01567: Saturday Expenses

It has been an interesting Saturday, despite having had work until around 11am. I've also spent a lot of money today - such is the way of weekends.

Beyond the inevitable Transformers expenses, today was notable since we found a new source of cool shirts. Before I used to enjoy the creations of Artwork, which were cool but a tad pricey. Over time though their shirts got rather boring and a wee bit too nationalistic. Today we stumbled across Culture in the teens section of SM. And while a lot of their shirts are old jokes and the like, it was nice to see that someone took the extra action of putting them on shirts. And there were some nicely witty ones - hence the shirts that you now see in the photo. We ended up with with 5 since that was the minimum for a promo that resulted in it being like a 4+1 deal. Mine are the three shirts above - Tobie got the two shirts in yellow below. I can't wait to wear them this weekend!

Oh, and I had to get new glasses. So at the moment I'm wearing my contacts while at home (not a common thing for me) since I decided to retain my old frames. The new ones they were trying to push on me were ridiculously expensive. Oh obligatory expenses. At least lenses have gotten cheaper over the years. Before they'd nickle and dime you for all those additional features like multi-coating and anti-glare. Now they all come together as a package, which is awesome.

On the Transformers front, I finally completed my purchase of a secondhand G1 Scorponok. He's missing a lot of the smaller accessories and his stickers were done bu a child but on the whole he's still pretty awesome. Plus his walking legs gimmick still works when you push him along in scorpion mode. But I also picked up toys that are part of the Beast Hunters line today including the cute litle version of Hardshell and two Kre-O mini-kits. I'm such a sucker for those little Kreons and now I have little versions of Trailcutter / Trailblazer and Windcharger together with some Predacon dragons.

The Beast Hunters line as a whole is really a blatant attempt to tap into our deeper love for the old Beast Wars: Transformers franchise. And so initially I avoided the Transformers Prime line in general (except for a secondhand Soundwave), but now I'm indulging a bit with it's beast-ish side. And for Beast Hunters they primarily have dragons as their big theme for enemies, so it's kind of fun to have all these kickass monsters. The Autobots remain to be vehicles and so I'm largely ignoring them still. So sue me - cars never really excited me all that much.

Oddly enough, I've been regularly following the Transformers Prime cartoon since it started. It's not that bad a show and the storyline is pretty serious compared some past incarnations of the franchise. And while initially it felt too much like a continuation of the Michael Bay universe, over time the show has rather grown on me. I still want a Soundwave who feels closer to my personal concept of that forever awesome character, but I suppose for now I'l take whatever I can get. More people celebrating the Transformers franchise is generally a good thing - it means more toys designed to exploit my love for these robots and thus more happiness for me, hehe.

Gaming Saturday! Got to focus now...