Current Ramblings
Saturday, October 30, 2004
I suppose I can just die now, huh?
Not to brag, but I'll be damned if it hasn't been a banner week for toys for me. It's not even that I've had especially great luck finding them (though the ones I found today were first sighted all of Thursday night or so), it's that I've found three of the toys I spent most of my time outside the art room at OTFCC drooling over in such a small space of time. Not just toys I really wanted because I thought they looked cool, mind you. That would be too easy. These are toys that are new versions of characters I've liked and fixated on so much I've written exceeding geeky and occasionally angsty fanfics about them. Well, sorta. I concede that the Energon "Air Team" is not technically supposed to be the Aerialbots. But Takara gave them the same names and that's good enough to make me happy. (Also, Warabi has some awesome art of them, if you haven't seen it yet. As people. Air Raid/Treadshot and Fireflight/Windrazor are girls FOR NO REASON. I love Warabi.) I actually find myself liking Slingshot/Sky Shadow more as a toy than Air Raid/Treadshot, who is a tad bland despite being Air Raid, and in very Cyberjet colors to boot. Sky Shadow has those big awesome wings sticking off his back, and I just love the shape of his legs.
But Alternators "Meister" - my other awesome toy acquisition of the week - is unquestionably Jazz. He's so Jazz I can't even get my mind around it sometimes. I just look at him and it takes me a second to get my mind around the idea, and then I am SO HAPPY. He doesn't even get to hang out with the other Alternators yet. I'll stick him in the display in the other room, and then I'll bring him and Zoom-Zoom back out to the coffee table half an hour later. It's not even that they're especially amazing toys. They do fix some of the major problems of Smokescreen's design, like ratcheting knees that have a clear position in vehicle mode, but it's nothing particular innovative. Tracks, on othe other hand, is pretty different and exciting. But he's just Tracks. He's no Jazz. And I easily care as much about the characters they're supposed to represent as I do the toys themsevles.
(As a final note: Why was Megas XLR fighting Baron Karza? God, I love that show.)
posted@8:55 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, October 24, 2004
BBC NEWS | UK | Boots considers selling sex toys
Boots continues to be one of my favorite things about England.
posted@4:46 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Friday, October 22, 2004
Can't Talk, Playing Pokemon...
Yeah, um, so I've been meaning to post for a while now, but, well, Pokemon. I had a three day weekend last weekend and, after hunkering down Thursday night to beat the Elite Four, I spent fully half the next three days visiting islands and breeding and making Togepi happy and trading myself an Absol (I Heart Absol) from Sapphire and building a team comprised entirely of Eevee and all its evolutions. I decided to name all the Eevees after the symmetrical combiners from GaoGaiGar: Flareon and Vaporeon are Enryu and Hyoryu, Jolteon and Eevee are Rairyu and Fuuryu, and Umbreon and Espeon are Anryu and Kouryu. I was even lucky enough to get a female Eevee for Umbreon, but sadly Espeon will just have to be a queen.
So what pulls me away from the Unown ruins and brings me back here? I have to comment on Galaxy Force/Cybertron, of course! Those who keep up with the TF news sites have seen all this, but I will provide links for outsiders. ;) (See, I warned you guys this blog got geeky. And for those who don't keep up but do want to see all of this and not just the bits I wanna comment on, they're all posted on the front page of the Allspark.) To start with, Mini-Cons. MINI-FREAKING-CONS, in your face! Yeah, I know, Aaron said it at OTFCC, but that didn't keep me from running around the apartment squealing over them and their tiny misunderstood oppressed cuteness. And it sounds like they'll actually be involved in some way instead of just ferrying Kicker around and being called "his bike". Also, Vector Prime, who not only comes with a Mini-Con that I really, really want to be Over-Run but is also absolutely beautiful. I just can't think of any other word for him. He's beautiful. The silver and gold and translucent blue, the cape made from the panels of his ship mode, the detail. And I love toys that you can just look at and know the character. I really hope the story's good, but at least some of the toys so far have some real character. And there are Mini-Cons.
Also, comics: I would just like to thank Simon Furman for giving us the first new Nightbeat stuff in...gosh, I guess it's right on about 10 years now. (I'M SO OLD.) I felt the tinglings of it, but I think I'm gonna have to sit down with some peace and quiet and reread War Within: Age of Wrath #2 again to fully let that old enthusiasm that Nightbeat represents for me take root. Some people think of Transformers circa 1984 as the "simpler times", I'm happy with 1989.
Though on the subject of comics and 1984, does anybody else think Dreamwave's second TF/Joe crossover's tagline should be, "We Bring Nothing To the Table"? I suppose "All the animated style and flavor of the classic cartoons..." is close enough. Why don't they just have Pat Lee redraw the original Marvel crossover with added bad cursing and gratuitous urination? (No, I will never forgive the urination.) With his storytelling "skills" he could easily stretch that four issues into a 12-issue maxi-series. I'd like to just skip it entirely, but I might fall prey to Jazz being on that wrap-around cover. I'm really not minding him at all in the G1 ongoing.
Okay, that's all off my chest. Maybe next time I'll tabulate approximately how many hours out of my life I have cumulatively spent playing Pokemon.
posted@6:16 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, October 10, 2004
posted@1:34 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Take that, Lucas.
So rather than buy the new Star Wars DVDs with their shiny new set of "updates", I've turned to old technology for my fix. Thanks to my bookstore (well, technically the Lane Ave. branch), I now have the Widescreen Unspecial Edition box set. Because I hate Hayden Christensen more than I hate VHS. Though this may eventually drive me to buy a laserdisc player.
posted@9:48 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Screw the debates. I already know who I'm voting for.
And since Cheney isn't the terrible public speaker Bush is and therefore the VP debates didn't seem like they'd be very funny, I spent the debate watching GoBots.
Yes, GoBots. I often come into work to find that my coworkers have left VHS tapes of old cartoons on my stash, figuring I'd want them. More often than not, they're right. Today's present - and it was free, because it didn't even have a sleeve - was a tape with two GoBots episodes: "Trident's Triple Threat" and "Doppleganger". GoBots is an interesting case in the history of pop relevancy and kiddie-show marketing. It actually predated Transformers by about a year, with toys that were also brought over from Japan (in this case by Tonka) and a show put together by Hanna Barbara. But somehow Transformers was the one that really lived up to the new Cabbage-Patch standard of children's toy crazes, despite coming in a year later. The variety of the toys was probably one factor - Transformers had a lot of different sizes and price points, while the vast majority of the initial GoBots toy line were small carded toys - but ask your average 20-something why Transformers was better than GoBots and they'll say it was the shows. I really liked GoBots when I was a kid, I specifically remember Turbo being my favorite, but once Transformers started there was just no competition. Hasbro knew what they were doing when they asked Marvel Comics to work on the story behind the toys they pulled from all over Japan. While the GoBots show (judging from the, um, two episodes I just watched) is only marginally goofier than some of Transformers, the characters, even the characters' names, helped make a difference. Who sounds like a more impressive leader, Leader-1 or Optimus Prime? Cy-Kill or Megatron? Graham was going on the whole time about how they changed Herr Fiend's name to Dr. Go so he wouldn't be offensive or anything (what with being evil and German), but they still gave him a goofy German accent and a monocle and had him talk about experimenting on people and made him clearly a Nazi. But silly and late-Hanna-Barbara as it may be, I'm really glad to have some actual episodes of GoBots on tape, since they're clearly never getting any kind of modern release.
posted@10:29 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, October 04, 2004
More Politics (But Not Like Bobbi's LJ Or Anything)
I'm totally going to this on Thursday. Live Al Franken Show! Living in a swing state ROCKS.
posted@1:22 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, October 03, 2004
I = Pokegeek
Have I mentioned how awesome it is when you beat a Team Rocket grunt in a Pokemon battle and they just stand there and let you go about ransacking their headquarters? Damn, I love that.
I'm currently on the fence about what I want to do regarding the Nintendo DS and Christmas. Talking to my mother on AIM tonight, she showed plenty of willingness to get it for me for Christmas. (She also misread a teaser ad on the top of GameStop.com as saying that they were offering free shipping on Tom Hanks Underground 2.) But I'm not entirely certain I want to get it right away. The thing is, Nintendo has a habit of doing special edition Game Boys to go along with new Pokemon games, like the Fire Red and Leaf Green GBASPs you can get from the Pokemon Center. I would love to have one of these, but they seem, more often than not, to come out long after the system's initial release, so I have the blasted system already. And I am kinda attached to my pretty blue SP. Am I ready to upgrade already? But see, I asked myself that when the SP came out, if I really needed to replace my GBA so soon, and the closer it got to release, the more certain I was that the answer was clearly "yes". I thrive on these gadgets and their endless upgrades, and the wireless LAN connection is exactly what someone with so many net friends like me needs. I can walk up to Cup o' Joe and trade Pokemon with a friend in New Jersey? I'm there. I'll probably give in by the end of the month, but for now I'm still fighting it out.
(Quick political aside: Walking downstairs to do the laundry, I ran into the couple who live in the apartment below us retrieving their escape-artist kitten. Turns out they were both at the March for Women's Lives, too. Add that to the fact that one of our more recent additions to #wiigii! was also coincidentally there and that's a pretty big segment of the population for how little coverage the Oh So Liberal Media gave the event. Yep, that media sure is liberal.)
posted@9:07 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments