Ivan

With the relative absence of releases over the last couple of months, I decided it was time to finally put together that Minimate website I had been thinking about. Originally it was just going to be my personal, glorified want list. Then I realized that with a couple modifications it could be a (hopefully useful) reference for the whole Minimate community. Minimate Database Right now it's packs and figures, and of course it doesn't have images of what I don't have. The next step is to fill in all those holes and add in all the various accessories. (weblines, swords, alternate heads, etc.) If anyone spots any errors, typos, or broken links please let me know. And if you have photos of the items I'm missing that you'd be willing to contribute, please drop me a PM here. I haven't set up any email on minmatedatabase domain yet, but soon. A final note of caution, I'm not a web designer. So if you see clashing colors, funky design, or ugly css.... uhm, a wizard did it.

Shamelessly lifted from the E-Spectrum No. 47 Newsletter: So, does anyone have a Minimate costume in the works yet? I could probably modify my Mulder PALz costume from last year's SDCC. I'm having trouble coming up with a team name. I've come up with a few good candidates, but I'm fearful of Scavenger Hunt Item #42: Provide a photographic representation of your team name. It's unlikely Team UFIA will get past the anti-lewdness provision. I'll probably just end up being Team Minimate In A Shoe.

Oooh, "Mad About You" Minimates! Mini-Helen Hunt, you shall be mine. Oh yes, you shall be mine.

Nothing to complain about... mainly because I find this rule so very entertaining. (Not quite irony, but close.)

A week ago, I would have said 'probably not.' But since the hunt announcement I've already started pricing hotels and seeing which ones are close to the trolley stations. It's still 50-50 whether I'm going or not. The draw of The Only Two Smeggin' Minimates I Don't Have is quite strong.

No no people, don't you realize what DST is trying to do? They are trying to finally rid the world of all us overly-enthusiastic Minimate fanatics. They're so tired of all the relentless badgering for this Minimate or that Minimate, that they are finally ready to wipe us all out. I'm picturing some cavernous conference room on one of the top floors of some tall building in Timonium. In it, DST's upper management decides the best way to cure the plague of Minimate devotees. Radioactive substance embedded in the plastic? No, nobody wants to deal with the Nuclear Regulatory Comission. Poison-coated packaging? No, we wouldn't want to hurt all those nice stockboys at Target. Create little homicidal Minimate-shaped robots and randomly substitute them for regular Minimates? This way the more Minimates a person buys, the more likely it is that they will get one of the little killing machines. No, that won't work either. Just think of the R&D time, I wan't these annoying fans gone now! Create a contest that only the most obsessed fans will enter. And make them do it in person, so we can look them in the eyes before we kill them. Eureka! What contest prize would draw the most Minimate maniacs to their doom?? Gold and Silver Spideys of course! That kind of temptation would crack the reservations of the most die hard cynic. With that kind of bait, DST will be able to get rid of all of us. Posting on the MMMV would slow to a crawl.. There would be, what, only two people left? Probably just Jules and that new guy from Australia. I'm sure after the deadline is over, all the participants will gather in one of the exhibition rooms upstairs for the award ceremony. Just before the winning team is announced, the lights will dim down. In darkness, the DST staff will slip out the back, and the room will fill with mustard gas. Or Chuck will say "Execute Order 66" and all the DST volunteers will whip out their light sabers and start hacking off limbs. Or maybe giant metal spikes will come down from the ceiling. However it happens, it won't be pretty. This is just your friendly neighborhood Ivan, spreading a word of caution. I don't want all my MMMV friends to die. So if you are a wise Minimate fan, you won't enter this contest. You don't want to die, do you?

I've made a few Minimate images, I wouldn't necessarily call them 'art' though. They're all posted at my MMMV blog. (Now totally free of trackback spam!) Here's a taste: Thanks for the opportunity for a shameless plug.

Thank you for posting this. This is the perfect way for me to further torment my sister. It recently occurred to me that my nephews aren't geeky enough. I shall make each child memorize a different cast. Then they shall hold mock debates to decide which series is the best. Better yet, I shall record these debates then upload them to youtube for all the world to see! That'll teach her to call me a geek. Victory shall be mine!

I'm loving the little bit of spinal column. (I'm always very hesitant to click on any myspace link for fear of Extreme Retinal Assault so I'm probably not the best judge of such things, but that has to be one of the nicest looking myspace pages in existence.)

A spanking! A spanking! There is going to be a spanking tonight! And after the spanking, the oral sex.

It's just something I do and have always done. Nothing special. No, no. don't sell yourself short. Obviously the bold makes your posts stand out. It shows you are a special person. Your thoughts and feelings have such an extrodinary gravitas that they must be weighted more heavily than everybody elses. This board needs your bolded posts, now, more than ever. I always felt this place was missing something, but couldn't quite figure out what it was. Of course now its exceedingly obvious, I don't know how we survived so long without your bolded words. Truly the Golden Days are upon us.

So uh, why do you feel the need to wrap every post in tags?

That's odd. I see it as almost the exact opposite. This will allow AA to sculpt and design while leaving DST to actually make the toys. That way AA gets back to their roots, what they were good at, being a design house. I can't think of any AA line that succeeded at mass. (Enterprise, Trek MM, Tony Hawk, C3... uhm... I'm sure I'm forgetting something.) The only thing AA had that was truly theirs was the basic Minimate design. Now DST owns that. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I noticed this quite a bit with the LOTR line. I think it was a running change in production where they switched from fully painted heads to colored plastic on most of the flesh figs in Wave 1. It could be the other way around (plastic first, painted later) too, I don't know. I know I have a couple loose Legolases (Legoli? ) that illustrate the difference. I'll try and get a pic up tonight.

Or place it in the first video thread. I hate to minimod, but the search function does work.

Oh great, now you've done it. Yoko Ono must die says Catcher in the Rye. Yoko Ono must die says Catcher in the Rye. Yoko Ono must die says Catcher in the Rye. Yoko Ono must die says Catcher in the Rye. Yoko Ono must die says Catcher in the Rye. Yoko Ono must die says Catcher in the Rye. Yoko Ono must die says Catcher in the Rye. Yoko Ono must die says Catcher in the Rye. See you guys in 30 to 40 years, maybe earlier with good behavior.

Thanks blacksun. I don't mean to threadjack, but if anyone's interested there is a standard 4:3 resolution version also available in the blog post.

Come on guys, obviously it has to be the Illuminati. The "defending the DST offices" was a bit of misdirection to fool the unobservant. They can't come right out and say Illuminati, that's not how they operate. You have to hunt and dig for the facts and relationships then slowly assemble all the little clues into one glorious whole! Only then will you come to realize the all encompassing power and control this group of gifted individuals has over your daily life. Here's the proof. Look at the phrase used in the Radical Confidential newsletter, "defending the DST offices". It has three words and one acronym. We'll start with the acronym, DST. You'd think this stands for Diamond Select Toys, you'd be wrong. It is actually referencing Daylight Saving Time. The only state in the continental United States that does not observe Daylight Saving Time is Arizona. Arizona's state flower is the Saguaro Flower. After this flower is pollinated it forms a red fruit containing 2000 seeds. In Roman numerals 2000 is indicated with "MM". You're probably thinking that "MM" is a reference to "Minimates," but you're wrong. "M" is the thirteenth letter of the English alphabet. MM = M*M = 13*13 = 169. 169 is the sum of seven consecutive prime numbers (13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37). If we go back to the phrase and look at the three remaining words, "defending", "the", and "offices," we can see there are 19 total letters, which is one of the seven primes. So we remove 19 from the list and convert the remaining numbers to their letter equivalents (modulo 26, of course.) 13->M, 17->Q , 23->W, 29(3)->C, 31(5)->E, 37(11)->K. MQWCEK, doesn't look like much, right? Well, shift it eight characters forward and we get UYEKMS. Rearrange the letters and you get "SKY EMU". Now we know emus can't fly, so this is an obvious reference to the emu constellation identified by aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal Australians account for 2.5% of the total population of Australia. 2.5% expressed as a fraction is 1/40. Forty days (and forty nights), was the duration for which rain fell during Noah's flood. On Noah's Ark there were two of every animal. In Ghostbusters 2, Ray discovers a river of slime flowing through the New York Pneumatic Railroad's Van Horne Station beneath the intersection of East 77th Street and First Avenue. First Avenue, as in "one." Pull out a one dollar bill (US) and look at the back. See the pyramid with the eye on top? Well-known symbol of the Illuminati. Dun-dun DUNNNN.

Hey Ady, Just want to let you know that your MMMV black-on-white text page isn't there and now it points to some strange forum. You might want to look at that. Might be hackers. Nice to see you back, hope the move wasn't too much of a headache.

Thread of which you speak. Ah sweet, sweet schadenfreude.

I learned the "Don't write SQL statements when you're drowsy" lesson the hard way. It's far too easy to write "DELETE * FROM table WHERE id > 50000" when you mean "< 50000" and deleting everything you wanted to save while keeping everything you wanted to delete. :sad: Luckily I had a two-year old backup and the quarterly update files were available in an archive. It wasted a day but wasn't totally catastrophic. On the plus side, I now handle databases with all due caution. Everytime I type out DELETE, I shudder a bit thinking about what could happen.

Yep, I wanted some of those Twilight Frodos too. Thanks for the news Reideen1313.

Chicken Chucker! I got one of these at an office Christmas party a few years ago. It came with five of those scaled chickens. My magnetized Spidey has been hanging above my office door threatening to drop it on any loiterers.

I miss that duvet. It makes it easy to recognize the stolen pics in eBay auctions.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.