How R2-D2 is an important part of this balanced breakfast

As I was researching various cable providers I noticed a lot of them refer to their products as satisfying their customers' "entertainment needs". I don't really think entertainment is a need-my body doesn't need entertainment to live-but I do feel I've grown up conditioned to expect music in the air and moving pictures on screens wherever I go.

The menu for 12/11/77

Maybe the cable companies should reword their pitches to replace "entertainment needs" with "entertainment expectations". Or maybe I'm just uncomfortable with how right they really are. Considering how freaked out I get by absolute silence maybe it should read "entertainment addictions".

TV IS MY DINNER

If there is an entertainment component to a healthy mind and body then is there an entertainment food pyramid? If we truly have entertainment needs then is there a certain way to ensure they are met just as there is a certain way to eat right? as Surgeon General Entretenimiento of the Kingdom of Macrocrania I think I've found just that parallel. At the bottom of the entertainment pyramid is pure entertainment. This is entertainment that comes from being entertained firsthand. Pure entertainment is experiencing a concert or seeing a movie or watching a play or reading books. Pure entertainment is the meat and potatoes of the entertainment pyramid. You need as much of it as possible. Then there is a secondary level of entertainment that comes from discussing that which entertained you with others who were also entertained. Conversation about entertainment with other people is like candy and snacks-you can't have too much of it or it gives you high blood pressure. (Some people are sort of weirdos with crazy ideas if you know what I mean.)

PODCASTS ARE JUNK FOOD IN A WELL BALANCED DIET OF ENTERTAINMENT NUTRITION AND I'M REALLY REALLY BLOATED

The last entertainment is the most bad for you as it lacks purity or interactivity-it's passively listening or reading other people talking about entertainment without participating yourself. They could be talking about entertainments I've never even experienced or care about. I call this non-interactive meta engagement. This is pretty much what I do as a podcast listener, message board lurker or reader of any sort of review and it's dangerous because I feel like I'm being entertained but the entertainment is several degrees removed. It's empty entertainment calories. There are even risks like those associated with bad eating habits. Too much exposure to other people's entertainment opinions exposes me to the danger of being ruined by spoilers or bad reviews that could affect my attitude about a movie or show before I experience it. The problem is I'm addicted to this behavior even though it's bad for me. I now know so much about certain movies and comics I've never seen that I have no willingness to see them. It's like not eating salted fermented squid butts because I overheard somebody talking about what they taste like, and just because that guy hated them I'm losing out on the nutritional entertainment value of salted fermented squid butts. I think you can tell where I'm going here. GI Joe movie = salted fermented squid butts

FEED ME, OBI WAN KENOBI. YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE

09/24/09

The other night for my wife's birthday we went to go see the Disney Princesses on ice show and holy hell was that like being force fed fried chupacabra nards. But I was smart and I smuggled in a copy of the weekly entertainment tabloid newspaper to read and I found something to chew on. I may be deficient in vitamin R2-D2 but there's going to be a stop in Miami on the Star Wars in Concert tour. I didn't think they were coming here because it wasn't on the list at their website so I got excited. Attending this will be like a four course Thanksgiving feast served by C-3PO himself. Star Wars concert-it won't just be good, it'll be good FOR me.

Finding beauty in the simple things like floating trash bags in the sky is either Zen enlightenment or an early sign of Alzheimers

I've been sculpting multiple versions of those triangle shaped ships from the Transformers cartoon and working with this shape so much has me falling in love with it. I've been messing up a lot but every time I start a new one I find myself appreciating the simplicity of the basic concave triangle with one flattened edge I start out with. One time I just stopped working the clay any further once I had the basic shape because I thought it was pretty. I'm not smart about art but I do know that my favorite piece of sculpture ever is "Bird in Space" by that Romanian guy Constantin Brancusi. For "Bird in Space" Brancusi captured the very essence of flight itself in one sleek elegant shape. The raw tetrajet shape I'm working on strongly resembles Brancusi's bird, maybe if it died and splatted on the ground and broke its neck at a 90 degree angle to the rest of its body.

I know it's presumptuous of me to compare what I'm doing to one of the greatest artists of all time. My homemade clay spaceship based on a throwaway design from a toy robot cartoon isn't anywhere in the same league as real art. I'm not even sure it's art at all. I remember I had a friend once who told me that all the little things I sculpt in clay and make from plastic were not art. I held his opinion in some regard as he was studying to be a Zen master. He read the Zen books and went to the Zen websites and did other Zen master stuff you do if you want to be enlightened. He even sent me Zen e-cards. I never knew the meaning of humility until someone practicing to be a Zen master told me my clay robots sucked.

In a recent How To Be Happy strip, one fly tells the other fly that "Happiness stems from process and achievement". I could understand the achievement part, but I didn't quite understand why he included "process" too. Until now, the work required to get something done was always a drag to me. When I'm working these resin casting projects my mind is always thinking about how great it will be once I'm done. I love that sense of accomplishment upon finishing, but with this tetrajet sculpt I find myself enjoying each little part of the process right from the beginning. I'm appreciating every little bit of progress along the way and not being so focused on finishing that I overlook the fun that I'm having right now in whatever rudimentary step I'm on. Finally after 34 years I understand what "It's no more fun when the work's all done" means. I don't know if I feel dumber because it took me so long to achieve this understanding or because I achieved this understanding from reading webcomics about talking flies.

I feel like I've achieved a level of enlightenment comparable to Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty. I always thought that movie was sort of dumb the way the characters were finding beauty in floating trash bags caught in the wind, but now that I've been staring at clay for hours on end I think I understand (what it must feel like to be high on marijuana all day). Occasionally I read obituaries of people and their survivors are always bragging how the dead guy "could see the beauty" in even the most mundane aspects of life, similar to the floating trash bags from that movie. Well now that I have beautyvision I guess yay I have something else in common with crazy old people that are close to death.

The references of good importance OR: For those with Roboplasti-Bergers Syndrome, 208 pages of alien robot Volkswagen drawings is never enough

Back in late 2002 I picked up a hobby called resin casting where I learned how to make little robots and spaceships out of plastic. Making homemade robots from plastic isn't just fannish behavior, it's full blown roboplasti-bergers syndrome diagnosis. It was pretty cool because not only could I bring to life anything I imagined, but I wasn't limited by the fun crushing restraints a real toy company would have like worrying about what would sell or adhering to child safety laws. Over the next four years I made a lot of Transformers related figures that I shared with friends and strangers and I had fun with it. Resin casting required an enormous amount of time and dedication, though, so when my son was born last year I decided I'd retire from that hobby. I thought my roboplasti-bergers had gone into remission. But damnit, I'm having flareups again because lately I've been wanting to get back into making those wacky robot figures and spaceships I used to do.

The very first things I tried to make from plastic were replicas of the triangle shaped spaceships that Skywarp and Thundercracker turned into during the first episode of Transformers. In Transformer fan circles they call those things "tetrajets". These were somewhat obscure, only appearing in two episodes throughout the series and even then only for a couple of short scenes. At first I thought it would be easy but I discovered that the toughest part of making a model based on a cartoon spaceship that only existed onscreen for a few seconds is finding good visual references.

Back then I had no access to the official model sheets that the animators used as definitive reference for what these things looked like. I watched those brief moments the tetrajets appeared in about a tryptzillion times and I used a Transformers trading card I had as references for my sculpt. I did the best I could and I thought I captured the look of the ships well enough. I was satisfied with what I'd come up with and I went on to make a buttload of those things. Heck, if you do a google image search for "Tetrajet" you'll find one of the orange ones I did. Those orange ones were the very first resin castings I gave away during the 2003 Transformer convention/roboplasti-bergers party.

In January 2003 I was able to establish correspondence with fellow roboplasti-bergers sufferer Floro Dery, the design supervisor for the 80's Transformers cartoon. Floro was responsible for much of the visual look of the Transformers cartoon. I was pretty excited about the tetrajets I made and I emailed him some pictures of them, to which he responded-

"Hello Steve! Your sculptures are good, but it needs to be bit more stylized and stretched to make it more dynamic."

I was very excited to get feedback from the guy. However, the "stylized and stretched" comment confused me a little, especially since I thought I nailed it. I would have loved if Mr. Dery could have supplied me with the actual character models for the tetrajets, but he wrote that although he did have many versions of the design, he couldn't find them at the time. I was a little confused, like if I wrote a wacky outer space movie script and George Lucas critiqued it by telling me, "Well I'm just the guy who came up with this stuff, but I think you need more incestuous kissings between your characters," and I'd be thinking, "Okay, but someone please explain to me WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?"

Then last year IDW publishing published The Ark, a book with tons of original Transformers animation models including the tetrajet reference designs I wished I had back in '02. Finally I had the definitive vision, the clearest possible rendering of what these things were supposed to look like. The Ark is the ultimate reference, like a Chilton's manual for cartoon robot spaceships. For once I totally understood what Floro Dery was trying to tell me and I saw how off I was with my original sculpt. It was as if a giant spaceship of shape changing alien robots crashed into the volcano of my mind.

It always bothered me that I never got that tetrajet sculpt right. This year would be the fifth anniversary of when I started making and giving away little plastic spaceships at robot conventions. Plus I finally have the definitive reference materials I always wanted thanks to The Ark book. More importantly, the baby sleeps for 12 hours solid each night and I have enough time to myself to work on a project. If I could manage it right I think I have just enough time to do a small run of new improved 5th anniversary CrazySteveFigure tetrajets. I can't believe I'm excited about the remanifestation of the nerdiest side effects of my roboplasti-bergers syndrome. It's like herpes people being happy about the return of their cold sores.