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!

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.

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.