I am thoroughly ill and
have been since about the 28th of December – the cold has now moved
to my head, my good ear is blocked, my head feels like there’s a balloon
inflated in it, I forgot the names of Knuckles the Echidna and Watership Down
today and every time I close my eyes I see a neon pink sperm (I suppose it
could be an eyeball on fire…) so my Post-Christmas Reviewapalooza isn’t going
very fast, I’m writing around one a day and have been too ill to get up in the
loft and take the photos. Luckily I’m never too ill to churn out another
Examples of Crap I Waste My Money on post, or in this case, part 2 of the
Post-Christmas Examples of Crap I Waste Other People’s Money On.
Two of these might seem a
little too much but it’s been a weird year for me and the receiving of gifts;
this usually happens in one big lump between roughly the 23rd and
the 28th but this year it’s the 7th of January and I’m
still receiving gifts from people, and with eBay yet to deliver a couple of
things I used Christmas Money on it’ll probably be early February before I have
everything I got for Christmas. I honestly have no preference either way re:
getting everything in one go versus getting everything spread out over the
holiday but it does mean that you might have to write two crappy blog posts
instead of one.
Owl Plush!
According to the Harry
Potter and the Cursed Child store that’s its official name. That won’t do, I’m
calling him Spanky. Spanky is gorgeous, he’s an official Harry Potter plush and
if you’ve not been near one they are like the fucking Cadillacs of soft toys
and the owls are the most luxurious of the lot. I guess whoever makes these for
Universal just knows where there bread is buttered and girls like
owls, so do thirty year old men and I’m surprised I haven’t stroked Spanky a
bald spot. Actually it was brought to my attention that Spanky has a LOT of
beans in butt, it’s presumably to weight him correct so he stands up rather
than flops over like he’s got narcolepsy but it does make him seem a little
like he has piles, this only makes me love him more. Last year the people who bought me this
bought me a book called ‘Images You Should Not Masturbate To’ this year they buy
me a cuddly owl with owl piles…make of that what you will.
Pig Ball!
“Seriously dwitefry, for this you waste my time with another of
these posts?” you’d say if you were real “A tie-in toy to a terrible film based
on a fad that’s already well and truly so last year? A toy that’s been reduced to £2, a toy that
costs only marginally more than a Twix Duo – go on then dwitefry what’s so
special about this that you need to post about it on the internet?” My reply:
everything about it is gloriously nostalgia, also, up yours. Madballs, Weird
Balls, Spitballs, Blurp Balls, Blabber Balls there was a LOT of balls when I
was small, ’85 till ’95 was a decade of balls with faces. My birthday’s in
June, smack back at the height of ‘summer toys’ so I got a lot of these balls,
sort of a compromise between my mother and grandfather’s desire to get me out
in the garden playing sports and me wanting to sit in and play with action
figures, and they were always packaged like this. The blister cards with a
bubble either side of it and the ball hanging in the middle; I saw this and
bought it just for the memory of opening one of these sorts of cards
again. Look when your life is as
worthless and dire as mine you must take these chances for pleasure, no matter
how small, when you find them.
Mythical
Creatures!
The fact that this sort of
toy still exists in 2016 gives me faith in, well, everything. It means that
another generation of kids is going to grow up with a lingering appreciation of
shitty rubber monsters turned out by shitty nobody companies and sold for the
price of a packet of crisps and that means a) I will always have something in
common with the youth of today b) more kids might turn out right c) a part of my
childhood will live on d) there are new toys I can buy that don’t cost £22 each
at least and e) not everything has to look like Stephen Universe or Batman: The
Animated series. There’s been no attempt to modernize these things, no
metallics, no manga influences, these are toys Imperial or Remco would have
turned out in 1982 and better yet someone thought to give them to me as a gift!
That just gives me even more faith in my fellow man.
My New
Favourite Glass!
My friend’s mum got me
this, I know right? How cool is that person’s mother to buy her daughter’s
friend a present and that present be a glass skull you can drink out of? Even
the straw looks like it was plucked out of Tim Burton’s subconscious and I’m
using it for everything forever. Obviously the greatest times will be when I
drink either milk or cherry aid out of it because it’ll either look like I’m
drinking the very skull itself or a skull filled with blood but the days when
it’s just filled with apple & blackcurrant squash will be still be great
because it’ll be drinking from a glass fucking skull.
Rogue One Big
Figs!
I enjoyed Star Wars: Rogue
One so much, I genuinely think it’s one of the best Star Wars things made BUT I
didn’t see it until Christmas Eve and that’s a bit too late to ask for/get any
merchandise for Christmas. Holding my exclusive popcorn bucket from the cinema
I decided that a chunk of Christmas Money was going to go on getting me a
Death Trooper and a Jyn Erso of my very own. Death Troopers – black troopers
with ‘death’ in their names - couldn’t be better suited to the stereotypically
Goth side of my personality, it’s almost like they were designed just to appeal
to me. I suppose I could have been
more reserved and bought the 3 & ¾” figures from eBay or the Star War Black
6” figures from Toys ‘R’ Us or perhaps just bought one Big Fig but fuck that it
was Christmas AND I had a voucher for the Entertainer so I just waltzed in on
Boxing Day, grabbed these two and marched them to the counter and you know
what: it felt good. You remember that time when you took all your pocket
money/Christmas money/birthday money to the toy shop and bought a really big
thing, it felt exciting and daring and almost like you were saying ‘fuck you’
because you were buying something that your parents say are ‘too expensive’ and
you were being wilfully unsensible? I totally got that feeling buying these. Despite
what this blog might say to the contrary I’m actually pretty good with my money
so being able to just go in and ‘waste’ money on needlessly big and expensive
things was a nice break from adulating – and as a bonus I now have a huge Jyn
to make me look a little like I have a sexual obsession (I don’t have a sexual
obsession with Jyn, I have one with Darth Talon, and She-Hulk, and Power Girl,
and Kylie Griffin from Extreme Ghostbusters and…why am I single again?).
Build-a-Bear
Sonic!
I think my mum is
legitimately psychic and if she is she must be so disappointed, as evidence to
why I direct you the final bracket of my last paragraph. I only found out that
Build-A-Bear Workshop would be doing a Sonic plush a few weeks before
Christmas, but I also found out it was allegedly going to be a U.S. exclusive
so I filed it away as something to import in the new year and didn’t bother
telling anyone because I knew I’d be overpaying for it and they don’t need to
know just how obsessed I am. Little
did I know that my mum had found out about the toy separately (almost certainly
through psychic powers, or Google) and ordered one for me: turns out it wasn’t
a U.S. exclusive, it was just only on sale in-store
in America but was available online in the UK. Sadly Sonic did not turn up in
time for Christmas but rather arrived on the first day of post afterwards
(the…28th?), in a huge box, huge boxes are already the shit but huge
mystery boxes are the best type of parcel and are beyond the shit, and then the
huge mystery box opened to reveal a really soft Sonic plush. Happy Christmas to
me – thanks mum.
Letters from
Sam!
Some people don’t like
hand-made gifts and Cracked.com wrote a whole article this holiday season going
into the science of gift giving and why it’s OK to be pissed off when someone
gives you a clever crafty gift like these letters instead of something store
bought but to Cracked I say: fuck that, Sam spent ages and got herself a major
wankers cramp (and has possibly developed a life-long hatred of envelopes) writing
these lovely things and I appreciate that effort a hell of a lot. Each of these
letters start with ‘Open when…’ then a scenario when I might need something
nice and because she knows me very well (her mum knows me well enough to buy me
the most dwitefry-compatible drinking receptacle on sale today so imagine how
well her daughter, my actual friend, knows me) each of these little sealed
envelopes are tailor made for situations that I’ll actually find myself in so
they actually have a genuine practical use, they’re especially well-suited to
me because having intense depression and a paranoia that focusses almost solely
on social things (basically I become convinced people hate me) I often need
this sort of comfort and counter-arguments from someone who isn’t family and
who’s opinion I trust but am often far too worried about looking like an
attention seeker or far too filled of self-hate to ask for it (instead I just
post about it online, that’s not attention seekery at all) so basically these
are a REALLY good present for me, and I appreciate them so much I’ve used the
gift giver’s real name in this post so she gets the recognition she deserves.
Though me and one half of the couple who gave me the owl became convinced that
the one that reads ‘open when…you’re feeling peckish’ just says ‘you fat
bastard’ on it.
I’m done now; I promise I
won’t be posting one of these again until Convention and Bootsale season begins
– I had a great Christmas and a good New Year (even if I was ill as fuck) and I
thank everyone who gave me a gift, I appreciate it so very much, and I leave
you with this: Cracked.com used to be the magazine you only bought when the
store was out of Mad Magazine, never forget that.
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