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

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

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 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

NaBloWriMo 9: Star Wars exhibit

So I was tapped for a good idea for a post today and decided to delve into the annals of history. For the record, the documents folder on my desktop shall now be referred to as that annals of history. Anyway, while poking around I came across our Vacation from '08. Our Primary destination was the house on the rock which was a completely awesome and weird destination. I'd blog about that, but it was quite possibly the worse place in the world for taking pictures.

So instead I'm going to talk about our secondary destination which was the Star Was: where science meets imagination exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. It featured presentations, activities and star wars props and costumes. Unfortunately it was also not great for taking pictures, but we did get some that are appropriate for sharing.

First off my favorite, the star destroyer:

The Star destroyer was always my favorite ship. When I saw that it was there I literally squealed with delight. I don't really have a solid reason as to why it's my favorite, but something about such a massive ship just appealed to me. Who could you engineer something so huge? Where could you build it? How much staffing do you need? The mind, it boggles. Not to mention that it's just so iconic. This is probably the nicest picture I took of any of the props, it's too bad that guy's head is in my shot. Though the exhibit hall was just crammed with people so it's a small miracle I got a shot with only one obvious person.

Next up we have the Millennium Falcon:

There were lots of ship props and we have lots of pictures, but we thought we should share this one because C'mon it's the millennium falcon. I really wish the corner of the glass case wasn't so obvious in this one, but it's otherwise a cool shot. I love how the light trails make it look like it really is flying. They were totally a mistake, but a great one.

Last a Model of Kashykk:

I do not have words for how badly I wanted to play with that model. I mean who could really look at that and NOT think to themselves, gee it would be fun to fill that with action figures. It was really cool and detailed. I was sad they didn't have more models on display. It was a traveling exhibit though and there really was a lot of awesome stuff so I can't really complain.

We took way more pictures than those three, but those came out the nicest. They're pretty old now, but I hope they can still be enjoyed.

The exhibit was really really interesting and I'd love to see it come back. Other than seeing all the cool props I loved the interactive stations for building a droid and a working land speeder maybe if it comes back Jen and I can find a less busy day to go (we went on opening day) and we can race our creations). We got admission into the science museum with our special admissions tickets and spent the whole day playing with exhibits which I'd be all too happy to have an excuse to do that again as well. My only complaint is that we paid for the special millennium falcon "ride", but didn't get our limited edition pins :(

~Stephanie

NaBloWriMo day 8: Jumbo Cactuar

So in my first post of the month I decided that doing NaBloWriMo was like a Tonberry, it looks harmless enough until it catches up with you. Today I think it's more like the Jumbo Cactuar from final fantasy VIII.

If you're unfamiliar with this suave fellow he was one of the secret summon creatures (called Guardian forces or GFs in hat game). I had to go to an isolated island and wait for him to pop up so I could beat him in to submission and use at my discresion to fill other enemy creatures with needles. A bit annoying, but I thought I was levled up enough to take him on without too many issues.

Half an hour of fighting later, he runs away from me. Now I knew going in that he could do that, he's just a big curly mustached catuar and that's what they do, they run. But F!@#$! after half hour, that's insane and rage inducing. So after that point I turned off the game and didn't touch it for days. When I came back to it, I just avoided the cactaur Sure he was in the desert, mocking me, laughing at my failure, but I just let him be. I had too many other things to attend to without enduring that again.

So you may be saying. "Stephanie, you totally suck at playing final fantasy, you should play other games. Additionally what does this have to do with your posts?"

Well, I do play lots of other games and I don't always suck at FF...just sometimes. The other part being that writing something relevant everyday is harder than I thought. I'm doing an OK job right now, but I'm sort of burned out from other things so it may just run away from me. If that happens, I'm just going to swear, ignore it and move on with my game.

But maybe I shouldn't be so negative. I should dig up my memory card, fly into that desert and show mean green Mr. Mustache who's really boss or I can fail miserably, but I won't know unless I try.

I seriously don't know how the novel writers do it. trying to hit that word counting everyday has got to be grueling.

~Stephanie

NaBloWriMo 6: Collection Pictures

I've had a perfectly awful day, I'm sick, I'm stressed out and people who were supposed to pay me didn't. So I'm not going to try to come up with an interesting post today, because it's totally just not going to happen. I'm also not going to whine. So what am I going to do? Post some pictures of our collections because I've been meaning to do that for awhile.

Today I have 2 shots of our "trinket shelves" which mostly hold video games for systems we aren't playing and a heck of a lot of random anime and game related crap. Several of the weirder things have been highlighted already and a few will be in the future.

First a tall shot:

Next up a wide shot of just the top stuff as a lot of that got cut off in the first picture:

It should be pretty obvious that our primary collections are vintage nintendo (almost exclusively Mario and Zelda) and Sailor moon, but there's all sorts of other random goodies in there if you look had enough. The really sad part is that, that represents maybe a quarter of our random crap collections and maybe 1% of our total game collections. Yes, we are sad sad people.

~Stephanie

NaBloWriMo 4

I said I was going to try to be more on topic and I actually do have a variety of fun on topic things to talk about, but it's been a very very hard day for me and I really don't have the desire or energy to talk about any of the geeky things I enjoy right now.

Instead I'm just think about the how life is too darn short to be miserable, yet sometimes it's impossible not to be. Sometimes you can past on your brightest smile and turn both cheeks twice and you'll keep getting punched in the face. It's not pretty, but that's how life goes. Often I can accept that and move on. Other times I simply need to allow myself to wallow in the unfairness of it all to cry, to lash out, to beat my fists against the wall before I can pick myself up and move forward again. Today is a wallowing a day. a day of tears and marred walls.

I hope tomorrow will be better. Hopefully, I'll be prepared to ignore the crap this world throws in my face and continue being happy with the things I've been blessed with.

~Stephanie

How to cook in glasses

So, it's only day two of NaBloWriMo and I'm already veering into completely random stuff that has nothing to do with the normal content of this blog. I had thought this would take longer. I am going to do one of my regularly schedule updates in tomorrow, a Retro Review so maybe that will jump start me back on topic.

But tomorrow is not today.

Today I've got a quandary that plagues my daily life. How in the heck are you supposed to cook in glasses?

Let's start with a little background. When I was a wee lass, very wee around 4ish, it was discovered that I had a lazy eye. Which meant I had to wear glasses (and an eye patch, but I'm not even going to go into that right now). I was already social awkward, studious, and funny looking, my blue plastic glasses just made things infinitely worse. So I kept conveniently leaving them at home in the mornings, until it got to the point where my teachers would send me home to get them because they knew it was on purpose. At that point I thought I'd be saddled with them forever. Then one fateful day in 6th grade I got in fight for reasons I don't recall with a girl I barely remember. During said fight my glasses got broken. My parents never got around to replacing them and for the rest of my school career, and several years after, I was blissfully glasses free.

Fast forward o last year when I realized that I was having a lot of eyestrain issues while watching TV and playing games and I found myself thinking that it was probably my old eye issues coming back to haunt me. Earlier this year a trip to the optometrist confirmed that I shouldn't have been such a stupid kid and just wore my darn glasses.

So now here we are and now that I'm older I don't mind wearing my glasses and while I don't wear them constantly I do wear them daily. I have just one issue, cooking. If I forget to take my glasses off while making anything warm, I always have the moment of disorienting blindness when I lean over a pot or open an oven. I know I could just take mine off, but some people would be more blind with no glasses than wearing the completely fogged ones. So what the heck?I haven't worn glasses for 15 years so maybe I've forgotten something. Is there a special head movement or something to prevent this from happening or should I just to resolve to give up cooking? I just don't remember this being such an issue before.

So there's my entry for the day. It's totally off topic and boring, but at least I got through it. Hopefully I'll be a little more interesting and on topic as the month progresses.

~Stephanie

NaBloWriMo Coupon Codes and Contest!

So I've decided I'm going to make an attempt at doing National Blog writing Month, next month which means there should be one post of geeky goodness (or something reasonably on topic) in here everyday. I might FINALLY get to taking some of those pictures of our existing collections. However, as per their no selling rule, I'm going to refrain from making any store references So I'm giving out November's coupon code now it's: Turkey15 and it will get you 15% off your purchases, it won't work until Nov. 1st though. But, that's OK because there are still 6 days to use the Present coupon code to a HUGE 27% off your order. I'll get to some great and seasonably appropriate suggestions for you to spent on it a little later, first there's the contest!

Time is running out if you want a FREE $15 GIFT CERTIFICATE to our shop, I plan on drawing names just before midnight on Halloween so if you want in you'd better hurry. Go check our Halloween Candy post for more details.

So if you're going to try for that gift certificate or just want to use the higher percentage coupon code before next month here's some Halloween spirited selections for you:


Wonderful hand painted animation cel from the animated adaptation of Brian Frouds wonderful Faeries book. If you haven't had a chance to see this aniamtion check it out on youtube here. (I'd normally insist on owning a legal copy of such a thing, but it's been out of print for 20 years at least) It really does do a wonderful job of capturing his art styleof Oisin battling the Shadow King (who obviously resembles a black dragon). It' s really wonderful image and currently quite festive.

If you're not an animation art collector there's always comics and manga.


Judas is a dark and bloody manga which loosely follows Christianity and mythology. It's definitely intended for an older audience. Description from the back of volume 1 sets up the story as:
Judas, cursed for his sins, is the spirit of Death--he is without form, and has enslaved young Eve to carry out the most heinous of acts. Together in spirit and body, they must slay 666 people so that Judas can regain his humanity.

It was an interesting series to say the least. This is volume 4 so you'd have to have already started the series or procure it elsewhere though ours is measly $3.50 before getting a discount so if you're already reading it, this is a great value.





Or finally what's more Halloween than costumes?




This Simplicity Renaissance pattern set includes instructions to make 2 variations on the upper class gown and one lower class gown. It obviously far too close to Halloween to make your own dress(or even get these patterns on time), but you have plenty of time until next year or for next summer's Renfaires.




There so now go forth and shop if you're interested in something and don't forget to come back to this post if you want something in November and check out the shop occasionally as I will still be updating, I just am not going to be posting about it. I've got everything I need for my Uzumaki review as well so I should be posting that tomorrow.

~Stephanie