No Sleep Till Botcon

How I spent my weekend

Holy crap I stayed up until 4 a.m. Friday night/Saturday morning working on the tetrajets but it was worth it. I have all the parts cast and all I have left is assembly and painting. It's downhill from here in terms of work so I expect to have painted ones done by later today. Of course my plans always go terribly wrong and I may find myself painting them on the plane ride to Cincinnati.

BOTCON PEOPLE-if you want a tetrajet and you're going to the show, email me and we'll arrange some sort of arrangement. I'll have ten and so far five are spoken for (Nala, Defensis, Silverwynde, John S., and me). That leaves five remaining that will probably go unsold anyways so who am I kidding. I'm going to price them at $7 each, which is $2 more than I said I would earlier, but I decided to throw in a free copy of THE KING OF ALL TOY ROBOTS POEMS COLLECTIONS* (which I was originally going to sell for $2 anyways). It's great deal.

(First five people to email me get a tetrajet reserved. Only one to a person. If we're unable to meet up at the show then there's no sale, but I will try my damndest to make it happen. Also, I will probably not have change so if you could have exactly seven bucks that would be fantastic.)

*Features the exclusive poem "I Only Feel Alive at Botcon (and that is why I want to die)"

UPDATE!-Thanks to everyone who responded. I don't have anymore email access so I can't take anymore reservations.

Tell me have you ever really, really really ever loved a toy robots?

My wife once lost her wedding ring
so I told her I'd buy another
But so many great toy robots came out
that I never even bothered

I had so many toy robots
I could fill a cargo freighter
Our home a toy robots dumping ground
robots in the refrigerator

The house was really dangerous
toy robots covered every inch
One time I couldn't find the baby
the toy robots fell on him

Robot plastic filled up every room
We couldn't use the garage
An outside pile of rusty scrap metal parts
was all that was left of my Dodge

One day my wife was nagging
"We need a new washer and dryer!"
But I told her "HEY! You shut up bitch!
I'm listening to TFWire!"

I told her collecting toy robots
like I did demanded sacrifices
I've never seen a guy with assloads of robots
and also nice household appliances

So she kicked me out of my own home
and she made me go away
and from the public library computers
I saw her sell my robots on eBay

The librarian saw me crying
and I explained why I was glum
He said "You must love them toy robots"
But inside I thought-I hate 'em

I tried to go back to her
and extend the olive branches
I was sorry about the refrigerator
and robot baby avalanches

But she'd found another man
who wasn't no toy robots guy
He kind of looked like the librarian and
their clothes were clean and dry

Once I was a man who had it all
though now I don't have shit
I'm mostly mad my robots collection is gone
I really really miss it

I have read a million movie reviewers telling me why Star Wars sucks but none of them mentioned that Darth Vader's helmet was asymmetrical

I'm in the part of my latest mold making/resin casting project where I start running into problems and things don't come out right and I go all crazy but I figure it out. I've learned that mold making is really tough and to do it well requires engineering talent, which isn't something that my uneducated brown trash mind has in much abundance. It's funny because the guy who sells me my supplies has this motto, "If you can bake a cake you can do resin casting". I know he said that to encourage me and keep me motivated, but holy hell I have wedding cake dreams but only a cupcake skill level.

Don't try this in space

In a nutshell, some things went wrong and I screwed up the mold and this will complicate things down the road. Describing particulars is technical and boring, but the point is I should have known how to avoid this mold design problem based on my past molding experience. It pisses me off because once I saw my mistake I had a Ben Kenobi moment where I thought, "Wait a minute. How did this happen? I'm smarter than this." It's a pain in the butt but I'm going to keep going with my crappy mold. If there's one thing I like about myself it's that I don't let notions of doing a quality job get in the way of getting crap done.

Aside from the mold design dissapointment, I've had other little OCD type aggravations throughout this project. The biggest one is the very slightly noticeable asymmetry of the tetrajet sculpt. If you look at the little spaceship head on in just the right way, you can tell it's not perfectly symmetrical. It bothers me but it's not worth starting over or quitting the project. It's hopefully not even that big of a deal and when all is said and done nobody will notice it. But in the back of my mind it really bothers me that I don't have a computer brain and robot hands and laserbeam eyes so I could do precision sculpting of my clay cartoon spaceships.

When I'm feeling bad about my limited resin casting abilities I like to think about the guys that made the Darth Vader and Stormtrooper helmets for the very first Star Wars. They used a somewhat similar process to what I use for my little figures and those first helmets had symmetry issues, too. Although I never noticed that kind of stuff as a kid and Star Wars was still a huge success, I know there was probably a costume maker who had a hard time watching Star Wars because he knew he fucked up the mold and he made Darth Vader's left eye 2 millimeters wider than the right one.


The point is that when it came time to do a Darth Vader costume for Revenge of the Sith, they didn't use the old ones that they knew were a little off. If you check out this article, seven paragraphs down they talk about how the new Darth Vader helmet was done with computers even though nobody in the audience gives a crap. I UNDERSTAND YOUR PAIN, DARTH VADER HELMET MAKER.

Rejected Transfromer art contest ideas number 3: PIGGUN or: Ham and Megs

I had this idea where there's this ultimate colossal crosssover alternate universe and Spider-Ham fights the Incredible Change-Bots. IT IS A TOTALLY ORIGINAL IDEA.

Tet(trajet) offensive

Sometimes when I am running laps around an oval track I get mystified and I lose track of what lap I'm on. I am experiencing a similar phenomenon as I get further into my tetrajet project. I have studied this shape so much that I have absolutely no idea what it looks like. I will just pass off any design inaccuracies as artistic license, although sometimes I think the design as presented in the cartoon is the cel animated equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting. Holy crap I swear some of the aspects of this shape delve into impossible object territory.

However I am getting closer and I made a Flickr album of some in-progress pictures of what I've got so far. The last two weekends have been nothing but sculpting, sculpting, sculpting. Well, except for last weekend when Richard gave me the heads up on the Star Wars marathon on Spike TV and I lost 3 days of productivity watching R2-D2's adventures in pan-n-scan with bonus commercials. The sculpt is coming out pretty good despite my artistic licenses which should have been revoked a long time ago by the artistic police. I'm still not at the final sculpt yet but I'm really close.

My most memorable moments in Transformer conventions moments PART 3: When you say Bud(iansky) you've said it all

Being four years old going into the eighties and being fourteen when they ended was like getting hit by a ten year long freight train of heavy metal and robots. At the end I was left wondering what the heck just happened. As a kid I knew what crazy cartoons and movies I liked and I ate it all up without paying much attention to where it came from. Part of this was because I really didn't care who was making up all this crazy stuff about robots and Darth Vaders and part of it was because at four years old I was hardly a sentient being. But I hit a point in my post-childhood life where I wanted to know just who exactly was responsible for all the craziness and how it all came about. These were the mysteries of the universe for which I wanted answers when I was a teenager. I was never really concerned about the meaning of life or man's purpose on earth, I just wanted to know who made Optimus Prime and R2-D2.

Thanks to the opening credits of Star Wars that boldly state it's by Lucasfilm and was filmed in LucasVision with LucasSound by LucasCorp at LucasRanch I was able to figure that one out. But Transformers was a bit trickier and it's only been over the past five years or so that the answers have started coming out. One of the people most closely involved with the creation of the Transformers was comic book writer Bob Budiansky. I never realized how big a role he played in the creation of the line until the last five years or so when the online fandom started asking these sorts of questions. It turned out that Bob Budiansky was arguably the George Lucas of Transformers. What is even more amazing was that Transformers was just one of his many projects. He worked on more..much more!

Back in 2006 I went to an unofficial Transformers convention where Mr. Budiansky was a guest and hot damn he told the story of the creation of Transformers as if it were yesterday. I stood slack jawed as he recounted the most minute details of the creation of the Transformers. If the eighties hit me like a freight train, Bob Budiansky was the guy driving it.




I don't normally record video and audio of just anybody talking about anything, but that day I recorded his entire 30 minute panel and even took video of him telling his story. Since I was dumb about computers I didn't ever upload the audio to the internety but I did write down pretty much every word he said. I look back now and I'm amazed at how much time and energy I spent doing that, especially since I just put it out on Usenet for free and I wasn't getting paid to write that transcription by anyone. It was pure blind fan insanity. I was able to do this because those were the days when I was suffering from full blown RoboPlasti-bergers, also I was unemployed.

Now that I am less dumb about computers I have figured out how to put the audio portion of this panel right here on the internet!


Or download it directly

So if you're into that sort of stuff, check it out. It was a good time and sitting up there in the front row as Mr. Budiansky told his story ranks as one of my favorite moments in Transformer convention moments. Of course there is still a chance I am dumb about computers and the link won't work, making this post a huge shameful embarrassment and effectively making me the Star Wars kid of Transformers.

My most memorable moments in Transformer conventions moments PART 2: HOT DAMN RED MILL SNACK FOODS HAS SOME SEXY MODELS

WHO IS THAT SEXY GUY STANDING ACROSS FROM BRITISH COMEDY STAR RAS HARDIKER?