It's not you, Botcon, it's me. OR: It's just that while I love Peter Cullen, I'm not IN love with Peter Cullen.

I'm sorry Botcon, but we need to talk. After seeing the hundreds of guys in line waiting to be with you yesterday, I realized that I needed my space (preferably on the other side of the country from where you're being held). You've always been like a brother to me-a brother that invites me to his house hundreds of miles away and then charges me rent and makes me eat out every night and buy him strippers for four days. We used to have so much fun together but lately I feel like we're not compatible anymore. You like me to give you thousands of dollars and I like to eat food and not live with my mom. So Botcon, I'm sorry but the reason I'm not there right now is that I just remembered I'm married and I have a kid. Plus honestly I've been going to other conventions over the last few years that you didn't know about. I would still like to be friends, mostly because if I ever get divorced you're an easy way to score on slutty girls who like toy robots. I really wish you the best, and by the best I mean I hope your roof caves in and destroys everything in the dealer room so that my collection of not broken Dinobots will be that much more awesome.

I MUST BE STRONG! OR: Down and greedy in Rapid City

Pepsi Prime-the reason I've poisoned my body with Mountain Dew-is being sold exclusively at Botcon as we speak. It's also supposed to be up at Hasbrotoyshop.com in limited quantities, but there's no listing as of yet. This really kind of pisses me off but I think I'm going to still try winning one instead. There's just something magical about being a contest winner and getting something in the mail. I don't care what temptations those Hasbro bastardos use, I'm still not buying a plane ticket to Rhode Island this weekend just to get Pepsi Prime at Botcon.

Speaking of winning, I won the Comedy4cast Podcast Transformer DVD drawing. So now I'll be getting a copy of the Sony 2 disc set of the animated movie from '86 on DVD. I bought one when they came out last year but I took it to Antarctica with me and lent it to a friend who never gave it back. He's still down there now and he paid me for it so everything's cool, but it's nice how everything worked out in a way. What kind of sucks is that the Comedy4cast guys also had a press kit for the upcoming Michael Bay Transformers Movie and I didn't win that. That also kind of pisses me off because those press kits are pretty awesome.

I guess I seem really greedy because I'm complaining about missing out on a convention this weekend and not winning contests. There are people in Iraq whose idea of a good weekend would be just living long enough to see Monday. I am a terrible person with nothing to complain about. Still, I feel a MyDeathSpace.com marathon coming!

pacifiers

My son is two months old now and occasionally when he's crying nothing consoles him like a nice rubbery pacifier. It makes no sense to me because otherwise he's fine but at those times he'll cry unless he's got his pacifier. I realize that this pacifier is his equivalent of my toy robot hobby. It keeps me happy when the horrible reality of life and the pointlessness of existence gets to me. But then what happens when his pacifier becomes the source of his upsettedness, as drowning in toy robots has become for me? I figured I should intervene before my son's hobby becomes a source of depression like mine has. I will do what has helped me lately with my extra toy robots and I will take his pacifier and put it up on ebay.

I'm still feeling a little down about missing out on Botcon although it's the most sane thing to do from a financial and mental perspective. I wonder if there is a baby equivalent of Botcon where a bunch of babies get together and suck pacifiers together. I wonder if at Babycon the babies would buy and trade pacifiers and write stories about them and invite people from the pacifier companies to speak about what new pacifiers are coming out next year. I wonder if a Japanese baby sold rare Japanese pacifiers at Babycon, would he make a lot of money? But of course babies do not partake in these pacifier related distractions, which makes them infinitely more mature and sane than I am.

I guess that's why I miss being at the shared participatory fan experience that is Botcon. We all sucked our pacifiers together. This weekend I'll be missing the feeling of validation I got from hanging around people who were just as crazy into toy robots as me. People who knew what I was talking about when I said I'm looking for a "Big Daddy". Even though I knew it wasn't normal to be buying toy robots well into my thirties, at Botcon I felt better being around people older than me with gigantic collections. Compared to them, I was nothing in terms of fandom or fanaticism. I guess I liked being both understood and at the same time being a small fish in a big pond. There's some whales there at Botcon.

Years ago I used to feel real bad when I missed out on concerts because I had to be working that night or some other schedule conflict prevented me from going. When the time came around that the concert was happening and I was stuck at work I really obsessed about what may be happening and it got me down. But concerts were only three hours long and I was able to recover from concert depression by the next day. Hell, Botcon is five days! I'm feeling every minute of it, but being with my son helps a lot. He's just a baby and there's really nothing going on in his head, but whenever he looks at me and smiles I feel like he's telling me everything's going to be alright. He has become my refuge from the storm of toy robot induced insanity. It's the greatest feeling ever just being around him. Unfortunately when his mom comes home she wants to be all holding him too and I have to give my pacifier up for a little while.

I sure do miss being at Botcon, but not as much as I like having money and a big TV

Welcome to a special "Holy crap I'm not at Botcon" edition of PSMR. Going to the big Transformers convention every year had become the norm for me but everytime I'd go all I thought about was how much money I'm blowing and it detracted from the fun. I neevr thought I'd get tired of seeing Simon Furman or Peter Cullen, but I did. Socializing with the other fans became my last real reason to keep going, but seeing how I pretty much regret every interaction I have ever had with other robot fans I decided to pass this year. It's nothing they did. It's just that I feel like I made a dork out of myself pretty much everytime I ever talked to anyone at Botcon. Plus I spent so much money just getting to and staying at the convention that I never bought anything good while I was there. So I will sit this one out in solitude and spend the weekend creating scholarships at local colleges with the money I would have spent on Botcon registration, plane tickets, hotel accommodations, food, parking and hookers recreation.

Speaking of hookers, I bought the movie game for PS3 yesterday and it looks like there are a total of five unlockable G1 characters. What you do is enter the codes supplied by Target when you get to this screen. Then you choose the G1 characters menu and five blank slots with question marks will pop up. The question marks fill in with what you've unlocked after you enter the code two screens earlier. The Target codes only unlock three of the five-G1 Jazz, Robovision Prime and G1 Starscream. I've only used the Jazz so far in the game and it's just a skin they apply over the movie car model. I don't know where or if the G1 Prime model is in here but I suspect that the last two unlock slots are probably G1 Megatron and Optimus. Here's hoping.

A second Jazz picture
A third Jazz picture

Overall I'm having fun with the game. From what I've read on the professional game sites I am not supposed to like it but luckily I'm not experienced enough or hardcore enough or smart enough to know if a game sucks. I don't really give a crap as long as there's nice explosions and lots of robots. In fact this game is better than a lot of games I consider good. One of the gripes I have with Need For Speed or other more serious vehicle simulators is that you can't run over pedestrians. That oversight is corrected here. Running over people and trees in a bright yellow '76 Camaro is awesome, plus if you hit certain geographic features right you can do some sweet jumps. It's brown trash heaven. This game may not as cool as seeing Stan Bush perform "The Touch" live at Botcon, but it's still pretty cool.

Archevillian Economics OR right now is a bad time to be buying blue robot dragons on eBay

iT'S A CONCEPT that goes back to caveman days-buy all of one thing so that you can artificially inflate the price of it on eBay, but up until this point I haven't actually seen it in practice. That was until I looked up how many Cryoteks eBay seller Playidia has up at their store. Cryotek is a blue dragon Transformer that was a Target exclusive sold at retail for about two months at the beginning of 2002 for $20. If you want a Cryotek now, you have to get it from Playidia if noobody else is auctioning one off and they're charging at least $119 for a loose one that's missing parts. And guess who is a winner of nearly every Cryotek auction not put up by Playidia? Playidia. Holy crap these Playidia guys are trying to drive up the market value of this toy by buying them all. What an evil little scheme they have going there. The only conclusion I can make is that Playidia is Doctor Archeville's eBay user name.

Playidia Cryotek market manipulation aside, I was wondering if there was any correlation between the secondary market value of an item and how many of said item exist. If I wanted to estimate, say, how many unopened Bumblejumpers still exist after all this time, could I infer a number using advanced mathematics based on the current market value of sealed Bumblejumpers? I do know that as of 1997 there were only around six known samples in existence. I saw one go at Botcon last year for $300. I wish I could come up with a formula so I can put some crazy flavor text in my upcoming ebay auctions like 2 SONIC ATTACK JETS MISB OMG VHTF ONLY 2 IN EXSiSTENCE! BIN $10,000! The problem with eBay is that a winning auction price only tells me how much the majority of people DIDN'T want to pay. So calculating the number of anything that exists based on how much one crazy guy wanted to pay on eBay would take math so complicated that even Doctor Archeville couldn't figure it out.

Talk about flame wars!

It looks like the Transformers Gay Podcasting Wars have begun. Up to this point there's been only one weekly Transformers podcast, TFWire, which I thought was already pretty gay because it's two guys giggling about toy tobots. But one disgruntled fan of TFWire podcast has gone off and started his own show called "Gay Transformers" because he felt his opinions and input were being suppressed because he was gay. So he launched his own show which will discuss Transformers news from a gay perspective. I really appreciate any toy robot talk I can find regardless of the sexual orientation of the podcaster involved. I just wish Ironhide1975 from Gay Transformers Podcast would lay off the personal attacks against the TFWire crew. As a listener I think all this drama is pretty goofy coming from grown men in their twenties and thirties who play with toy robots. It's already pretty embarrassing to be an adult Transformers fan whether you're gay or not.

i think I know who's winning first at Botcon again

I met Shane of Kingbotz.com at last year's Botcon. He built a five foot tall Devastator out of Tonka trucks and took first place in the Botcon 2006 diorama contest with it. I realized two things after staying up till 3 a.m. in the hotel lobby talking with him about his ideas for future projects. The first was that my feeble attempts to win anything in the Botcon art contests would be futile unless I could build a life size transforming lawnmower. The second was that at my age I was a dinosaur, too old to be staying up till 3 a.m. in hotel lobbies talking to young guys about Transformers. Well, Shane has put teaser pictures up on his MySpace of his latest project, a seven foot tall Bruticus. If this is what he takes to Botcon I am relieved I am not there embarrasing myself with my usual robots made of grocery bags and toilet paper rolls.