Quickie Review Photodump: MMC Cylindrus

So I kinda decided I wanted to use this site for more things this year given I never use it. Actually create some content and the like.

So with that said, “Toy Review Crap” is gonna be a new feature – basically me doing quickie text reviews of things I got, using whatever photos I randomly took for fun on Twitter or something with my phone.

<INSERT WAYNE’S WORLD PRODUCT PLACEMENT JOKE HERE>

And first up, we have a big one – the (currently) final retool/redeco of Mastermind Creations’ Kultur mold – Cylindrus. Or, in actual character names, Roller from the Roberts/Milne/Lawrence MTMTE/Lost Light series at IDW.

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Listicle: Top 5 Non-Transforming Toys of Twenty Eighteen

And now for the third of my toy retrospective lists of 2018 – namely, that of the NON-transforming toys. Action figures, roleplay items, high and low end… all of that stuff is included here. And to refresh on the rules:

  • Toy must have been purchased and received in the calendar year of 2018 (this excludes stuff like MP Sunstreaker, who I was messing with Dec 31 of 2017)
  • Toy does not have to have been released in 2018 to qualify – it can be something I only just got this year
  • Five things plus an honorable mention of “something that’s not on the top 5 but deserves to be brought up all the same” are going to apply for each list.

Lots of cool stuff came out, but only so many got to make my list – a list which admittedly is very subjective:

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Listicle: Top 5 Not-Transformers Transforming Toys of Twenty-Eighteen

With 2018 now in the rearview mirror, it’s now the time to curate my lists of the best toys of the year – and having done so with the official Hasbro/TakaraTomy releases, it’s now time to do so with the UNofficial stuff. The unlicensed things. The knockoffs. What the layman calls “third party” even though the actual definition for third party items is not these. And like the HasTak list, I will abide by certain ground rules:

  • Toy must have been purchased and received in the calendar year of 2018 (this excludes stuff like MP Sunstreaker, who I was messing with Dec 31 of 2017)
  • Toy does not have to have been released in 2018 to qualify – it can be something I only just got this year
  • Five things plus an honorable mention of “something that’s not on the top 5 but deserves to be brought up all the same” are going to apply for each list.

This was honestly an INCREDIBLY hard list to curate – there’s a lot of quite frankly amazing things that didn’t make the cut even though I loved them. But I wanted to make sure I represented a bunch of high points of the past year, and so with that in mind, here we go:

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Listicle: Top 5 Transformers of Twenty-Eighteen

Wait, what’s this? A new post to this site? YES!

Basically I decide that I wanted to maybe actually use this thing that I pay money to maintain to post my top toy lists for 2018 as I also try and get myself back to working on my own personal projects in the coming year.

So with that said, we’re going to start with Transformers – specifically, the official Hasbro/Takara Tomy varieties. To lay down some ground rules for how this list works:

  • Toy must have been purchased and received in the calendar year of 2018 (this excludes stuff like MP Sunstreaker, who I was messing with Dec 31 of 2017)
  • Toy does not have to have been released in 2018 to qualify – it can be something I only just got this year
  • Five things plus an honorable mention of “something that’s not on the top 5 but deserves to be brought up all the same” are going to apply for each list.

So let’s get down to brass tacks:

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On Comics Pricing and Holding the Line

Got on a bit of a musing tonight re: complaints about how a particular comic I read (yeah, it’s MTMTE) has been doing an increasing amount of stuff off-panel, and it’s gotten me wondering, on account of a lot of those complaints tending to come AFTER the pagecount went down from 22 pages to 20 (which was a VERY recent thing; to IDW’s credit they held the line for awhile).
Comics fans often make a lot of noise when prices go up. It’s something they show a distaste for – the whole “HOW DARE YOU raise the cost of this book” with ignorance to how real world economics such as inflation work. And as such you get stuff like comics companies cutting the pagecount.

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