Hello all. It has been quite some time since I last posted here and every time I come back for a minute I say I'm gonna stick around then I end up posting a few times and disappear for a long time so I'm not making any promises but I am truly glad to be back on here again.

It's been a long long road for me over the last 5 years or so and a lot has changed in my life between the last time I was on here and now. Most of that change has been for the better but it took a few years of bad times, family problems, deaths, and toxic living situations before I got to where I am now. I am finally in a fairly stable position and have been able to live my life in peace mostly stress free aside from some dental issues which have started to crop up in the past few months and I am currently in the middle of having them taken care of.

To be honest, I haven't bought a My Little Pony thing in almost 3 years. I've been more into collecting Sci-Fi/Horror and Jurassic Park/Dinosaur related things as of late and I was seriously contemplating parting with my Pony collection or at least seriously downsizing what I have but as I've been unpacking and going through stuff that has been boxed up for the last 3 or 4 years I've started to realize just how much My Little Pony meant to me and I'm not so sure it's going to be as easy for me to part with a lot of this stuff as I thought it might be. I'm sure this might sound silly to some but as a 33 something Man as of this year, My Little Pony brought me the most joy and happiness I had in my life for the better part of a decade.

I am on the austism spectrum and 10 years ago I was barely out of my teens. I didn't have a particularly large pool of friends and I was going through a lot of anxiety/ stress related things and identity issues. I didn't really have any serious thoughts about what I wanted to do with my life at that point and I was heavily under the influence of my mother who had a large amount of control over my finances and how they were handled even though I was working and had 3 jobs by that point. It took years and years before I was finally able to gain complete control over my finances and I had a lot of bad experiences that ultimately pushed me to my breaking point when I decided that enough was enough. I now have total control over every aspect of my financial situation and am currently living on my own through an arrangement I have with my father and a friend of his who he has a renting agreement with.

I've always had a bit of a quirky taste when it comes to things that interest me and I've always had the mindset of a collector since I was a very small child. My interest in collecting MLP was mainly focused around G4 just because I was in the right place at the right time when it was coming out but my interest initially was sparked by G3 and MLP was exactly the sort of thing I would have eventually gotten into and liked regardless of whether the Brony thing ever happened or not. I love toys in general and all of the history behind them. It never mattered to me whether it was a line aimed at boys or girls. toys are toys to me. I also love bright, colorful things so Rainbow Brite, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, all that kind of stuff appeals to me but I also have always liked shoot 'em up, smash and bash toys like G.I Joe, Ninja Turtles and Batman just as well.

I never really identified as a "Brony" during the height of the G4 era but I didn't mind being called one, I just didn't necessarily relate to a lot of what the community represented as far as being exclusively based around G4. I liked all gens, but since G4 was current at the time that is mostly what I collected. I also was very big into the show for at least the first few seasons because of it's unusually high quality for a show of it's target demographic, so much so that I bought every single DVD release that ever came out just so I could support the show and see it through to a complete series release which unfortunately didn't happen. I also didn't really participate in many Brony centric gatherings or attend any cons but I loved the atmosphere at the time and the whole idea that some random thing I liked had blown up into this huge phenomenon. I didn't really experience or hear about any of the negative stuff from the community like you sometimes hear about now, I just loved the fact that Pony was everywhere at the time. I love the show's messages, the animation style, the voice cast, the music, It was just an all around exceptional cartoon in my eyes and it helped me through a lot that was going on at the time. The only con I ever attended was MLP Fair 2012 which was right when the Brony thing was first blowing up so even though it was a general Pony con, there were a lot of Bronies there. One of my best friends was a vendor there and I bought a lot of really great stuff at that con.

Going through all of my Pony stuff recently has reminded me just how big of a part of my life this all was for a very long time. For like a 5 or 6 year span, the biggest joys in my life were going to Disney with my best friend who I used to work with and collecting My Little Pony. In the beginning when G4 had just started I got really deep into it really fast and started buying basically anything I could get a hold of. Eventually, I started to be more selective of what I really wanted but for the most part I got a lot of the new stuff that was coming out at the time until I ended up with a pretty sizeable collection that took up a good deal of my apartment. I lived in an efficiency type apartment building that was part of my parents property at the time. After my parents divorced I moved like 3 different times and most of my stuff has been packed away for the last 5 years. Going through it has been like a massive blast from the past for me just because I guess it's been long enough now for me to be nostalgic for the early days of G4 but also because I haven't actually looked at most of these toys since 2016. At one point the majority of my "fun money" would go to Ponies. Even though I was a 20 something year old guy at the time that was what made me the most happy, going to stores and looking for the latest Ponies. There was just something really euphoric to me about collecting colorful toy horses and I really miss that feeling a lot. I have a lot of really happy memories attached to these toys.

Anyway, sorry for my overlong reintroduction. I just really miss coming on this board and talking about Ponies. I do think I want to downsize a little but I don't think I could ever get rid of my collection entirely. Ideally if I ever have kids I would like to one day hand my stuff down to them.

This may be an odd question, but as I'm still trying to get past the fact that my favorite childhood store has gone out of business (Toys R Us), I have been noticing a number of eBay auctions for some really interesting things such as in store signage, shopping baskets, price scanning guns branded with the TRU logo, and other various TRU branded paraphernalia, but the thing that really is really getting me excited are the listings for the actual storefront signage from the outside of the building.

I'm sure the odds of any joe schmoe getting a hold of something like this are slim, but if one were interested in purchasing/acquiring somethibg like this, how does one get in contact with the owner of the building? There is only 1 TRU anywhere in my vicinity, but they still have all of their exterior signage.

I consider Toys R Us to be an iconic part of my childhood and to own something like this to me would be like the ultimate memento. I don't really expect anything to happen, but I feel it's at least worth a shot to get in contact with the property owner. Realistically I don't even have room to store something like the whole sign, but there have been eBay listings for individual letters and even just the backwards R would be awesome.

Also, most of the signage on my local TRU is pretty new, most of it was replaced a year or so ago after one of the Hurricanes.

This is the majority of my music collection except for my vinyl LPs which are out in the living room. I've just been taking pictures of some of my stuff as I've been setting up my room.

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My roommate picked up the Capper Dapperpaws set for me today while he was at Target, and also picked up some Songbird Serenade stuff for himself. He is not a Die Hard collector of MLP but does like FiM and has a hand full of brushable Ponies, and pretty much anything to do with Songbird Serenade as he is a huge fan of Sia.

Dapper was my favorite character from the Movie so I have been wanting him since he came out. He is so awesome! I haven't really picked up much from the Movie but I do have the Tempest with the missile firing glider thingie and a Songbird Serenade toy.

Well, This has been a hell of a year for me, and not necessarily in a good way. A lot has happened in my life good and bad over the last several months, but a lot of it has been extremely crappy and I pray that this upcoming new year will be a better one.

I haven't been on here in so long that I wasn't sure if I should reintroduce myself or not, but anyway here I am. I'm back, but may only post sporadically depending on how things continue to go. I haven't really followed MLP too much with everything going on, but I still have all of my collection and am excited for the upcoming movie. I love this forum and don't think I could ever leave it forever.

So basically to keep it as short as I can, Last Christmas while we were on vacation as a Family, a random Woman had called my Dad during the night which sparked a huge argument between my Mom and my Dad who have been married for 30 years, and since then their relationship has gone into a downward spiral and they are now in the midst of getting a divorce. My dad has apparently been living a secret double life of constant drug use and drinking, strip clubs and going to bars every other night, and has been having various relations with a multitude of different Women. Shortly after my Mom confirmed they were having problems, My brother, My Grandfather and I moved from their house and got a house to rent. After less than a week of having lived in our house, my Grandfather who I've been living with for the past 8 years and was closer to than anyone else, passed away in his sleep. Now my brother and I, along with a friend of mine from work, are living in the house and splitting the rent 3 ways. This year has been an extremely, stressful, painful, and Drama filled one for me, and couldn't be more glad that it is about to end. 2017 will hopefully be the start of a new beginning.

I was just looking at my collection and I just noticed that Pinkie's face has discolored to a noticeably different hue to the rest of her body. I'm really bummed since she was my favorite one. I dunno if I did anything to cause it or if Hasbro's quality control just sucks. I haven't found any other pieces in my collection that have discolored. There is a window facing it but the blinds are always closed and the light that does leak out of them never directly hits my collection. We also have the heat on right now since its very cold. I wish there was something I could do.

My 5 year old Lady Gaga Heartbeats finally went out in 1 ear, but I'm pretty sure they were counterfeit anyway and considering the fact that they even lasted 5 years never mind that they sounded amazing, I'd say I got my money's worth out of them.

I originally got these headphones in 2010 on eBay close to when they first came out, and I later learned they they were most likely fakes as the comparison videos I saw later on how to tel fakes from the real ones indicated mine were fake, but even so they sounded so much better than any other headphone I had ever hear at the time considering I only paid $40 for them. I've had many other pairs of headphones of various types and varieties but no other pair of in ear headphones sounded as good or lasted as long as those which is why I kept using them for so long. Seeing as these haven't been made in years I'm not really looking to get another pair but I want something that has deep, undistorted bass but without it drowning out everything else. i find many in ear phones tend to have a very tinny metallic sound and don't sound very robust at all.

If anyone has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated. I would rather not having to keep wasting money on cheap sounding heaphones that stop working after a month.