Annual Gift Day and Nostalgia Marketing

Greetings loyal and somewhat neglected readers,

My apologies for the brief absence in posting. I think we can all agree though that besides being the season of jolly happy funtime lala sugarplum land, the holidays are also a time of insane, soul-stomping busyness, workaholism and casual explorations of stress-induced illnesses like hyperventilation, migraines and stomach ulcers.

Seasonal erosion of the collective health aside, I do have something of worth to share this week. I'm one of those people who uses holidays as an excuse to buy themselves expensive and frivolous presents, as in, "Why yes Amazon.com, I do think I deserve a PlayStation 3. After all, it is Arbor Day. I should treat myself."

This Christmas, among other things I picked myself up a replica Transformers Generation One Ravage USB Drive. For those of you who either don't remember or never knew, Ravage was one of the tape cassette Decepticons that Soundwave, the evil tape player, was able to shoot from his chest. He had a bat, bird, two little men and Ravage, who is best described as a robot stealth murder panther. He was awesome and was always making some kind of problem for the Autobots.

I know what you're thinking. "That's great Mike. You sure are a dork and spend too much money trying to recapture your misspent youth." Well listen, I think there's a valuable lesson to be extracted from my semiperpetual adolescence.

The Ravage USB I bought is not a "good product" as most would define it. For 40 bucks I got a measly 2 GB of memory that is of shaky quality at best (no lifetime guarantee, packaging that recalls those awful, off-brand drug store toys, etc.). At that price, I could probably get around 16-20 GB at retail with all kinds of nice features like autoplay menus, sortation functions and data protection. But I don't need another awesome flash drive. I have plenty of those. What I need is a toy robot panther that can transform into a USB drive and remind me of the greatest children's cartoon ever made, and now I have that.