I guess we're a raptor farm now

 Yes, of course I'm dead! How did you know?

Things have happened.

Okay, so two dumb things we like to do for fun spiraled out of control a bit and ... look. You know how we've sunk thousands of hours into Ark: Survival Evolved, right? Not playing it competitively on a public server or selectively breeding all of the rarest and strongest dinos or anything like that. We basically tamed everything we thought looked fun, raised base dino health a bit to make sure our virtual pets won't die the first time a random mosquito farts at them and mostly just played house where the average player would tear through the content for rapid progression or just straight-up spawn all the good shit with cheat commands and get bored of the entire game ten minutes later. I mean, we did end up completing caves, bosses and ascension and shit in the end, but that was after a good year of just derping around not doing anything related to progression. 

And then there's another thing we like to do for fun. You know how wealthy people can afford a car and going on vacation and shit? Well, we can only afford ghetto entertainment. So a couple times or so each year we go to B&M and buy random garbage. I'm not even kidding. Place is full of discounted crap they couldn't shift at the bigger stores, so every now and then we go there and come back home with a crappy Nerf gun or something. Or 500 tubs of dried onions and a plastic dinosaur.

What, you thought I was making this up?

I don't like Jurassic World. They're making what now, the third, fourth film in that series? With this and Jurassic Park, they've re-opened the same damn park, which always ended in catastrophic loss of life and calamity ... seven times? Is that correct? I mean, that's almost as stupid as opening Disneyland in the middle of a fucking pandemic or something!

But hey, we like dinosaurs and we were utterly blown away by the quality of this discounted plastic indoraptor. See, when I was a kid and Jurassic Park wasn't a thing, my brother had a Dino Riders toy,  which wiggled one of its feet a bit when you pushed a button.

Don't you just want to put it out of its misery?

Meanwhile, Claire had one of the original first generation licensed Jurassic Park raptors and, while it was certainly better than most of the cheap lump of plastic dino toys with zero articulation you could get back then, it reeeeally hasn't aged all that well.

It's stiff, it's derpy, the feet are weird.

Now there are worlds between this guy and the disgusting little freak from Dino Riders, but in the end they were both hard, rough, stiff plastic-y things with very limited articulation. Which is fine, because who even gives a shit when you're five years old? Besides, back in the 80s, most of the action figures we had weren't dinos. They were excessively muscular, handsome men wearing nothing but fur thongs. Which, I'm sure, contributed absolutely nothing to the fact I'm living my life alongside a woman who acts, talks, pisses and cuts her hair like a man. Just like the fact she grew up watching Xena had absolutely no impact on her personality and, ahem, interests.

The girliest girl who ever girled. We are shaped by stuff we like, is what I'm saying.

And suddenly there was this indoraptor. With swively arm joint things, which allowed you to pose and move its arms in ways we've never seen on a toy like this. Elbow joints, posable wrists, separate joints for the neck and head, two joins in the tail ... you get the idea. Insane articulation. On top of that, the mold itself was of a much higher quality than on the legacy Jurassic Park dinos. Muscles, skin folds, scales, little spikes, just a lot more detail and softer materials, which felt a little less coarse than the solid plastic shells our old dinos were made of. Basically, the sensation you get from a current-day toy when the last plastic dinosaur you've seen was in the 1990s. 

The 90s dilophosaurus is just a bit terrible.

So we had this new indoraptor and Claire loved and treasured it and it became her new favourite thing in the world until she even retrieved her ugly old Jurassic Park toys from her childhood bedroom and had me replace the batteries in them. She's also still completely obsessed with Ark and her dinos on there, so I wanted to do something nice and searched the interwebs for Ark-inspired toys. You know, a feathered raptor, a tek-triceratops, the sort of stuff you encounter on there all the time. But no such luck.

While I'm generally fond of shops like Etsy or Redbubble, most of the stuff you can find on there is just some screenshots printed out and laminated or put on a shirt. Nobody is gonna build a model techno trike from scratch and for reasons I cannot quite understand, Wildcard doesn't seem to have a contract with any toy companies in a day and age where you can have your WoW characters and even your star ships on Star Trek Online 3D-printed in just a few clicks. Hell, Digital Extremes sent me an actual RL Clem nogglehead, for fuck's sake! Please, DE, never stop sending me free shit, no matter how much I bitch about your garbage content updates!

I'm only strict with you because I care.

So I did the next best thing and searched Amazon for licensed Jurassic World merch. I hate the films, but I'm genuinely impressed with the quality of their huge-ass indoraptor. So I went and ordered a current-day raptor figure. And since it's illegal to keep only one raptor at a time, they quickly turned into two. Their articulation was crap and basically just limited to the arms, because they have springs in their legs for some weird jump attack gimmick. 

The overall model, the paintjob and the soft, rubbery plastic were absolutely sublime, however. They were even more detailed than the indoraptor and incredibly satisfying to touch. You can't really pose them or do much with them beyond making them jump at the stupid cat, but the level of detail on these things went way above anything we've ever seen. By comparison, the original Jurassic Park raptor looks like their inbred little cousin.

Posable neck, jaw and arms. It's something.

If you can't understand how blown-away we were by these figures, scroll back up to the Dino Riders figure and look at them side by side. And yes, the modern ones have clearly-visible seams, the different materials don't match perfectly in colour, Blue is a stupid merchandise device that exists solely to sell terrible films to 12 year olds and the Chinese. But it's a damn 15 Quid action figure, which makes all of our childhood toys look like shit. 

Impressed with these new raptors we went and ordered something called a dracorex, because we thought it had personality. That one turned out to be slightly more posable than the raptors, sans gimmicky action features, and quickly became the new favourite.

The legs, arms and head can be moved. Which isn't a lot, but you get a few decent poses out of it. The level of detail is stunning.

After that, we decided to be reasonable, mature grown-ups and stopped buying toys for kids, because we have bills to pay. Haha, just fucking with you! We bought another raptor and the indominus rex, both in what's called the 'Super Colossal' series. In case you can't imagine why, these guys are massive and about a meter in length from the nose to the end of the tail. So, that picture at the top of this entry? These aren't two normal-sized dino toys surrounding tiny dinos from a Kinder egg. These are normal sized dino toys, framed by super colossal dinos, which are bigger than our fucking cat.

At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, these are unlike anything we have ever seen. You see individual scales, wrinkles, muscle, the detail being as close to the real thing as it gets. We shared our house with a giant savannah monitor for many years, so we're pretty aware of what a large reptile looks and feels like. And these super colossal dinos ... hang on.

We put him in our living room and you'd swear he's moving a little when you watch him from the corner of your eye.

Funnily enough, this picture hardly does this thing justice. I can't begin to describe how ridiculously real and life-like these guys look in person. I mean, look at this Amazon picture and tell me it doesn't look like that kid is playing with an actual dinosaur.

The velociraptor is the one on the right.

Now that our list of recommended products on Amazon had exclusively turned into dinosaurs, they showed us one more thing, which was even crazier than these colossal toys. They call it the Amber Collection. These figures are a bit more expensive than the regular action figures and are aimed more at enthusiasts and collectors rather than children. They're even more detailed, have even better paint, better materials and have as much articulation as you could possibly get.

You can remove the weird, rubbery, movie reference head camera thingie, fortunately.

There's just one flaw with these. See, since these figures have insane articulation, from countless joints and hinges to a wire in the tail, they can also be put on a little stand. Generally, it's entirely possible to put them in a pose which lets them stand up all by themselves, without having to prop them up on their tails or anything. But if you wanted to put them in a running or jumping pose and still show them off, you can attach a stand to prevent them from falling over. And it comes with a bit of a flaw. Can you find it on the picture?

For dinosaurs of a certain age, who wish to lead an active lifestyle, try the new Tena Rex.

Right. So. The 'amber' stand looks like a big yellow puddle, which just so happens to spring from the dinosaur's crotch. I'd love to know the story behind this one. Like, was the person who came up with this stand so incredibly innocent and blind, they really didn't notice? Did none of the people, who approved of this thing before production, think it might look maybe just a little bit weird? Or did all of them think it looked like the dinosaur is taking a giant piss, but nobody wanted to be the one to point it out? 

This is a dinosaur taking a piss. And there's no way in hell I'm taking this 'amber' stand out of the box and attaching it to the figure. The figure is the true masterpiece in this weird little collection we never planned to have, so I won't let one design flaw ruin it for us. I'm just glad there aren't any other awkward extras coming with some of these Amber Collection dinos.

Oboy.