Fun for under $50?

With the upcoming birth of my son, the already austere hobby budget I've had the past few years is about to get REALLY austere. Prices on new boxed action figures and new model kits have already exceeded a point that I feel comfortable paying, although there are still some good bargains if you shop around. With a typical modern military 1/6 scale action figure now retailing in the $120- $150 range and media property figures scraping the $200 mark, I've already resorted to bargain hunting and reusing existing pieces in my collection to keep things going. Now, priorities for both finances and physical space have changed, so I'm going to try to keep my hobby running with less money and tighter focus.

Towards that end, I've decided to start an "Under $50" project. Basically, I want to try and avoid paying more than $50 for a boxed figure or model kit whenever I can. I may have to stretch the definition if the item itself is close to $50 before taxes or shipping. However, when I say "under $50" I will as often as possible stick to well under that price. Will it work? Possibly so! One way to do this is to buy older but new to me items that aren't priced at "collector" levels. Some ideas that come to mind include Dragon's earlier 1/6 figures like their Hong Kong police and SDU line that often turn up for less than $25 at on-line vendors and on eBay.

Most importantly, I don't want to turn my house into a "look but don't touch" museum full of "Daddy's toys" which means that eventually, my son will have "dibs" on most of the sturdier, child appropriate stuff. I may have to stash fragile, adult collectible stuff away for a few years, so I want to keep what goes into storage to a minimum. There's also the possibility that some of it might need to be *GULP* sold or traded! 

Anyway, back to today's project which is clearing out the soon-to-not-be spare bedroom that was formerly my storage and hobby space. But when a bargain comes along, I'll be sure to post it here.

A little quiet around here.

Hey, I thought I'd check in since I haven't posted anything in over two months. There's not much hobby activity going on in the Geektopian Republic at the moment as I spend my spare time packing things away and getting the house ready for the birth of my son.

Oh yeah, Mrs. Geektopian and I are expecting a boy, BTW.

Anyway, my hobby room is going to be the baby's room so I'm stowing my gear for now and hoping to have it repainted and furnished within the next two weeks.

All I've got to say is, I hope this kid grows up liking action figures and model kits 'cause there are lots of 'em for him to choose from! LOL

Chancellor Stahl's alternate uniform

I mentioned this in my previous post but here's a photo of Alrich Stahl in another alternate uniform. This is pretty much the same as the blue-green tunic version I posted earlier but with a new field gray officer's style tunic. I like the hat but there's yet another version of Erwin Rommel on the way from DiD that will have green cap with the same gold trim. IF anyone parts that out and it's sold at a somewhat reasonable price, I'd like to buy one as an alternate to the blue-green cap.

For this version of Chancellor Stahl, the boots are from Dragon as are the trousers- an early production item that has neither belt loops nor buttons for suspenders but does have cinch belt at the back of the waist. The hat is a DiD field marshal item with the iron eagle removed and a plastic self adhesive star stuck to the cockade. The tunic came from a company called Figures Home and looks like a mid-production era Dragon item. It's fairly unadorned aside from the iron cross ribbon and a poorly printed iron eagle insignia above the right breast pocket. The iron eagle was removed by burnishing a piece of Scotch-brand clear tape over it few times and quickly pulling it off. I always try to remove any overt nazi symbols because while Caelia is militaristic and totalitarian, they are not nazi. The use of German-style uniforms and a sort of "Anglo-Germanic" language is considered more an homage to Caelia's Dutch-Prussian-Germanic ancestry, and to take back their cultural heritage from its dark past. This is much the same reasoning as their former Cold War ally East Germany once used. I hope to get more in to the background of Caelia in future post but for now, the Propaganda Ministry uh, I mean the Office of Public Information hope that you will enjoy this image of our Dear Leader, Chancellor Alrich Stahl!

Peeking out from under my rock.

Yes, I'm still here! December and January proved to be a wild and raucous ride through life. As you might have guessed from my previous post, the Mrs. and I discovered that we're adding a little Geektopian to the republic later this year. We also lost some family members and I've been dealing with some mysterious health issue. So yeah....

Hobby plans for 2012 have been scaled back considerably but I've recently taken advantage of a lull in the "fun" of recent life to tweak my Caelian project just a bit. I still need to find some misplaced items to finish the minions project shown here earlier and "Dear Leader" Stahl has a new tunic that's a little more "every day" than the blue-green item seen previously.

I've also just about decided to reformat my blogging and possibly keep only this one active. I'm not really happy with Google and I'm definitely not pleased with Wordpress. I'll probably close my old, mostly unused LJ account and at least my one largely abandoned Blogger account. Claire's Big World is on indefinite hiatus and may close later this year. As much as I like the character, I've never been happy with her blog. I doubt I'll have the time to do much with it in the foreseeable future, so it may not be around much longer. I MAY try my hand at a "life and family" blog some time later but we'll have to see how that goes.

If all this sounds rather dour or even dire, then I must apologize because it really isn't meant to be. I am simply readjusting my priorities to reflect the ebb and flow of my life. RoG isn't currently slated to go away but it will likely become my primary "voice" on the internet for a while.