an X-wing with popup R2D2 action, Ewok Village. Shoot, I think I was the only kid in town who had the Tundertank. I also had some ridiculously unpractical Transformers moonbase-robot-train thing, which was utterly stupid as a toy. The key to toys isn’t more motors and assembly, any idiot knows kids gravitate towards the most rock-simple concepts when it comes to toys. At least, in my day we did. I don’t know about these Poke-Digi kids of today? but give me a sticky spider thing that crawls down walls or a slingshot, and I’m good to go.
We also agreed that whoever thought of the whole “crack-ups” gimmick was a genius. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, crack-ups (or maybe it was crash-’ems) were Hot Wheels cars that had spring-loaded sections which would rotate quickly upon impact to show a “wrecked” version of the car. You could roll a normal looking car at a wall and the little rollover portion would switch to a fake dented hood or something. Pretty soon the rollover-change thing made it’s way into other toys like Battle Armor He-Man and such. Anyway, what a brilliant idea. Boys love to wreck their toys. My brother and I used to drop bricks on our Hot Wheels anyway, just to wreck them. Who was the genius who was smart enough to realize that a perpetually wreckable car would be a boys dream? Wish I woulda thought of it.
I’m outta here.
Also written on this day...
- not just for the clouds - 2009
- a grumbly harrumph - 2008
- shuffling papers and stuffing envelopes - 2005