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Nostalgicons - Set 185 Part 1 / 2

FairyWinkle

Simpsons on Parade

Bronze MicroMachine Car

Gray and Brown Dino

Egg Bunny

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Nostalgicons - Set 184 Part 2 / 2

Monty Python DVD Collection

Braves Baseball Bat Keychain

Blue Butterfly

Tracker, Roam, and Bruno

Wolfman

Set 184 Commentary

Beanie Babies, instantly recognizable and were prolific in the 90s and early 2000s, are not worth the thousands of dollars today that they were "supposed" to be, and can often still be found in thrift stores en masse for cheap. Still, the collection we built up while they were around was large enough to sustain their presence throughout this series, and digging them out and handling their soft, high quality material for shoots has always given me little nostalgic flashbacks.

There have been a few times where both the regular Beanie Baby and its smaller McDonald's counterpart (which were sometimes in even higher demand) have shown up across the collages.

Also, Monthy Python is a central influence on my sense of humor.

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Nostalgicons - Set 184 Part 1 / 2

Fisher Price Farmers and Horse

Toucan

Ice Cream Truck

Pokémon Snap Guide

Tiny Helicopter

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Nostalgicons - Set 183 Part 2 / 2

Donkey Kong Country Promo Tape

Dragon Pegasus Thing

Daffy Duck Posing

Peg Boys

Yellow Sports Car

Set 183 Commentary

Media, like video games and tapes, computer software, magazines, and DVDs have appeared in the series since the very first set of ten, though it's rarely been the focus, and typically acts as "fluff" or "set dressing" for the more personal and interesting-to-look-at toys. Media has been in the spotlight twice: in one segment of the Trefoil collage, and in the top bar of Wireless. (The best place to look at all the collages at once is iandeanphoto.com/nostalgicons)

Media has always felt more mass produced and impersonal, and most of it has carried on as the form has evolved, ie from video tapes to DVDs and beyond, so I usually only bring in pictures of such things when the movie, etc, or physical object containing it stands out in my memory significantly, is a favorite of mine, or feels a little more rare and special. If I wanted to shoot every tape, game, book, magazine, CD, and DVD me and my parents collected, I could easily make a second series as big as this one, already at 1800+ pictures, and it would likely be pretty boring to look at.

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Nostalgicons - Set 183 Part 1 / 2

Pink Bendy Rabbit

John Hughes Movie DVDs

Lucky Rabbit's Foot

MicroMachine Harrier

Burger King Diglett Top

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Nostalgicons - Set 182 Part 2 / 2

The Cowboys

Birth of Bullwinkle

F4U Corsair

Stegosaurus

Simple Red Wagon

Set 182 Commentary

While shooting a full set of ten, and usually for a few weeks afterwards, I tend to have several variations of a dream where I discover a cache of old toys from some forgotten corner of childhood. Sometimes I even visit my old house, which I moved out of at six and have precious few memories of, and discover a box of relics that were left behind. These are the kinds of dreams that make you excited and soon after leave you with waking disappointment. In the real world, every toy or object I find and archive feels like immortalizing another tiny treasure that played some microscopic role in my childhood. And then, sometimes, I find one of those dream stashes for real.

These ten sets will heavily feature objects that I had forgotten about, and had been locked away in a storage unit for years, maybe two decades in some cases. Said unit is full of my dad's artwork and things used for his installation pieces at art shows. Usually probably only once, or not at all; instead just being there as an option.

While a good portion of this discovery are just wax mold cheap figures, there are enough of the good toys to help make these series-twilight sets more feasible, since I've been running on fumes for available stuff to shoot for a while (no surprise, given that I've probably photographed at least 5,000 individual things by now).

Still, even little bits of simple plastic figures can be interesting enough to shoot. Case in point, the cowboys here. I don't know why one is big and the other is Mighty Max-scaled, but there's something to be said about finding a repeated design in the box they both share.

If you're curious about my dad's art, I maintain a website with images of many of his pieces: whitcombprojects.com

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Nostalgicons - Set 182 Part 1 / 2

Melanie Mouse's Moving Day

Burger King Gargoyle

Mustang Convertible

Another Barbie Pencil Sharpener

Inspector Gadget

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Nostalgicons - Set 181 Part 2 / 2

Here Comes the Bus

Fisher Price Chicken

Babe Keychain

Yellow Frog

Pliers

I plan to finish this series with Set 200, for real this time. It will still be a while until then, and I figured these last 20 sets of 10 pictures would go well with some commentary, which will be a mix of talking about the project as a whole and some of the ongoing themes of the project.

Set 181 Commentary

LEGO is one of the most prolific toy brands in the world and has been around basically forever, so it's no surprise that it's shown up in this series often. I sort my photographed LEGO sets in a few different ways. Fully intact sets from the 1980s-early 2000s (seen mostly in the Isometry collage in the upper quadrant), were built from complete sets. Some photos are of memorable playset pieces like moulded baseplates or boats, while others are of personal creative things built in the past and that have survived for decades. And some, like this segment of the popular 1994 Pizza to Go, are only fragments of sets that have avoided being broken down and sorted, usually by having hidden away in a storage box all this time. The custom airplane seen in Wireless, the largest custom creation in the series, was built in 2006, the current cut-off year for all Nostalgicons.

On Belle and Dresser: Sometimes an object is begging to be paired with something else that is unrelated to it. In this case, I wanted to take advantage of having a mirror on the dresser. I don't go out of my way to combine toys like this, instead grabbing a mate that will "just work" and is in the same bin or area I'm digging through. These pairings are infrequent but inject a little bit of those old "kids playing with whatever they find a in a toy box" halcyon days into the series. The first instance of this was way back in the third collage, Fire, with a bird on Lucy's head.

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Nostalgicons - Set 181 Part 1 / 2

Belle and Dresser

Tonka Truck

Transforming Cheeseburger

Hickory, Dickory, Dock

Pizza to Go Lego Remnant

Getting in a few Nostalgicons right before 2024 ends!

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Another scary story, this time for the month where many welcome a tree into the house. Except this one is all by itself on a remote New Zealand island. A shorter tale, but one with some sketchy illustrations to go with it.

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This year's Halloween creepypasta is The Mind of Theseus, which explores science's goal of digital immortality, and a method of bypassing that annoying "only making a copy of you, you're still screwed" issue. Of course, this wouldn't be a scary story if nothing went wrong.

Read here

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Finally, 90's Kid art of the Royal Valley mall. Always wanted to show this place off in the series, but the city, theme park, and school kinda took priority. Definitely a staple of the 90's kid and teen scene!`

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It's late summer, and what's the hot season without a little 90's Kid? In the works for about a year, here's the "movie" of my serialized web show-story that wraps up some loose ends from the 50 chapters that came before it and concludes the story on some high and sci-fi notes.

Taking place in 2022, 1998, and, at long last, the far future where time travel is an everyday thing, The 90's Movie should be a fun little read on an afternoon day, with just six chapters (and an epilogue) with around 140 pages of text. The format of 22 pages per chapter is the same, but given the pace of the story, it reads more like a 90 minute movie. And since it's not episodic, it's up and ready to go for unlimited free showings.

The story's a coming together of slice of life, science fiction, and nostalgia, featuring everything from the mundane like Nintendo 64 pizza parties and running around Middle School while invisible, to a zero-g boss battle in a space station and a little bit of adult issue-fixing and time-related mystery.

Read it right here!

I won't say this is the real end of these characters' stories. I have more ideas and want to be open to revisiting them again. But for now, this serves as a conclusion to a series that I started working on back in 2017.

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My Dead Mall creepypasta mini-series has proven to be pretty well-liked (with multiple YouTube narrations), so I went ahead and turned it into a trilogy. Here's the last one, Dead Pines. A lone security guard live-streams the most bizarre night ever at a large warehouse, and the dark deeds of the land are finally exposed.

Click to Read!

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#9 in my Creepypasta style series, Cold Relics, is The Crypt Under Denver. This is the closest they've gotten to the truth.

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2024 eclipse from Evansville, Indiana!

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Nostalgicons #18 - Isometry