Spent on fabric/sewing : $12.25
Kind of a busy day today, too. There was a rare Thursday yard sale down the street, and the Simplicity patterns went on sale when I had money. So I was off !
The sale advertised toys, but it was mostly boy stuff. Some girl clothes, but no dolls. I still managed to spend $4. there - and we're now the owners of a vintage Game Boy ! Yup, the grey Nintendo brick, first of its kind. It was funny, because I'd been idly thinking about it yesterday...
Back when I was all about animation, I also worked part-time for TRU. While I was never a gamer, there was something oddly compelling about the brand-new, anchored to the center of the universe display model we had. I kept watching it while it demo'ed some sort of fighting game, showing a girl in a cheongsam spinning around, over and over. It hit me after about a week - while I could care less for video games, the animation was both primitive and incredibly advanced. Every tiny pixel had to be exactly in the right place for the image to move so fluidly. Yet the motion was dictated by the player -so you were controlling the animation ! What a concept ! Part of me wanted one, just so I could study it. I still had zero interest in games, I just wanted to see how the characters moved.
Of course, this was the ‘stupid with money' portion of my life, during which I also bought a slightly-on-markdown Animator 2000, from Ohio Arts. I know I shelled nearly $100. for this and a couple memory cartridges. I honestly thought it would teach me how things move in animation, the one thing I never understood, no matter how much of the technical side I studied and did understand. I thought that, if I could program the oversize pixels and achieve motion, I would finally understand.
Suffice to say, I never ‘got it'. Sure, I could roughly animate about a second of a small cluster of dots moving around a bit, but not much beyond. For an incredibly sophisticated toy, it was a PITA to use. Now, bear in mind, I was in my early 20s when Animator 2000 (1988) and Game Boy (1989) came out. Really old enough to know that the toy may say ‘photocopier' on the box, but it's carbon paper underneath the plastic ! Not to mention be a bit wiser with my money !
Well, I guess it was mostly due to my failure with Animator, that I went from ‘one day, I will discover the secret, and I WILL animate my imagination !' to ‘I can always be a fan' before 1990 dawned. Anime premiered just on the horizon, too. By the time the year odometer rolled over to '00, most of my animation books had been either sold or donated. And I'd endured several parental lectures when the dusty Animator 2000 was found under my bed - I was in college at the time - for wasting money. Yeah, I did, but I still think it was necessary in some ways. I might still be obsessed with a secret that really doesn't exist if I hadn't had that colossal, expensive failure to remind me of a few things.
So, anyway. Never bought the Game Boy, but I did get a Sega Genesis, to play Disney games on, until it too got dusty and the darn rabbit ate the cords. Ended up trading SG in at Electronics Boutique for a Star Wars ‘desktop experience' that ate most of Windows 3.11 on my Packard Bell when I tried to install it. And nearly 20 years later, I find a Game Boy, quietly playing Tetris with itself in a yard sale box, with a neon ‘$1' sticker on it. At least I didn't have to ask if it still worked ! Further digging around got me ‘Tetris Attack !' still shrink-wrapped in its box and ‘Dr. Mario' in a plastic case. A buck each. So for $3., I got something a lot more fun than a $10. handheld poker game !
Did a bit of research, and there's a few hundred games for it, and because it's pretty much outmoded, they're cheap ! I may get the Barbie ‘Game Girl' one, just for kicks. Some of the Game Boy Color games can be used on my ‘new' toy, but not all. I'm hoping to find one of the pinball games some day. If you're curious, there's lots of good Game Boy info on Wikipedia - including a photo of a GB that nearly got burned to slag in the Gulf War...but it still works !
I also got the three Simplicity patterns I wanted while they were ‘on sale' for $1.99 at Hancock Fabrics. Yeah, I'm still mildly bitter that they're not on 99c sales anymore. My list was originally six patterns strong, but I stuck with the ones I wanted most - and two were just too low-necked for me to wear. I also got a pink and gray ‘skull and crossbones' print cotton remnant, and a half yard of ‘ballerina' print lavender flannel - I'm thinking of making Princess Dorrie some pajamas. Fact is, I just couldn't resist that lovely design. Also scarfed up all the $2. packs of 8 ‘Made With Love By' labels they had, while they were 80% off. Maybe around Thanksgiving or so, I'll have 48 more personalized clothing labels ! They still had more, but they were $3., and you know how cheap I am ! Should have ‘em in the mail on Monday.
Both GoodWill and Salvation Army were serious disappointments. GW looks as though they haven't received a donation in months, and SA has always been kinda cheap and expensive at the same time, ya know ? I hardly ever go over there, even though it's in the same strip as Hancock's.
