By now many of you who are interested in classic Transformers box art have probably heard that Jim Sorenson, who has released a couple of books of Transformers cartoon animation models, is planning on putting out a book of G1 box art. Some have asked me how I feel about the whole thing. So here's my thoughts!

First, Jim is an extremely nice guy and without question a big Transformers fan. He contributed more than a dozen pieces to this Archive back in 2005 and 2006, and I'm sure he would have contributed a lot more artwork since then had he not been trying since 2007 to get IDW to do this book. (Makes sense -- why put out on the web for mass consumption the exact thing you plan on trying to sell to people?)

When he first mentioned the book, my first concern was whether this would lead to the Archive getting shut down via a "cease and desist" letter from Hasbro. This site has always been for "educational and entertainment" purposes rather commercial gain, and so long as I'm not selling or otherwise making money off this site, Hasbro seemed content to occasionally use the artwork from here for official or promotional purposes. However, I always feared that if Hasbro decided to somehow monetize the artwork (through a book, for instance) that the Archive would be viewed as a competing resource and their lawyers would finally turn their formerly blind eye my way. Based on the feedback I get from fans, I think the loss off this Archive (which has been online for 14 years) would be very disappointing.

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Yet another piece of original TF box art has popped up on eBay! It's strange how years went by without any surfacing, and now this is the fourth one in as many months. The latest is Gutcruncher, one of the Decepticon Action Masters. The auction in question misidentifies him as Roadbuster, but hey, they tried. Unlike the other sellers who were listing obscure Micromaster character art at starting prices of $850 or $3000 -- hilarious! -- the seller of Gutcruncher's art has taken a more realistic tack by starting the auction at $0.99. I'm eager to see where it ends up! Shall we make guesses in the comments? I'm going to go with $65.

Gutcruncher actually cropped up a number of times in Transformers comic books over the last several years. Will this increase his popularity? Probably not.

Ever with his digits on the pulse of Transformers box art for sale, Nukeote pointed me to two auctions on eBay for original Micromaster art that I might have otherwise missed: one for the little-loved Detour of the Decepticon Sports Car Patrol; and another for one of the more popular Micromasters, Fixit of the Autobot Rescue Patrol (who actually just made an appearance in the most recent issue of the excellent ongoing Transformers: Robots In Disguise comic book series). I've cleaned up the images from the auction photos and added them to the Archive. Thanks for the tip, Nukeote!

Perhaps you remember I recently told you about a seller that was trying to auction Skystalker's original robot art on eBay? Considering how relatively insignificant Skystalker is in the Transformers universe, my response to the seller's $850 asking price was "Good fucking luck with that!" Well, get ready, because the "Buy It Now" price for the Detour listing and Fixit listing is a whopping $2,999.99. Each. For Micromasters! Good fucking luck!

Sky High! That's right, another Pretender has gotten the deluxe treatment with an updated scan straight from his original art and thus on the original black-to-white gradient background. He looks ten times cooler now. I may still have no desire to collect the Autobot "giant astronaut" Pretenders, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate this kick-ass rendering. It's only too bad we can't see the chest of the Pretender shell and its hawk-like face. This art was scanned by snipebot. It was one of several that he won when all those transparencies were being auctioned off back in 2007. Why is it only now being posted...? Look, up in the air! It's Sky High! Go, Sky High, go!

Sky High is now the 19th Pretender whose Archive entry comes from the original source featuring the original background. Sadly, there are still 22 Pretenders whose entries are not as handsome as Sky High's. Scanned from their boxes instead of the original art, they are thus on a white background that doesn't do justice to the whole "shell-to-robot" ghost effect. We may never have original source scans for all or even most of them. All we can do is crawl into our protective outer shells and hope.

Remember back when everyone used Hotmail and kept their email in folders? Then Gmail came along and said, "Folders are dumb, use labels." And many of us said "labels are stupid!" but we eventually realized they made sense because, well, some emails belonged in more than one folder, really.

Back in 2005 when I first transitioned this site from simply being the home of the Transformers Box Art Archive (and its infrequently updated "What's New" page) to a full-fledged blog, the standard of the time was like Hotmail inasmuch as posts were grouped by Category. This worked fairly well: I was able to easily distinguish Archive posts from more general posts about Transformers and personal posts that had nothing at all to do with toy robots. And categories can be very handy, especially in a blog like this one: many of my close friends don't really care about Transformers, and many TF fans don't really care about me. Stick to the category you like!

As time went by, my topics strayed into new categories like religion and Gozilla and my marriage. Growing the list of categories was easy, and I even re-coded to allow the assignment of multiple categories to any given post, but occasionally I would become unsure of that system. I talk about New York City often; should that become a category? Does a single mention of Godzilla or comic books in a post qualify them for assignment in those respective categories? Do my wife's cats deserve a category of their own, or should that just default to the "Personal" category? Oh, and what if you were really interested in every post about comic books? That might be difficult to search for.

Of course, I wasn't the only blogger to have these issues, and so like the transition from email folders to labels, blogs started using "tags" instead of categories. The wisdom of this choice was immediately apparent to me. It allowed for granularity. Tags imply their own weight: "Transformers" is very general, but "Metroplex" is pretty specific. Let the reader decide their level of interest.

Now here comes the interesting part. ("Finally!" you say.) Coding and retrofitting the website to replace categories with tags was relatively easy.

Retroactively tagging every post ever written took time.

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I blogged before about Bluestreak, the Autobot gunner that is wont to "talk a blue streak," and the whole blue/silver "Silverstreak" calamity. (I also showcased the vintage Bluestreak "Stand Up Puzzle". You should really go back and re-read it. I'll wait.)

What I really want to know is... Where the hell is my Chinese knock-off blue Bluestreak? As far as knock-offs go, isn't this one a no-brainer? I want a toy that looks like this:

Bluestreak is blue!

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There are some box art submissions and other awesome images that I have not yet shared with you, and I have felt very delinquent about that. But I have a very good reason: my Transformers-allotted time has been taken up with a very intense but worthwhile project. You see, after my blog post about dusty toys I couldn't get the problem out of my mind. Every day I checked Craigslist for second-hand glass display cases. I was initially distraught that all I could find were grandmotherly curio cabinets and horizontal cases suitable for store counters. Then — suddenly! — a couple from our neighbor city of Vancouver listed a custom-made oak-frame case that they could no longer keep. It was huge. It was beautiful. It was cheap! It was perfect.

Transporting it was a daunting effort. My friend Tom graciously agreed to lend his time and his pickup truck to the project. Dollface and I squeezed into the cab with him, but this was not nearly as snug a fit as the cabinet halves were to be within the truck bed. Large, heavy, fragile and cumbersome, we carefully shoved the bisected cabinet into the back with not half-an-inch to spare on the sides and top. The glass doors and shelves were remarkably heavy and worrisome. Did I mention it was raining? In the end, though, we transported the entire thing without any breakage or damage. We celebrated with hot dogs, cheese fries and PBR.

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I've talked about so-called "Third-Party" Transformers several times before. (For those who want a quick primer on them, see my past articles here and here.) I own an increasing amount of third-party TFs, so I'm obviously a fan of them. Hasbro started the "Classics" line of modernized versions of classic Transformers, but for various known and unknown reasons they have left many classic toys unrevisited. The third-party producers thus supply a demand for other modernized toy characters that would otherwise not be filled. However, since those classic characters are still the intellectual property of Hasbro, these unauthorized products have raised a number of legal and moral questions. The legal aspect is a little more cut-and-dry, which is at least one of the reasons that most of these third-party toys are mass-produced in China where intellectual property laws are rather lax. It's actually the moral and economic aspects that interest me more.

This whole issue had a bit of a flashpoint last week when BotCon, the official Transformers convention authorized by Hasbro, announced that third-party toys would not be permitted in the dealer room and that any dealer that displays them risks having their third-party wares confiscated. The technicalities of all that aside, the announcement set off a firestorm of discussion on TFW2005 (here) and Seibertron (here). Interestingly, the heated commentary served as a great barometer of how fans view the third-party producers and Hasbro. Some third-party fans painted Hasbro as a big, bad, and jealous corporation who, instead of delivering what the "fans" want, is attempting to squash the "little guy" so they can continue to produce sub-par products without competition. Some third-party detractors were unwaveringly loyal to Hasbro and "official" Transformers, and believe the third-party toys "cheapen" and pervert the hobby. Indeed, there was much argument, some of which was astute but much of which was emotionally-charged drivel.

But before continuing, I'd like to craft a little moral illustration with the help of Mötley Crüe...

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Dust is my enemy. One of many, admittedly, and I seem to make more every day, but for now let's focus on dust. It's universally unwelcome, except perhaps to dust mites, which are themselves quite unwelcome. For some, dust means allergies and other health risks, but that's really boring. No, let's talk about the real problem: DUSTY TOYS.

Man, my Transformers are dusty. It makes me sad. Even from afar, you can see this grainy particulate film coating them, most visible on shiny blacks (like Insecticons) and dull whites (like the ramps of Fortress Maximus). You pick up a toy and you see their footprints outlined in relief on the dusty shelf surface. It's hard to focus on the analytical evil of Shockwave or the diligent heroism of Ultra Magnus when all you can focus on is their coat of dust.

Compressed air cannisters barely make a dent. No, you really need to go over them with god-damn cotton swabs to make any real difference. And even if you get them completely dust-free, it only lasts a week or two before they're visibly dusty again.

What to do, what to do? I don't think those electronic air filters are going to work. They give us headaches, too. Must I -- should I -- finally cave in and get.... GLASS-DOOR CABINETS?

If I had only a few Transformers -- or say, a few dozen -- a single glass cabinet would hold them all and I would consider that reasonable and not-at-all weird and eccentric. But I have more than that:

First there are the two bookcases of Generation One guys.
There's a lot of toys there and they're already pretty crowded.
I have to keep most of the gestalts combined just to have enough room.

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So I have a new band. It's called Die Like Gentlemen. I play guitar, sing, and do most of the songwriting. We're kinda like a chunkier version of Black Sabbath. You can "Like" us and listen to a few rehearsal tunes on our Facebook page while you read this, if you like.

We played our first show last Saturday at an excellent local Portland dive music venue called Plan B. We had a great turnout, played really well, and got a lot of positive feedback. It really went excellent. The most popular songs were "Covetous" and "Hidden Switch" (the latter of which discusses my tinnitus).

You may remember that I was unsuccessfully seeking a second guitarist. One of the main reasons was to have a more accomplished lead guitar for solos and such. Soloing was never my strong suit, I've always been much more of a composer. Some guitarists pick up a guitar and start soloing, I pick one up and start writing parts.

Well, we didn't want the lack of a second guitarist to stop us from gigging, so I manned up and started working specifically on my solos. I started sketching them out, trying to figure out how to play what I was hearing in my head or just sloppily improvising until I lucked upon something that didn't suck. After a couple of months I felt I had improved from "embarrassingly bad" to "could easily fool non-musicians" so it was time to put ourselves out there. Which, like I said, went excellent.

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I've been trying to find a lead guitarist for my new band. We just need that final player to turn our slamming trio into a crushing quartet!

But finding the right musician is hard -- hell, finding someone who isn't a complete flake or a complete loon is itself nigh-impossible. I've been posting on Craigslist. The ad is understated and thorough. I list influences, post links to some rehearsal recordings, and explain what we're expecting: someone who doesn't mind learning and doubling existing guitar parts to thicken up our sound, but can also handle lead lines and solos, and if you have material and ideas of your own we'd be happy to incorporate it. To me, this seems very straightforward.

Allow me to share some highlights of my search so far...

Well, there was Nathan. He seemed like a good prospect so I gave him tablature to two of the songs and asked that he learn them before coming in. I had a cold the following week so it was two weeks before we could schedule a night to jam. When I emailed/texted to confirm that he was still coming in, he said

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I still feel like a New Yorker who lives in Portland. Oh, I'm a little less antagonistic, sure, but I will always miss the passive-aggressiveness, the foul smells, the madness of the subway and the block-by-block unpredictability of The Big Apple.

Before I left, one of my best friends gave me this shirt as a going-away present:

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