davidd's A DOLL A DAY 2024

[davidd]

My mom had some big earrings like that. Alphabet club does sound like it should be an official doll release.

You haven’t been depressed online until you’ve spent two years scrolling through real estate listings in three provinces and not found anything as good as what you used to have. And then you finally see a house that you really, really like and can see yourself in, and then you find out both next-door houses are Airbnb party houses and you are back to zero.

I’d say, “pick a project and start in at it”, but I am currently in such a state that nothing is happening at all so I guess I can’t give anyone else advice about getting sh!t done. 

Were your mom's big earrings metallic or plastic? I'm thinking about painting Maxie's earrings gold or silver (if I can find my metallic paints); but then it occurred to me, I think that colorful plastic jewelry was popular in the '70s and '80s, so maybe white plastic is more "period authentic" than chrome plated.

"As good as what you used to have." Oh, gurrl, let me tell you! When I go back and look at the house I left in Hawaii, and see that the Zillow estimate is now over a million bucks -- and, in fact, right about a million bucks more than I paid for the Utah house -- I get depressed. I genuinely thought I could get my act together, make some money doing the AirBnB thing, and then move back in three or four years. By the time five years had passed things were starting to look dicey as prices in Hawaii began to heat up. Now, coming up on nine years later... and I can't even hit one number when I buy a lottery ticket... yeah, that's depressing.

But... even Hawaii wasn't "as good as what I used to have," which is why I left. The neighbor was getting weirder by the day. Taxes and insurance were going up. Wages had stagnated (it was a "pay cut" due to "an economic downturn" that finished me off; and then when pay was restored, mandatory health insurance premiums went up more than the wages, resulting in a further take-home pay cut). The other neighbor had turned his house in to a vacation rental with big spotlights that guests would leave on all night. Crack-heads had broken in to two of the nearby houses, and even though neighbors had security cam footage, the cops said they couldn't do anything.

After my mom passed away a few years ago, letting go of the house was a lot easier than I ekspected it to be because the neighborhood had changed so much that it wasn't anything like "what I used to have" when I was a kid. The surrounding orchards had been turned in to subdivisions. The city was talking about re-annexing a strip of land in front of the house that they had legally abandoned decades previously to put in a new street. The horse pastures had been turned in to a subdivision. And as soon as we sold the house, the new buyers chopped down all the remaining trees and build another house next to my mom's.

Even where I live now "isn't as good as what I used to have." There was one red barn in the valley across the river. Now there are seven houses, each with multiple outbuildings. The air used to be spectacularly clear. Today the air is so bad I had to come inside because of the smoke from "prescribed burns" fires, in addition to the smog that blows in from Cedar City -- a university town that is projected to be four times the size it was when I moved here within ten years. Smog blows in from as far away as Las Vegas -- and Las Vegas is growing at a pace beyond comprehension, and spewing out increasing amounts of smog as it grows. Zion National Park is hazy from Vegas smog pretty much every day all year now. So is The Grand Canyon.

Relatives who live in North Las Vegas are starting to look at maybe relocating because their densely packed residential suburb has, within the last two years, become surrounded by more densely packed residential suburbs, with apparently unlimited development spreading outward, row up on row upon row. When the new construction started a couple years ago and I mentioned it to him, he said, "it's great, it's economic development, it's progress." But now that his ten minute drive to the shopping center is already taking him twenty minutes, he's beginning to have second thoughts.

My crummy little house in Florida sits in the middle of a 12-or-so block stretch of single storey cinderblock houses that were built between 1953 and 1955 in a neighborhood that, other than the cars parked in the driveways, looks pretty much today like it has since 1955... until last year, when a homeowner one street over somehow got zoning permission to build a second storey! And that second storey is visible from my back yard. And the rat-b*stard for some reason needs spotlights all around the upper storey eaves of his effing big-*ss house that stands out like a hideous eyesore in what was, from 1953 until 2023, a virtual time-capsule. I've grumbled about it to a few neighbors, and they just kind of shrug and say, "well, that's progress, I guess."

Not to be overly pessimistic (too late, I know), but finding something "as good as what you used to have" is probably a long-shot; at best, you might be able to find something better than what you have now.

Until somebody does something to ruin it. Which they will. Because everything sucks, and if it's not broken yet, somebody is just itching to come along and break it.

And while everything gets junkier and crummier and yuckier, the prices keep going up and up and up. Who has all the money to spend? It sure ain't me!

As for picking a project and starting, I'd kinda started cleaning up my storage shed so I'd have enough room to really work on cleaning up the storage shed, but this, that, and another thing keep happening and I haven't been out there for a number of days now so I've lost all my momentum. Which reminds me, I need to go out to the shed and see if I can find a 30 amp circuit breaker and a coil of heavy-duty electrical wire because... everything's broken.

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14 June - A Doll A Day 2024:

Toy Photographer Magazine - Volume One Issue One - June 2024

What was once a "niche hobby" has gone mainstream, at least to an extent.

Yet another hobby originally embraced by a handful of artistic eccentrics has become an Instagram fad, largely among a tight-knit clique of action figure enthusiasts who mostly photograph Star Wars toys, 6-inch size GI Joe figures, and two-hundred dollar a pop limited edition video game-based figures.

And there's money in it! Now that "toys" have become an adult hobby rather than a childhood pastime, specialty toy retailers are inking deals with "creators" to provide elaborate Photoshop-enhanced images featuring plastic action figures... usually combined with fireworks and smoke effects, both practical and digital.

I guess I... along with most of the other toy and doll photographers with whom I've been acquainted since my early days on Flickr... were so far ahead of the curve that we're now miles behind, still playing around in our backyards and basements and on our kitchen tables just for the fun of it rather than for Instagram adulation and real-world riches.

I picked up a copy of this new magazine in a no doubt futile effort get bring myself up to speed with the Who's Who and the What's What in the now-socially-acceptable pastime of toy, doll, and action figure photography.

Not unekspectedly, the images and articles in the magazine focus almost solely on "action figures" in the "Star Wars" and "Super Hero" genres, with a few Lego minifigs offering the only variety. There are no Pullip Dolls (as in my photo here) or any dolls at all; and no other "toys" -- no diecast toy cars, no building blocks or Tinker Toys or Lincoln Logs, no plushies; and no Breyer horses, no Adventure Team era GI Joes, no Erector Sets, no Easy-Bake Ovens; and not even any classic green plastic army men. And what about the original domains of miniature builders and photographers: model railroading and miniature wargaming? Not a single picture from the historical antecedents of the toy photography hobby.

I'll ask Vampira to put together a "Literary Lounge" review once I've had a chance to page through the mag in greater detail.

Get your inaugural edition of Toy Photographer Magazine exclusively at Amazon now, before they sell out and become a premium secondary-market collectible!

(Remember when magazines cost, like, a coupla bucks? Yeah, well, this one'll set'cha back eighteen smackers plus tax; steep, yeah, but a small price to pay for the future collector value.)

14 June - A Doll A Day 2024