Jeremy Barlow of Soundwaves Oblivion has been sending me a ton of improved pieces of box art lately, the first two of which share something very obvious in common: they're both space shuttles! White ones, specifically. First there's the Japanese art for Astrotrain (left). While the American version of Astrotrain was a lot more purple, the Japanese one, released a year later, was recolored to more closely resemble an actual American space shuttle, that is, white. The second of this pair of images is Galaxy Shuttle (right), the Autobot Victory-era space shuttle, whose main function was to, you know, shuttle Autobots throughout the galaxy. In the cartoons, both robots had to "expand" to a ludicrous degree to house and transport their fellow soldiers, but at least Galaxy Shuttle was a really big toy. That helps with the suspension of disbelief.

Considering that the Transformers is, at its core, an outer space-related toyline, and that in the 1980's there was no vehicle in the real world more obviously associated with outer space than the space shuttles, I'm almost surprised there weren't more space shuttle Transformers. (Unless the Challenger disaster made the shuttle a less attractive toy.) Nonetheless, there was a handful of other white space shuttles in G1, all of which I will mention now.

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Dudes. Dudes. Somebody has to clean up this image of Waverider for me (right). You know, edit out the text and the little captioned pictures, fix the parts obscured by those white indicator lines, clean up the white base so that the pictures from the opposite page aren't bleeding through, etc. Since this is a Pretender, the black-to-white gradient background has to be maintained, just like Groundbreaker or Splashdown. The existing entry for Waverider is not that great, but probably still worth consulting.

I got this from a page on X-Entertainment of Mildly Interesting 80's Print Ads. You know you're curious.

But seriously. Dude. Somebody clean up this picture for me. I'm jonesing.

More box art updates soon, and a discussion of the retirement of the War Room...

UPDATE: Dude, it's been edited! Devastator of kitbashing resource Sector 70 labored over the print ad and managed to edit it down to just the art (left). Show your appreciation for his efforts by checking out Devastator's most excellent kitbashes of numerous gestalt team members. Thanks!

Megatron Blue!

Megatron Red!

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Hot damn, we got a great version of the Autobot special ops main man, JAZZ, to add to the Archive. This pic, one of the Smythe transparency scans, was cleaned up by JP White. Thanks once again to both those guys.

Being such a blatant Decepticon sympathizer, I am often surprised when I encounter Transformer fans who proudly proclaim their Autobot allegiance. I mean, the good guys? Let's see if heroism and nobility put energon on your plate. Me? I'm cold like Shockwave, aloof like Soundwave, arrogant like Starscream and ruthless like Megatron! So what could I say about such an archetypical Autobot like Jazz? Not much. (I didn't even own him as a kid.)

But don't you worry, because my good friend Lucs, a kitbasher, customizer, Autobot-lover and straight-up Jazz junkie, honored my request and wrote a brief explanation of just why he digs Jazz so much...

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I love my Robot Heroes! Cute, happy, lovable Autobots and Decepticons, chasing each other around the playground with their little fusion cannons and flamethrowers. So adorable. As such I was really disappointed when several G1 characters slated for release were canceled in favor of movie characters instead. (Yet another reason to hate the Bay movies.) Fortunately, some enterprising individual managed to snag a few pre-production prototypes of these little guys and auction them on eBay. (It was big news.) My bank account was unable to afford the Prowl/Laserbeak pair, but I managed to score the Robot Heroes versions of Victory Saber and Deszaras!

The attention to detail and faithfulness to the original toys is really impressive, and since I haven't seen many photos of these little dudes, I decided to take some myself. Enjoy, internet people!

Victory Saber

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Her Majesty's favorite band, The Soundwaves !!!

From left to right: Electrostatic Soundwave with Ratbat keytar (TF: Animated); Robot Heroes Soundwave (top); my original G1 Soundwave (with Buzzsaw cassette); Soundwave with Laserbeak guitar (TF: Animated). Not pictured: Titanium Soundwave; dignity.

What I didn't mention in my recent "Ode to the Cassette" post was that I finally received my 2GB USB thumb drive Ravage. It is every bit as awesome as I had hoped. It's relatively sturdy, it transforms easily, the jaguar mode is very posable, and the design is slick. It even comes with a program you can install so that when you plug the USB drive into your machine, an animated Ravage stalks your desktop. They went the extra mile.

The absolute best part about this device is that the USB thumb drive is a perfect update to the original microcassette mode! It's the modern portable information storage device! Plus, unlike the original cassettes, this USB drive actually works. I've been using it to transport MP3's from home to work and back. As brilliant as the cassette/boombox idea was for the early 1980's Transformers, those "disguises" are no longer viable; in fact, a boombox or a microcassette would really stand out in 2009 as a technological anachronism. As if to drive home that point, when Hasbro recently released their re-imagined Hound/Ravage pairing, Hasbro apparently wanted to market Ravage's disguise as his "capture" mode, fearing that today's kids wouldn't know what the hell a "cassette" was. (The final packaging, however, consistently refers to Ravage's "tape mode".) In my "updated" G1 collection (of mostly Classics and Universe toys), this USB Ravage definitely replaces the "tape" one that came with Hound.

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I love lists. I love them. I love itemization, quantification, prioritization. I love efficiency and thoroughness and accomplishment. I try to resist absent-mindedness, forgetfulness and especially slothfulness, and lists help me do that. Online lists of music recommendations compete with the stack of CDs on my desk; a small collection of to-watch DVDs are outgunned by my Netflix queue. To-read books are a foot thick, to-read comics as long as my arm. Emails that need attention are starred or labeled PRIORITY or both.

But it's my personal To-Do list that intimidates and exhilarates me. Historically I've maintained several lists in several places, presumably because I just jot down reminders on whatever's handy, electronic or otherwise. Now I'm trying to keep everything in my Google Tasks list, accessible on iGoogle, Google Calendar, and Chrome extension. Gawk in horror as I share some of these items with you. :)

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My absolute favorite author is Vladimir Nabokov (pronounced "vla-DEE-mir na-BAH-kof"), best known as the author of Lolita. Nabokov's books are not considered easy reads: he is generally considered a "prose stylist" and his works have the complexity and texture of poetry. For my own part, I enjoy works of complexity that reward a careful and astute reader who decides to invest in an arguably less accessible but ultimately more layered fiction. I don't recommend Nabokov to everyone; aside from being dense, his stories are almost all character studies with far less emphasis on plot than on nuance. However, if I do lend or buy you a copy of Pale Fire or The Defense, you can definitely take it as compliment.

Nabokov died in 1977, just two years after I was born. His final published novel, Look at the Harlequins!, is an odd, fictionalized autobiography, a seeming parody and/or comment on himself, but a fitting final work for an author whose repertoire is laced with characters with whom he shared a great deal of biographical information. (Russian born, emigrated to Germany and thence to America, etc.) However, Harlequins was not the last novel on which he labored. At the time of his death he was working on a new piece, one which had gone through several working titles but was last known as The Original of Laura. Prior to his death, Nabokov instructed his family to burn his unfinished work, lest an imperfect and unpolished aspect of himself be made public.

Alas, they did not destroy it, which brings us to my sad dilemma.

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As you may have discerned from the dispassionate tone in my earlier posts regarding buying a home, I was never in love with the house we had found. It fit all the necessary criteria, to be sure, but it just didn't resonate with me. Nonetheless, I was fully committed to securing the place and spending at least the next few years there. But none of that matters anymore, because after inspections and sewer scopes and soil samples and a multitude of addendums, we ended up withdrawing our offer on the house. But let me tell you why.

The fault lies primarily with Bank of America's mortgage lending department, which is completely fucked-up, disorganized and unreliable.

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