Custom action figures

Photo swiped & cropped from Wired

A while ago, Wired ran an article on action figure modding. It's an interesting concept but I wasn't blown away by any of the examples in their gallery (except the seriously awesome Skeletor shown above). Then I saw Jin Saotome's Master Chief on Kotaku. I was so impressed by the incredible level of detail on this 8-inch figure, I'd be proud to own it, even though I don't play Halo.

I would love to have a modder selling these at a Craftstravaganza, except the price would probably have to be somewhere on the scale of a customized Blythe doll. Master Chief is on eBay and bidding is already over $300 with four and a half days to go!

KnockMan Family instrument toys

I was at Robot Love today and became enamored with the KnockMan Family, cute little toys that you wind-up to make noise. All the figures are charming, but this one takes the cake: Pololon is a tiny guitar-man with strings you can tune (watch the video)!

I officially have too much useless plastic crap cluttering up my desk. Regardless, KnockMans have been added to my lust list. I could make room in my collection for one more gadget if I got it as a gift. Why, it could even be friends with my solar-powered Sunshine Buddy.

Pok Pok Pok...

Paper Critters papercraft generator

Do you like cute toys? Do you like papercraft? You will want to check out Paper Critters, a web tool for designing little block-head creatures.

They're like collectible mini figures that you make yourself, and just like anything you make yourself, most are not going to turn out very well. I looked through several pages of the user-submitted "colony" and they're are all crap. You can probably do better.