GOOD BYE PS3 CONCLUSION: Welcome home old...stranger?

Well I got the Playstation Sony sent me yesterday and just as I feared it was not my original one but a new (to me) and most likely refurbished 60 gig launch SKU console. I was happy to get all the same features like the extra USB ports and multiple card slots and my son's DVD back. I'll be checking the backwards compatibility tomorrow but it looks like they did just as they said so there were no surprises, just disappointment that they couldn't (or didn't even try to) save my old machine and all the data on my hard drive. But it is holiday season and I would really like to play The Force Unleashed and the Revenge of the Fallen games so having a rePlacedStation is better than no 'station at all.

THE LONG AND WAITING LOAD

So then resumed the long and arduous process of getting everything back to how I had it on my old machine, from retyping all my favorite internet bookmarks to redownloading all the games I had and most importantly-reloading the Peter Porker wallpaper. Starting all over from ground zero took a lot of time. This machine was outfitted with Firmware 3.0 so I had to start by reactivating my account and downloading firmware 3.1. Firmware always takes a while so that wasn't fun. Then the nightmare of reloading all my stuff and realizing I didn't have copies of game save data made for a bad day. I think I did copy a game save for the first Transformer movie game but if I don't find it I'm back to square one with nothing unlocked on any of my games. No way am I going to replay all the hundreds of hours it took to get as far as I did in those games. Boy does that suck. I feel like a douche for complaining about stuff like this when there are probably people out there that just found out today they have cancer, but those cancer dudes at least have the slightest infinitesimally small chance they can beat it whereas I am not so sure I can beat Megatron again in the last level of Transformers:The Game.

THE DRAMA ON FOLDING

And speaking of cancer, boy do I feel dumb for ever contributing computing time on my PS3 to that Folding@Home project. I know the idea was that Playstations could harness massive amounts of computational power to help Stanford cure cancer but as it turns out I was only killing my Playstation leaving it on like that. Maybe if Sony could guarantee their products won't self destruct after two years I would feel comfortable leaving a Playstation 3 on for more than 30 minutes at a time now. As it is I feel like an idiot for wasting away my $600 machine thinking an already super rich college couldn't afford their own calculators.

WE ALL MUST FRY SOMETIME

As soon as I turned on the new (to me) PS3 that fan kicked in and started roaring. I am not surprised. Other gamers have said their PS3s are whisper quiet but every console I've had roared like a lion. It doesn't matter. I will do things differently from here on out now knowing this Playstation will eventually self destruct like the first one. I won't stand it up on its side so the chips won't slide off the motherboard like lava down the side of a volcano when their solder melts from the heat. I will save every game data file from here on out and no way will I ever do any folding again. Folding is like duct taping a lit stick of dynamite to your PS3 and using the lit fuse to light cigarettes for cancer doctors on their smoke breaks. BUT NO MORE! If my next PS3 is going to die, it's going to die benefiting me and my terminal medical conditions-chronic robotardation and addiction to topless Disney actresses pictures. EXCUSE ME I THINK IT IS TIME TO UNLEASH THE FORCE NOW IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

GOODBYE PS3 part 2: I guess I'll know if they checked my hard drive if Stone Philips is the UPS guy

Four days ago I got an email from Sony that started like this:

"Dear PlayStation® Owner,
On 12/02/09 we shipped a PLAYSTATION 3 - CECHA01 and if applicable, peripheral(s) and/or accessories, to you."

I'm glad they didn't decide I hacked my unit or did anything else on my end to void the already expired warranty. I'm a little uncomfortable with their wording. Telling me they shipped "a" Playstation to me instead of definitively saying it was my repaired Playstation being returned has me worried. I guess there's enough wiggle room to interpret it either way. I would love to just have my old system and data back but from how fast it took them to do the turnaround I doubt it's the same one. I sent it to them November 25th, exactly a week and a half ago. A week after I dropped it off at the UPS store they sent me something back? Factor in the delivery time and that's only one or two days to fix a system. I think they just opened mine up, said screw it and sent me a refurbished one.

THEY GET NEW BRAINS SCREWED IN THEM AND ACT CONTRARILY TO WHAT THEY'VE BEEN

I'll find out what they did soon. Tonight I got a call from UPS telling me I have a delivery coming tomorrow. Once it gets here a quick check of the serial numbers will tell me if this is my old friend back from the dead or a new old friend of someone else's recently reanimated. I'm pretty sure my hard drive is gone and with it all my torrented Shin Mazinger Z cartoons and my secret wife-proof hidden folder of topless Disney actresses pictures. Damnit, I hope those chicks were legal when they took those. On the bright side, the Sony rep I called when this whole fiasco began said my son's DVD that was stuck in it would be removed and sent back to me. I can't wait to get back to watching that cartoon about the kid and his friend the duck named Pato a tryptzillion times everyday. OH WAIT YES I CAN.

REVERSE VACATION: When the movers take your stuff its like your life is taking a vacation from you

The movers have been packing up and taking away my kingdom over the last few days, transforming what was once a vintage space toaster palace into nothing more than an empty room with a bunch of holes in the wall where my shelves used to be. I will miss my shelves and the roboplasticos that used to fill them. But when I think back on my time in Rapid City, my favorite memories are not of the toy robots I bought on ebay or at KMart while I was here, what I will really remember and what makes this move hard is leaving this house where my son took his first steps and laughed for the first time and all the other countless things that make this the place he spent his first two years. I guess I should be used to it since over the last 14 years I've never stayed in the same place for more than three years. Still it is never easy leaving. Moving so much has taught me how to say goodbye but I still haven't learned how to let go. Either the roboplastic apocalypse is upon me or maybe this is just how everybody feels before they move to Florida.

DID BABY DARTH VADER THINK EVERYTHING WAS "MOST IMPRESSIVE"?

My son took one last look at all the robots in the laundry room the other night before the movers came. I know he doesn't have the faintest clue what they are but he still said wow. When the movers came they too said wow (although like the baby I don't think they had the faintest clue what all those toy robots were either). One of the movers asked me what was my most expensive piece-what was the most money I could get on eBay for my most valuable toy robot. I guess this is the gauge by which people measure the worth of something when just being impressed is not enough. We talked about it a bit but all I could think about was if this guy really knew anything about Transformers this collection would not be all that impressive. Still, judging by my toddler son's reaction and that of the furniture movers I think there may be an untapped blog audience of babies and sofa lifters who like robots that I haven't yet exploited. The problem is I wouldn't know how to write stuff catering to this niche market because I've never moved furniture for a living and it's been a long time since I was two.

THE ROAD TO MIAMI IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS (AND PROBABLY MY COLLECTION IF THAT TRUCK EXPLODES)

This is the point where I was sure I would stop blogging for the rest of eternity as I left South Dakota for a life of adventure and excitement like Luke Skywalker leaving for Alderaan (except he took some of his robots with him). This is the point where, stripped of the toy robots that were the source of my blog powers, I was sure there would be nothing to write about and no motivation to continue. But as it turns out the ideas keep coming. Or what I really mean is I keep buying crap on ebay that I want to write about even though I won't have a mailbox anymore soon. So I still have much to write about and there's still a lot of robostastic acropolypses to go around. I'll just be taking an internet break for a few months as we drive down there and get settled and find a nice safe place to live amongst the robot collecting alligators and hurricanes and drug dealers from Cuba. But no matter where I go the writing urge will still be with me and one day I'll have more ideas for you, and you'll have things you'll want to talk about. I will, too. And so I leave you now with something that occurred to me as I was looking at the empty room that once was my very own vintage space toaster palace. My fellow Macrocranians, it doesn't matter how much robots you have or what they're worth in the eyes of babies and guys who move refrigerators, if you like the toy robots you will always be a weirdo.

Goodbye, land of ads and snow

After three years of living here I'll be leaving Rapid City, South Dakota soon. It may not have been toy robot convention central but Rapid City had it where it counted-the library was awesome for old toy robots ad looking. Every city has its own unique strengths when it comes to their library's microfilm archive of old newspapers, and Rapid City had the most beautiful quality microfilm transfers of anywhere I've ever seen. The only downside was that it had the clunkiest, most broken down microfilm readers I've ever used. During the time I was here the zoom lenses on both machines completely broke and they were both stuck on mega zoom and one machine's display slowly degraded to the point that half of the screen was permanently blurry (I called that one R5-D4). I understand how Luke Skywalker felt in that scene where R2-D2 wouldn't play back the Princess Leia message. It's hard being the internet jedi super hero of old toy robots newspaper ads when you have to work with shitty droids.

MICROMASTER MICRO BASE ADS FROM THE MOST INCREDIBLE PLACES

(a better) K-Mart 11/26/89

I've noticed that there are people who never truly take advantage of living where they live. I know natives of Rapid that have never been to Mount Rushmore. Even worse, I know people living here who have never searched through the library microfilm archives for toy robots newspaper ads from 1987 through 1990. I didn't want to be one of those so recently I went back to the library for one last Rapid City gig on the Vintage Space Toast Tour. Another great thing about this place is Rapid City has Target, K-Mart and ShopKo ads going further back than anywhere else I've ever been. I was able to reshoot better pictures of Target and K-Mart ads I'd already found in other cities in nicer Rapid City quality. While Target and K-Mart were strong with Transformers ads from '84 to '87, from '88 to '90 their circulars usually just ran a single combo ad for a line-wide Transformers clearance. On the other hand, ShopKo didn't jump on the Transformers bandwagon until late in the 80s and they kept advertising individual assortments all the way until the end of the road in '90. So while Transformer ads did get increasingly rarer towards the end of the line, at least ShopKo was hanging in there and thanks to them I was able to add one new ad to the Transformers 1990 section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. I was so glad I got that one because there's never any guarantee that 1990 will have anything and I spend so much precious time looking that coming away empty handed would have been nothing short of a roboplastic apocalypse. I would have beaten R5-D4's ass.

ShopKo 12/18/88	ShopKo 11/04/89	ShopKo 12/05/90

REALLY RAPID RAPID REELING

I only spent six hours at the Rapid City library but I ended up finding a total of about two dozen new* ads for the Transformers 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990 sections of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. A couple of those were for assortments that I've never found before like the Monster Pretenders from '89. I'm happy with what I came away with because I usually do not have time to search through the later years of the 80s during my short vacations to other cities. Speaking of which, I feel like it was good practice for the upcoming Vintage Space Toast Tour Pasadena where I'll probably spend six hours each in 1984 and 1985 and not get to visit the eras after 1986. I know I will leave Pasadena wishing I had a little more time because like South Dakotans who have never seen Mount Rushmore, Pasadenans disappoint me by not internetting their library microfilm archives of old toy robots newspaper ads. What could there possibly be to do in California that's funner than microfilm looking?!

IT WAS WOOLWORTH IT

Woolworth 11/26/89

It was kind of sad sitting down for the last time at the library here but it also reminded me of how much fun I had here. Although I started doing this ad collecting seriously in Tucson, Arizona almost ten years ago, it was here in Rapid City, South Dakota that the VSTP was born and really grew. When we first moved here I thought I wouldn't find much by way of old ads because there was no Toys R Us, Children's Palace or Lionel Playworld here in the 80s, but Rapid City ended up being one of the best sources of material because of what it did have. It had small retail chain stores and independent mom and pop retailers that ran some of the most memorable toy robots ads I've ever seen. In a short three years Rapid City and I robotted enough to last a lifetime. Now like Luke Skywalker leaving Tattoinee I leave Rapid for Miami where there will be warmer weather and hopefully more agreeable microfilm droids. DEATH STAR DO NOT BLOW UP MY LIBRARIES BEFORE I GET THERE!

So much for Stormbringer .2

I went to the comic store yesterday and I was pissed. They had four copies left of Stormbringer #2, but all that was left was the black and white Thunderwing cover. These last few months IDW had been pimping the Optimus Prime battle scene cover and I was all excited about getting that one. I guess it sold out before I got to my shop. This is why I hate alternate covers-more often than not if I don't arrive the day that the comics get to the store the cover I want will be gone and all I'm left with are the craptacular ones nobody else liked. Is it so unreasonable to expect that I should be able to walk into my comic store the same week a comic comes out and get the cover that's been advertised in all the promotional materials? So instead of getting the shitty unfinished, half assed Thunderwing cover I didn't like I'm just going to skip buying Stormbringer #2 altogether.

I want to say a couple things about this trend of using the uncolored inks as alternate covers. Instead of calling these 'sketch covers' let's just call them what they really are-half assed attempts by IDW to save a few bucks by not completing the printing process. What you're getting with the retailer incentive to Stormbringer #1 and the Thunderwing variant of #2 is not an artist's sketch, it's uncolored, unfinished art. Art that was taken all the way up to the inking and then left undone. How is this anything less than laziness on the part of IDW? How is unfinished comic cover art supposed to be desireable? What's next? Color it yourself comics shipped with magic markers?

I hope Stormbringer is successful and they sell out of issue #2 but they'll be doing it without me. Stupid crap like this alternate cover BS makes it so easy to support digital comics piracy. At least with torrents I can guarentee I'll get the cover I want.