Year 3: January Update

1990 Toys R Us ad (It has felt like
things have been going downhill of late
but it's time to turn that around.)

January 2nd marked the two-year anniversary of the blog and things had been going quite well for the ads in 2018 until Flickr introduced a fee on accounts with over 1,000 images. While I would have preferred to keep all of the game ads there, I didn't think I could really afford to forever or even for 5-10 more years so I opted to stop uploading for a little over a month until I could find a solution. Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with a good alternative and Blogger isn't really built for albums. Plus I didn't want to have the images all spread out and therefore I uploaded the past two years of ad posts to Facebook at the start of the new year. However, that has been a bit of a let down as the albums will not stay in alphabetical order. I wrote to Facebook support to find out why but have yet to hear back. Perhaps when I feel the project is complete I'll also place them at Google Photos where albums currently go in order of most recent upload. You can still visit the Vault 1541 Flickr page to see some ads (I'll keep around 300 there once all is done) along with game hardware and toy photos from the blog articles. I'm hoping it will drive some web traffic over here.

On December 26th I discovered that my basement had flooded. I believe it flooded the week before and I just hadn't gone down there for a while so cardboard had soaked up a lot of water before I got to it. This primarily impacts the YouTube channel as most of my toys are in the basement. While the majority of toys are okay, a lot of cardboard got damaged, like a G.I. Joe box and the Transformers Omega Supreme box pictured in the blog header. Some advertising pieces I have got wet too and the Hot Wheels Service Center box was soaked. They aren't completely ruined but the water did cause things to curl and in some cases boxes got brittle. Also, everything is still a big mess at my house as I had to scramble to empty cardboard boxes and dry the items inside, and haven't repacked anything. I've got stuff spread out around the basement while I'm trying to repaint parts of the floor and then more stuff is spread out in my living room. I'm going to try and continue the toy videos this year but I don't know that I'll go beyond that. Also, the 2X-L video recently got blocked by YouTube because of the sound clip I played from an 8-track tape so I have to remove the music in order to get it restored. Even if I stop the toy videos I do plan to keep making game recordings which have become a bit Commodore 64-heavy of late.

Early concept of Slightly Mad Studios' MadBox console.

Aside from my problems, there has been some big game news the past week. Activision and Bungie parted ways with the Destiny game rights remaining with Bungie. Activision does have Blizzard Entertainment but otherwise doesn't publish a whole lot of games itself anymore. Electronic Arts apparently canceled the open world Star Wars game that had been in development for at least a few years I believe. It's now been five years since EA got the Star Wars rights and five more years remain on the contract. So far we've got two Battlefront games and a possible Jedi game coming out late this year. Surprisingly, a new console was announced at the end of December by game developer Slightly Mad Studios (Project Cars). I have a hard time believing it will ever see the light of day, and if it does, I don't know how it will compete with the big three. Of course, I didn't think the original PlayStation could challenge Nintendo and Sega either so what do I know.

The whole holiday season was rough for myself and part of why I've been slow to get much new content up. I've got a 4-day weekend coming up and if I manage to make good use of my time I might be able to get things back in order. Thank you for reading, and thanks to those following on Facebook and/or subscribing to the YouTube channel. I know I'm not great at replying to comments but I do read them all!

-Jonathan