Current Ramblings
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
An interesting thing happened this, um, noon. When I went to take a shower at 11:30, I noticed there was a fire chief car (no, not a Lamborghini) in a parking space behind the building with its lights on. Odd. So I took my shower and then turned on the 12-o'clock news. They cut away to a live report of a fire in a Grandview Heights apartment building. And there they were, reporting from two buildings over, where there had been a fire in a ground-floor apartment. It didn't seem to have spread too far, though it really did a job on that one apartment. It was just so surreal seeing them reporting live from right over there, by the dumpster behind that building with the door. The kicker was the guy with the shopping cart who walked by while they were shooting. (There's a Kroger right up the street.) Just half a minute later I heard him rattle by my window. Hee hee...
Oh, I found a short article on the channel's web site. Though they call it Upper Arlington. We're right where the two neighborhoods meet.
posted@12:45 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
*Photo blog updated.* While I'm taking toy pics I should really get some shots of self-combined Energon toys, since Graham and I each have a set. I've gotten good and caught up on toys lately, even managing to score Asajj Ventress to add to my Jedi (and now Sith) Women collection. I could take pics of all that, but...eh. Everybody else will see them when they buy them and I'm hardly the first to put pics of them up. If I have something unique to contribute I'll do so.
Today I forgot I had traded shifts with Melanie at work, so I showed up at 9AM when I didn't have to be in 'till 2PM. So I picked up some fresh paint at Hobby Lobby and started on that Upstart toy I've been meaning to do. This is what I have so far. It's been a long time since I tried painting non-model plastic. I had to wash it to get the production oils off the surface, and I think I might have to score the already-painted parts like his nosecone with super-fine sandpaper just to get it to stick right. And the joints are being bitchtacular. WHY don't toys come apart as cleanly as they did in the G1-through-Beast Wars days? It made them so much easier to repaint. *sob* But I think the ends will justify the pain in the ass.
So I won't be online much for the rest of the week because of this big get-together. Check my photo blog, though, because I'm sure I'll have lots of fun stuff to upload. If nothing else, I'll take some good shots around town while showing everybody around.
Psycho baby people scare me. A LOT. What's so fucked up in your life that you have to not only lie to everybody about being pregnant, but then kill somebody so you can cut out their fetus so people don't ask why you haven't had that baby yet.
posted@1:42 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, December 28, 2003
I've decided to set up a photo blog to post all the stuff like, um, what I posted yesterday. I'm linking it to the sidebar here, so check it out every now and then.
posted@10:04 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
I heart my digital camera.
posted@2:31 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Friday, December 26, 2003
So here's most of what I got for Christmas:
I'll post more about my Christmas when I get home from work.
posted@2:19 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
So much for a Dean/Clark ticket. :p
I just know that, as soon as I get home with my digital camera, I'm going to proceed to spend all my time taking pictures of my cat. You'd think after 16 years I would be less impressed with her sleeping in a tidy little lump or streching or lying comfortably in strange places. But I'm not. I'm considering starting a photo-blog, since I'm pretty sure Fateback gives me a heaping pile of webspace that I just use for archiving fanfics that nobody has given a fuck about since 1998. Not of my cat. Of things like Columbus and just everyday things that I think are interesting or photogenic. Possibly my cat every now and then. I have a bit of an eye for things, as anybody who waited patiently for me to take out my camera and photograph a particularly interesting angle of an overpass at OTFCC this past year would know. But be warned: me with a digital camera will be a dangerous thing. This warning is especially extended to anybody planning to be at the annual #wiigii! New Year's Throwdown.
posted@12:13 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, December 21, 2003
Before I get to my toy talk, I must take a moment to vent about something that annoys me. I don't like bitching about customers in my blog, but since this was something that was also annoying other customers by in turns holding up lines on the Saturday before Christmas and generally creating a scene, I think it's a safe general bitching. I really, really can't stand the Technologically Paranoid. These are generally people ignorant of computers outside the sensationalized accounts of a tiny percentage of people whose information gets hacked. To deter people selling us hot merchandise (more commonly DVDs or CDs than books), we ask for IDs. We put these driver's license numbers in the computer just on the off chance they're needed in a police investigation. There are laws governing this; we fall under the same laws as pawn shops when it comes to buying merchandise from the public as a business and as such we have to get certain seller information in case of stolen stuff. I assume this exempts us from being charged with buying stolen merchandise, too. But of course you have some people who see us getting their precious ID in the vicinity of a computer and they freak out. We don't send this stuff over the internet. It's not something that can be pulled up except in the event of said police investigation. But it doesn't stop a handful of ignorant people from being certain, absolutely certain, that if their driver's license number is entered into a computer, by tomorrow either a random hacker or even one of our own employees will be pressing crateloads of credit cards in their name. Far more women are raped by random attackers than fall victim to this insidious "identity theft", and I bet that'd leave them feeling a damn sight more violated, but they sure do manage to face that risk by leaving their houses to come and fuck with us and annoy our other customers. If they're that terrified by everything, they should just stay at home. Reasonable precaustions are enough to protect us in our everyday life. Too many people act like scared animals, running from any percieved threat because they haven't learned or are too stupid to figure out when it's really a wolf lurking in the shadows and when it's just some perfectly benevolent humans who they're insulting. Who wants their stupid identities anyway?
I would like to point my toy-minded friends to something called Xevoz. I would point you to their web site, at www.xevoz.com, but, um, it's not up yet. So instead I'll point you to Entertainment Earth's listing. I picked up on of these - specifically the Alpha Ranger - at TRU last night during an otherwise disappointing toy run. They're a permutation of Stikfas, complete with the logo on the bottom of the bubble. They're bigger than Stikfas and incorporate a dice game, but otherwise they have all the posability and interchangability of the former line. And they totally rock. It's a shame that my faction of choice took a name from the second best animated series of the 90s.
Also in Trixter's Exciting Toy News: I picked up Alternators Smokescreen the other night, and he also rocks. I went out and found him on my lunch break and even my coworkers were impressed. I'm clearing out Armada now, so I suppose he'll take the spot on the coffee table where my Energon stuff's been. I really need shelves.
posted@1:15 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Thursday, December 18, 2003
Fuck. I feel awful.
I need to rest. I need to sleep. I need to not constantly have something I need to be doing, like shopping for Christmas presents or wrapping Christmas presents or shipping Christmas presents or driving all over the place looking for toys that I know I'm not going to find or working or remembering someone I forgot to buy something for. *sob* I think I've still got a little of the flu; I know it took Graham a good week and a half or so to totally shake this one. This is just not the time for me to be feeling run-down. I don't have time to be sick. Ugh. I love the holidays, but I just want them to be over, finished!
I'm dying to do this redeco of Skyblast, but I'd feel bad buying one before Christmas. He seems to be the most popular basic here, and I want kids to be able to get him for Christmas. I already have blue and red paint from Gundam kits. I need to work on some Gundam kits...
I'm going to go wrap some presents (yes, in the middle of the night, because that's the only free time I have), so if you're inclined, you could go read this CNN.com article on Wesley Clark. At first I wasn't sure I could respect a guy named Wesley. I blame the Crusher boy. But now I like him. Howard Dean is okay enough, and certainly an improvement, but an ex-military guy seems like a better choice right now. Dean seems a bit squishy. I just hope Clark gets enough attention before the primaries. John Kerry also seems like a good choice, but he's lagging so far behind in the early polls that I don't have much hope left for him.
*sigh* I really don't feel like wrapping presents...
posted@1:13 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Friday, December 12, 2003
I failed. I got sick. I'm supposed to be at work today, but I called out in the hope that a day of lying on the couch drinking orange juice and echinacea tea would drive away the feeling of complete exhaustion I get after doing anything at all. I presume this is the flu Graham's been fighting with for a week and a half. I tend to recover from viruses fast, though, so hopefully I'll be up to going to work tomorrow. In the meantime I have Alan Greenspan on TV for no readily apparent reason other than because I've been reading too many political books lately. I should read "City of Fear" while I'm couch-sitting, too. Woo, zombies.
posted@2:26 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Thursday, December 11, 2003
I will not get sick this winter. I've already been taking vitamin C and zinc suppliments because of all the terrible things I get exposed to at work, and that's protected me for most of the year from anything viral. (Stuff I pick up from bad fast food, sadly, cannot be stopped so easily.) I've decided to bolster it with some echinacea tea and lots of OJ. Graham's had a bit of this flu or something for a week and a half now, and I think I've managed to protect myself from it. I was feeling kinda run-down yesterday, though, but I didn't really get enough sleep.
So this week is the end of Armada. Energon's hitting the shelves in force, the last five episodes of the show are running on Cartoon Network, and the last issue of the comic before it changes over to Energon came out yesterday. (The letters page ROCKED, BTW.) I think I would feel better about buying the Energon toys already if some part of the fiction had started up, or even if Hasbro had put up their bios, but I don't have the patience to wait for another month before buying them. I keep getting ideas in my head about their characters, sometimes not even consciously, and inevitably the fiction doesn't match up. I'm already glad I picked up somewhere (Talking to Aaron at OTFCC, I think? Heh, I'm gonna assume he didn't just tell me about it 'cause it was me...) that Inferno was supposed to be a young, tough character, because I would have pegged him as older. I'm really sad to see Armada go, though. I think it really hit me the hardest when we watched the final episode at Walky's that he downloaded from the UK showing, but now even the comic is over and we've reached the point where those of us with limited display space put away our old toys and put out the new. It's over, finished. No more plight of the Mini-Cons, who are not only tragic and magical and being oppressed but also very small. I mean, I know they'll be around, but it's not going to be about them anymore. Maybe I'll use the wrap-up to start thinking about that fanfic I kinda want to do, now that nothing new's likely to happen to...well, okay, it doesn't really matter if it gets contradicted, because it contradists everything anyway. But the point is, Armada's over and, while I like Energon okay and all, I'm sad. Well, I don't like that Energon looks like it's gonna have Quints. Stupid Quints. FUCK YOU, QUINTESSONS!
posted@2:16 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, December 08, 2003
I keep really wanting to compose and post insightful essays on the state of the fandom and geek culture and culture in general, but then I keep doing it on alt.toys.transformers and it takes all the impetus out of me. I suppose people might just come here to read about how my day went, but I'd certainly like to contribute something deeper. I'll probably wax so political come next year that people will take me off their lists over on LiveJournal, but things haven't kicked into high enough gear yet.
So I suppose, for lack of anything important to contribute to the internet today, I will talk about how yesterday was the Best Day Ever. This is primarily due to three events:
1) I found an issue of Fantastic Four from 1990 that has Death's Head in it. I happened across it as I was pricing a box of comics that I got as a transfer from another store. Sometimes one store'll have more comics than they know what to do with, so they send them to the warehouse so other stores can take them if they want, or they can take them back later. We've been kinda dry lately, so I've been taking them off their hands a lot. I think at some point I had gotten confused and thought the FF story from Incomplete Death's Head was from the FF series, and that's what I thought I found at first, but upon looking at the story I realized it was one I hadn't read yet. Oh, happy day! I'm sorta thinking of making a nice online archive for obscure DH stories like this and the Marvel Comics Presents story. I've also been working on one of the most complete collections of Comics Simon Furman is Vaguely Embarassed to Admit He Wrote, but for his sake I probably won't catalog them. I mean, does anybody really want to read Brute Force? Isn't knowing of its existance enough?
2) I made a grown man run away in fear. After some exchanges between me and a co-worker about a guy looking kinda suspicious, I wandered over at her suggestion to see if he was a known troublemaker - we have a handful of recurring problem people, but nobody too bad currently. So I go over there, and I stare at him incredulously as he zips up a pocket of his coat that's clearly got big angular shapes poking out of it. I went back to tell the shift leader, and as soon as I was out of sight the guy walks to the door, manages to walk to the edge of the sidewalk, and fucking runs as soon as he hits the pavement. He just bolted across the parking lot and around the corner. Actually stopping shoplifters is a tricky business, but hopefully the fact that he was for all intents and purposes caught will keep him away for a while.
3) After all that work-related fun, I got some Energon deluxes. No Starscream, but I kept myself amused letting Hot Shot and Inferno take turns being on top. Awww yeah. Energon is the single most inherently unintentionally dirty line we've had so far. I mean, Armada was bad enough that I was actively worried about the fanfic I wrote sounding like gay erotica (I rewrote one part repeatedly until I got the best phrasing), but Energon still manages to be worse. I like them a lot, whether because of or despite the gay-gay. I'm actually tempted to write a review, which I never do because I'm awful at them because I'm a girl and like toys intuitively and not analytically, but I might save it for Glen if I do.
Pretty soon Graham and I are going over to the Drexel Grandview to see Bubba Ho-Tep. Tell me that doesn't look like the best movie ever.
posted@7:59 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
I did not cheat to get this.
| you are lightskyblue #87CEFA |
Your dominant hues are cyan and blue. You like people and enjoy making friends. You're conservative and like to make sure things make sense before you step into them, especially in relationships. You are curious but respected for your opinions by people who you sometimes wouldn't even suspect. Your saturation level is lower than average - You don't stress out over things and don't understand people who do. Finishing projects may sometimes be a challenge, but you schedule time as you see fit and the important things all happen in the end, even if not everyone sees your grand master plan. Your outlook on life is bright. You see good things in situations where others may not be able to, and it frustrates you to see them get down on everything. |
posted@7:02 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Some links for the afternoon:
Ancient Roman D20s are just mad geeky.
Also mad geeky, CNN.com's got an article about Segways that shows the further progression of the Segway->mecha evolution. Y'see, while everybody else was picking on the Segway when it came out, I realized what it truly was: the Missing Link in the design evolution of mecha. We could make arms that move, legs that walk - and now we can make the whole thing balance right. Though the AI applications the military wants are fine by me, too.
I hate to wax political, but stuff like this other CNN.com article on standardized testing and special ed students really makes me seriously wonder if the whole point of this "No Child Left Behind" law is to deliver public schools into the hands of private companies just like Bush has delivered everything else to them. You can not seriously create a law mandating that 99% of students must pass a standardized grade-level test without making an exception for seriously disabled students and, realistically, ESL students. (Though I suppose you could hold the ESL kids up to the same math standards.) It's clearly engineered either by people with no understanding whatsoever of special education or people who simply want the schools to fail and be turned over to private corporations.
I'm off today, and I'll likely be bored, so maybe I'll weigh in on other exciting things later. In the meantime, if you are also not at work, you could go snicker at/get off on the contributions at www.transformerotica.com. My friend Lithrael has some Highly Questionable Art there.
posted@1:11 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Woo! Energon!
So yeah, I found some Energon toys today. I wanted to stick a "finally" in there, but that seems a bit strong a word for something that only appeared at retail less than a week ago. I guess it's just that I've been seeing them since summer, so I've gotten really sick of waiting for them to come out already. This is why I don't like looking a toy pictures way in advance. But I think I've avoided stuff enough that I'm still really happy to find them for them, and not just because I'm sick of waiting. I found all the toys that have come out at Wal-Mart so far, which means Prime, Ironhide, and Treadbolt. I only got Ironhide because I can't afford Prime without another paycheck and I can't really afford redecos with everything else that's out now. Though I'll probably eventually get Treadbolt for his Rollout. Ironhide's great, though. I wasn't as enthusiastic about him as I am about some of the smaller toys because I had just sort of written him off in my mind as Red Alert 2.0, but I'm glad I'm getting to appreciate him before Hot Shot and Inferno show up. He's a really nice, solid toy, and I keep wanting to remix his turret sound. Though as soon as I opened him I felt an overwhelming need to give him a Mini-Con. I've assigned him Rod for the time being, with Atlas and the redeco Emergency Team for support. I'm really, really gonna miss Mini-Cons. I know there'll still be some, but it won't be the same.
Sorta on the subject, on my way home this dude got out of his car at a red light and asked me if I really liked Transformers (my plates say MINI CON), and I grinned and showed him my new acquisition. And he asked me who that big guy that all the Constructicons turned into was, and I answered "Devastator!" with a big, impressive voice, and we laughed and went about our business. I like my life. It's so weird and fun.
Oh my god, it's The Ant and the Aardvark figures!
posted@1:08 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments