Today’s visit to the flea market

My pony collector pal had specifically reminded me last night that we had made an agreement last week to visit the flea market at China Square Central today.  I said okay, that we’ll go together.  Knowing that he tends to wake up late, I called him this morning and we agreed to meet there. 

After reaching the flea market, I circled all the stalls for about 5 rounds but he still hadn’t showed up.  Hence I finally called him to ask his location.  And what was his reply to me?  That he was still at home.  Apparently he went back to snooze for “a few more minutes” which eventually stretched to more than an hour!  That’s what happens for someone who goes to bed at 4am!

In the end I called off the appointment! I also didn’t get anything from the flea market today as I was partly in no more mood to shop. 

Buying loose toys vs MOC / MIB toys

Fortunately, while looking around at the stalls, I found a topic to blog for today!  I remembered another tip to stretch your dollar in this current economic situation and still get to enjoy some mini toy luxuries.  The flea market aka toy market at China Square Central is not just a great place to buy Mint-on-Card (MOC) or Mint-in-Box (MIB) collectible toys.  You can also find lots of loose collectible toys on sale. 

It’s amazing how fast some collectors or perhaps kids, get tired of their toys so quickly.  The flea market was quite ‘flooded’ with lots of in-trend Transformers Animated figures, which is a relatively new toyline.  There were also of course loose Movie Transformers, Marvel, Star Wars and other popular action figures on sale everywhere at the stalls today.  Loose toys make such tempting bargains, especially if you are not shy to haggle for lower prices.

Loose figures, being out of package, cost much lesser than their MOC or MIB counterparts.  If you are  certain that you are defintely opening your toys to ‘play’ with or to display, you can consider buying loose toys instead of forking out more money to get the MOC or MIB ones.  However, some toy collectors prefer the idea and feeling of removing brand new toys from their packaging.  Well, it’s all up to the individual.

For me when I was actively shopping at the Clarke Quay flea market many years back, I did a combination of both.  Quite a portion of my X-Men collection came from other collectors who decided to let go their loose action figures and I picked them up for a steal.  I stopped collecting X-Men action figures since the more “manga-like” versions came out.  I much prefer the action figures that were based on the X-Men Animated series from the 90’s.

Also read: 7 tips to buy more toys with lesser money.

The first tip that I had previously shared in: 7 tips to buy more toys with lesser money was to shop for or buy your collectible toys during sales.  Well, some of the departmental stores in Singapore are having storewide sales again.  It’s not difficult to know which stores are having sales because they all tend to hold their sale at around the same period.  You just need to flip the newspapers on a Saturday morning to get ‘bombarded’ by all their sale advertisements.

One of the local departmental stores is now having its annual anniversary sale where if you accumulate purchases of up to SGD 75.00 in one day during the anniversary sale (from now till end of September), they will issue you a free Member’s Card that gives you 10% discount off regular-priced items during the non-sale period for the next 1 year (till its next yearly anniversary sale).  I buy many My Little Pony toys from this store, and sometimes my die-cast Lamborghini model cars too.  This store has only 2 capital letters in its name, so go check it out soon and grab your discount card!

I watched some more of the My Little Transformers episodes at random from Vid Central and this is one of my favourites (episode #14).  Talk about inter-toyline romance!  So far my own toys prefer to ‘date’ other similar toys, like cars with cars, action figures with action figures etc., not like the ones in this video! 

Anyway, enjoy this amazing home-made toyfic video!  More can be viewed at MyLittleTransformer.com in episode order, or at Vid Central in random order.

One of my toy collector pals used vPost (a special postal service by SingPost) recently to ship in some toys from the USA.  The online seller did not ship overseas.  Fortunately she has a vPost account which she used to resolve the shipping issue.  Her brother had used vPost services before and apparently for his case, it had been slow.  To her pleasant surprise, she received her items within 2 weeks of purchase.  Now that is quite a fast delivery time and the shipping costs were also reasonable.  I would like to test out vPost services for myself in the near future. 

It would be even better if a few toy collectors can combine their purchases and use vPost to save on the shipping.  This is a way to stretch your dollars in this current soft economy.  Of course, the best is to cut down on purchases and be more prudent with your ‘Play’ funds.  We don’t know how much worse will the economy be in the coming months and year.  But then, some collectors will feel that it’s a great time for ‘bargain hunting’ while many shoppers are tightening their expenditures.  Well, to each their own…

I’ve added all the postings I made about the Singapore Toy & Comic Convention (STCC) 2008 in my Articles page.  I attended the 2-day STCC held in end June 2008 and took some photos of the venue, crowds and interesting toys spotted there.  The event may be over but the memories still linger.

The thing about blog formats is that many past postings get ‘hidden’ away with the additions of newer postings over time.  Hence unless you label them or remember their posting dates, it can quite a challenge to find them in the archives.  Most readers don’t read beyond the latest 2 pages of a blog anyway as they feel overwhelmed by the sheer volumes of content stashed there.

My next step would be to set up an online photo gallery somewhere, perhaps on Flickr, Slide or something similar.  I’m constantly getting new ideas from other blogs.  I want to make my blog more ‘dynamic’ and more ‘fun’.  At the moment, it resembles a static website more than a blog, haha…  

This is just episode 1 out of the current 78 episodes to date.  The series and storylines get more creative and interesting as you continue watching the rest of the episodes!  Just beware that certain episodes contain swear words but it was meant to be part of the jokes.

Talk about taking toyfics to the max!  For a while I had thought that I was the only toy-obsessed collector to imagine my toys having ‘adventures’ of their own.  Other toy collectors out there like those talented folks from MyLittleTransformer.com had already taken steps to make their toyfics a reality, instead of just keeping those toyfics in their heads.  

I enjoyed watching these videos and now I have listed the YouTube versions on the first page of Vid Central for alternative and easier access by viewers.  Unfortunately, my Vid Central software is not so advanced that it can list all the “My Little Transformer” episodes in order.  To date, there have been a whooping 78 episodes made, and the creators have also compiled the toy videos to sell as DVDs!

It’s best to watch the episodes in the order that they were numbered.  You can either watch the toy videos directly from the episodes section on MyLittleTransformer.com , or from Vid Central , which consists of the videos that had been uploaded on YouTube. 

For me, I’m definitely more of a My Little Pony fan, though I own a very small collection of Transformers figures from some series.  Anyway, I had a great time watching those videos.  The toys in the cast brought out the laughter in me as they ‘act’ and ’speak’.  Hope you would enjoy viewing those videos too!

My fellow pony collector pals and I met again yesterday for the second pony meet this month.  We had an earlier pony meet just 2 weeks ago .  One of my pony collector pals visited the toy market at China Square Central with me in the morning, and then we headed for another pony collector’s home in the northeast of Singapore, after our lunch. 

It was pouring at some parts of the way while we were driving along the Central Expressway (CTE).  Good thing the rain became a light drizzle when we reached our destination.  We spent a couple of hours at that pony collector pal’s place admiring her boxes of near complete collection of G3 ponies (including the various harder-to-find exclusive ponies), as well as her shelves of gorgeous custom G3 ponies. 

It was also my first time seeing G3 Exclusive Pony Bay Breeze in person!  I also admired my pony collector pal’s fiery red-colored San Diego Comic Convention pony from last year, which is affectionately known as “Super Pony” in the My Little Pony forums.  I’m still contemplating whether to add this pony to my collection.

In the late afternoon, we decided to visit the departmental store in one of the nearby sub-urban malls.  To our delight, there was a 20% discount for some ponies there.  Hence, my 2 pony collector pals made off with around 7 ponies between them, for their own collections and for customizing.  I didn’t get anything for there was no pony there that I needed.

We also briefly discussed meeting up again soon for a pony customizing session.  For me, I’m not into customizing ponies as I have longed passed that very ‘obsessed’ stage in toy collecting.  Now I prefer to leave the toys as they are, unless there are some very obvious ‘flaws’ on them that need my immediate attention.

Looks like we will be meeting up again soon next month because that’s when I expect our combined order of ‘Blue Art’ Collector Ponies that we ordered from Hasbro’s website 2 months ago, to arrive.  The website stated that shipping will begin in the later half of September, which is just next month!

During the recent Beijing 2008 Olympics period which just ended tonight, Google uploaded a different logo picture featuring different animals playing different Olympics sports each day.  The selected animals were based on the 12 Chinese zodiac animals. 

I like these Google Olympic logos very much and I collected all of them since day 1 of the Beijing 2008 Olympics.  The first 15 logos in my collections are found at link 1, link 2 and link 3.  The top 2 logos below were the last few Google Olympics logos to complete the series.  The bottom logo is the plain Google logo that we’ve been so used to.

Rooster playing Baseball

 Beijing 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremony

Plain Google Logo

That’s all for the Google Olympics logos series over the past 16 days of the Beijing 2008 Olympics.  Hope that you had enjoyed viewing and collecting those logos as much I did!

If you had been using Google search during this Olympics period, you would have noticed that the Google logo picture is of a different animal playing a different Olympics sport each day.  The selected animals are based on the 12 Chinese zodiac animals. 

I like these Google Olympic logos very much and I had been collecting them since day 1 of the Beijing 2008 Olympics.  I have already uploaded the first 12 logos in my collections here and here. 

The Beijing 2008 Olympics are drawing to an end soon and we are now in the third last day of the Olympics.  The following are the latest Google Olympics logos I collected over the past 3 days:

Horse and Rabbit in Track & Field

Rabbit doing High Jump

Monkey and Tiger in Martial Arts combat

There should be a few more Google Olympics logos before the Olympics end on this Sunday (24 August 2008), hence come back again to view them here!