Brushes with (relative) fame OR: Thanks for the (almost) memories

The other day I was at the mall and I'm sitting down and this old guy starts talking to me. I guess it was because I had the Prince of Macrocrania with me and for some reason old people really dig babies. I imagine when I'm old I won't want to be around babies because they would remind me of the time I wasted when I was a baby not doing productive things. Well it turns out this guy was the dad of some famous PGA golfer guy and he was expecting me to know who his son was. I think it's kind of unfair to get in a pissing contest over how accomplished your children are with someone like me who's only got a baby. I'm thinking, well it's fantastic your son is a golfer but mine still pees on me. I HAD NO STORIES OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS! I think if I want a boost of self esteem I will hang around kindergartens and tell five year olds about my vast collection of Turkish porn.

That would be my second near brush with celebrity. The first was when I was working at Target back in El Paso in '95 and I met the mom of a girl who was dating Robbin Crosby, the guy who used to play guitar in RATT. She saw I was working in the music section and she needed help with something so we got to talking. I told her I liked RATT and playing guitar badly and she said Robin was teaching lessons. Sure enough, in the El Paso Times classifieds I found an ad Robbin put offering to teach people guitar. I never pursued it and a couple years later Robbin died and I felt dumb for having missed the opportunity to at least meet the guy. I saw a billboard for a RATT concert that's coming up around here in South Dakota and I almost started feeling sad but then I thought, "Wait! You can't almost feel sad about someone you never really met, dummy!"

I forget-am I masturbating or am I in a Legend of Zelda boss battle with a Dodongo?

The other day I was at the base exchange here at Ellworth Space Station and I came across what I thought was a hot new porn magazine called "Military Spouse". What a great concept! Judging by the cover I thought it was naked pictures of lonely wives of deployed military guys. But then I opened it and it turns out it's about recipes and decorating your bathroom and crap. What a dissapointment. It got me thinking about the golden age of porn at army and air force bases back when I was active duty.

When I joined air FOrce in 1995 they sold all sorts of fantastic porn at the base exchanges. I was impressed with the wide scope of pornographies for sale. The post exchange at my first duty station Fort Hood had a magazine section easily twice as large as the biggest Waldenbooks and it was dominated by a 20 foot long Library of Congress of porn. Those were awesome times. Then I went overseas to Good Korea and I was dissapointed that Korean porn was so awful. They cover up the crotches with badly photoshopped neon bikinis or even worse, multicolored Tetris blocks. I think it's like that for all of Asia. While I percieve Tetris blocks on vaginas to be censorship, I think the Japanese government incorporates video game related images into porn to get Japanese guys interested in women.

Thankfully when I got sent to Good Korea in '98, the post exchange at the little army camp I was at still had a pornorama unlike anything you could find on the streets of Uijongbu. But then some pansies in the Department of Defense decided the military guys were wanking too much and it was getting in the way of our mission defending the earth from the aliens. What can I say they found me out. So they passed the Military Honor and Decency Act and halfway through my Korea tour they took all the good porn out of the exchanges while I was yelling NOOOOO! in slow motion like you see in the movies. It was back to the streets for me and I had to get used to Donkey Kong coming out of asian girls' butts.

Cell shaming

I ran across some Yahoo Japan auctions for four cels from the original Transformers cartoon. They're still going on and right now they have 2 days to go. They're breathtaking and I mean that in a Bob Ross kind of way. The painted background of the one Ravage cell is a beautiful depiction of Arctic ice. I hope the animators at Toei really enjoyed their work and weren't all burnt out on cartoons. Usually talented artists start out doing laborious and unglamorous work just to pay the bills and the worst part was that individual artists weren't credited at the end of the show. I wonder if the background painter was a guy named Takumi who had dreams of painting fantastic Arctic landscapes and debuting them at a prestigious art gallery, but until then he was doing cartoon paintings for toy robot commercials. I'd prefer to believe that Takumi enjoyed working in anime and that his background paintings in the Transformers cartoon were his calling. I hope he was afforded a little bit of fame in his lifetime for his work on the show but like I said, he went uncredited and nobody knew who he was as he walked the streets of Tokyo looking for a pachinko parlor to go unwind. I imagine Takumi may have resented being uncredited a bit and one night at the pachinko parlor he may have overheard two little boys talking about cartoons and one of them liked the Transformers and said Fire in the Sky was his favorite episode because of the beautiful ice paintings. But just as Takumi was about to walk over and appreciatively give the boy some signed arctic background cels he kept from the show because the studio threw them in the garbage after they were done filming them, the other little boy said Transformers sucked and it'll never be good as Gundam. After which, alone and dejected, Takumi walked back to his pachinko machine and committed seppuku by continually banging his head against the pachinko machine until the glss broke and then he slit his throat with one especially sharp shard that was reminiscent of the beautiful arctic icicles he painted for the cartoon that day.

***UPDATE!***

The auctions are over-here's what the 'winners' paid in both yen and real money:

Ravage in the snow - 153,000 yen / $1,296 America money
Optimus Prime and a tree - 46,000 yen / $389 America money
Starscream shooting - 66,000 yen / $559 America money
Megatron and Reflector - 90,000 yen / $762 America money

When I Kiss Play, I Kiss Play to win

I just ordered a Kiss Play Convoy, which is the Japanese version of Alternators Optimus Prime released last year as the premier figure in the Transformers Kiss Play line. Kiss Play is the Japanese only Transformers series where Takara packaged thier version of the Alternators molds along with small cartoony female figures. The figures in and of themselves weren't more risque than a lot of Japanese candy toys. Heck, compared to action figures you can buy at the mall of girls from video games, the Kiss Play figures were actually pretty mild. But where this line caused an uproar was in the packaging and associated fiction where the girls were depicted in a most hardcore Lolicon fashion. There was a bit of backlash from the vast majority of toy robot fans in America because of the overt sexualization of these characters and also because Takara discontinued the use of significant amounts of die cast in their versions of the Alternators. Consequently Takara began miscalculating demand and underproducing subsequent figures in the line, causing toy robots like Kiss Play Rodimus to be in high demand on the secondary market despite the vocal majority of collectors' condemnation of the line as tasteless and perverted. I was surprised to find a video game importer of all places selling Kiss Play Convoy and still at a somewhat reasonable $65. They rarely go up on eBay and just recently an opened one sold for $87. I see that there are four sealed Kiss Play Convoys on ebay right now with over five days to go and they've already been bid up to $35-$60 each. I expect they'll climb to somewhere in the $90-$100 range by auction end so I'm glad I jumped on the online retailer solicitation when I found it.

I am not collecting toy robots, I am operating a bizarrely complex catch and release program with toy robots

I really admire this "Will it Blend" guy because he at least has a plan for what he's going to do with all the crap he buys. This is unlike myself in my twenties, who just would buy stuff without any thought of where I'd put it or the damage I was doing to the space-time continuum. When the time came to finally put all my roboplasticos together in one room after a lifetime of collecting, the resulting super dense mass of die cast parts almost caved in on itself and created a black hole. I swear if I had bought one more robot I would have disappeared South Dakota.

What was I doing? Whatever it was I wasn't doing it effectively. I think moving around constantly over the last ten years contributed to my problem. I never had to worry about how much stuff I was accumulating because I never had it all in one place. I would just leave the bulk of my collection with my mom in Texas while I lived in different places buying more toy robots and sticking them in storage or taking them with me to the next place. Now that I finally have a place to put it all, I understand the enormity of my consumption and I'm trying to right the wrongs of the last decade of excessive roboplastico accumulation. I know one collector with over 5,000 toy robots. Not coincidentally, I also know a guy that lives in his bathroom because his house is full of 5,000 toy robots. I will avoid that fate!

I find myself really anxious and upset as I'm getting my collection sorted and organized for the first time in since forever. Why should getting it presentable like I always dreamed be giving me anxiety attacks? I have this suspicion that cleaning it up means I have to confront what I've done with my time and money over the past 20 years. For once I will be face to face with all I have bought. I am Luke Skywalker going into the tree cave on Dagobah. I sense there is evil in my laundry room and I must confront it.

Getting rid of stuff on ebay has at times been therapeutic. I used to cower in fear every time I stepped into the robot room but now I enter those hallowed halls a conqueror. I can feel their little plastic robot eyes trembling, wondering if they'll be next. It's given me a measure of control over my robots but on the other hand I find myself questioning why I ever bought them in the first place if all I was going to do years later was sell them off. Oh well, there's no sense in trying to guess why I have countless Combaticons, multiple Megatrons, plentiful Primes and too many Terrorcons. Selling the extras off really isn't going to kill me and I think I can cope with not being the king of all robot collections.

I am not above wanting to see Michael Bay direct a live action Yar's Revenge

Back in the 80s it was so hard for me to find geeky people to talk with about toy robots. Nothing has changed but thanks to podcasts I can hear other people as geeky as me talking to each other about toy robots. So it's kind of cool to know these people exist but it really doesn't do me much good because all this technology does is make me feel like a voyeur or even worse, a guy with nothing to contribute overhearing a conversation where cool people talk about interesting things. Podcasts may as well be porn the way they leave me feeling like a spectator, although it's easier to play along watching porn than playing along listening to a podcast (if you know what I mean). I guess the next evolution in nerd interface technology will be a virtual person who will come out of the computer and have geeky conversations with me, at which point I will no longer waste time and energy trying to seek out abstract concepts that have so far eluded me like "friendship" and "multiple willing sex partners".

In years past there'd be only a handful of podcasts a month that would discuss Transformers or other toy robots and I'd eat them up quick. Thanks to Michael Bay I am now drowning in podcasts to listen to featuring conversation about Transformers. Even though the movie's long gone I don't know if I'll ever catch up. Despite how I feel about the opinions expressed, each of the shows is a lot of fun. I wanted Michael Bay's Transformers to be like Spider-Man the Movie but instead I got Spider-Ham the Movie. Oh well. it doesn't mean everybody else thought it sucked. Here's what i've been listening to lately:

The guys at Comic Geek Speak did a great Transformers movie review episode including an interview with Tom Martinek the sequence supervisor for ILM that worked on Transformers. At the end of the show they break out their old TFs and play with them. That was pretty funny to listen to.

This Week In Geek did a slew of Transformers realted shows recently and they were all fun listens. They did a review of the game, a review of the movie and most interestingly an interview with Stan Bush. I do think they got a bit over excited about the game and gave it a way more positive review than any other place I've seen, but I agree with them that it's a fun time and their review works as a nice counterpoint to all the negativity from other gamers.

Finally, Destroy All Podcasts DX did a funny (if overly long) review of the movie in episode 16. They thought it sucked so I was on board from the first moment but unfortunately their review suffered from the same problem as the movie-it went on for waaay too long. They had a couple of good jokes in there but hot damn they droned on for so long, commenting on and dissecting every single scene of the movie. At first I thought they couldn't go wrong because goofing on Michael Bay is so easy but boy did they make it look hard.

If you're going to goof on Michael Bay, maybe YouTube is the best place to do it.

This makes me want to do a video called Crazysteve-Power Collector

I think Mister Rogers' real message was you're special if you have a buttload of toys

There seems to be a lot of Mister Rogers hate going around because a finance professor at Louisiana State doesn't like that Mr. Rogers would tell kids they're special. The professor believes Mister Rogers telling viewers that they were special ingrained a sense of entitlement into kids and they grew up thinking life deserves them favors. So in essence he believes Mister Rogers ruined a generation of American kids. What a moron!

I agree that watching Mister Rogers screwed me over but not for that reason. How could the critics miss the most obvious negative message being broadcast loud and clear from the neighborhood of make believe? How could they not see that Mister Rogers was teaching kids that the accumulation of material possessions, especially toys, was the only way to true happiness? The BEST PART OF THE SHOW was when that trolley came and took the viewers to the kingdom of King Friday the Thirteenth, who ruled the ultimate toy collection land. I grew up wanting to have the sweet bachelor pad Mister Rogers had with a toy train running through the living room and a basement full of puppets living in gigantic castle dioramas and scratch built trees and shit. Man, I think his setup was awesome. If he was still alive I'd want him teaching the toy customizing and diorama building classes at the next Botcon.