We all know the story: two warring factions of robotic life forms, one noble and the other malevolent, crash-land on prehistoric Earth. They slumber for centuries and awaken, thanks to a volcanic eruption, in 1984. Their war - a desperate battle for the resources needed to revitalise their distant home - begins anew and in secret, thanks to the ( Read more... )

"Early this week, two of the boys - two of the most popular boys in the class - decided I was their new best friend. They wanted me to sit with them during maths, and hang out with them at lunch so I could meet their girlfriends. I figured 'what the heck?' and went along with it. Turns out one of their other friends wanted to ask me out! But he ( Read more... )

I don't think she does it deliberately, and that's part of the reason she astounds me.

A friend once described LJ's personal canon as "falling out of the genre tree and hitting every branch on the way down". It was a compliment but also an accurate summation; there's a lot of moving parts in LJ's world. She's always stitched those pieces together ( Read more... )

Comic conventions are fun, wrestling tours are awesome and celebrity interviews very, very cool, but the weekend I most look forward to, every year, is Toy Fair. It's an indescribable feeling: walking into a hall full of old toys, rummaging for treasure, racing other collectors for bargains, celebrating your discoveries and bemoaning missed ( Read more... )

Finding the time to write this entry has been something of an epic in itself. I won't bore you all with the details - it's enough to say "it's been a busy couple of weeks" and leave it at that. It's a shame it's taken so long because this, the first installment of a two-part story, is yet another one of LJ's strong ideas. The kidlet's burgeoning ( Read more... )

The simple fact is she's too good for the professionals ( Read more... )

I've now seen Avengers: Age of Ultron twice, thanks to (a) stareyednight winning a Marvel/Disney competition and (b) bc_scrubs' access to $10 movie tickets. I enjoyed it both times. If the original Avengers film was a 9.5/10 (being as close-to-perfect as a super hero team movie can be), I'd rate the sequel a solid 9/10. The glitch, for me, was the number of info dumps ( Read more... )

It occurs to me, when I sit down and write up LJ's epic adventures, how much hidden meaning they contain. And I wonder: is that me reading into the stories? Is it LJ subconsciously expressing the way she's growing, changing and developing as a person? Or is my daughter such a canny storyteller that she's possessed of insight enough to work through ( Read more... )

They're persistent, I'll give them that. Having failed on two previous occasions to bend LJ to their will, her former friends tried again today. Again there was the apology for earlier behaviour, again there was the insistence they remained her friends "even though you're weird", again there was the request she play with them. I suppose it is, in a ( Read more... )

Back in January, I decided my 2015 collecting goal would be GI Joe. I set myself some rules (characters previously owned or always wanted), calculated a budget (no more than $100 per figure), cleared some space on the comic room shelves (next to the Super Powers Collection, 80s with 80s) and went a-hunting. I was really looking forward to it and ( Read more... )