and mustard

my camera finally gave out. either the lens went bad or the light receptor. neither is something i feel like trying to have replaced when i already want to upgrade. unfortunately, financially that probably won’t be until the new year.

shatner’s new album is really good. his last album, from the 70s, was a bizarre mix of shakespeare and cover songs like lucy in the sky with diamonds. he actually wrote his own material for this one, and ben folds set music to it, and it turned out amazing.

went to see amelie at the laurelhurst last week. i’d forgotten how much i love that movie, and it’s totally worth seeing on the big screen again.

there are THREE gestalt combiner teams in the new line of transformers that are starting to hit stores right now. so far i only have one of the arms of the new decepticon construction team gestalt, but i cannot wait to get the rest of them. the little guy i’ve got is fully posable, looks cool, and can be either an arm or a leg in the combined version. the connection point is standardized across all four limbs, and i would imagine across the other two gestalt teams as well, which would mean you could swap limbs around between them as desired. totally cool.

the combined robot is going to be much nicer than past gestalts as well. instead of being a brick like the vintage ones, or a nicely posable but clunky robot like build king, these guys are nicely articulated and good looking, with ball shoulders, ball hips, and ball knees. my only complaint would be that a better design would have used six robots instead of five. currently the legs of the torso robot become the upper legs of the gestalt. if they’d had two torso robots, and the legs of the upper robot became the upper arms of the gestalt, that’d make the chest broader(currently it’s a little skinny) and added elbow articulation, for a much broader range of motion in the arms.

bit the fact that he’s got ball shoulders is pretty cool. and hell, it might be possible to hack them so i can do that anyways. and thinking along those lines leads one to wonder why they didn’t plan for this from the start. every single deluxe autobot in energon so far was able to combine with any other deluxe, such that the upper robot’s legs became arms of the larger robot while the lower robots became the legs. couple that with the elbow/knee connectors on the basics, and they could have had an entire year’s worth of transformers where any two deluxe robots and any four basics could be combined into a gestalt.

but i’m not trying to knock hasbro here. the fact that they designed and are mass producing THREE new gestalt teams is pretty damn cool. and two of them are decepticons!