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.

Boom! Krunch! Ka-Pow!

TITLE:  UNKNOWN
MANUFACTURER:  UNKNOWN
PIECES:  1500
MOVIES:  BATMAN (TV SERIES), FLIRTING WITH DISASTER

Date: November 6th, 2016

If there's one thing that makes me feel more nostalgic than puzzles, it's the 1960's Batman TV series.  I'm sure even people that have never seen it still know what it is, so no need to describe what there is to like about it.  I don't think I actually saw the series until I was 18 or 19, but I have a lot of memories of the renting the 1966 movie at the A.A. Brown library in Mobridge, SD.  Along with Felix the Cat and the ABC Weekend Special "The Red Room Riddle", this was the go-to rental.  This puzzle though, was done just after I bought the new available DVD releases of the TV show, so that's what I was watching.

The second movie was the 1996 David O. Russell film Flirting With Disaster.  A pretty funny Ben Stiller movie that definitely paved the way for Meet the Parents and his 2000's cringe comedies.

This puzzle is where I learned the limits of my coffee table.  You can see the top of the puzzle is hanging over the edge, and usually puzzles don't have a whole lot of rigidity to them so I mostly stuck to 1000 and under after this one.  I also learned that a lot of the puzzle companies are European, since the dimensions were in centimeters.  So I've had to remember to my table can accommodate in both imperial and metric (23" or 59 cm FYI).

I put unknown as the puzzle manufacturer, but I suspect that it was a company called F.X. Schmid.  I've looked online at other puzzle boxes from the company, and their logo and font seem familiar.  Also, they're European,

I obviously still hadn't learned to take the photo from a good angle, nor clear the puzzle of any loose items.  Cameo credit to my girlfriend Lia's bobby pin.

MAPS

October 26th, 2016

Title: World Map, 1630

Manufacturer:  Pomegranate

Pieces:  1000

Movie:  Unknown 

If there's one thing I love more than puzzles, its maps.  I love looking at maps, any maps.  I love looking at Googlemaps, city maps, bus route maps, hand drawn maps on a napkin, whatever.  Show me a map and I'll spend some time studying it.  Naturally, doing a map jigsaw puzzle was pretty fun for me, and a handful more will be popping up later.  Some, like this one, are fairly easy, but some of them are surprisingly difficult.

The company that made this puzzle is called Pomegranate.  The only reason to bring this up is because, as of right now, this is the only Pomegranate puzzle I have done.  Not that there was anything I didn't like about it, but it seems like they mostly do puzzles of paintings and other artwork (like this old map).  For the most part, I usually stick pictures of the natural world.  Castles, boats, houses, mountains is my usual endeavor, with a few exceptions.

Returning to the topic of how I recovered the pertinent information about puzzle, there's basically two ways I've been able to figure out who the puzzle manufacturer was: finding it online, or, more commonly, finding the puzzle again at a thrift store.  My basic routine is to go to a thrift store, buy a puzzle, do a puzzle, then donate back to a thrift store.  I'm guessing others have this same routine since I will find old puzzles at a different store than I left them.  I'm sure some of them where just another copy of the same puzzle, but mostly they are old enough that I'm certain they are the same one.

MOVIES AND PUZZLES

TITLE:  FRENCH HARBOR

MANUFACTURER:  MILTON BRADLEY
PIECES:  1000
MOVIE: JOHNNY BE GOOD

October 20th, 2016

If there's one thing I partake in more obsessively than putting together jigsaw puzzles, it's watching movies.  While I admit that it's impossible to dedicate your absolute undivided attention to a movie while also working on puzzle, I don't have too much of a problem being able to enjoy a movie or TV show while mostly looking down at my coffee table. Unfortunately, foreign film watching is not really a good idea, and some of the more quieter, visual aspects of a film are sometimes missed. Its preferable to getting distracted by the internet at least.

One thing I do enjoy about it, is the association with the puzzle and the movie.  I think it helps me remember both aspects better when I have the connection between the two.  Like when you hear a song and it brings you back to a particular time and place in your past.  Since I watch a ton of movies, it helps me retain memories of it when I have something else to look at that calls back to it.

This association helped when in late 2017 I decided to try to tag all the photos with a movie or movies I was watching when working on the puzzle.  Obviously I wasn't able to retain all that much the past years movies, but I did remember a surprising amount of movies and what I was working on while watching it.  Thankfully, I was also helped out a lot by the greatest store on the planet (aka Scarecrow Video).  One of their employees was nice enough to email me a complete list of my rentals going back to late 2014.  I was able to use this least to cross reference rentals with my photographs and was able to fill in the blanks.

I did not do a full transposing of all movies I rented to each puzzle though.  Part of the fun of this is the association I feel when thinking about the movie or puzzle, so I only wrote down movies where my memory is jogged when looking at the list.  Therefore, the information will be a little spotty for quite a while.

MY FIRST MODERN JIGSAW PUZZLE

October 14, 2016

Calling this my first my modern jigsaw is most likely not correct.  Since this was from several years ago, and I've done many puzzles since then, my memory is a little hazy as to whether this is the first puzzle I did since I really started getting into puzzles.  I do remember completing a puzzle and being disappointed that I would have to disassemble it and there would be no evidence of my accomplishment.  I'm not sure how long it took me to realize that I lived in 2016 and not 1916, and that I had a camera on my phone that could be method of archiving my work.  So this is called my first modern jigsaw puzzle because this is the first puzzle I photographed, and that's all I have left to go by.

This photograph was obviously a pretty sloppy affair, and lacked the meticulous precision that I try to achieve now.  A lot of these early photographs were taken at weird angles, but this one I didn't even have enough sense to clear the puzzle of my iPod and headphone cables.  I didn't really plan on making a well kept catalog, so I was merely trying to capture a memory.

I also had no intention of cataloging these photographs with any tags.  All tags from now until late 2017 were done after the fact, so info will be sparse.  In late 2017, I decided that I wanted to keep a record of: puzzle manufacturer, number of pieces, and what I was watching/listening to while working on the puzzle.

I will go into more detail about the information I record for each puzzle in the upcoming posts, especially how I have any information for these pre-2018 puzzles where I wasn't recording any data at the time.  For all subsequent posts after this one, I plan on having the puzzle information at the top, and then I'll go into a little discussion about the puzzle or whatever else I want to talk about after that.  So it should look like this:

TITLE: BERNER OBERLAND, SWITZERLAND

MANUFACTURER: MILTON BRADLEY

PIECES: 1000

MOVIE: CHOPPING MALL

Much like my early archiving of these puzzles, I'm guessing these early blog posts to be pretty clunky as I get more used to writing them.  I would say I don't have much of a voice yet, so hopefully I get better at writing and I can bring a little bit of flavor and interest to these posts.  If you are in the future and you are going back and reading old posts, then you will agree, I got better!  Or maybe I got worst and then why the hell are you even reading this blog you masochist!

Anyway, thanks for reading.  

And yes, I did watch Chopping Mall while doing this puzzle.  A+ in the head explosion department.

Beginnings

According to family members, I apparently started putting together jigsaw puzzles when I was around three or so years old.  I obviously have no memory of this but, but I have heard the story about my mom and I doing a puzzle, and I was holding and piece, looking for where it belonged.  My mom kept telling me "higher, higher", and I lifted my arm above my head and gave her a wry smile.

My early puzzles were all easy, 100-300 piece fare, like Spider-Man, Disney, Looney Tunes, He-Man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

     

We had a couple of more difficult ones, like Dracula and Star Wars, that I'm pretty sure I at least attempted, though I doubt I ever finished.  I also distinctly remember an Alien puzzle that was of the Space Jockey that I found a little scary.

I spent the majority of the next 30 odd years not really doing any puzzles at all, and if I did, it was dusting these old ones off for nostalgia's sake.  I had one flirtation with a 3000 piece puzzle of Sistine Chapel ceiling, but I soon realized that I was both unable to fit the puzzle on my coffee table, and lacked the patience and experience to put tackle such a difficult puzzle.

A few years after the Sistine Chapel debacle, I decided to purchase a puzzle on a whim at my local Goodwill.  I could not have realized what I had started...