Pondering the imponderable mysteries like the anthropological worth of toy robot collections and should I renew my website hosting

When I was eleven years old in '85 I thought the Transformers from 1984 and 1985 would always be in the stores. Then in '86 as all the old guys disappeared from the shelves I realized this wasn't the case. I felt like I missed out forever and this feeling was a strong motivation for me to start hitting the garage sales and flea markets while other teenagers were busy hitting other stuff. I was a self-appointed teenage Noah of the roboplasticos, trying to save the toy robots from extinction so that I could one day repopulate the world with my collection of Dinobots.


I WAS NOAH WITH A HALF BUILT ARK AND THE INTERNET WAS A PERSONAL WATERCRAFT SALESMAN HOOKING EVERYBODY UP

Then in my early twenties the internet came along and I saw a lot of other guys were just as batshit crazy as me. At first there were websites with text lists of people's collections and later there would come colossal photo archives. How un-special I felt at discovering were lots of toy robot Noahs (even Japanese ones) and it turned out they all had bigger Arks than me. I felt humbled at having been so thoroughly bested in my goal of creating an Indiana Jones warehouse of toy robots, but also very relieved because it meant I didn't have to keep thinking my Gears was the last surviving example of that toy in all the world and I had failed humanity because he was all fucked up and missing an arm.

IT'LL BE LIKE STAR TREK IV EXCEPT THE ALIENS ARE SPACE TOASTERS

Thanks to the internet the impending roboplastic apocalypse that I was building an Ark full of toy robots for was averted. I was pretty sure we were covered if hostile reptilians from outer space came to destroy earth unless we could show them the entire Transformers product line from 1984 through 1990 still in the box (and with examples of Japanese packaging). So I turned my attention to a separate and somewhat scholarly, yet still incredibly robotarded pursuit-that of collecting old toy robots newspaper ads. I figured I could still carve out a niche. Even if I couldn't be the roboplastic Noah maybe I could be the guy selling flood insurance after the waters subsided. I SENSED THERE WOULD BE A MARKET.

TRANSFORMS FROM ROBOT ARCHAEOLOGIST TO TURD AT THE BOTTOM OF THE INTERNET (BUT NOT BACK)

But it just dawned on me last night that as technology advances it is almost guaranteed that all libraries will eventually digitize their microfilm archives and make them freely available on the internet. It's inevitable. All this running around I do to different cities in search of new* toy robots newspaper ads is another epic waste of time and effort on a scale of biblical proportions. One day we will all have access to centuries of digitized newspaper archives that will make my Vintage Toaster Space Palace look more like a not-so-vintage space toaster porta potty. Thanks to the internet I went from being the Noah of toy robots fandom to the flood insurance salesman of toy robots fandom to finally the porta potty janitor of toy robots fandom.

YOU GOTTA KEEP WIPING IN THE END

The internet needs to see this now!

I'm better off realizing all of this now instead of later. It's not going to stop me from doing the old ads thing and I'm not going to stop paying my webhosting bill anytime soon just because library websites will one day kill the only sense of self worth I derived from my pointless hobby. Ultimately everything in life is pointless but we still keep wiping our butts. This isn't one of those things we do because it makes us happy. I know one day my obsolete Vintage Toaster Palace Toaster Space website will be nothing more than a broken link to content that disappeared off some server a long time ago. But until that day, the world needs its toy robots ads porta potty emptied now and I don't see the roboplastic internet Noahs rushing to do this job. YOU'RE WELCOME, VOLTRON FANS!

*twenty five year old