solo LARP
Kirby and i went out shopping. Not headline news—like anything else on this blog—, but for us, that is one of the most important news of the day. I said i'll go out and grab what we need, and without warning, Kirby got up to grab his shoes, proclaiming he'll accompany me.
We went at a time when everybody was busy with doing things indoor, and if they had outdoor business, they put that on the back of their to-dos due to the strong winds and dropped temperatures. Compared to the couple of days before it got "rougher", but the sun was out, so it didn't feel that bad. On the way we talked about all kinds of stuff on our minds. Kirby brought up magazine layouts, and how he understands that all those publications around toys—Lego and Playmobil in particular—are designed to keep his attention in them, and despite this knowledge, he can't look away.
Got him a Kinder Surprise Egg due to the DC Comics figures in there. He got a Green Lantern—by the shape of the hair, and my limited knowledge of what is going on in that corner of DC Comics i guess it's Hal Jordan. That figures … there are 16 out at the moment, and i have no idea who said "Make it so!" to this, but i guess it won't get Playmobil out of their financial woes anytime soon. They certainly don't motivate me to sample more of their products; Hal has no moveable legs, so he fits into the container, and the head proportion doesn't work.
A long rant about Playmobil:
Looking trough the latest product offerings, i feel like Playmobil themselves have no idea what they're doing, they work like Lego, flooding the market with whatever, while forgetting that Lego caters to a lot of franchises. And the new Skytrails1 range looks interesting, but can't be actively combined with any other of their product lines. Kids will surely come up with ways to combine the medieval mechs with guns2 and the rail system, yet, the first thought when doing such a thing shouldn't be "Woah, we can let this guy slide down a rail track, which's length is in correlation to the parents budget." but "How can we get this dudes to slide through the enchanted forest to the police station, from there into the spaceship, to land at the besieged castle?"
Of course Kirby and i wrangled together again.
In the afternoon, i put a few new audioplays on his media player—a Hörbert, wodden case containing a speaker, a card reader, and the electronics needed to make it sing; it can do bluetooth receiving and sending, the biggeest selling point for us was: it works offline—, and we thanked the Batcave he wasn't binging on Benjamin Blümchen3 anymore.
Talking of Batman, i read Detective Comics no.1100, a celebration of Batman, that contain the usual suspects of Batman feel-good stories, with one of them being the definitive "When he isn't doing his solo LARPs, he sometimes acts like a human." -story for years to come.
In the evening, i got Chip Zdarsky's run on Batman out of the shortboxes; only read the first couple of issues, until he jumped from the Moon to the Fortress of Solitude.
Benjamin Blümchen is a german radioplay series about a talking elephant who does all kind of jobs and gets into odd situation. Good idea, terrible execution. I already listened to it when i was Kirby's age, but hadn't had the life experience to see the part of it, that is a boot camp for backwards reactionary senior citizen in the bodies of kids.↩