Announcements From The Realm: Happy 2015
Well, we've come to the end of 2014, so I thought I'd do a post to greet in the New Year! Got a lot of fun stuff planned for 2015, and I hope everyone else does as well. I also meant to post this when the start of 2015 actually came around, so this should tell you how on top of things I am right now.
It struck me that I never got around to posting any pictures of my apartment, as I'd been planning to do. I did have a few pictures of my apartment prettied up for the holidays, but because LiveJournal's being a bit difficult in regards to me uploading pictures, I'll just have to save that for another time. In the meanwhile, I do have some pictures of my holiday decorations and a few things I have gotten done for the New Year, so enjoy!
At my parents's place, we had a ton of nutcrackers. Two of them were mine - the blue one in the picture and a large red one that I bought at a yard sale. The red one was too large for me to bring with me, but I couldn't leave the blue one when I was getting Christmas decorations to bring to my apartment. He's been too much of a Christmas tradition for me.
The same goes for the skating girl, Maria. I can't even remember when I got her, it was so long ago. I remember telling someone in second grade that I named her that though, so it must have been at least around then. But yeah, she's one of the other Christmas decorations that was mine specifically, and I brought her along. I don't have a lot of room for holiday-specific ornaments, but I managed to fit in those two.
Other than that, I had quite a few Christmas cards on display. My family wrote in to me and gave me cards when I came over for the holidays, so I put them all out. I have them stored away now. I'm sure I'll need to think of something to do next year, when I get more cards, but eeeeeh! I hate throwing out cards!
This is my first apartment Christmas tree! It's obviously artificial (no way I'd be able to get a real tree in, even if it was that small), and I was pleased with how it turned out. I bought tinsel, garlands, and lights from Rite Aide and my mom let me pick out some ornaments from our own stock at home (she was fine with that, since we seem to have too many for the tree as it is). I also put up some Chinese and Japanese charms, along with a few homemade ornament gifts I'd been given from co-workers. The whole thing turned out adorable, I think!
I gave a close-up on the angel of the tree. I was especially pleased with her. It took me awhile to find a suitable tree-topper, since I didn't want to stick just anything up there. My family always had an ornamental Santa face that we put up top, and that had always been the thing to put up there for me. I wanted something equally special. I found her for sale at a thrift shop in the neighborhood next to where I work. I bought her and two other ornamental wire angels (no pictures of them, sorry!) and was so happy that she fit up there perfectly! I actually had to glue her wings on because they fell off, but that stuck nicely.
The paper garland, incidentally, is another ornament that I bought at a massive craft fair I went to with my mom. It folds up into a neat little square when not in use and is made from the pages of discarded books. A lot of the stuff at the craft fair was made from old or secondhand things. When I saw that for sale, I knew it was perfect for my apartment.
This is the right side of the village under the tree. Ah, the village under the tree. That's easily my favorite part of decorating for Christmas. For serious, I basically took it upon myself to handle the entire village every year at my place. I had a little system: the left side was always the town, with the park and school and cars and trendier houses, and the right side was the farm/rural area, with the frozen pond and sledding hill and farm animals and less modern houses and cars. We also had nine million Campbell's Soup trucks because we would get them through various offers, so I would always pretend that our village's economy was centered around the production and shipping of Campbell's Soup.
This year, seeing as my space was more limited, I didn't have as many village items. What I had were mostly decorations bought from my aunt's fundraising efforts for the local library. What you see up there is the left side of the village, which again was meant to be the more urban area. There's a distinct lack of housing, though. Of course, there also are only three kids, a cat, a dog, and a few woodland creatures. Oh, and a random sheep. So yeah.
The schoolhouse, bridge, kids, snowman, and campfire (which is kind of out of view) all came from the fundraiser. The sheep came from home, the cat, puppy, and robin (which fell behind the tree stand) were found in various places. The snow was just a bunch of cotton balls that I pulled apart. It came out a little thicker than I would have liked, but oh well.
Fun fact - while it's hidden by the gold ball ornament at the top of the picture, I have a little porceline Santa coming out of a chimney that I set up on the school. I guess in this town, Santa just drops off the presents there. That's a mean trick to get kids back after the break.
And this is the right side of the village! Again, a lot of the houses and such came from the fundraiser. There's a china nativity set at the far left of the picture, along with a henhouse, a hot coco stand (halfway out of view to the right there), and (too far back to see), a pier with a guy sleeping on it.
Like with my previous villages, I set up a frozen pond. It's basically just a hand mirror laid flat. There's a little ducky there, which I could not resist (if anyone's wondering why, just check out here). The relatively large boat on there is a toy Noah's Ark. It's from the American Girl toyline, specificially one of Felicity's accessories. You can lift the top part off to store the animals below deck, along with the ramp. I took it with me when I moved out and very much wanted to give it a place of some sort in the village. The leather straps holding one side of the roof (which was supposed to be a flap to allow Mr. and Mrs. Noah be stored in the cabin) broke, so unfortunately that half of the roof wouldn't stay on and had to be propped up on the back.
As a part of Operation Combat Weird Gloomy Winter Feelings, I ordered this fun little doohicky. It's a dawn simulator! Basically, you hook it up to a lamp, punch in a time for "dawn" and how long you want the "sunrise" to be, and at that time it slowly turns the light on. You program it for about when you wake up in the morning and it tricks your body into thinking it's a summer sunrise instead of a winter one. I love this thing, I really do. At the very least, it's fantastic waking up to an already-lit room instead of a pitch-black one.
Aaaaand here we get to my guilty pleasure part of the new year. I celebrated things all around by ordering a few things off of eBay. This is technically the second time I've ever used that website, but it's the first time it's been without my parents knowing, so fun. I ordered a few Legend of Zelda collectables, which are awesome but need to be bought sparingly because damn. I'm pretty sure it'd be less expensive to take up a drug habit than to try to get some of the discontinued or Japan-only figurines.
ANYWHO! Those up there are the first order to come in. They're metal gashapon toy charms modeled after weapons and items from A Link Between Worlds. The set includes the Master Sword, the shield, the magic bracelet, a bomb (which makes for a good flail if you swing it by the chain, I'm just sayin'...), the Pegasus Boots, and the boss key. They're all very nicely-crafted, I must say.
Here's the second of my orders to come in, and lord. It's things like this that make collecting stuff for the Legend of Zelda franchise difficult. Near as I can tell, this set of three action figures (Link, Adult Zelda, and Ganondorf - somewhat incorrectly identified on the box as Ganon) was released as a promotional toy set for the release of Ocarina of Time. They, like most of the merchandise released for Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are now discontinued. Finding a set is like panning for gold. I was insanely lucky with this one. Not only was the price significantly less than the other handful of offers from other vendors, but I was able to make a better offer. Still, I love these three guys and they're all awesome.
I'm quite impressed with the quality of the Link figurine. It's not the top-notch paint quality you'd get from something like a Figma product (and yes, I have the Figma Link. I'll need to get a pic of him up at some point), but it's got decent detail. And while Link has a Serious Face on, he doesn't look insane or constipated or anything, so that's good.
The figurine comes with the Master Sword and the Hylian shield. Link has a hole in the fist of his left hand to fit the sword into, and the shield is designed to clip around the wrist of his right arm. The scabbord for the Master Sword looks like it can come off and on his back, but it's just one solid lump of plastic (meaning it's impossible to sheathe the sword).
The figurine can turn at the neck and legs, but not at the waist. His arms can also go up and down. So kind of limited movement, but some posing is still possible.
Zelda has to be my favorite out of the group, though I may be biased since she seems to be the only figurine of Adult Zelda ever made (for OOT, at least. I know a few of her from TP have been released). It's a good likeness too, though her expression seems a tad glazed. Like with Link, her paint job is respectable. There's pretty good detail on her dress, and the coloring's nice.
The figurine can turn at the waist and have her arms go up and down. It looks like it should be able to turn at the neck, but her hair (which is a solid plastic mass) goes so far down her back that it doesn't allow for much movement.
Of the three, Ganondorf is the one I have to say I'm the least impressed with. I might be spoiled since I already own a Ganondorf figurine (a larger one, part of the set released with him, his horse, his trident, and the Phantom Ganon mask), but there's just something... narmful about the way Ganondorf's grinning while staring out of those beady little squinty eyes. It's like he's leaning over someone's shoulder, real obnoxious-like, asking, "You going to finish that sandwich? Huh? Huh? Are you? Are you done with that sandwich? You going to finish it? Are you? Huh? Are you?" It doesn't help that the head seems disproportionately smaller than the rest of his body (which is a bit jarring, considering how broad-shouldered and muscular the rest of him is).
The figurine's range of movement is basically the same as Link's - no waist movement, but able to move the legs, arms, and neck.
I got the box as a part of the order. Looking at this thing makes me feel like I opened a time capsule or something. It has offers for preordering Ocarina of Time all over it, including an offer for a coupon to get ten bucks off of the special gold cartridge.
Oh, and this set was apparently for sale originally for ten dollars. It's kind of sad that things like this make me think stuff like, "Should time travel be invented, one of the things I'd do is go back in time to when this shit was on sale for reasonable prices." It reminds me of when I'd think things like, "If I could travel back in time, I'd go back to the 90s so that I could watch my favorite cheesy shows that never got DVD releases".
As you guys probably can tell from the pictures, incidentally, Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf are all still in their plastic wrapping. I'm kind of on the fence here. On one hand, I'm really not a serious collector and would love to pop those suckers open and actually enjoy them. On the other hand... it really feels like breaking something. I guess? Maybe? If that makes sense. So I'm really not sure what to do. To open or not to open... hmm... What do you guys thing?
So, speaking of stuff for sale on eBay, one last thing! I've set some of my own stuff for sale up there! You can find it all on my eBay profile here. I'm still putting more stuff up, but by the end it should include:
So, other than that, I hope everyone else has been off to a fine start in 2015! Here's to another year, folks!
It struck me that I never got around to posting any pictures of my apartment, as I'd been planning to do. I did have a few pictures of my apartment prettied up for the holidays, but because LiveJournal's being a bit difficult in regards to me uploading pictures, I'll just have to save that for another time. In the meanwhile, I do have some pictures of my holiday decorations and a few things I have gotten done for the New Year, so enjoy!
At my parents's place, we had a ton of nutcrackers. Two of them were mine - the blue one in the picture and a large red one that I bought at a yard sale. The red one was too large for me to bring with me, but I couldn't leave the blue one when I was getting Christmas decorations to bring to my apartment. He's been too much of a Christmas tradition for me.
The same goes for the skating girl, Maria. I can't even remember when I got her, it was so long ago. I remember telling someone in second grade that I named her that though, so it must have been at least around then. But yeah, she's one of the other Christmas decorations that was mine specifically, and I brought her along. I don't have a lot of room for holiday-specific ornaments, but I managed to fit in those two.
Other than that, I had quite a few Christmas cards on display. My family wrote in to me and gave me cards when I came over for the holidays, so I put them all out. I have them stored away now. I'm sure I'll need to think of something to do next year, when I get more cards, but eeeeeh! I hate throwing out cards!
This is my first apartment Christmas tree! It's obviously artificial (no way I'd be able to get a real tree in, even if it was that small), and I was pleased with how it turned out. I bought tinsel, garlands, and lights from Rite Aide and my mom let me pick out some ornaments from our own stock at home (she was fine with that, since we seem to have too many for the tree as it is). I also put up some Chinese and Japanese charms, along with a few homemade ornament gifts I'd been given from co-workers. The whole thing turned out adorable, I think!
I gave a close-up on the angel of the tree. I was especially pleased with her. It took me awhile to find a suitable tree-topper, since I didn't want to stick just anything up there. My family always had an ornamental Santa face that we put up top, and that had always been the thing to put up there for me. I wanted something equally special. I found her for sale at a thrift shop in the neighborhood next to where I work. I bought her and two other ornamental wire angels (no pictures of them, sorry!) and was so happy that she fit up there perfectly! I actually had to glue her wings on because they fell off, but that stuck nicely.
The paper garland, incidentally, is another ornament that I bought at a massive craft fair I went to with my mom. It folds up into a neat little square when not in use and is made from the pages of discarded books. A lot of the stuff at the craft fair was made from old or secondhand things. When I saw that for sale, I knew it was perfect for my apartment.
This is the right side of the village under the tree. Ah, the village under the tree. That's easily my favorite part of decorating for Christmas. For serious, I basically took it upon myself to handle the entire village every year at my place. I had a little system: the left side was always the town, with the park and school and cars and trendier houses, and the right side was the farm/rural area, with the frozen pond and sledding hill and farm animals and less modern houses and cars. We also had nine million Campbell's Soup trucks because we would get them through various offers, so I would always pretend that our village's economy was centered around the production and shipping of Campbell's Soup.
This year, seeing as my space was more limited, I didn't have as many village items. What I had were mostly decorations bought from my aunt's fundraising efforts for the local library. What you see up there is the left side of the village, which again was meant to be the more urban area. There's a distinct lack of housing, though. Of course, there also are only three kids, a cat, a dog, and a few woodland creatures. Oh, and a random sheep. So yeah.
The schoolhouse, bridge, kids, snowman, and campfire (which is kind of out of view) all came from the fundraiser. The sheep came from home, the cat, puppy, and robin (which fell behind the tree stand) were found in various places. The snow was just a bunch of cotton balls that I pulled apart. It came out a little thicker than I would have liked, but oh well.
Fun fact - while it's hidden by the gold ball ornament at the top of the picture, I have a little porceline Santa coming out of a chimney that I set up on the school. I guess in this town, Santa just drops off the presents there. That's a mean trick to get kids back after the break.
And this is the right side of the village! Again, a lot of the houses and such came from the fundraiser. There's a china nativity set at the far left of the picture, along with a henhouse, a hot coco stand (halfway out of view to the right there), and (too far back to see), a pier with a guy sleeping on it.
Like with my previous villages, I set up a frozen pond. It's basically just a hand mirror laid flat. There's a little ducky there, which I could not resist (if anyone's wondering why, just check out here). The relatively large boat on there is a toy Noah's Ark. It's from the American Girl toyline, specificially one of Felicity's accessories. You can lift the top part off to store the animals below deck, along with the ramp. I took it with me when I moved out and very much wanted to give it a place of some sort in the village. The leather straps holding one side of the roof (which was supposed to be a flap to allow Mr. and Mrs. Noah be stored in the cabin) broke, so unfortunately that half of the roof wouldn't stay on and had to be propped up on the back.
As a part of Operation Combat Weird Gloomy Winter Feelings, I ordered this fun little doohicky. It's a dawn simulator! Basically, you hook it up to a lamp, punch in a time for "dawn" and how long you want the "sunrise" to be, and at that time it slowly turns the light on. You program it for about when you wake up in the morning and it tricks your body into thinking it's a summer sunrise instead of a winter one. I love this thing, I really do. At the very least, it's fantastic waking up to an already-lit room instead of a pitch-black one.
Aaaaand here we get to my guilty pleasure part of the new year. I celebrated things all around by ordering a few things off of eBay. This is technically the second time I've ever used that website, but it's the first time it's been without my parents knowing, so fun. I ordered a few Legend of Zelda collectables, which are awesome but need to be bought sparingly because damn. I'm pretty sure it'd be less expensive to take up a drug habit than to try to get some of the discontinued or Japan-only figurines.
ANYWHO! Those up there are the first order to come in. They're metal gashapon toy charms modeled after weapons and items from A Link Between Worlds. The set includes the Master Sword, the shield, the magic bracelet, a bomb (which makes for a good flail if you swing it by the chain, I'm just sayin'...), the Pegasus Boots, and the boss key. They're all very nicely-crafted, I must say.
Here's the second of my orders to come in, and lord. It's things like this that make collecting stuff for the Legend of Zelda franchise difficult. Near as I can tell, this set of three action figures (Link, Adult Zelda, and Ganondorf - somewhat incorrectly identified on the box as Ganon) was released as a promotional toy set for the release of Ocarina of Time. They, like most of the merchandise released for Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are now discontinued. Finding a set is like panning for gold. I was insanely lucky with this one. Not only was the price significantly less than the other handful of offers from other vendors, but I was able to make a better offer. Still, I love these three guys and they're all awesome.
I'm quite impressed with the quality of the Link figurine. It's not the top-notch paint quality you'd get from something like a Figma product (and yes, I have the Figma Link. I'll need to get a pic of him up at some point), but it's got decent detail. And while Link has a Serious Face on, he doesn't look insane or constipated or anything, so that's good.
The figurine comes with the Master Sword and the Hylian shield. Link has a hole in the fist of his left hand to fit the sword into, and the shield is designed to clip around the wrist of his right arm. The scabbord for the Master Sword looks like it can come off and on his back, but it's just one solid lump of plastic (meaning it's impossible to sheathe the sword).
The figurine can turn at the neck and legs, but not at the waist. His arms can also go up and down. So kind of limited movement, but some posing is still possible.
Zelda has to be my favorite out of the group, though I may be biased since she seems to be the only figurine of Adult Zelda ever made (for OOT, at least. I know a few of her from TP have been released). It's a good likeness too, though her expression seems a tad glazed. Like with Link, her paint job is respectable. There's pretty good detail on her dress, and the coloring's nice.
The figurine can turn at the waist and have her arms go up and down. It looks like it should be able to turn at the neck, but her hair (which is a solid plastic mass) goes so far down her back that it doesn't allow for much movement.
Of the three, Ganondorf is the one I have to say I'm the least impressed with. I might be spoiled since I already own a Ganondorf figurine (a larger one, part of the set released with him, his horse, his trident, and the Phantom Ganon mask), but there's just something... narmful about the way Ganondorf's grinning while staring out of those beady little squinty eyes. It's like he's leaning over someone's shoulder, real obnoxious-like, asking, "You going to finish that sandwich? Huh? Huh? Are you? Are you done with that sandwich? You going to finish it? Are you? Huh? Are you?" It doesn't help that the head seems disproportionately smaller than the rest of his body (which is a bit jarring, considering how broad-shouldered and muscular the rest of him is).
The figurine's range of movement is basically the same as Link's - no waist movement, but able to move the legs, arms, and neck.
I got the box as a part of the order. Looking at this thing makes me feel like I opened a time capsule or something. It has offers for preordering Ocarina of Time all over it, including an offer for a coupon to get ten bucks off of the special gold cartridge.
Oh, and this set was apparently for sale originally for ten dollars. It's kind of sad that things like this make me think stuff like, "Should time travel be invented, one of the things I'd do is go back in time to when this shit was on sale for reasonable prices." It reminds me of when I'd think things like, "If I could travel back in time, I'd go back to the 90s so that I could watch my favorite cheesy shows that never got DVD releases".
As you guys probably can tell from the pictures, incidentally, Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf are all still in their plastic wrapping. I'm kind of on the fence here. On one hand, I'm really not a serious collector and would love to pop those suckers open and actually enjoy them. On the other hand... it really feels like breaking something. I guess? Maybe? If that makes sense. So I'm really not sure what to do. To open or not to open... hmm... What do you guys thing?
So, speaking of stuff for sale on eBay, one last thing! I've set some of my own stuff for sale up there! You can find it all on my eBay profile here. I'm still putting more stuff up, but by the end it should include:
- An unworn bridesmaid's dress, size eight, strapless (could also be a great prom dress)
- A doll pram (Corollee, now discontinued model)
- The original Angelina Ballerina, Alice, Henry, and Polly dolls
- The original Angelina Ballerina Kitchen, Parlor, and Bedroom furniture sets
- The original Angelina Ballerina Storybook Cottage
- The original Angelina Ballerina outfit sets (princess dress, winter outfit, tumbling costume, and accessory set)
- A numer of discontinued Bitty Baby clothing sets (those will be going up later, depending on my success in selling the other stuff).
So, other than that, I hope everyone else has been off to a fine start in 2015! Here's to another year, folks!