Current Ramblings
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Get off my lawn!
Yes, it's been right on a week since I updated, so clearly it's time for me to start whining and bitching like a crotchety old woman.
(Sorry for the no-update, but while the combination of work and school seem to be working out pretty well stress-wise, they're conspiring to keep me offline. Poor Fang thought I was mad at him when he realized how little we'd talked lately. <:) I probably just won't update quite as much as usual until I get a handle on things.)
I finally went and joined this new Master Collector Transformers club tonight. I have to say they drive quite a hard bargain, and one I'm not really thrilled about. The whole thing strikes me as really Barger-y. (Backstory: Dennis Barger ran BotCon '96, with far, far too much emphasis on the dealers.) Now I did join, so I can't even say that all this is enough to make me stay away, especially with the prospect of exclusive stuff and extra Vector Prime. But then again, I actually paid money - money I could have been spending on things like tasty food or My Little Ponies! - on Dreamwave's sometimes-atrocious TF comics, so it clearly takes a massive amount of suck for me to not spend money on Transformers. The thing about this club is that it feels far too much to me like what they're really selling you is a subscription to their "indexed Toy and Doll trading newspaper with several thousand classified ads each month." "Your newsletter will come every other month stitched in the center of your issue of Master Collector." "During the in-between months, you will receive your Master Collector and a small insert with upcoming shipping and ordering information." My issue of what now? Oh, and look! "With your club membership you receive a FREE 30- word ad each month that will be placed in the print version and online version of Master Collector." Yay! Because all we care about is the bling-bling! There's no such thing as a Transformers fan, just a legion of Transformers collectors out there for toy sellers to fleece! (And I do consider there to be a difference between the two, largely judgable by your concern about the "value" of your "collection".) I really wonder if they get to charge more for their ads for getting this club. I'm glad to have something going on, and I'm looking forward to the actual bimonthly Transformers content, but I don't have any interest at all in looking through their little ad-sheet. I've been at this game so long I have just about all the non-current toys I want, and bought them at retail for half the life of the line. I'd be just as happy not having more dead trees in my mailbox, thanks. Or as my Aussie friend Fin, who has to pay $89 versus my $40 for living overseas, put it: "See, that's the only thing making me hesitant about joining. The whole 'shitload of postage duty on a heap of trader magazines I don't give a fuck about.'" I guess I just wish it had gone to some people - even another professional company! - that didn't need a volunteer fan panel (Ben on it or not) because they understood the people who were here for the love of it as much as the people who were here for the bling.
posted@1:10 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments