After Daniel posted a favorite commercial (for "Totally Awesome Guns & Range") I had to look this one up. Still my favorite, and still as good as I remember it!

My latest column is up at PopMatters, being a look back at The Matrix titled "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.":

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/117655-i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream-the-matrix-ten-years-later/

Hope ya dig it.

Not counting gifts for friends and mundane necessities and the ten billion pounds of chocolate I've consumed in the past two weeks, here are the things I have purchased thus far during our London holiday, which ends Friday:




The funny thing is, none of these items are things I'd planned to buy. Most of the toys and DVDs I bought just 'cause they were discounted; I'd planned to spend every bit of my money on G.I. Joe toys, but London disappointed me in that regard, if no other.

Still, I got a ton of great deals, and I'll return to Asmara with many fine reads and some entertaining movies and some toys I might be able to get creative with.

We visited London Dungeon today, which is sort of a small-scale Disneyland as imagined by Glenn Danzig. And they had these beauties in their souvenir shop, which I'd have happily purchased except they were ten pounds each:

My daughter is watching some new-era Scooby-Doo show...and the inevitable chase montage just began... to the tune of "Now I Wanna Be A Good Boy," by the Ramones. These are strange times.

Anyhoo...

Things I'm tentatively planning to buy next summer (or summer 2011) include DC Direct's Ultimate Quarter Scale Poison Ivy figure, seen here:


I have a huge story I want to tell with this figure. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's going to be released; a google search for it yielded hundreds or even thousands of photos and copies of the DC Direct press release as recently as October, but now it's almost like it never existed. Odd.

I also hope to score the creepily lifelike Hot Toys Hellboy figure and most of the McFarlane Toys Clive Barker figures from the Infernal Parade and Tortured Souls lines, all for stories I plan to tell with 3.75-inch G.I. Joe toys, believe it or not.

Finally, there is a list of dozens of upcoming and recent G.I. Joe figures I hope to procure. Unfortunately, many of them were scheduled for the upcoming Pursuit of Cobra series, which appears to have been canceled or altered or put on hiatus or some damn thing, because the Rise of Cobra figures didn't sell as well as Hasbro had hoped. Or perhaps because I wanted them; after all, the last two lines I followed were Sigma 6 and Transformers Animated, both of which were quickly canceled.

These are the computer thingies that came with that crappy Primeval figure:



Pretty sharp, right?

I say again: the custom backdrop for which I plan to utilize these computers is tentatively planned to be about the size of an average bedroom... just not as high.

So... we made our way to a Toys R Us today, saints be praised and hallelujah.

G.I. Joe Rise of Cobra figures were my primary goal, and on that level this trip, too, was mostly a bust. Most disappointing of all was that they didn't have the two Toys R Us-exclusive figures I've been wanting for several months: Barbecue and Benchpress. But really, where G.I. Joe is concerned, this store was just like Sainbury's, in that all it had in the way of Rise of Cobra figures was the tired old Wave 1 stock I grew tired of seeing back in August. I nearly went for a Sgt. Stone, whom I regret passing up back in Idaho before we left for Africa, but at eight pounds I just couldn't bring myself to do it. (If they'd had a Paris Pursuit Snake Eyes for that price, I'd have paid it.)

They did have their Alpha vehicles discounted to ten pounds, so I got the Snarler Cycle or whatever it's called, plus some sort of Cobra underwater thingy. They were great deals, not least 'cause Rollerbar (is that his name?) uses the Airborne head, which I've been wanting to procure for a possible Bravestarr custom. But hell, the motorcycle comes with two figures, so that's two figures and a motorcycle for two pounds more than a single figure.

The Beachhead is pretty sharp looking, and I really, really like the driver of the Cobra submarine thing. He's got all this funky tech gear, and since it's all black and red, he looks fantastic next to the Rise of Cobra Flash figure; he looks far more like a Joe than a Cobra, especially with his friendly, almost dorky-looking head sculpt.

I also found those Primeval figures I'd mentioned before, and they were much cheaper at Toys R Us than at Hamleys. They were cheap enough, indeed, that I bought a half-dozen or so for my friend Bill back in Idaho, who it turns out is a fan of the show. I also bought six of the figures for myself, which is to say I bought the same figure six times, opened all six, tossed one of the figures into Bill's pile, gave another to Maitea and then gave the rest to any children who happened to pass by us in the store; the figure is weak sauce on all levels, but she comes with one of the greatest computer accessories I've ever seen. I'll photograph them later, and more longterm, I'll eventually use them in the custom PIT I've been planning for quite some time; it's going to be about the width and length of an average bedroom.

I also got a Joe-scale Hermione, a little Wall-E figure and a couple of Star Wars figures; I don't know the characters they represent, but they were discounted, and it's always good to have fodder from other series when it comes time to create more customs. Oh yeah, I also bought, for about two pounds, this insane Dr. Who toy that's, like, a tank with a giant face. It's rather difficult to explain, but it'll be a fun thing to have lurking in the background of my photographic comic books.

So I won't have quite the staggering sum to spend on toys next summer as I thought, but I also don't have to wait until next summer to have some new toys to play with, so I'm happy with the compromise.

I also bought, through Kohl's online, the Rise of Cobra PIT playset; the Generals Joes* blog alerted geeks everywhere to a fantastic sale whereby one can buy the PIT, which normally retails for $120, for $50 shipped! (It's always bugged me that "Generals" doesn't have an apostrophe.)

I had to have the PIT shipped to my dad's in Washington, but I don't mind; anticipation is half the fun of this hobby, and while the PIT may get discounted to cheaper than $50 by the time we go home next summer, it might also be gone from stores altogether by then.