A long overdue post

I'll admit, I have been behind on posting. Life has been busy, my 2 year old needs potty training, I haven't found a job after an extended period of unemployment, and I am a reluctant stay-at-home-dad, selling toys on eBay between potty training the aforementioned 2 year old, making dinner, walking the dog, keeping up with the belated GI Joe Retaliation Movie toy releases and trying not to shoot myself in the head in the midst of it all.

I have a new custom toy art project on the horizon, which has led me to sell a better than average portion of my collection to help fund the project and pay off some older debts. That alone has changed my outlook on my existing toy related purchases/behaviors/hobbies, and made me really think about what I want to accomplish as I move closer to my fourth decade existing. I've enjoyed "owning" a lot of shit for quite a while, but the more creative aspect of collecting has been calling more and more to me. I'm not sure where I will go, but casting my own toys has been on my mind for a while. I have a few friends that cast, and I have always looked up to them and been quite envious of their abilities. I don't see myself ever working in the toy "industry", but the art, the creative aspect is well established in the "bootleg" figure art community, and that is where I really hope to go next.

I won't lose my love of GI Joe, or the documentation of the creative and production process attached to it, but I do feel like my future in the hobby is much more tied to what I can create, not what I can buy and take pictures of to show off to random readers who might give less of a shit than I want to believe.

I've had an NJCC Metalhead: Revealed post planned for a while, but I've been waiting for the people involved in the project to list their auctions and sell their proceeds from the NJCC show. Maybe that will be my next post, but there are other things in the pipeline that might pop up first. I don't plan to leave the hobby, but I definitely need to change how I interact with it. I'll report more here as things develop. Until then, YoJoe bitches, we have a movie and several waves of a toy line to deal with over the next few months...