HOARD WORLD: HOARD WORLD: YEAR TWO - HOW TO CELEBRATE THAT DIFFICULT SECOND YEAR WITH A BIRTHDAY PARTY

It's my birthday. It's my birthday. I'm gonna spend my money.
p.s. I'm broke, so not really.

Long time readers might recall around this time last year when I took an exhaustive, obsessively critical and self-indulgent look at the first year of Hoard World in all its various guises.

For Hoard World's 2nd anniversary, let's not gaze into my plastic, slime-filled navel too much; instead, why not remember what it is that we actually like about Hoard World with a nice, laid back retrospective? (And then celebrate our difficult second year with a birthday party.)

For instance, sometimes on Hoard World we have guest columns by other like-minded folk from the blogosphere!

Our pals over at Doomkick.com were the very first to attempt such a feat on Hoard World with their excellent Top 5 Action Figure Lines with Awesome Articulation feature!

(Do you wanna write a guest column for Hoard World? Email me with a pitch! hoardworld@gmail.com )

There's nothing I like more than photos of toys playing with toys.
Great job Dr. Rampageo!

Not satisfied with merely having special guest columns right here on Hoard World, we showcased our blogging wares by popping out some guest spots of our own - over at other sites!

Zombie Cap, Tarman and Zombie Supes from a trilogy of guest spots by yours truly at The Epic Review!

As well as guest columns at The Epic Review, we also contributed our third and final guest review for the (sadly now defunct) Poe Ghostal toy site.

"I ain't 'fraid of no Ghostdak."
(The Poe Ghostal review I did was for The Spirit of Hordak 2013 chase figure.)

What other good times have we enjoyed over the last 12 months on Hoard World?

A big one for me was the quintet of spotlights we did on a variety of great indie toys.

Pictured here with Spirit of "Hoardax" are releases from Rampageo Industries (The Slimes) , Goodleg Toys (Ded Dibia$e) and Huggingtons Twisted Toys (unreleased MOTU mash-up prototypes).

Often with mini-interviews with the creators involved, we took detailed looks at:

Goodleg Toys' excellent Wrestlers of the Universe line.

Ryan Hall's awesome Paper Art Toys.

Eric Nilla & Wolf Voigt's fantastic M.U.S.C.L.E.'s of the Universe.

Kaboom Toys' magnificent Mash-ups of the Universe.

Huggingtons Twisted Toys' wonderful FrankenTrooper, The Savage Bobby Pin and Pincer M.D.

We also had our second ever Hoard World caption contest* on The Hoardstagram and gave away a bevy of prizes to two very lucky Hoard Worlders!

But no year would be complete without a Hoardsmas celebration. This year we were fortunate enough to have a new venue for such seasonal events: Castle Grayskull.

And celebrate Hoardsmas in it, we did.

I want this so bad it actually hurts me a little bit.

Late last year, almost poignantly, given the recent news that the complete Batman 1966 series is finally being released on bluray/dvd/download this November, I also took this picture, which I quite like.

Mind you, once the merchandising licenses for Batman '66 had been sorted in 2013, the home entertainment releases of the actual TV series couldn't have been too far behind.

Other highlights of the second season of Hoard World included:

And who could forget........

Hoard World's Six YouTube Videos You Need To See Before You Die!

Now, I haven't forgotten that at the beginning of all this (not to mention in the heading) I promised I'd show you how to celebrate your difficult second year (of anything really, but in this particular case: Hoard Worlding) with a birthday party.

Here's how to in three easy steps:

1. Gather some pals.