Our little island nation of Singapore is proud and extremely honoured to be the host of the inaugural Youth Olympic Games (YOG) 2010!  The symbolic Youth Olympic Flame arrived in Singapore early this month and its torchbearers carried and escorted it around many parts of Singapore throughout this week (in both rain and shine).  The highly anticipated grand opening ceremony will take place this evening at our world’s largest floating platform stage by the Marina Bay. 

These are our beloved mascots for the YOG.  Quoted from the YOG website:

“Lyo is short for ‘Lion of the Youth Olympics’.  A sports lover, he is fun-loving and hopes to inspire young people to keep fit and enjoy sports for life.  He symbolises the boundless energy of youths, their determination to live life to the fullest, and their zeal to strive for excellence.”

“Merly got her name from ‘mer’ (meaning the sea) and ‘l y’ stand for ‘liveliness’ and ‘youthfulness’.  A passionate advocate of environment protection, Merly believes that everyone has  role to play in working towards a sustainable future.  She also wants to encourage young people to play an active role in their communities and promote respect for one another.”

Incidentally, Lyo and Merly are also made into plush toys and keychains etc, that are available for sale at the YOG booths.  Together, Lyo and Merly will also be with the athletes in “blazing the trail” from 14-26 August 2010 as they inspire the young athletes and help them persevere towards their goals and strive for Olympic Gold!

Our local tv channels will offer some coverage of the various YOG sports in the coming 2 weeks.  If you subscribe to local cable sports channels (e.g. Starhub), then you’ll get up to 4 channels that are specially dedicated to YOG sports coverage throughout the day and late into the night.  Or if you prefer, the tickets to the venues of some sports are still available for sale online and at the respective sports venues.

Have a fantastic time during the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games!

Well since my laptop is awaiting the replacement parts which need to be specially ordered, I end up using my older laptop whose internet speed capacity seems almost like “crawling”.  This makes online research for toy news, and even blogging and posting photos a torture for me.  As a result, I cut down my online hours and decided to do one of my other pastimes - clearing piles of accumulated paper clutter from my room!

In less than half an hour, I cleared out one plastic bag full of useless paper materials for the recycling bin.  For the paper clutter that I retained, most are actually the backcards and flattened boxes of my latest toy purchases, but I hadn’t stored them away with the rest of my toy packaging collection yet.  It’s a bit troublesome to access those storage areas in the remote and hard to reach parts of my cupboards, so I procrastinated for the past several weeks.  In the meantime, new toys keep streaming in, together with their packaging, argh!

I usually dislike stacking heaps of things on the floor as it is very unsightly, but my cupboards are full and my toy cullings are not speedy enough to match my toys inputs.  Such is the peril of being in a hobby to do with compulsive and addictive hoarding habits, like toys collecting.  At the end of the day, I sometimes wonder if there are truly other effective ways of appreciating toys without owning them and storing them at home?  I may want to look into my nephew’s suggestion of ‘collecting toys’ by ticking their sightings at the stores on a check list and be done with it!

Well, this has actually to do with my laptop rather than my blog or website.  But in a way it’s also a technical glitch.  My less than a year old lap top has been giving me problems in the past few weeks.  It started off as mild flickering of the screen, and now the glitch has progressed into “jumping” of the screen images. 

So that means I can barely read anything on the screen because the images jump and jerk very violently and too rapidly for me to even aim for and click on the “shut down” button, much less read anything on the screen. 

Hence I’ll need to send it for repairs and my blog posts will have to be held back.  I guess the weekend could mean that the service centre would mostly likely to be more crowded.  That also means having to take my queue number and wait in line with many others. 

Oh how I dread such down moments!  But the repairs need to be done and in the meanwhile, I’ll have to use my old laptop, which is slower in speed, but still usable.  Thank goodness that I still have a back up machine to use!  My blog posts are ready but the photos I need are in my problem laptop, argh!

Update: My laptop screen needs to be replaced and the parts have to be ordered.  Expected waiting time frame is 1-2 weeks, my goodness!

I’d often pondered over this topic on what hobby or pastime would I most likely have today if I didn’t collect toys.  It’s something like an alternate reality of my life.  I guess I would have to trace back to my childhood where I loved to read extensively on books about animals, wildlife conservation, and my top favourite topic - horses! 

Yes in a way, my love for horses got me into collecting My Little Pony, and also LEGO medieval series like the knights and horses sets since my early teens till now.  I might have even considered a career to do with horses, but somehow I didn’t.  So I sort of made up for it by collecting replicas of horses or things related to horses, including their books and toys. 

I also used to collect models of different kinds of wildlife, but all that fizzled out rapidly after I discovered that reading about them is more interesting than collecting their replicas, of which very few in the market are very lifelike enough for my liking.  So in some ways, my toy collecting patterns do reflect my likes and a great deal of my psychic.

If I didn’t collect toys, I’d most probably spend most of my free time pursuing interests related to these major passions in my life.  Perhaps I would be a career or hobby involved with close to the real things.  Maybe I would work in an animal related or wildlife conservation industry, which tend to have rather long hours.  Hence I probably won’t have the time to go shopping or internet surfing for toys.  I’d be too dead tired from all the physical work and intensive research to go anywhere or do anything else. 

What about you?  Let’s say if you collect army toys, do you think you could have done a career or another hobby that is closer to the real thing?  If you have the chance to be closer to the real deal and have to give up your toy hobby for it, will you do it?  Feel free to share your views here!

Recently there was an article which I read with interest.  It was about the growing local trends of more and more people renting secure and air-conditioned self storage space for reasonable sums per month, to store their excess possessions that could not fit into their homes.

The original use for such space rental facilities was mainly for people to store their furniture etc., while their homes were being renovated, and while they stayed at smaller and temporary premises elsewhere.  Gradually when people started home based businesses and needed more space to store their goods and equipment, this storage solution worked well with them too. 

Then over the years as hobbies that involve collecting physical items became more widespread, people even rented space to house and store their precious collectible items!  This is also compounded by the lack of land in Singapore to build bigger average homes for all of us. 

It has indeed become a growing trend, though I first heard of this kind of external storage method for collectibles more than 10 years.  Back then a toy collector that I knew was already using a similar concept storage service, but the ‘warehouse’ back then wasn’t as sophisticated as the ones we have today.

Although I don’t use the above kind of self storage service for my toys collection, I do however treat my rental toy lockers at Toy Outpost as a kind of external storage facility for my toys that I don’t mind selling away.  In a way it’s better than keeping them at home where they are not seen and do nothing useful for me.

While the self storage may seem to be the solution for collectors in general, it ultimately does not address the root causes of such phenomena.  And that is, people are basically buying too many things for them to store at home.  Perhaps it’s true that our homes in Singapore are getting smaller, so some people feel that it’s out of their control.  Like it or not, land scarcity in Singapore is here to stay.  We can’t further expand our territories by a lot more.

However, our minds and how we manage our shopaholic emotions are flexible and not as rigid as physical space.  Hence, there is a pressing need for hardcore toy collectors to be focused in their toy collecting hobbies, instead of collecting nearly every fad toyline that comes along every year, collecting every toy in a toyline so as to “complete the sets”.  

We need to be aware of that modern media is throwing all kinds marketing tactics at us everyday, to entice us to part with our hard earned income more readily and buy things that we may and may not really need.  Be especially aware of “addiction” products and services, such as collectible toys and gaming.  “Addiction” businesses thrive on our addiction to what they offer. 

Older generations tend to save up much more than the younger ones do because there were much lesser entertainment and addiction distractions in the old days.  Today many people like to visit shopping malls when they are bored.  There is even a term called “shopping therapy” to relieve stress!

So the next time you decide to make your next purchase of anything, do be more aware of what factors are  influencing you to spend, and to consider very carefully whether you really need to.  We need take charge of our spending habits as early in our lives as possible.  Using self storage may seem like a solution, but if our uncontrolled spending and collecting habits persist, we’ll just end up renting more space to ’solve’ a space constraint problem that isn’t really getting solved.

But we don’t have to totally give up our toys collecting hobby.  Collecting in moderation and culling periodically will help to keep our toys population in check and manageable for us to enjoy the hobby.  I hope that you find this article useful.  Happy toys collecting!

The Great Singapore Sale (GSS) is nearing its end sometime in the middle of this month.  Some of the departmental stores are ending their store wide sales by this weekend.  I believe most toy collectors have gotten what they wanted, provided the toylines that they are after have been out in the stores for a while already. 

If you have had a bountiful toy harvest so far from the GSS so far, congrates to you!  I have had a moderate success in terms of acquiring my most wanted toys at good discounts.  Some toys that I want for 2010 (e.g. LEGO Kingdoms) will only be released later this month, so I think they will be sold in the stores at the normal retail prices.

While most toylines were noted to be on at least 20% discount during the GSS, some notorious and seemingly forever nett priced ones like LEGO were observed to be selling at 20% discounts at several departmental stores too!  This is great news for fans and collectors who managed to benefit from it.

July also marks the start of the second half of 2010.  How quickly time flies by isn’t it?  Have you achieved many of your goals that you had set for the year by now yet?  If you haven’t or haven’t even started, it’s really time to sit up and take charge of your life aspirations, if any.  Before you realise it, Christmas will be round the corner once more and we’ll all be counting down to 2011, LOL! 

While many collectors first pick up toy collecting hobby based on their inborn love for toys and what they represent for them, a lot of other collectors end up collecting toys because they were influenced by friends who happen to be serious toy collectors.  After admiring the sizeable toy collections of others, some collectors start this hobby and have been “stuck” and “deeply poisoned” ever since.

From the number of years I’ve devoted to toy collecting, I can safely conclude that it’s going to be my life long hobby.  I started and am still in it because I love toys for they are and what they represent to me.  I used to be an “underground” collector before the days of the internet.  Then after learning from the world wide web that toy collecting is a popular and serious hobby all over the world, I became more opened about it.  

What about you?  Is toy collecting your life long hobby, or just a passing phase in your life?  Feel free to share your thoughts and comments here!

For me, most of my toys collection consist of My Little Pony, super hero action figures, movie action figures, LEGO knights, Lamborghini model cars and animal plush or figurines. 

The My Little Pony are sweet little things who live in a paradise world where they graze all day, roll on my blanket and snuzzle one another as part of social grooming.  They hardly pay any attention to me, their owner because I’m not a pony like them!

The model cars are inanimate objects like the real things (unlike Knight Rider’s car Kit) so they don’t converse at all.  They just look pretty. 

The super hero and movie action figures largely have the personalities of their screen counterparts.  They are mostly high achievers, even the villains.  So they frown upon my sloppiness and lack of big exciting goals in life, other than chasing after the ‘next big toys’ to catch my attention.  The Chinese have a term for this known as “no future”.

If my LEGO knights can come to life, they are like the real knights who spent most of their lives since childhood, training hard and leading very disciplined and goal oriented lives every day.  So naturally they are appalled that their owner is such an exact opposite of them.  No wonder they say “opposites attract”!

Am I thinking too much into my toy collecting hobby?  Or am I feeling a little inadequate because I’m no where near the implied personalities of my high acheiving toys?  The laymen will refer to this stage as “too deeply poisoned already”, LOL!

There have been so many unfinished personal tasks to complete lately that they all piled up and await my long overdue attention.  Paper clutter to clear into the recycling bin, paid bills and read letters to file away, latest toy purchases to store properly instead of leaving them on the floor, simple errands to run but I had procrastinated, tonnes of emails to read and reply to, etc. 

The mountain of things to do are just driving me crazy.  I know I should have tackled them as they came but the easier choice of pushing them off to the next day and so forth is just too convenient.  So now I have to bear the consequences of everything snowballing.  I hope to clear most of my “to do list” by this week!  No time for toy shopping at the departmental stores for the moment…

My nephew posed an interesting comment or observation to me - that many toy and comic collectors generally do not have similar personality, interest and image as the toy characters that they like and collect.  That means that for super heroes for example, they tend to be have muscular bodies, superb fighting skills (they exercise a lot) and a cool image.

When you finally see the adult comic fans and toy collectors in person at the conventions especially, many of them look very introverted and typical guys or gals next door, that you cannot tell they actually like toys and comics.  They are also usually people in their all time favourite t-shirt and jeans attire (which is what I tend to wear too).  Actually my nephew used the term “nerd” to describe them, and me…

For me, other than My Little Pony, I also collect action figures, and LEGO Knights series of toys.  Most local sellers whom I met in person for the first time are very surprised that I collect these “boys’ toys”.  Of course by now, most of the sellers from the days at Clarke Quay, and from China Square Central are used to seeing me already.  If I didn’t reveal it, would you have guessed that I collect such “action character toys” too?

I’m an introverted person who doesn’t physically exercise much, though I know I rightfully should get away more from my lap top and hit the jogging track more often.  I hardly know how to fight, though in theory I know how fighting should be done (without mercy to your opponents, if you want to win, LOL!).

So why do I like such action characters?  I mostly like them for their outer appearances and image first.  Then comes the personalities within them.  Many of their personalities are also flawed like typical humans, but fans like me still like them anyway. 

Even the villains have their own legion of children fans, who quote that the former are very cool when they use their evil powers to take over the world or something.  Then when you see the little kids who idolise the villain characters, they look like goody two shoes kids.  Hidden inside them is an opposite world altogether, LOL!  Same for the adult fans too!

So what do you think?  Is my nephew’s observation spot on?  I told him I’ll get back to him on that, LOL!  Feel free to share your comments here!