Cyber Monday Discount in Our Shop

So I know that I said I'd avoid all sales related stuff during the remainder of Nablowrimo, but it's Cyber Monday so I can't avoid it, sorry for all the shameless self promotion NaBlo people!

I'm offering a special discount (as I worked into my last post) So if you go shopping in my store
today you'll get $5 OFF any order over $20! We've got several fun items under $5 so it's like getting a free item!

Just use specail code: Cyber to get your discount, it's only good for today though, so don't miss it!

We've added some rare new items in perfect gift/collector condition as well so there's lots of new stuff perfect for spending your discount on!

First up if you're a sailor moon fan (or just shopping for one) there's the hard to find Sailor Pluto Beauty Change Doll:

Beautiful doll straight from our private collection in great collector or gift giving condition! We've got lots of other dolls too, so check out the dolls section for others if pluto's not your cup of tea.

Next for your favorite anime and game fan there's this beautiful cel of Chun-Li from the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero animated film:


This is an absolutely gorgeous hand painted cel. It was actually used in the production of the film! You can own the same frame you see on screen! We've got several one of a kind production cels and sketches available so if you're looking for a unique gift idea and aren't much of a street fighter fan check out our art section.

For the vintage video game fan on your list there's this awesome Mario and Zelda combination Lunch Box:

I use a box like this to get all our postal receipts in. :) I also used one as a purse at geek prom and got a ton of postive comments about it. It would make a really fun gift for a retro gamer and it's currently on sale for $25 so if you buy it today it's only $20! We've got loads of old and new video game memorabilia so if a lunch box isn't your cup of tea you're sure to find something else you'll like.

For your favorite Sci-Fi fan we've got a huge collection of 40 Star Wars miniatures:

These are new and sealed and make a perfect Starwars tabletop RPG starter set as it comes with the books and maps. It's only $25 or $20 ($0.50 cents a figure!) if you buy it today with coupon! Though even if you're not a RPG palyer they make excellent display pieces, we'd know as that's what we do with ours. :)

If none of that stuff tickles your fancy be sure to come take look anyway, we've got 100's of fun items available and some smaller items that would make excellent geeky stocking stuffers that would end up being free today with the purchase of a larger item with coupon!

If you don't see anything you like, but know someone else who might like something please pass the word on to them. We'd like to see as many people as possible benefit from the today's coupon!

~Stephanie

Collection picture spam!

I've been way off task lately because of all sorts of serious business taking place. Today would be no exception as I've been working all day to get the store fully stocked and things prepped for cyber Monday tomorrow (Psst the coupon code is Cyber and it will get you $5 off a purchase of a purchase of $20 or more!) So instead throwing up another whine, whine, whine, I'm too busy to write a blog post type of thing, I thought I'd spam with some collection picture instead. These are broing collction pictures though, just dvds and video games, not much in the way of fun toys and figures. (which is the sort of suff I like seeing/talking about more) It does give you a bit more of an idea of the scope of our collections and a very good idea as to why we know so much about our store stock.

First off our dvd and game shelves note that each shelf holds 200 items roughly and that we still couldn't make it all fit properly.

We;ve actually changed our set-up a bit now and there are even more games now, though there's less spillover at the tops and under the shelves.

More games, older games this time:

Once again our setup has changed from when I took that picture. Our trophy figures are still out, but the 8-bit bottlecaps are elsewhere and the games in that shelving has changed drastically.

That's about half our game collection maybe when I've got more time, I'll take shots of our PC collection, all our strat guides, and some update shots of the shelvses. Totally exciting stuff right?

~Stephanie

NaBloWriMo 28

I almost missed today which would have totally bummed me out as I've only got one day left to go before I successfully finish nablowrimo this year.

I haven't got much to say today because I was gone the entire day and I've got mere moments before it's tomorrow.

Exciting developments to come soon!

Black friday

So I totally lied, I still haven't had time to be on task. It's amazing how busy we've been lately. we didn't go out and snag and black Friday deals today other than a couple of pizzas that were marked down from $8 each to $2. None of the electronics deals were good enough to brace the crowds. Though my brother did take advantage of the threadless $9 sale and bought me three early christmas presents.





It kind of sucks the I know what I'm egtting for presents, but they're awesome and cheap and nerdy. I am excited.

~Stephanie

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone had a fantastic thanksgiving. We spent the day with my family and had a fairly good time. Since I was out for most of the day, I really don't have a lot to say, but tomorrow I should have something fun and on task. For today, I'm just going to relax and hope everyone else does the same.

~Stephanie

So I may have lied...

...When I said I was going o finish adding screenshots to my review today. We had an early thanksgiving today and I ended up cooking, eating and being upset that I ate so much for most of the day. It was a good day, but bad for productivity.

Tomorrow will be out of town spending thanksgiving with my family and returning with my brother which promises all sorts of impending geekery.

Only 5 more NaBlo entries left...

~Stephanie

Retro Review Tuesday: Mario's Picross

So lately I've been playing a lot of Picross on the DS and it made me reflect on it's predecessor which is why I decide to do this review this week.

Introduction
Mario's picross is really a hidden gem, it's seen as cult favorite, but it wasn't received well in the US when it came out. Which is really a shame as it's one of the most fun hand held puzzle games to grace the gameboy. For me it's really right up there with Tetris, I could easily pick it up and play it just about anytime.

Overview

Like most puzzle games the plot line is a bit thin, Mario is an archaeologist who's searching for the pictographs by slowly chiseling away at stone to reveal the pictures. It's simply a series of nonogram (logic puzzles involving a grid with numbers for every row and column), with loose Mario theming.

Controls are simple it's a Gameboy game so there's not much to worry about. You chisel stones by pressing A, you make an X were you shouldn't chisel by pressing B and you move around the grid with the D pad.

If you can manage to hit this a mushroom or flower might pop out.

Graphically it's fairly nice for an original Gameboy game from 1995. Though most of what you see graphically are borders and menus screens as the bulk of the game is the graphs you fill in. It's worth mentioning that I took screenshots via an emulated super Gameboy so it's in color, but if you'd played it in a normal Gameboy it obviously wouldn't be.


Musically, it's so-so. Like many puzzle games you get a section of background tracks to choose from. They're likable enough and make for fine puzzle completion music, but none of them are as noteworthy or interesting as those found in games like Dr. Mario or Tetris. The sounds themesleves are pretty sparse, but serviceable.

Gameplay

I'd like to know why this was translated Kinoko instead of mushroom since the star isn't Sutā

The game divides puzzles into 4 categories, Easy, Kinoko, Star, and Time Trial. Each category consists of 64 puzzles. The puzzles start at 5x5 grids and moves up to 15x15 grids. The puzzles increase in complexity as you move forward.

Ahhh yes the classic an much beloved Mario back hoe

All you have to do is match the numbers on the grid to corresponding points in the puzzle and chisel out a spot when you find it. It's one of those cases where anyone can learn how to do it, but it hard to master. If you try to chisel a spot where there should be a space you get a time penalty, the penalty goes up depending on how many wrong answers you get. The first wrong answer is -2 minutes, the second is -4 minutes etc. with a max of an 8 minute penalty per mistake. You only have 30 minutes to do these puzzles in so getting a lot of silly mistakes can end your game quite quickly.You also get the option to take a hint in the beginning which will fill both a horizontal and and vertical line correctly this doesn't dock tine and is extremely useful in the larger more difficult puzzles. If you get stuck you can strategically "try out" a spot (preferably one that will help guide you to plot multiple points) you run the risk of losing time, but it often quicker than several rounds of endless speculation in tough spot.

If it take you the full half hour to make this letter R this is probably not the game for you.

You can start off in either easy picross or just picross where you can select the first normal class, Kinoko (the Japanese word for mushroom). The easy picross puzzles are as you would expect, quite easy. They do move up to 15 x 15 grids, but aren't very complex. The Kinoko puzzles are all a 15x15 grid and are much more complex than the easy puzzles. After completing all 64 of the Kinoko puzzles you'll unlock the Star catergory which has even more complex puzzles.

The first three classes, Easy, kinoko and Star all work in the way described above. The time trial class however, works differently. First you have to have sucessfully completed all 192 of the previous puzzles before you can unlock it. Second, there isn't a time limit, the time just counts up as you work towards completion. The final difference is, you are not told when you make a wrong answer, this may seem nice at first as you don't have to worry about losing, but is actually quite a challenge. If you make a mistake you usually won't know until after it's potentially ruined your entire puzzle.

Overall it's a lot more addicting that it sounds via descriptions and with a total of 256 puzzles you'll have hours of fun with it. Even after you've managed to beat them all, you time totals are stored so you an always try to get better and better times, in time trial mode you can even enter your initials for posterity.

Mario is proud of your ability to make everyday objects our of squares

Conclusion

As I said earlier this one of those games that's easy to learn, but takes a long time to master. It's easy to pick up and play, but you can easily spend hours with it. The logic is easy enough for a child to follow but more than complex enough to keep an adult entertained for hours. If your a fan of games that make you think, puzzles and logic, this is a perfect game for you.

~Stephanie

Don't forget to stop by our shop:

NaBloWriMo 23

I can't believe I've already managed to do 23 days (though I have had help) It's been a lot harder than I initially expected it to be and I really thought about giving up several times

Unfortunately I've got nothing interesting to say today. I'm still fighting off a really nasty cold so I'm really behind on accomplishing most tasks. We've got a house guest right now too, that's kind of screwing with the household dynamic and thus my productivity levels. OK, so maybe it's not hard to screw with my productivity levels, but I actually do like feeling productive.

However, I don't see my productivity levels rising anytime in the near future, my cold is going to stick around for a while still and we've got two thanksgiving gatherings to attend and my brother is coming for a visit. So all in all it looks to be a very busy week and busy usually is bad for getting anything done you actually want to get done.

So that's my really really boring entry for the day. But at least I managed to add another day on to my NaBloWriMo count only 7 more to go. Honestly, I've had fun with it, but I'll be glad when it's all over with. I don't mind the excuse to write some of the on task entries I've been meaning to do, but when I'm too bust to do anything other than ramble about nothing I think it's best they stay unwritten.

~Stephanie

Sometimes you're know you're crazy.

There are a variety of reasons that I'm totally crazy. I mean how many others would devote so much of their time and money to do some of the stupid crazy stuff we do? Case in point being our large and silly collection of vintage Nintendo stuff. I mean I know I'm not the only one who collects that stuff, but I have to think I'd be the only one really excited about some of the really odd ball stuff. Like for example this Zelda Trash Can that recently went across eBay.


Now I really, really really wanted that trash can I wanted it so much I bid $30 not including the $10 shipping fee, for it. In my mind that was way higher than I probably should have bid considering I'm pretty much tapped out at the moment, but still was enough that I thought it was secure victory. If I had won it I was going to declare it an early christmas present from Jen. However when I came home from running errands that day it ended and saw that I lost, I was of course disappointed, and expected I'd probably lsot by $0.50 or so like usual but, no Someone was not only crazier than me they were twice as crazy as I was and it ended at over $60 not including the shipping. Someboday paid $70 ($72.09 to be completely accurate) to own a small metal trash can. First I thought, well they sure are crazy, I wouldn't pay that much. Then reality hit me, I wouldn't pay that much because I couldn't afford that much. If I had the money I'd totally be bragging about my $70 small metal trash can right now.

See, totally crazy.

~Stephanie

Acklay and Final Fantasy XII Mantis sepearted at birth?

While going through some Star Wars tabletop miniatures we noticed we had quite a number of Acklay figures:

I only vaguely remember seeing this creature in episode 2, I know where and when it appears, but you don't see it for too long. However when examining the figures, I noticed it looks remarkably like the Mantis monsters in Final Fantasy XII. I probably wouldn't have noticed except for that awful mission where you have to fight hordes of them. But other than the color difference they sure do look like siblings:


It really makes me wonder where that intial design came from. Did the FF team copy the Lucas creatures, did they both get it from some other pre-exsisting fantasty creature or is it a coincidence? Just something to ponder on a Saturday night.

~Stephanie

Collection update: Here be Dragons

We just updated our cel gallery recently with more than just cels. A few months ago we managed to get some awesome concept drawings of a dragon. They were apparently supposed to be for a Las Vega theme park that never got off the drawing board.These are Cool dragons on their own, but to make things better they were drawn by Jeff Dee who is a fantasy artist best known for his contributions to Dungeons and Dragons books and modules. GEEK SCORE! So we thought we'd share them here as well:

A great shot of the dragon sleeping on his treasure pile.
The Dragon breathing fire well more likely smoke given that it was supposed to be a theme park and you probably wouldn't want to start your guests on fire.

We added other geeky stuff to the gallery as well.... Our My Little Pony additions spring to mind. So go check out our gallery if you're interested in that sort of stuff.

~Stephanie

Silent Hill - Alessa comes to Animal Crossing

Sometimes something already geeky, like being an adult playing animal crossing, needs something a little geekier. So borne out of discussion about one of the standard game wall papers, I got the idea to make a Silent Hill themed floor of my animal crossing house. It was honestly half hearted and while eerie, it wasn't quite there. My brother decided he could do a better job. The following are the fruits of his labours...

~

So...a long time in the making, this was an idea that spanned off of mainly impulse...it all started back when I was visiting my sister's house a few months ago...she looked at a "Shanty Wall" in Animal Crossing and said something like "My God, does that ever look Silent-Hilly." So she found a scary looking floor (Incidentally, the "Shanty Flooring") and filled her upstairs with all sorts of creepy looking items, such as strange pottery, eerie hospital equipment, and a haunting audio track. It was a nice try, did look rather depressing, but it still looked too bright. I thought I could do better, making my own designs. Using my own Wii which was with me, I made my first attempt at a custom Silent Hill flooring. And the rest is history.

So without further ado - The Animal Crossing Silent Hill House



MAIN FLOOR: The main floor's theme was originally going to be just random scary stuff that reminded us of Silent Hill. But I then decided that I would base it on the School area of Silent Hill. However, since I couldn't find the floor and what not that I wanted, I lost interest for a while...but upon finding some very nice school equipment, my interest was revitalized and I set out to make the best damn Midwich Elementary School replica Animal Crossing would allow.

-Normal-

Angle 1:

Angle 2:

Angle 3:


Although the Library Wall doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it's still pretty eerie which I decided was a fair trade. I used to have Birch Flooring on the ground but decided to go with Common Flooring after I found a new use for the Birch. I was pleased to have found those desks and chairs, and was happy to finally acquire the large Chalk Board as it is a two-piece item that "snaps" together. The Easel by the chalk board is based on a design I got from Wendell (the notepad design) and I added the faint "letters."

-Reverse Side-

Angle 1:

Angle 2:

Angle 3:


It's been suggested that I should leave the school floor for last as it really is my most impressive floor. But I'm trying to do it in a certain order, but yes...I really did kick this one's ass. I'm especially proud of the Halo of the Sun over there (The save point in Silent Hill 3). The floor was the very first custom design I made for the house, and the walls are the Third. I was very proud of those as well.

~~~~~~~

UPPER FLOOR: The upper floor's original theme was scrapped as it just didn't work well with the small size and windows, so I reluctantly moved that theme down to the basement and turned this into my rendition Alessa's childhood bedroom. I also made a reverse version although it seems a little wrong since there isn't normally one in the game but I really wanted to use the reverse floor/wall scheme that I did, so I decided to do it.

-Normal-

Angle 1:

Angle 2:


There weren't many distinctive features I could add here, so I just tried to make a nice, eerie bedroom. I did however make that design of a child's rendition of butterflies as it is pretty important to that theme. Sometimes I switch that design out for Alessa's dress pattern since my designs are always full. You can't really tell but there's also a grandfather clock in there for basic eeriness. Additionally, this is where I decided to put the birch flooring

-Reverse Side-

Angle 1:

Angle 2:


I really wanted to use this surrounding scheme for something, so I decided to just use it for this, although the bedroom shouldn't have a reverse side. I also thought it would be creepier (and also much easier) if all the items stayed unchanged despite the [dare I say horrific?] change of the surroundings. Here, I'm using the second design I made for the house, which was originally meant to be a wall. There are two angles and forms - one showing the original design (angle 2), and one showing what it looks like, placed and rotated (angle 1) which is how I usually set it.

~~~~~~~~

BASEMENT: I just got the basement for the house today and went straight to work on it at starting at 6 AM. I originally just wanted random scary, chain-linky, basement stuff in there like you'd see in Silent Hill but I had to put the bed/bench down there for the Hospital theme as it wouldn't be very right not to include it. So I just mixed the themes together to make Alessa's hospital room. I suppose it's sort of appropriate to put it down there. This room is always on the reverse side.

Angle 1:

Angle 2:

Angle 3:

Angle 4:


The basement was a hard sell for me but I think I finally got it to where I'm okay with it. There are about 10 stoves down there which are meant to resemble boilers, as you see plenty of boiler-like objects in the game. I'm using a Lab Bench and Amazing Machine it resemble Alessa's hospital bed and the nearby machinery. I can't tell you how proud I am of that wall. It took a long time to make and remake several times, but it was so worth it, definitely the best piece of design work I've done to date. I was going to make the floor down there the same but it seemed a bit repetitive, in the sense that the upper floor also had alike flooring and walls.

~~~~~~~~

House Exterior:


I liked this better when it was smaller, but I still rather like the outside...I'm especially proud of the seal of Medatron, I wish I had found more things to do with it inside the house.
~~~~~~~~
Regarding Alessa...

You'll notice she's wearing a different outfit in the first few images and outside of the house. You see, I made that school-girl dress for her to resemble her clothes from the game, but because all of my design space was used up before then, I really couldn't let her wear it. So in the images where she's not I gave her a mummy shirt, as a way to make her look bandaged, which is also appropriate. When she's wearing the school dress, I traded it the butterfly drawing for it at the Able Sisters, so the easel upstairs would have actually had the dress pattern on it at the time...

Other Info: Some down sides to this would be the lack of design storage, for one, as far as what you can use at one time, which is limited to eight designs. Another would be that although the flooring LOOKS metal, when walked on it still makes the sound of ceramic tiling. That's a bummer. Also the windows have the tendency to ruin the effect of the house, so it's nice that the basement had none.

One thing it was suggested I do would be to get an animal's key and keep it for myself to leave it in the house to be ever closer to the game. If an animal I don't like loses their key, I will certainly do this.

I use a musical track in the Reverse version of the rooms and the basement. It is the same track my sister used for her original attempt at the Silent Hill theme many months ago, and it is called "K.K. Dirge." It's a rather eerie tune, and is especially good at the end of its loop when you hear two loud, intimidating pounding noises. For effect it also has a skipping-record sound when it plays the first, lengthy, unsettling note. The main theme is a bit hokey for Silent Hill but I think having the track helps the rooms as a whole.


So yes...that's the Silent Hill House. It took a couple of months to make, what with the scrounging for appropriate items, and of course paying off the dreadful loans towards expansion. All of the custom designs were created by myself. My older sister Steph can also be credited for funding a lot of the project. I am very proud of it, and I know it makes me a new breed of mega-dork. If there are any questions, I will happily answer them. I'd explain everything in detail here but this journal is pretty damn long as it is. If the public interest is there, I'll make another journal showing off alternate design schemes/layouts for the rooms in the future.

Thank you for looking, I hope you've enjoyed it. I know I did.

~R.M.

NaBloWriMo day 17 the plague has grasped me

There has been a dread death plague stalking my house. It has been creeping along, watching and waiting. First it took Jennifer and with my careful care she seems to be making a recover now, it seems to have come for me...

So.. I was supposed to make a better post today and then Jennifer came along and infected me with her plague and now we're both to sick to do anything other than lay on the couch and watch Law and Order. OK, fine I admit than when we are healthy we also lay on the couch and watch law and order. It's really not that much different, other than now I actually kind of want to accomplish other things and can't because it sucks up all my energy. In fact just typing this in entirely too much effort.

Tomorrow I might talk about the cel gallery update I did today that I intended to talk about today or I might finally have my brother showcase the Silent Hill themed animal crossing house and character he created. But what I know now is that tomorrow is not today and today I am sick and quite tired.

~Stephanie

~Stephanie

NaBloWriMo day 17 I totally suck

So...it's Tuesday and normally one of us would have done a video game review for today. Unfortunately we've been super busy with other stuff and totally dropped the ball. I don't even have any good geeky consolation prizes either. So in short, today, I totally suck. I will have hopefully stemmed the flow of suckage by tomorrow and have something at least sort of interesting to type about. Until there here are two of our cats, I will use their cuteness to help distract from the boring nature of this post:

If I were really cool, I'd give them a witty and relevant caption. I am sadly not that cool, so you'll just have to deal with the cuteness and hope that I'm better tomorrow.

~Stephanie

NaBloWriMo day 16 Sandcastles

I was looking through some pictures today and found some of our sandcastles from back in June. Every year, weather permitting we head to the beach on Park Point and build sandcastles on Jen's birthday, this year it was a couple days after, but close enough. Before I share some pictures it should be noted that we, mostly meaning me, do not simply build sandcastles like a normal person. I build sand infrastructure, there are roads, parks, residential areas, forts, working areas and naturally a big religious/government structure. Not to mention a port and a light house to promote commerce. It's kind of like playing civilization only with more sand and less peasants.

First up we have a shot of the skyline of Duluth taken from the Park Point shoreline for an idea of the setting:


Next we have my castle and surrounding grounds (including a tree made of driftwood and seaweed):


I realize looking at it now that it bares a passing resemblance to the pyramid in the dark world:
Jen's sand town, which provided residential areas for my towns people:

Now I'm missing the warm weather.

~Stephanie

Collection Update: Link Pillowcase

So, this is a bit of a lag in coming. I should have updated it last month as I begged for it for my birthday and got it. I think anyone who reads this normally knows I'm a little slow though. Anyway here's the only collectible item I can think of that I use more than the glasses case I talked about yesterday, my Link Pillowcase:

Now I can't think of anyone I'd rather take to bed every night than 8-bit Link. I wish we could take credit for creating this beauty, but it was instead a very talented Etsy seller who made him for us. There are quite a number of similar 8-bit character cases available on Etsy, but I wanted this one because of the fabric choices and the quality. It's seen constant use since October and has stood up to snuggles, smooshes, drooling and cleaning without any issues. I'm insanely pleased with it. If anyone is interested in the seller's name do drop me a note as I can't recommend anyone more highly. Though fair warning, it's a pretty steep price for a pillow case, I had to have my own pillow on hand to fill it with and it was still more than a set of 600 thread count Egyptian cotton cases.

I'd really like to get an entire set of pixel pillows made for the couch in my geek room, but that would require a lot more cash than I have and a couch nice enough to put them on. I'm going to go ahead and file that under "pipe dreams" for now, but I think anyone would have to admit, it would be pretty freaking awesome.

Not surprisingly we have lots of other geek bedding materials as well, Jen has two sailor moon pillows on the bed normally and we have a bevy of character sheets including: sailor moon, care bears, Pokemon and rainbow brite. Though I can never seem to score a set of vintage Mario and Zelda ones. :( I'm sure I will someday. In the meantime, maybe one day I'll get around to taking pictures of our incredibly unsexy "boudoir" collections.

~Stephanie

Collection Oddities: Mario Brothers Glasses Case

Today's oddity doesn't have a lot of moving parts or weird attachments or anything like that. It is however, one of the geekiest items currently in our possession.

It is an official Nintendo of America eyeglasses case featuring Mario.



Given the long standing association between nerds/geeks (I use the terms interchangeably)and eyeglasses I can't think of anything nerdier than a video game related glasses case..well maybe a pocket protector (runs off to see such an item exsists)I originally found one of these while looking to replace my vintage Mario 2 drinking glasses. I saw an auction for eyeglasses and a case like this one. For some reason I don't fully understand, Nintendo makes eyeglasses as well.*

I missed out on that first combo auction, but a case came up separately a few months later and I snagged it. It's quite a useful collectible, one of the few things I can use daily. I have a few complaints about it though, it's made out of pretty cheap plastic and the inside is a thin layer of foam type felt. However, when I bought my glasses they had no case and this one has yet to cause any issues. besides, I'd love it's weirdness too much to really complain even if it was the worst thing I'd ever stored my glasses in ever.

~Stephanie

*Though be warned even if you're a Nintendo loving mega dork like I am who would be interested in such things they're almost exclusively child sized and they're some of the least attractive frame styles I've ever seen in my life

NaBloWriMo day 13 Shopping and Sales!

So I know I said when I started this I wanted to adhere to the NaBlo community guidelines as closely as possible and not talk about any sales related stuff for the month. However, I've been doing a lot of work lately and can't help but talk about it. I hope if I just leave out any links and things an hope that means I'm still good, I'm not trying to be an ad, I'm just feeling pleased with myself.

First I integrated Paypal checkout. A relatively easy to implement and simple change, but two people used it immediately on the day I put the code in so it must be a good thing. I know that it saves typing time because otherwise my site's shopping cart asks for your payment info and then you have to put it in again if you use paypal so I know I'd appreciate it.

Second, I just signed up for a Twitter account today and integrated it in the store. So now my items should automatically "tweet" as soon as I upload them. I'm really awful at social networking, I deleted my myspace about a year ago and only update my facebook every couple months, if that's any indication. So I don't know that I'll ever end up tweeting about anything directly. My social ineptitude aside, hopefully it will be useful for the regular customers we have who want to know about our updates (as I also suck at putting together mailing list mailings). I still haven't figured out how to add the "tweet this" button on things, but I'm sure I'll learn eventually.

Third I got caught up on all my shipping. The only things I have left to send out now are recent things. I'm very happy about that. I always feel like a big jerk when I get behind on getting stuff out.Hopefully the craziness of life that's been plaguing us lately will die down a bit. As it gets closer to the Christmas shopping season the last thing I want is people thinking I'm the world's slowest shipper (though honestly I totally can be a times).

Lastly our cel sales have been going well, though it's a bit sad to part with some of the things we've had for years. But sometimes you know you just need to move on. Tastes and priorities change besides we could really use more cash right now. Not that we're quitting collecting, in fact I've got snazzy new stuff to update as soon as the selling period is done, some of it purchased with cash garnered from sales (cash we meant to save -_-;;), it's the great circle of collecting life. :)

I admit this is a boring entry, but that's all I've got for today. I've been working a lot and that's what my mind has been on and fore once I actually feel pretty accomplished.

I'll try to get a collection oddities post ready for tomorrow. It should hopefully prove to be a lot more interesting than minor site tweaks that are only really interesting to me.;)

~Stephanie

Freezepop Concert!

As Jen said in her entry we went to a freezepop concert last night. If you're not familiar with freezepop they're a synthpop band from Boston that's been making catchy dancy pop songs for the last 10 years and who've gained notoriety from doing video game tracks. We first heard them doing Science Genius Girl in Frequency, but they've recently become much more popular because of their songs in the Guitar Hero games. We've managed to see them live 3 times, every time they visit MN we manage to see one of their shows.

Last night we were right in front of the stage so we got a great opportunity to get close up shots of the band performing. Unfortunately our camera really isn't fast enough to take great action shots so we got more colorful blurs than anything, but they're still fun.

A Ghostly image of Sean and Liz from the beginning of the concert, doing Brain Power.

Liz the blur



Liz and Sean I can't remember which song this is, but that Sean shaped Blur is clapping.



Sean and bananas doing Get Ready to Rokk



The whole band during the encore




Jen posing with the band after the concert



It was seriously a great time. If you every get a chance to freezepop in concert I highly suggest doing so. They're normally cheap tickets, ours were $5 and the most we've paid was $10 and you'll see one heck of a great show.

~Stephanie