I've been very introspective lately you might have noticed. Lots on my mind in these trying times. When I was a kid I had things on my mind all the time, I was always trying to figure out the secrets of the universe or whatever. Not really sure why.

One thing that kept me out of my head was my toy collection. When I was a kid my parents bought me tons of toys, usually from clearance bins or the flea market. I would peruse the flea market for hours looking for the perfect toys.

As I got older I did gradually lose some interest, but never all. I shifted more into miniatures and tabletop RPGs, but I never abandoned the toy life. In my senior year of high school, while the "Real World" was looming, I built a little apartment that some of my GI Joes lived in and would play out their hijinks, which seemed to be reflective of many of my worries of the time.

Soon after I moved to Columbus, a vintage toy store opened up called Big Fun. It's technically a chain, as the original shop was in Cleveland, but this is the only one open now. I would spend hours perusing the old tos of every stripe, feeling a bit like getting to visit 1998. I worked there part-time after college while still getting established in the IT World. Some of the best days of my life.

But I'll get into the details of that some other day. Today let's talk about my favorite toys to collect.

As you can see I have a pretty large collection of toys. This isn't even stuff I have in storage in California from my childhood. You can probably spot a couple treasures if you know what they are.

One of my dearest friends, Kuranda, happens to love vintage toys also, though she's much more into the kitschy collectible aspect, whereas I go for those 80s and 90s toys I grew up with. Though she is a competitor for Mighty Max stuff and those little transforming McDonalds toys that turn into dinosaurs.

Big Fun wasn't enough for her, so she started dragging me to various vintage toy shows that pop up a few times throughout the year. Ohio is a veritable Mecca for vintage toy shows it turns out. The first time I went to one I experienced sensory overload for the first time, as everything around me drew my interest to a high degree. Loading up that kind of information constantly in my brain made me rather drained. I've since gotten better.

But since I've been going to all these shows, my collections have expanded dramatically. I'd like to show you three of my favorites.

These little bastards were my favorite toys to play with through most of my childhood. The scale is just perfect for having a bunch of them and they were cheap enough to employ in mass combat.

They're called Z-Bots, and their whole shtick is that they are divided into two groups, the Z-Bots and the Void. Best as I can tell, these are some kind of political affilitions and the Z-Bots would like peaceful coexistence and the Void would like the right to kill all the Z-Bots. Nothing terribly groundbreaking (or reality defying) here.

Of course, kids don't often play neatly with just one kind of toy. My Z-Bots were joined by a singular Battle Beast.

Battle Beasts had been a thing several years before in the 80s, and were not available in the stores when I was growing up. I was at my favorite toy vendor at the flea market when I was 9, and I overheard some kid ask the guy about Battle Beasts, which he kept in his van. The kid said he'd be back to purchase them, but instead I purchased them, being one of the guy's regular customers he was happy to sell them to me.

I acquired Blitzkrieg Bat and Triple-Threat Snake. I gave the snake to my cousin later that day, who was a lot older than me but I wanted him to know how happy I was to see him.

The bat remained and I renamed him Gunner, after a random bad guy in a random cartoon I watched on Sundays sometimes (Teknoman, the dub of Tekkaman Blade). He became my general, and would lead the other Z-Bots against invaders. I made him a space ship headquarters out of an old metal wagon I had, and he would lay siege to whomever the bad guys were at any given time, usually holed up in a tree with a really good flat surface in the middle of it perfect for a dramatic throne or something.

I've since been able to acquire many more, and I keep them together on my collection shelves. I don't really play with them anymore, but I guess part of me would love to do a photoshoot with them someday.

You can probably guess this stuff. Obviously I was a huge Power Rangers kid, having managed to catch it the day it premiered and thinking it was pretty good and fun. It wasn't until the premiere of season 2 that I got really into it, being drawn in by the new villain, Lord Zedd, and being enamoured with the new giant robots which I thought were so much flashier than the old ones.

I begged my parents for a complete collection of Zords from season 2. They were some of the biggest toys I ever had, and didn't come from a clearance sale, so I had to wait for Christmas and my birthday for each one. I don't think I was missing any by the end of season 2, and they are all in a storage locker in California, but I have a few here I was able to find for extremely reasonable prices that are in better condition than the ones I played with.

These guys were the big jewel of my collection growing up, they were mostly set pieces and decor, always something plot important, and of course being the centerpiece for any finales that we got to: y'know, epic final battles and the like. Actually it occurs to me now that a lot of my scenarios ended with everyone dying.

I had a couple power rangers figures, and they were cool, but it was all about the giant robots, yo. My Z-Bots often used them as summoned war machines to destroy each other.

So these guys are really niche. I stumbled across them in the late 90s in some clearance bins at KayBee Toys. They're called Fistful of Aliens and they were an attempt to create a collectible toy in vein of a TCG which had become insanely popular around then.

The basic premise is that there were three races of aliens who were blue, green, and red, respectively. The toys came with a fairly random assortment of guys, and you would play a game with them that was just rock-paper-scissors but with colors. Some of them were like, hybrid super mutants who are two colors and nigh undefeatable.

So the super mutants were blind-box figs within the toy package, and they had various rarities. The rarest are these transluscent alien goddess figs representing like water, wind, and fire.

I was able to find a near complete set for my birthday a couple years ago, and now I just hope to acquire a couple more space ships for them to better organize the collection. I ended up using them in conjunction with other very tiny one-inch figs, like Z-Bot Minis and War Planets. They were def good for bigger scale, epic playtimes and the like.

I've only seen them out in the wild one time, they seem to be completely forgotten, or perhaps more accurately never remembered at all.

So yeah, I think a big part of my neurodivergence is how the things that made me happy growing up never really stopped making me happy. I def don't get as much dopamine from them as I used to, I can't really find myself spending hours playing crafting some imaginary world (without other people at the table at least).

But this stuff just kinda reminds me of a simpler world, feels like the boy within me really appreciates having all the cool things they wanted in their life. Just a little reminder that good days will come once again.