After quite a hiatus I am happy to announce the return of the Lame Toys series! Due to recent doctor bills and the annual deductible dance I couldn’t plumb the depths of Sirtoys, Amazon, or the local shops (Can you imagine not living five minutes from a Five Below anymore?) for strange, silly, or shitty things to feature but damn was the temptation strong. Then just last week Glen and I were picking up our various prescriptions and drinks from the pharmacy in town. Now this place has a toy aisle of its own but most of the things in it are either costlier things I could get for less at a Dollar General or boxes of those collectible mystery things so we’ll not be looking there. We’ll be looking at the Dollar Tree right next store.

Me: “I am really tempted to go in there and look around.”

Glen: “We can go in after we pick the stuff up. It’s a dollar store.”

And so we did. I did end up finding a good candle in an octopus glass and another dopey bird to hang from the fruit bowl which the cats immediately yanked down and batted around the living room that very night. I got mad that my $1 bird now had claw and tooth marks all over it now, my priorities don’t always make sense. It was in the toy isle that I hit the jackpot, for I was greeted by a box that screamed “ROBOT“, and then more conversationally, “Transforming Vehicle”. On the back of that little box it encouraged me to “Collect Them All!” so I looked around on their pegs. There were three different kinds available in swapped colors and one “Boat Guy”. Only one “Boat Guy”. I had been given the gift of a complete set and I certainly wasn’t going to pass that up!

When I had a bit of quiet time to myself to work I started getting the bots filmed and edited. I chose to try out a new app I picked up that allows you to film, edit, and compile video all on your phone and it seemed great at first. I especially like the look of the “Comic” filter which I used for the Feature Image. I wanted to use it for filming but the effect wasn’t great with moving objects, but I could still do stupid things like this:

It was during the actual filming that I ran into a problem. MuseMage, the recording app I used, was having constant trouble focusing on the robots. The app itself wasn’t behaving any differently than it had been when I was running tests so I have to chalk it up to the setup that I use just being too close to the camera for this new tool to handle. Attempts to clean it up proved unsuccessful but what I had just recorded went so perfectly that I just had to use it! So I threw some jazz over it in an attempt to make it seem like I did all of it on purpose for artistic reasons. I also should have named the tank “Treadwell” instead of “Tready-Steady” but I realized my opportunity only after the fact.

Enough talk, here’s a video of me talking.