SPREADING THE GOOD WORD

TITLE: FRANTENAC CHATEAU, MONTREAL
MANUFACTURER:  EDUCA
PIECES: 1000
MOVIES: THE CARRIER, HEAVEN HELP US
PODCAST: CASEFILE

June 14th, 2018

So we are going on a month and a half now of the Covid-19 hanging over us and three weeks of being to to stay at home, and the results have been pretty predictable: lots of time to work on puzzles.  I don't think I'm alone in this either.  One of the places I've been getting my puzzles from lately is a free, neighborhood library in someones front yard.  Until this thing started, the little bird house sized box was overflowing with puzzles and they even had a plastic tub next to it that was also full of puzzles.  Now the tub is gone and the little house is down to one or two small ones. Its not just this quarantine either, apparently there's even a jigsaw puzzle renaissance going on.

This puzzle was from June 14, 2018.  A simpler time when we all lived care free lives full of nothing but whatever our hearts desired.  One thing that was not simple though were these damn Educa puzzles.  I'll do a review or discussion about at the main companies some other time, but to preview, Educa is one of the more difficult ones.  What's most frustrating about them though is that their images are fantastic and their quality is really high, but their piece are so similar and often times even fit together so when you're doing a anomalous area like the sky, you can easily get thrown off by putting pieces in the wrong spot.  Some of my greatest all time puzzles though were from Educa though, so it's an uphill battle that is usually worth the struggle.

EVERYTHING IS NEU

TITLE: NEUSCHWANSTEIN CASTLE
MANUFACTURER:  SCHMIDT
PIECES: 1000
MOVIES: A KILLER IN THE FAMILY, SMOOTH TALK
TV: TALES FROM THE CRYPT

April 17, 2018

Hold on a second, my last puzzle was from November 2016, and now this one is April of 2018, did I give up on puzzles for a year and a half?  No, absolutely not.  I've just decided to switch up the format up a bit and do away with the chronological progression and now I will skip around at my whim.  Why?  Because it's new, that's why, and everything I will do now is new (well, new to me).  I just moved into a new apartment, doing puzzles on a new coffee table under new lights, new housemate, taking a new way to work, writing this at a new coffee shop.  Everything new!  

Ok, obviously not everything is new, but it has been a big change. Precipitating this big change was a lovely 40% rent increase at the apartment I lived at for 8 years by the new owners (gotta love living in Seattle).  It's never ideal having to move when you are not prepared for it, and the first few weeks of searching for a new place quickly dashed my hopes of ever finding anything that was even close to being comparable to my place in either price or square footage.  But being a Bergman, it often feels like we just have a knack at turning lemons into lemonade, and it just so happened that my sister Jolie was juggling a handful of lemons herself and we came up with the idea of getting a two bedroom apartment to share.

So far, it's been an absolutely great decision.  The apartment is amazing, the view is amazing, the elevator is amazing, the actually having a fan over the stove is amazing.  For the first time in my adult life, I'm actually living in a place that I truly love.  It's a place that I feel like I can call my castle.

Oh wow, what an unexpected and totally unintentional segue into talking about the puzzle.  This here is Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany.  A very popular castle, not only for tourists, but also apparently puzzle makers too because this is 1 of 5 (yes 5!) puzzles I've done of this place.  Each one is surprisingly different though, so the deja vu feelings are not triggered too much while working on them.  I like this one a lot because its taking at an odd high angle so that there is no sky in the puzzle.  This messes up my usual method of starting from the sky, but everything is new!, so thats ok.  There's also a lot of green, which I've already explained is problematic.  Overall, a pretty challenging puzzle but I remember it fondly.

SOMETHING'S MISSING

TITLE: COBH HARBOR, IRELAND
MANUFACTURER:  KODACOLOR
PIECES: 1000
MOVIES: TOY STORY, THE ROYAL TENANBAUMS

November 29th, 2016

Hmm, feeling a little cheated here, honestly.  Like I said before, missing pieces is just part of the game when getting 99¢ puzzle at Value Village, but this is just disappointing.  A couple of pieces are understandable but this shouldn't be in circulation anymore.  I think there will be worse examples to come, but this is one of the worst examples.

This is also another harbor puzzle.  That makes 3 out of 9, and I wouldn't be surprised if it comes out to 33% on the final tally.  Hope you like boats!

DEALING WITH FREAKS

TITLE: MEERSBURG, GERMANY
MANUFACTURER:  UNKNOWN
PIECES:  1000
MOVIE:  THE ELEPHANT MAN

NOVEMBER 23rd, 2016

This was the first time, but not the last time, that I had to deal with a puzzle that was in the vertical orientation.  When I started working on it, my plan was to just do the puzzle sideways, which seems like a good idea but it turns out it feels very awkward kinda drives your brain a little crazy.  So I decided to just work on an upper half and next to it the lower half, and then turn them sideways at the end and stitch them together.

Title for the puzzle is approximate.  I was never able to find the same puzzle in person on online, but I did stumble across a picture of that same clock tower and apparently its in Meersburg, Germany.

ANTICIPATING THE NEXT MOVE

TITLE:  CAMDEN HARBOR, MAINE
MANUFACTURER:  MILTON BRADLEY
PIECES:  1000
MOVIE: ECSTASY OF ORDER: THE TETRIS MASTERS

NOVEMBER 19TH, 2016

After doing a handful of posts now, I kinda had the idea that I would try to write the post in a certain way that would hopefully tie the movie or TV show or whatever with either the content of the puzzle or an idea related to puzzle assembling into a nice little interconnected bow.  Like a few posts ago I had the discussed briefly about the difficulty of the green bush, and the movie I watched was The Color of Money.  Silly stuff, I know, you get it.  Now, if I had taken a moment to think ahead, I would've saved my discussion from last post about working the puzzle from top to bottom for this post, when a watched this damn Tetris documentary!  Oh well, missed opportunity.

So yeah, Ecstasy of Order was pretty good documentary about competitive Tetris players.  Not quite to the level of King of Coin, as far as video game documentaries go, but I guess I can't think of many so I'll go out on a limb and say it's the second best.  Solid B

If you're like me, you've spent a lot of hours on a Game Boy playing Tetris.  Despite being one of the most basic and repetitive games ever made, it's amazing how addictive and popular it has been and still is to this day.  I've always found it funny that it doesn't really matter at all how well you play, you still just get to those few moment where it's physically impossible to get the pieces in the correct spot and you just get that stack to game over.  Even if you played perfectly and get down to just a few blocks left, you're only really saving yourself from about an extra minute of play, at most.  Brutal game.

THE RIGHT WAY

TITLE: UNKNOWN
MANUFACTURER:  MILTON BRADLEY
PIECES:  1000
MOVIE:  GETTING IT RIGHT

NOVEMBER 16TH, 2016

Even though it was still early in my puzzle assembling career, by this time I pretty much had my method down.  I always, without exception, put the sky together first. It's almost always the most easily identifiable pieces in the box so they are easy to pull out first.  I put the sky edge pieces together first and then, if possible, put together the bottom edge of the sky, creating an enclosed area.  Since I sit on my sofa and put the puzzle together on my coffee table, I found putting all the edge pieces together first forces me to lean uncomfortably over the table to put the top together.  This is why I work more or less from the top down.

After completing the sky, I usually move to the area down.  Often times it's something like mountains, or a town, or in this case, a castle.  Now let me tell you about castles.  If there's one thing I love more than puzzles, it's castles (haha tricked you).  I'm sure I'll get into castle discussion in a future post because god knows how many of these damn puzzles feature a castle.

As I work my way down the puzzle, I oftentimes have to skip around to areas that are more distinctive.  Its easier to do areas that are lighter first.  You can obviously see more detail in the lighter areas so its good to get them out of the way.  The hardest part is usually areas of trees or shrubbery.  I usually try to avoid puzzles with too much greenery on them.  It just gets too tedious and I honestly lack the patience for that.  Sorry trees, learn from castles and stop being lame.

A WHOLE LOTTA GREEN

TITLE:  FRENCH CHATEAU
MANUFACTURER:  MILTON BRADLEY
PIECES:  1000
MOVIES:  THE COLOR OF MONEY, THE FLY II

November 11, 2016

If there's one thing I hate more than missing puzzle pieces, it's running jokes that go on too long.  So don't expect to see a post begin like this EVER AGAIN!

This was a fairly standard puzzle.  Like I posted earlier, a common format is sky-castle-boats-water, well, another really common one is sky-castle-bushes-flowers.  I'm not a big fan of the bushes in these puzzles, honestly.  Each piece is pretty indistinct and its usually pretty tedious work to do them, especially when it's all one uniform color and texture, like this one.  I like bushes in real life though, so the lingering appreciation for them helps me power through the monotony.

The missing pieces are unfortunate, but at least they allow you to easily see the odd shape of the pieces.  This looked like a pretty old puzzle and I can't recall seeing pieces shaped like that on the more modern puzzles.  I might totally be wrong about that, we shall see as we go through these.  I do like the pieces though, the make it a little bit easier, especially with the dreaded bushes.