SAVED!

We're moving to Miami, Florida! Finally finally finally my wife's job gets us moved somewhere that I am really excited about. I haven't been this excited about anyplace since we lived in Tucson, Arizona. We're not leaving here until June and my wife is still far, far away saving the world from the aliens. She doesn't get back until May so the Prince of Macrocrania and I still have a bit more to go in the ice and the snow. But the move is big news and it's all I think about lately. And the more I think about it, the more I realize it means the end of the road for Please Save Me Robots, which is actually pretty cool.

CLOUD CITY IS ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL THEY CARBONITE YOU

Beginning in 2006 I found myself in an overwhelmingly boring period where I was living in Rapid City and occasionally working in support of the US Antarctic Program. Living near Mount Rushmore and hanging out with penguins might sound fun, but between South Dakota and Antractica all the snow and ice had me feeling like I was living in figurative carbonite. The reason I started bloggering was to talk about my life during this time, or actually to not talk about my life-to talk about anything else. Filling up the hours with poems and stories about Star Wars and toy robots really helped me get through. But as we get closer to the big move it feels like the carbonite is slowly melting.

AND I WENT TO SLEEP WITH A ROBOT ERECTION

I want to thank everyone who ever commented here and made me feel like I was being read by more than the ten friends that were actually tuning in, plus the occasional Megan Fox butt looker. My old ad collecting hobby isn't dying and the Vintage Space Toast Tour will continue. The only change is that between living in Miami and raising my son I won't have the time to write 900 word essays every week about some ad I found for 25 year old toy robot Volkswagens. So instead of seeing PSMR slowly wither away to only occasional postings with half baked content, I've decided to just end it altogether. If I ever do find the time and desire to write again I'll start another blog, probably more focused on the Vintage Space Toaster Palace but not updated anywhere near as often as I was able to manage here. Thanks a lot, guys. Like I said in the Paunch Stevenson Show-you really saved me.

Forget the Decepticon, what I want deciphered is why it took me 23 years to get these four glowing space toaster posters.

I was at the store yesterday when I saw the Blu-Ray for Dark City-one of my favorite movies of all time. I rank Dark City right up there with the greats like Laserblast, The Mothman Prophecies and the first Mortal Kombat. It is really that good. Well the store wanted 30 bucks for it and I don't care how good it is, I ain't paying that much for any movie not starring Tranzor-Z. I found it online cheaper so I spent the ten bucks I saved on a cod sandwich combo at Fuddruckers. It turns out Dark City has been out on Blu-Ray since the middle of last year and I never knew. Even if I did know it would probably have taken me this long to order it anyways because I'm such a gigantic procrastinator. When things I want are released I'm not usually the last guy to know, but I am usually the last guy to do anything about it.

THEY WERE THE ALL GLOWING, ALL TRANSFORMING GARBAGE OF THE UNIVERSE

I think my procrastinatory purchasing behavior is best described as passive-possessive, meaning I would like to possess certain things that in reality are simple enough to find, but I don't ever put much effort into acquiring them. Case in point is how last month I finally tracked down the last of four Transformer posters in a set that was originally released in 1986. If you were collecting around then you remember the "Decipher the Decepticon" sweepstakes where some boxed Transformers from '85 and '86 were released with glow-in-the dark posters. Well I finally got the last one I needed last month after 23 years of passive-possessiveness. And it sucks that it took me so long because significant chunks of glowy parts from some of my posters have faded away or disappeared entirely (much like my decaying brain cells). Now I understand what Chuck Palahniuk meant when he wrote "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone's glowy posters drops to zero." Like the Mona Lisa, my glowy Transformer posters are falling apart but instead of rejecting the decay as Tyler Durden would, I embrace it and find it charming. It's not very Tyler Durden of me to even be completing the set in the first place, but look where being an incompletist got him.

BEING 35 WITH THE HOBBY OF A TEN YEAR OLD IS HARDER THAN IT LOOKS

Between these posters and the 1985 reflective patch set last year I am feeling a great sense of robotarded accomplishment, tinged with a bit of stupid. I don't know what is dumber-that it took me 23 years to get these things done or that these were my life goals in the first place. If in 1997 Tyler Durden would have pulled me out of my convenience store, put a gun to my head and asked me what I wanted to do with my life, my answer would probably have something to do with glowy posters and reflective patches of toy robots. But instead of letting me go to accomplish those unfinished dreams, I think he probably would have shot me right there.

In my Zen contentedness I want for nothing (except multimillion dollar powerball jackpots) or: I NEVER KNEW I WAS BUYING SLURPEES FROM GALACTUS

The 35th annual IRONROBOHELLACON fell on Friday the 13th last week as it is sometimes known to do and we all had a great time here in the Kingdom. A couple days prior, the Queen of Macrocrania called from her current outpost in a galaxy far, far away to ask if any gifts or presents may make this year's convention extra special. I, feeling very enlightened in a way only Zen masters and Care Bears feel, said 'No, IRONROBOHELLACON is not about presents'. Then the rest of the conversation turned into me reciting a song by the Goo Goo Dolls about being content and complete, and since the Queen doesn't know who those guys are she wondered if I was singing Care Bears songs again. I honestly felt those feelings of contentedness, at least until I saw what the Powerball numbers were that week.



FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (OR AT LEAST TO THE LOAF'nJUG ON THE CORNER)

There was a comic book once about how all of existence joined together in the hope that it could destroy one single being of immense power, which is how I feel while driving with all these crazy people in downtown Rapid City. It was an issue of Secret Wars where Mephisto comes up with a plan to kill the Beyonder but it would only work if he assembled together all the magical beings of eternity and attacked in a certain place within a very specific timeframe. Mephisto is me planning to win the lotto by assembling the magical lottery numbers at the corner gas station before 8:00 pm. I don't have a problem with this metaphor making me the devil, but it is odd that the gas station clerk essentially becomes the living embodiment of all eternity. Plus she sells me hot dogs and gas. Once I dropped a Slurpee on the floor and the little ice balls spread out in a spiral like the Milky Way galaxy.

THERE IS NO GIFT AS GREAT AS LOVE BUT 35 MILLION DOLLARS WOULD HAVE BEEN PRETTY SWEET, TOO

This isn't going to be one of those "If I only had played my birthdate and age I would have won the lottery on my birthday" stories. Honestly, if I picked numbers based on my birthday and age in the way I usually do I would have only won 3 bucks last week. But there is a sort of cosmic synchronicity in the balls that did drop (3, 7, 13, 34, 47, 30) and I've been thinking about it ever since. The 3 and 13 correspond to March 13th and I was 34 last week. 47 is the last two digits of the year I was born, but backwards. I had never thought of playing that variant of 74 and since the form numbers don't go up to 74 I usually just play 7 and 4. 47 makes infinitely more sense. Now I know. DUH! The last number 30 would have been impossible for me to guess. There is some comfort in knowing even if I had played my usual 1,3,4,7,13,34 I would have only won three bucks. But then the second guessing and self doubting and what iffing come into play and I think things like-If I had only bought my regular numbers 300,000 times I would be a millionaire!

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU GOT, IT'S WHAT YOU...GET FOR IRONROBOHELLACON

That was the last lotto drawing before IRONROBOHELLACON 35 and when I went to the Powerball website I realized that my chance to kill the Beyonder that is my horrible, terrible future was past. Losing was a blessing of sorts because now I can stop fearing the horrible, terrible future and start living it. I understand that I will never again be that cosmically close to infinite wealth and ever since I accepted that, the true contentedness has begun settling in. And if I learned anything from all this, it's that true contentedness sucks. When my wife called again later on in the week I asked her if it was too late to get me anything. And she said "But I thought you were a Zen master who wanted for nothing! Plus it's too late to get anything shipped to you in time!" And I said, "I should have been more careful what I wanted for nothing for, because I got it. PLEASE TELL ME IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO ORDER ME A ROBOT TYRANNOSAURUS!"

Better codes and garbage OR: There is no apostrophe in Toys R Us

I was working on over a hundred new* ads for the Vintage Space Toaster Palace, writing the magical internet codes when I noticed that none of the countless 22 webpages that comprise it had closing HTML tags. This is like writing the bible and forgetting the periods at the end of every sentence. (Well maybe not the bible, more like Starrior fart jokes on toilet paper.) Thankfully web browsers understand robotarded morons like myself are writing HTML and they let people visit my page anyways, so aside from the horrific page design nobody knew how truly defective my code was. At least my shame was somewhat hidden. Nobody would ever know about the missing /html tags unless they looked at the source code but I still found it embarrassing. Which is funny because what should be embarrassing is that I'm 35 and my greatest accomplishment in life is a website about ads of 25 year old toy robots and spaceships. I took consolation in knowing that I may be an uneducated brown trash HTML moron but at least I'm not one of those semi-illiterates who pluralizes everything with an apostrophe.


If Megatrons were outlawed, only outlaws would have Megatrons

EVERYTHING I KNOW ISN'T WRONG, JUST DEPRECATED BY THE WORLD WIDE WEB CONSORTIUM

I decided that before I continue with putting up more ads I needed to address some other critical infrastructure issues at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace, the most important of which was the lack of pretty banners. Nothing says "this webpage guy knows HTLM" to me like lots of pretty, elongated rectangle-shaped pictures at the top of each page. (Except for maybe when websites do that thing where they center their content in the middle of the page. I find the CENTER tag the highmark of professional looking web design.) So I set out to realize the impossible dream of pretty banners and centered content at the VSTP. My basic banner idea was simple-take one ad from the GoBots and Micronauts and Transformers and everybody else and blow it up and put it at the top of their pages. I figured the whole project would take maybe a couple of hours on the weekend, tops. Then I ran into two problems: a) nobody uses the CENTER tag anymore because it's deprecated and b) I still can't figure out how to draw a straight line in Photoshop. So I was trying to figure out what to do and it ended up taking all my free time over 15 days.



MAKE HIS FONT ON THE HILL IN THE EARLY DAY

In a further stroke of genius I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if I put a 'Vintage Space Toaster Palace' logo on each banner in the same font as the toyline the banner is for?'" It seemed easy at first. All I had to do was rip off the fonts I knew internet people out there had already created. But then I ran into a problem because while fonts for Battlestar Galactica, Micronauts, Robotech and Transformers existed, for some strange reason nobody has dedicated their lives to making fonts for GoBots, the Star Bird, Wheeled Warriors and various unlicensed Robotron watches. Most surprising of all was the total absence of Voltron font. I guess it's understandable considering those less popular lines have only a cult following at best, but come on-VOLTRON? Why hasn't somebody made Voltron font? I see that Voltron logo and it's more rock and roll than the album covers of most every heavy metal band from the 80s. If your mom sees the Voltron logo in 1985 the first thing she thinks is 'WHO IS PILOTING THESE ROBOT LIONS? METALLICA?'



I'LL TAKE ROBOTS WITH GRIPPER ARMS AND SUCTION BASES IN THE DOLLAR BIN, ALEX

I really like how a couple of my banners came out, most notably those I did for GoDaiKin and Robo Force. Now there's no way in a million years I would have expected someone out there to do a Robo Force font, but I found the font from the TV show Jeopardy! to be pretty good match so I used that. I started exploiting a lot of similarities between fonts from different shows and toylines to make my banners. I noticed the font for Diakron just looked like the Battlestar Galactica font in italics and the Micronauts font was essentially Battlestar Galactica font wearing bell bottom pants.

IS THIS A COLLECTION OF OLD TOY ROBOTS ADS OR A VIRAL MARKETING SITE FOR A WHEELED WARRIORS vs STARRIORS MOVIE?

Learning about banners and fonting was a lot of fun. I feel like I'm in a special club of internet coding people who know what they're doing, even if what I'm doing is really only clear to myself and the resulting website is still rather confusing to the rest of the world. Hopefully the VSTP (whatever it is) now looks more attractive thanks to these banners and my inclusion of fancy new code like closing HTML tags. I hope the Googlebots that comprise the bulk of my traffic are impressed by all my newly amassed code mastery. Maybe one day I will move to that next level of Einsteinian internet code master wizardry-putting little boxes in bigger boxes. But I'll have to take it all a little at a time and there's no rush, really. Judging from my site statistics the VSTP lacks one other important thing that really well coded websites have-VISITOR'S.

*25 year old

An amusing toy robots collecting inspired witticism to share with friends, coworkers and everyone else who thinks you're a freakyweirdo monsterpsycho

Q: Why is a dog better than a toy robots collection?
A: Because a dog eventually dies!

So the guy says "Write anything you want in the block-your name, your wife's name, your girlfriend's name..whatever"And I said OKAY I KNOW WHAT TO PUT

There is a Blockbuster Video on Saint Patrick Street here in Rapid City and I was there the other day renting the 2007 cinematic masterpiece "Transmorphers". When I got to the checkout the guy told me that for a $2 donation to Muscular Distrophy I could get 2 free movie rentals, plus they would put a paper shamrock on the window for me. Honestly I could care less about muscular distrophy but I really wanted to rent Star Wars Episode 3 again. I can never get enough of that movie no matter what language I see it in.



I went back today and there were a buttload of shamrocks plastered all over the store windows but surprisingly very few of them had any names of customers who donated their 2 bucks. When the clerk hands the customers a shamrock the vast majority must hand it back blank and everybody is on auto pilot or something because they actually put those up. It is as if people who go to Blockbuster want to remain anonymous as evidenced by the large number of blank shamrocks on the windows. Apparently employees really don't care what you put and Blockbusters haven't noticed me going to all their different stores because here in Rapid City you will find shamrocks that come from the heart of "Evil King Macrocranios" and "Assless Darth Vader Costume".

PINK HEARTS, YELLOW MOONS, ORANGE STARS, GREEN CLOVERS BUT NO RED ENVELOPES

Once I saw a paper in the street from somebody with Netflix that said if you refer a friend you could get free rentals. I was thinking if I took a picture of all the shamrocks with names written on them from the Blockbuster windows I could do a massive amount of "friend" referrals to Netflix and then get massive free movies forever. Obviously these shamrock people do not have Netflix if they are going to Blockbuster so the probability of them actually joining and getting me free rentals is enormously high. Unfortunately I don't have that paper I found in the street anymore and this is all stupid anyways because I don't even have a Netflix account myself.

ACTUALLY I'MNOT SURE IF JOHN CUSACK WAS IN ANY STAR WARS MOVIE BUT THEY HAVEN'T MADE A FIGURE OF HIM YET SO THAT'S HOW I KNOW

My wife has Netflix but all she orders are John Cusak movies and he was never in Star Wars Episode 3 (I think). Sometimes I see Netflix commercials and it really pisses me off because I don't have it. Maybe I should get the phonebook and call the other shamrock people and start some sort of support group. I hope these guys don't ask who I am when I call because I don't like giving out that kind of personal information. But if they ask what I'm wearing I'll be more than willing to share.

I'm Not O.K., I'm ELEGANTLY WASTOR'D

This guy named Gerard who sings and writes songs in a band I like just happens to be a big comic book fan. Back in January he did a guest stint on an internet comic book review show and he recommended an obscure 1994 comic called "The Biologic Show". I was getting ready to order some Starriors comics because I had to do background research before I added a couple dozen new* ads to the Starriors section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace, so I figured okay, Gerard, I'll order an issue of "The Biologic Show" but it better be goood. (And then I thought, FUKC YEAH! I'm having imaginary conversations with rock stars who are giving me comic book recommendations and I'm not even smashed or anything!)

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR THOSE WASTOR'D YEARS

Children's Palace 10/28/84

Starriors and "The Biologic Show" were two comics I missed out on when they debuted because I was so consumed with my primary obsessions (The Transformers in the 80s and and Iron Maiden in the 90s) that I simply did not have any time, money or energy to spend on anything else. And as I cracked open each Starriors comic I was dreading not that they'd be terrible but that they'd be totally fantastic and my blind devotion to more commercially successful toy robots and European metal bands cost me the enjoyment of being in on these more obscure recreations when they first came out. I'm a total sheep for mainstream entertainment but I'm a wishy-washy one, so much so that at any given moment I am always wondering if I've missed out on something that would connect with me deeper than the adventures of Hasbro's 25 year old toy robot Volkswagens and their transforming dinosaur cohorts. Although I never paid any attention to them, Starriors had toys and commercials and comic books in 1984. What if Starriors was really great and because of millions of 10 year old Transfridiots like me it died through lack of support? Before I read the comics I wondered if I would regret that I hadn't Wastor-ed my childhood.

I CAN HANDLE ROBOTS IN LOVE BUT BLIND ROBOT POET TYRANNOSAURUSES IS PUSHING IT A LITTLE

Wal-Mart 11/27/84

I read one issue of Starriors each night just before I went to bed and just after working on the ads for the site so I was really Starrior'd this week. The comics had a lot of the basic elements I demand of great entertainment-a bleak post apocalyptic setting, conflicted machines going against their programming in a race to revive or destroy mankind, and giant talking robot Tyrannosauruses. In an interesting character quirk, the Starriors Tyrannosaurus was blind and he depended on his robot pterodactyl friend to tell him where to go. (Why is it that robot Tyrannosauruses in the 80s always had speech impediments or other handicaps?) This is actually an ingenious incorporation/characterization of the toy's relationship with its radio control remote. Deadeye the blind Tyrannosaurus robot was also quite eloquent and had a great vocabulary, and oftentimes was described as a poet. But Tomy misjudged the market here because what kids really wanted in the 80s was RETARDED robot tyrannosauruses. The newspaper ads for Deadeye are my favorite in the Starriors line and I can't believe a radio controlled, plastic disc shooting robot Tyrannosaurus retailed for only 20 bucks. I think Deadeye is the best figure in the whole Starriors line but unfortunately he goes down like a total bitch in the opening animation of his commercial. There's this other Starrior half his size that just pushes Deadeye right off the screen. Physically assaulting a blind robot cartoon Tyrannosaurus is very rude but I guess that's how they roll in Starrior World. After seeing that commercial I got the feeling that other Starriors probably don't respect handicapped Tyrannosaurus parking spaces.

Toys R Us 11/22/84	Lionel Playworld 12/06/84

"-OR" IS THE NEW "-TICON"

Shillito-Rikes 11/11/84

Deadeye's commercial highlights a lot of things I felt were confusing about the way the Starriors line was marketed. The biggest problem I have understanding any of Starrior world is that names of the individual robots are rarely ever used in the newspaper ads or TV commercials. Instead they call them by a different sort of designation each robot has depending on their size (I think). Starriors can be Wastors, Strazors, Vultors, Stalkors, Cosmittors or a lot of other things that end in "or". Then on top of that you have the good guy and bad guy designations, "Protectors" and "Destructors". So while Wastors and Strazors could be Protectors or Destructors there couldn't be a Wastor Protector that was also a Strazor, but Strazors could be Protectors. I think. Some newspaper ads would just forgo the Starrio-logical technobabble and just call them robots. Maybe I'm too old for all of this and when I was younger I could sort it all out, but right now Starrior designations seem like quantum mechanical string theory. But ask me to explain the relationship between a Megatron, Constructicon and Decepticon and I'm all over that.

Lionel Playworld 12/01/85	Revco 12/18/86

IN THE POST APOCALYPSE TWO OUT OF THREE IS ACTUALLY BETTER

After reading the whole four issue Starriors comic miniseries I slept soundly at night, knowing that if I couldn't understand these toys at 34 I probably wouldn't have as a ten year old, mostly because I am dumb. A lot of other kids probably figured that out, too because by 1985 the Starriors were hitting the clearance shelves. '85 saw Tomy abandon the Starrior concept in favor of the more traditionally Zoidy approach with their RoboStrux line of model dinosaurs (that could presumably see but not write poems). I think Starriors proved that sometimes complicated mythical backstories and angsty conflicted personalities could hurt the marketing of a toy robots line more than help them. Although Starriors didn't click with me, Tomy has done a lot of other robot stuff I liked. I kept that in mind when I ended up not liking The Biologic Show that Gerard recommended. After thinking about Starriors I figured that The Biologic Show's author might be the Tomy of alternative comics so I dug around a little and sure enough I found a different story by him that I absolutely loved and consider greatly entertaining. It is a bleak story in an apocalyptic setting about the destruction of mankind. It doesn't have giant talking robot Tyrannosauruses, but I think after all of this I'll just let that go.

*25 years old