I will concede that these past few weeks haven't been me at my most prolific; there are reasons for that beyond just sucking. I decided to leave Nick as a full-timer and go at it on a per-project basis, which has been really nice so far -- enough work to stay in game mode consistently, but not so much that I've gotta let go of/stop building upon the other things I'd like to. I wanted to write for ToyFare more, wanted to focus on that newspaper column of mine and wanted to have the opportunity to call the occasional Wednesday a spade and spend it watching shitty DVDs. This should in no way, shape or form infer that I'm returning to the online realm on a 24/7 basis, because I've seen the other side and it is better. But I will have more time to do the site, and as soon as the smoke settles and my mojo lands, this place won't be such a ghost town.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to whine about Gmail. I set up an account for work-related endeavors (not going to use my old AOL account which labels me a dinosaur, and not going to use my X-E account which makes the unknowing think I run a porn site), and despite the awesomeness that is 2 gigs worth of web-based never-fail e-mail, the way they group mail into "conversations" is just plain stupid. I won't go into a blow-by-blow for those who've never used Gmail, but suffice to say, if you're using it for anything nearing an official purpose where uber organization is key, you're going to end up murdering someone completely innocent out of frustration. I don't know why I'm writing about this.

My next ToyFare assignment is Transformers-related, and required me to read up/watch up on a little thing called Scramble City. I'd only seen the episode once many years ago, and it had no English dubs or subtitles, so I didn't know what in the fuck. Now that I've seen a fan dub in full, wow, that's a nice slice of Transhistory. Story goes like this: In Japan, Transformers: The Movie wasn't released. To help bridge the gap between pre-movie and post-movie cartoon episodes for our friends back East, this Japan-exclusive episode was forged.

In the first episode of the would-be two-parter, we're introduced to Metroplex and Trypticon, which doesn't seem like all that much of a bridge-gapper considering that neither character appeared in the movie. The second part of the story was never produced, but the tale was ultimately wrapped up in a series of really odd commercials using the actual toys as stop-motion characters. Just to keep the confusion rolling, these commercials featured Megatron and Galvatron standing side by side, which is something that shouldn't have been able to occur without the aid of Doc and a DeLorean.

Both the animated episode and the weird commercials are on the 20th anniversary Transformers: The Movie DVD, but you can at least watch the animated half over at this site. If you're more interested in the fan-dubbed version, scour YouTube.

K- started a really great survey in the last thread -- let's make it official. In the comments, talk about some of the expensive-but-stupid purchases you've made through the years. I don't even know where to start.