#I would fight middle aged collectors in walmart for this

[corlockstriker]

What Happened to Playtime?

This is Part Three in a series.

Part One: https://corlockstriker.tumblr.com/post/174484714825/streaming-and-its-effects-on-storytelling

Part Two: https://corlockstriker.tumblr.com/post/174516391315/info-dump

A few articles about the benefits of play just to add to the information I’ve already provided.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/119/1/182

https://www.parentingscience.com/benefits-of-play.html

https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-benefits-of-play/

We have a problem, at least in America.  Kids aren’t being allowed to play anymore.  They go to school, and they’re given too much homework.  Then after school, they’re shuffled off to sports practice or music instrument practice or some other extra-curricular activity that eats up most of their day.  They come home, do that homework, which is too much, and then maybe they have an hour or two before bed.  By the end of the day they’re mentally and physically exhausted.

Toy companies say that they’re losing to video games, that kids aren’t interested in toys when they can play video games.  That’s not what’s happening.  If I take my seven year old nephew or six year old niece to a toy store or the toy aisle in Walmart or Target their eyes go wide and they want everything.  I took my nephew to Toys ‘R’ Us once and he decided he wanted a Megazord, despite not knowing anything about Power Rangers.  Kids still love toys, and selling toys to kids isn’t hard, just put some in front of them.

However, I will admit that maybe kids aren’t playing with toys as much as they used to.  Again, remember, these kids have more homework than they should.  They’re over loaded on extra-curricular activities.  By the time they’re done with all their obligations in a single day, they have very little free time left to play in, and again, they’re mentally and physically exhausted.  They want to relax and play, to unwind, to engage in the developmental benefits of play that help them understand social interactions and how the world works, but they don’t have the energy for such demanding activities.  Instead, they veg out with a video game, just like an adult does after an exhausting day at work.

Toys aren’t competing against video games, they’re fighting for children’s time against homework and extra-curricular activities, and they’re losing.  Toy companies don’t need to worry about making their toys more interactive, and more like video games, that way lies madness.  Oh, and by the way, that approach doesn’t seem to be working, anyway.  That’s not what kids want from toys, nor what they need from them developmentally.

So, what can toy companies do?  Well, they need to be funding studies that get published in magazines about the necessity of play for children’s development.  Show parents through studies that having their children constantly engage in one particular sport year-round is terrible for their physical health.  Remind parents that playdates are important to social development, as it is social interaction combined with free play, rather than social interaction in a structured environment as is the case with team sports.  Educate parents as to the lack of benefit from too much homework at a young age, a topic we are starting to hear more and more about these days.  Toy companies need to sell parents on the need for toys, since as we know, selling toys to kids isn’t hard.  Parents today are the children from the 70s and 80s that were so successfully marketed to by toy companies through cartoon shows.  They’re afraid of their children being brainwashed by consumer culture.  You need to remind them that play is healthy, that toys are healthy in that they facilitate play, and that buying toys for their children is therefore healthy, as it is good for their child’s development.

You need to sell parents on the idea that cartoons like Transformers and GI Joe serve a social function other than to sell toys.  They are morality plays, teaching children how we expect them to behave.  That is a necessary function in any society and so letting children watch these shows isn’t rotting their brains, it’s helping to raise them into moral individuals.  Fund studies about the necessity of morality plays, which have been around since the Middle Ages, by the way.

Additionally, people want to feel good about their purchases, so make them feel like the money they spend on toys is helping to make the world a better a place.  That means assuring them that the toys made by your company are produced in factories that pay their employees a living wage.  Maybe even have a small percentage of every sale go to a charity.  For GI Joe a small percentage of each sale could go to Fisher House, a charity that allows the families of wounded soldiers stay near the hospitals they’re being treated at free of charge.  Transformers toys have a small percentage of sales that go towards encouraging STEAM education.  Jem toys give a small percentage to Save the Music.  Barbie gives a small percentage to a charity that helps girls in need or something.  Barbie is harder as that line doesn’t have quite as specific a focus, given all the jobs that Barbie has.  Animal-based brands give to the Humane Society or some other animal-related charity.  Parents would then feel good about spending money on these toys and would be more likely to buy them.  The endorphin rush of “doing good” is a powerful marketing tool, take advantage of it.

But now let’s get back to television because of course, television shows are how you market your toys to kids and teach them the necessary mythology so they can have adventures with their toys.  The fact that kids have so little free time means they can’t sit down in front of a TV at a set time after school every day; they’re in the car off to some extra-curricular activity.  That’s why afternoon cartoons are dead; it’s why Saturday morning cartoons are also dead, it’s why Cartoon Network is airing a show with little continuity from episode to episode all day every day, or at least, why they were.

Kids don’t watch live TV anymore, they watch recorded episodes or they watch Netflix where they can get any episode of a show they want any time they want it, such as in the car while being shuttled from school to some extra-curricular activity.  That’s probably also why modern kids love the 15 minute episode format.  They can watch a full episode of a show in that car ride.  Binge watching is where it’s at, even if you manage to get parents to ease up and let their kids be kids.

Release shows to Netflix or Hulu or whatever streaming service, or better yet, all of them.  But keep in mind that presents a new problem, those shows are now out there for children to encounter forever.  A child may become obsessed with a show years after you stopped making toys for it.  How do you get that business?  It’s impractical to keep toys in production with the injection molding manufacturing method in perpetuity.  You’re wasting space on keeping inventory you may never use in stock.  You can’t do that.  And given that molds eventually wear out and you’d have to replace them, it’s also too expensive for too little return.

Start 3D printing toys.  Sell them through websites, printing them on demand.  You don’t need to keep inventory, you don’t need to swap out molds to switch from producing one figure to another.  You can produce what you need, as you need it.  You can even design the figures so you’ll never need to paint them.  Just have the different colors print as separate parts.  Then you can either sell them unassembled or assembled, maybe make both options available.  For slightly less money, people can put the figures together themselves.  For a bit more, you’ll ship it out to them fully assembled, though delivery might take a bit longer.  Of course, this also means you can start selling individual parts to a figure as well, should some part of the figure either break or an accessory get stolen.  You’ve just created a brand new revenue stream.  And now distribution issues aren’t a thing anymore, which have been a recent issue that toy collectors have been complaining about.

That’s about it for this edition of this blog.  Next time, I think we’ll start moving towards what I want to talk about, though it’ll still be more of a related topic, it’ll just be more closely related than these last two posts.

Part Four: https://corlockstriker.tumblr.com/post/175194161695/the-beginning-of-my-insanity

[dallasinterstatedruglawyer]

‘Robin Hood’ drug dealer rebuilds life as novelist, painter, inventor

TWIN FALLS — Sting operations to catch drug traffickers don’t typically employ 40-something mothers of two as confidential informants. But Richard Urrizaga wasn’t a typical drug trafficker.

It was April 10, 2003, when the 49-year-old Urrizaga rode up to Boda’s Bar in Hollister in the passenger seat of a blue Subaru. At 6 feet, 240 pounds, with long hair and a mustache, Urrizaga still cuts an imposing figure 13 years later. That day in 2003, detectives hiding nearby watched him walk from the station wagon into the bar with the Subaru’s driver, a woman.

Ten minutes later, two more women walked in. The 40-something mother, a confidential informant for Idaho State Police, introduced Urrizaga to her friend “Kelly,” undercover ISP Detective Salena Mink.

“Salena did a good job,” former ISP narcotics detective Cliff Katona remembered recently. “I think Richard might have had an attraction to her … Richard liked Salena.”

After a brief exchange, Urrizaga handed “Kelly” a half-pound of methamphetamine inside a Walmart grocery bag, and “Kelly” paid him $6,500 in bills whose serial numbers had been recorded by ISP detectives. After the deal was complete, she used a code word to alert the officers listening to her wire transmitter.

A SWAT team burst into the bar and arrested Urrizaga and all three women. The arrests of “Kelly” and the informant were for show, to help them avoid suspicion. But for Urrizaga, that walk from the Subaru to Boda’s was the last time he walked free for 12 1/2 years.

“That was the last time I seen daylight,” Urrizaga remembered last month in the living room of his Hagerman home. “I made the delivery and they were right there.”

Now 62, Urrizaga was released on parole a year ago after serving a little more than his minimum sentence. Straightaway he went to work rebuilding his life: self-publishing one of the four books he wrote in prison; making colorful art he hopes to sell; playing his guitar; working on patenting a clock, a can opener and several other inventions; and spending lost time with his wife and grandchildren.

It’s a far cry from the large-scale trafficker he was in 2003, when a Twin Falls County judge dubbed him the “Robin Hood drug dealer” because of letters of support that poured in from friends ahead of his sentencing.

Urrizaga might be a clean, sober and changed man — “I have never been happier in my life than I am right now,” he said last month — but he’s still using the business sense, work ethic and salesmanship that made him a wanted drug trafficker in Nevada and Idaho. Now, he’s putting those traits, inherited from industrious Basque ancestors, into art, music and writing.

The salesman’s latest sell is a new version of himself.

His nonfiction manuscript, the lighthearted tale of his prison time in Nevada, Idaho, Minnesota and Texas, seems like his most promising work. But in the meantime he has self-published a novel, “The Outlaw and the Pocket Watch,” a Basque yarn inspired heavily by the story of his grandfather’s arrival to the U.S. in the early 20th century.

Urrizaga wrote the novel while imprisoned, with characters inspired by his experiences and those industrious ancestors. But Urrizaga’s most fascinating character is not in his books but in himself — a man dubbed by a judge “a person of bad character” but described in friends’ letters as “the best boss ever,” a “big teddy bear” and a “dear and supportive friend.”

The Renaissance man’s description of himself is intriguing, too: now, as a husband, father, grandfather, artist, author, musician, record collector, poet, conservationist, humanitarian, Democrat, Christian and proud Basque; before, as a salesman, a casino card dealer, a bartender, a well organized criminal, a junkie and, like the protagonist of his new novel, an outlaw.

It’s a tale stranger than any self-published novel.

‘Whole world was on fire’

Soon caught by a darker culture, Urrizaga still identifies with the one he was born into.

His paternal grandparents came to the U.S. from the Basque region of France and Spain around 1920. “The Outlaw and the Pocket Watch” reflects the experience of his grandfather, John Urrizaga, becoming a successful sheep rancher in Nevada.

John worked a two-year contract for a Mormon rancher, and at the end of that contract, he made a deal: He’d work another two years, but instead of accepting money, he wanted a cut of the sheep. The rancher agreed, and two years later, John was in business for himself. Then he called for Richard’s grandmother, Julia, and the couple started a family.

John and Julia had three boys and lived in Ely, Nev. The middle boy, John, followed in his dad’s footsteps to become a sheepherder, plying his trade in Idaho’s Pahsimeroi valley. That’s where, on a blind date, he met the woman he would marry. On Jan. 6, 1954, in Salmon, Wilma gave birth to the couple’s first child: Richard John Urrizaga.

After the younger John and Wilma had a second son, John was drafted into the Army, and eventually the family moved to Fort Polk, La. This was in the years following the Korean War, so John never had to leave the country or fight, but the family didn’t avoid tragedy. While they were in Louisiana, a disease tore through John’s herd, killing all of his several thousand sheep.

“He lost everything he had,” Wilma remembered during a phone interview.

When John was discharged from the Army, the family went back to Ely, where he grew up, and started their lives from scratch.

In the same place John’s father had cut out a good life for his family, John and Wilma and their growing family thrived as John went from doing odd jobs as a truck driver and mechanic to owning a gas station and several other Ely businesses.

“The guy played monopoly and always had hotels,” Urrizaga said.

Wilma, meanwhile, went to work raising Richard and his three brothers. While John’s businesses flourished, so did the boys.

“I had an excellent childhood,” Urrizaga remembered.

Wilma remembers her eldest son as outgoing. “He played baseball and basketball and was very good at both.”

At an eighth-grade graduation ceremony, Richard was honored with the “Principal’s Award,” an elusive honor given out only in the years when a student truly earned it.

“He did very well in school,” Wilma said. “He could have done even better if he applied himself more.”

In 1971, when he was 17 and a high school junior, Urrizaga married his high school sweetheart, Holly Davis. The newlyweds shared the same birthday, but Holly was three hours older.

The couple had their first child, Qwyntun, in 1972, the year Urrizaga graduated from high school. Angelique was born in 1974 and Alicia in 1976.

Urrizaga speaks fondly of growing up in Ely, but Nevada’s vices started to make an imprint at a young age. At about 10, Urrizaga sold newspapers in downtown Ely, which took him in and out of bars, cathouses and casinos — establishments that would play a large role later in his life.

Coming of age in the ’60s and ’70s also meant Urrizaga grew up with the specter of Vietnam, and as the oldest of four boys he thought he’d be drafted and be “off like a dirty shirt” the day he turned 18.

“I was gearing up to be put to death waving the American flag,” Urrizaga recalled. “You’re seeing death on the television every day. I had friends that never came back. And when you grow up with that, I’m affected by that.”

The drug culture of the times also influenced him. He started experimenting with marijuana, which he didn’t like because he was allergic to it, and psychedelics. Being big into music — he’s a huge Rolling Stones fan and played in several bands — also contributed to his drug use.

“I grew up with The Rolling Stones and Cheech & Chong,” Urrizaga said. “It was part of the culture. Jimi Hendrix dies at 27, Janis Joplin dies at 27, Jim Morrison dies at 27, Vietnam was raging and there were race riots everywhere. You got this turmoil, it seems like the whole world was on fire. And the culture I grew up with, that culture used drugs.”

Urrizaga said many of his friends who experimented with drugs cleaned up.

“They became bankers, doctors and lawyers, but I got into a different culture,” Urrizaga said. “I got into the gaming business.”

Read more here: http://ift.tt/2aPRroy

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