Monday 9 January 2017

Seven Examples of Crap I Waste Other People's Money On: Christmas Edition Part 2*


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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