Yeah, so we found wave 4 TFCybertron deluxes today. They're showing up in Wal-marts everywhere, usually as part of a giant display pallet, so they should be pretty easy to find. Ours were found hung up on the pegs like usual, so maybe there wasn't room for the pallet itself.

Anyway, it was a bittersweet toy search because while we did find them, the whole wave is really frustrating. I don't like them. Brimstone is easily the best, but that's just because there's nothing outstandingly wrong with him. He's simple and playable, but on the Way Too Simple side.

On the other end of the spectrum is Crosswise, who's axe-murderingly complex and unplayable. Remember the RiD car brothers? Well, he's definitely one of them. That means he's got thin, fragile car pieces hanging off every bit of his body and he's floppy as all hell. Mine does the splits constantly like he's a performing circus clown or something. And getting him back into car mode involves all the fun of rearranging his altmode shell-pieces back together Rubik's Cube-style that Big Convoy offers. Too bad. I was looking forward to him.

And do I really have to say why I dislike Thunderblast? Dude, she doesn't even transform. You wad her up into a ball and close the boat hull around her. Her feet barely reach the ground, that backpack is so big. There's absolutely nothing I can do with her.

So, um, yeah. Hello whiplash, what with Cybertron having been so pleasant until this wave. Oh well. The sad thing is that since we've reached Christmas, we probably won't get any new waves until March...

Just got back from watching Narnia. Aslan rocks. He's all like RARR.

If you're reading this blog on shortpacked.com, it's buried in an ugly and disgusting iframe. You know, with the scrolly bars. That sucks! I've been trying to get some wacky sort of coding set up to implant the LJ directly into my site, but that requires Stuff. My roommate Steve-o has been scripting it forever, and I think it needs some PPS or CSI or USA or whatever on the server end to fix it, and the fixings on that end have been sorta on the back burner for months, and I've gotten all sorts of helps and suggestions, but none that achieve everything that I want it to.

(Most important -- I want the ability to post replies directly to the blog as seen from the front page.)

Kris Straub has pointed out that I could just reconfigure my existing blogger.com account to paste onto this page, i-frameless, and accomplish all that. Thing is, there are over 300 of you who have this LJ on your friends list. That's a good freakin' chunk of people who I don't want to abandon. Also, Steve worked very hard on what he got accomplished with the LJ coding. It would be mean to dump it!

So, um, basically, tell me what to do. I am your bitch.

When my truck died two weeks ago, I wasn't only on my way to Kinko's. I was also on my way to deliver some original art to a local reader who had bought it. Mum was the word at the time, though, because it was a surprise gift. But cat's out of the bag now, so check it out.

Hey, remember when Chris Crosby started Sore Thumbs, a liberal-yet-insulting-to-both-sides political strip with a pink-haired commie?

Well, apparently Carson Fire has quit Elf Life to do Winger, a conservative-yet-insulting-to-both-sides political strip with a pink-haired commie.

Carson Fire is brilliant. Any mortal man would have created a real comic that dealt with issues even-handedly and realistically, without satire that paints so broad it doesn't depict anything possibly relevant to anyone. No, he's going for the more subversive. He's telling us, by providing a true counterpoint to Sore Thumbs, that political debate has become too polarized to matter to us anymore. He's telling us that it's not that one of us is liberal and the other is conservative, but that it's that we're flaming retards, with views so exaggerated and reactionary that the severity of our individual bias removes us from reality.

Good show, Carson. Good show. Others may not get you, but I do. I do.

I've got the next two redrawn IW! strips done. Pay your respects to our dearly departed Kup the truck. He lives immortal within the pages of the Internet.

I got the next issue of the Transformers fanclub magazine in the mail today. As always, the comic, the written bio, and the Hartmans' article never fail to entertain or educate. (Though I have to say, the art is getting increasingly impenetrable as the coloring gets more and more mushy. I can't tell half of what's going on anymore during the fight scenes. They hired ex-Dreamwave people, didn't they?) Definitely look forward to those every other month.

On the bad side -- damn. The BotCon '05 writeup. Dude. It's as fair and balanced as Fox News. "It looks like the show had good attendance." "There seemed to be just as many dealers and tables as past events." "[The dinner's] entertainment was very original and entertaining." Pete Sinclair's balls were firmly on this reviewer's tongue. It makes me absolutely ill.

We're also treated to a fan-repainted figure called Quickslinger. A purple Ransack. The given bio for her embarrasses me. It trots out the tomboy stereotype in its full nigh-sexist glory. She's so violently intent on not being defined by her gender that she is, in fact, defined entirely by her gender. There's not a single thing in this bio that isn't about her being a girl.

Also, regarding the latest Teen Titans episode...
So, I guess I hafta split up my DC Animated display. I could almost ignore that my shelf had two Dick Graysons (TT Robin and BTAS Nightwing) on it, but Kid Flash is definitely the same Wally as the Justice League Flash -- just younger by a few years. My Titans gotta be moved. Sad, really. Oh well.

Where's my grown-up Animated Starfire figure? Hmm?

So, yeah. People liked Wednesday's strip. In that "it hurts so good" way. Man. How am I gonna top it? Guess I should just quit comics now!

Also, I finally found Wreckloose today, meaning I've found everything that's out that I wanted. Which means that new stuff will start showing up in stores any minute now.

Any minute.

I'm back from Indiana now. Hurray for turkeys!

Meanwhile, I have an interview up at Comixfan. Booyah! Find out my dirty secrets. Well, not really. I tell all those constantly to anyone and everyone, so they're not very secret.

I just farted.

Apparently my brother works for a company named.... FapCo.

Yes. So many jokes.

So yesterday morning I flew out to Chicago for Thanksgiving. I'm staying at my best buds Steve and (Scott) Hooper's apartment until we drive into Indiana tonight. Whee! Chicago.

It's just a short hour flight from Columbus to Chicago, so I'm chugging down their Mountain Dew as we're landing and they're collecting trash. This won't end well. I get off the plane, and (Scott) Hooper picks me up and we're supposed to drive to Steve's work. Neither (Scott) Hooper nor I have any idea where we're going, and we end up going 20 miles the wrong way. Due to the Mountain Dew, I gotta pee something fierce. We get turned around the right way on the highway, and we're making good time again.

The car starts shaking. I turn to Hooper. "I think you bust a tire." He looks like he doesn't really want to believe it, and that if he ignores it, it didn't really happen. Eventually, I get him to pull over, and yeah, the front tire's completely flat.

So, sure. We start swiftly replacing it, and I figger I can pee in privacy behind the car after we finish. No, a tow truck comes up behind us and just watches. Rats. We're done in 10 minutes, and we try to assure the guy we're okay. No, he sits. As we're pulling away, he starts giving us instructions on how to merge back into traffic on his bullhorn or whatever.

Great. So anyway. It's another half-hour drive to where we're supposed to be. We get off on a wrong exit, but after calling Steve, it's not a problem. We're on the right street, just further down. We're just five miles away. SOON I CAN PEE. OH GOD YES.

Traffic stops. It's bumper to bumper through stoplights for all those five miles. There's road construction at the end of it.

I hate the world.

On the upside, I learned how to play disc (or frisbee) golf, which I didn't even know existed. I'm embarrassingly horrible at it, which got to be Steve's coworkers' first impression of me. Ah-heh. It was fun, though.

Also, I've been telling Steve he need to buy Katamary Damacy for a year. I was furious to find out he still hadn't gotten a copy at my insistence. So while Hooper's car was getting its tire replaced, I went into Toys R Us and bought We Love Katamari for him. Merry Christmas, I guess. But it's worth it, dammit. He needs to experience Katamari. While I was there I saw the new Mini-Con two-packs. Whee! Didn't buy them, but whee! I don't really need any more recolored Minicons.

But yeah. This hasn't been a good week for cars, in my experience.