Fantasy Toy Box

What this actually means is that I need to think more about how the site is organized. I want to include their entire site as they have a lot of great stuff, but I just don't have a reasonable way or indexing it today.

But it will be happening soon™

I could just drop their entire catalog that doesn't fit neatly into a category into the 'Other' section. However, it draws attention to how relatively useless labeling something as 'Other'.

For now, this means that only about 60% of their store is indexed.

Primal Hardware has a LOT of different kinds of products. Instead of just a simple product line, they are truly a whole store front for this entire genre of toys.

Since Fantasy Toy Box is organized by product type, this presents a specific kind of challenge.

Today we add @primalhardwere.com to the Index, a vendor I've been agonizing over for a long time (not for any bad reasons)

Read the thread if you want me to yap about all that kind of stuff!

That wraps up 2025's Awards! I'm already excited to do this again next year only with more time to prep and more categories. I'd like to make more of a show out of it and I think we can have a lot of fun with it!

I expect to grow the Index to about about 90~ vendors before now and then too!

This category was our one subjective category on the list. Everyone who contributed to the Toy Box this year in some way was allowed to vote and discuss their favorites. We wanted to feature toys we thought were particularly interesting, unique, well-executed and/or fun.

The final day of Awards! Thank you all who checked it out for entertaining a kind of 'end of year' recap for the first year of the site. Congrats to @master4fancy.bsky.social, @squidlyco.com, @odysseytoys.bsky.social, @were.dog and @synthsentoys.bsky.social... again :P

Fantasy Awards 2025 - Day 3: Editors Choice

It actually comes from our site and index. If you go to our site and click around on stuff, we track what gets clicked (completely anonymously - we can't even link a user to themselves if they hit F5, the session just has an ephemeral GUID), and we use that to generate this data set.

...But we do our best to level that off as much as we can. This year definitely is more haphazard. Next year should be better but the site's index will still be growing - time normalization will still have to happen. After that, we can likely run a 'pure' contest without having to normalize data.

Because Vendors were not added at the same time, For any vendor that was added after July 31st, we normalize results by giving them 'time credit' by giving them 80% of their average daily interactions for time they missed. This does mean that vendors that have been listed longer have an advantage

There is some math done to normalize spikes - if a toy gets a massive spike in interactions in a day, it's likely being linked to semi-directly by linking a filter somewhere - you don't get credit for all of those in the same way. (Although, it wouldn't have actually changed any results here)

We are basically just counting how many 'interactions' a toy gets. An interaction is how many times people click the 'Purchase' link with a small bonus given based on how many times someone clicked 'View Details' -- it ends up being about a 90/10 split for weight.

Tomorrow: Editor's Choice!

This is the only subjective category where all the folks that have contributed to the Index over the year got together to vote on what they felt were some of the most interesting and exciting toys.

I'm rather surprised to see this at least somewhat geographically diverse, and I had no idea what to expect for #3 - #5 when the chips fell. Congrats to @bad-dragon.com @were.dog @flirtydawg.bsky.social @synthsentoys.bsky.social and Drake's Shop!

Just for some clarity, the way this is counted is total interactions with a vendor's products. There is a real advantage to having a larger catalog of toys for this category.

To that end, it's not that surprising that the top dog / dragon are where they are.

Fantasy Awards 2025 - Day 2: Popular Vendors

Tomorrow: Top 5 Vendors!

'Coffee' actually ended up winning by a pretty wide margin, but 2nd - 10th was actually an incredibly close race and this would change depending on the day I'd pull the data. It was surprising to see how tightly packed the top 10 toys were on the list!

Congrats to @nyoon.com, @gaudygryphon.bsky.social, @streamstoys.bsky.social, @vulpinidesign.bsky.social and @synthsentoys.bsky.social!

This list ended up having a lot of surprises on it when I put it together!

Fantasy Awards 2025 - Day 1: Popular Toy

Way, way more than I would have expected to be honest, but I got receipts...

And literally nothing of value was lost.

The goal is to do this every year. Since the index is very much in a growing state, data has to be extrapolated on and it's not as 'pure' as it ideally would be, but for future years, we want more vendors with better data and more categories!

Categories this year are rather simple:

Dec 5th: Most Popular Toys Awards.
Dec 6th: Most Popular Vendors Awards.
Dec 7th: Editor's Choice Awards.

The 'Editor's Choice' is voted on by all those who have contributed to the index this year to highlight new and/or especially interesting toys.

Every day, starting on December 5th at 6:00PM CST (or there abouts), we will celebrate announce the top 5 toys or vendors for a category. This year, we have but a few categories since the index is very much in a growing stage, but we want to add more in the future!

"What is this?" I hear you ask.

Well, besides a weak attempt at a 'faking it until we make it'-kinda thing?

Since we've started the site, we track what toys and vendors are popular with people and while others would try to sell that, we want to make an awards show out of it!

Be excited for the most important set of awards given to anything, ever!

Wow. That is not the news I expected. I'll renew my statement that Scott was awesome and brought cool stuff into this world in a positive way.

It's going to be a busy day tomorrow, so we pushed the update a day early.

Today, we are happy to welcome @ppsculptors.bsky.social and @vaachar.bsky.social to the toy box!

The goal is to have 100 vendors in the Toy Box by the end of next year and we are on pace to do so!