Zobovor's Updates Log (2003)

I'm always making little changes here and there to the site that won't merit a mention in the updates log, but anything new that I've added to the site can be found here.  Keep in mind that some links on this page will no longer work as the site continues to evolve.  Always start from the home page to find the most recent links!  


(11/20/03)

Apparently, it's time for me to invest in a third digital camera.  Last year I replaced my enimently crappy one with a moderately serviceable one, only to find that the second one isn't compatible with the new computer.  Taking pictures of anything has become an interminably tedious process involving booting up the old machine, trying to coax the mouse into clicking the necessary icons to open my image editing program, uploading the digicam pictures to the old computer, once again trying to convince the mouse to successfully drag them to the jump drive, and plugging the jump drive into the new computer to extract them, only to find that the pictures are unusable because the focus on the camera was off or I didn't have the right lighting.  It takes about ten minutes to go through this process for a single digicam photo, and quite frankly it's not worth the bother.  I'll probably be looking into getting yet another camera at some point after Christmas.

In other news, we've adopted yet another cat.  She's part of the family of stray tabby kittens who's been hanging around the neighborhood for months, only this one somehow managed to get herself trapped inside a plastic six-pack holder.  I managed to capture her using a clever Elmer Fudd-style stick-on-a-string trap, cut her free from her plastic prison, and now she's living in the laundry room.  We named her Six-Pack, incidentally.  That brings our current feline count back up to five; what's more, I'm about 95% sure she's going to have kittens before the year is over.  I anticipate I'll be rather preoccuipied with her litter for the next six to eight weeks.

(9/27/2003)

The fifth anniversary of the ZMFTS is here.  Penasor is overjoyed, because this lets her out of her service contract.  The rest of us are too busy to take notice.  (I have no idea who threw that damn confetti all over the place.  And me with a vacuum cleaner that died after choking on all the cat hair.)

Well, I just couldn't let myself let this momentous occasion pass completely by without doing something special.  It was around this time last year that I had incredibly huge ideas that were at once celebratory and magnificent and obsessive and fun.  Of course, I was also working 12 hours a week and actually had the spare time to pull it all off.  (I was also using a computer that was actually compatible with my digital camera and printer.  The extra step of having to move files from one machine to the other every time I want a hard copy or a digicam shot of something has proven to be far more trouble than it's worth.  I really hate technology sometimes.)

So, what we've got is a coloring contest.  Click the link to read all the official rules and stuff.  It's gonna be a grand and glorious thing, let me tell you.  (Good luck to the two or three of you who end up participating.)

There's other stuff coming at some point.  What I'd like to do is get the RiD FAQ up to date, finish and post Book Five of "Children of Cybertron," and finish and photograph my April O'Neil fashion doll.  What I'll actually get around to doing is anyone's guess.

(8/5/2003)

Here's some more stuff that I finished up a while ago, but never got around to uploading for one reason or another:

KITBASHES:

FANFICS:

(7/29/2003)

My computer problems are officially solved.  I bought a cute little jump drive that's very helpfully enabling me to transfer files from one machine to the other.  Now, work on the ZMFTS will undoubtedly fail to continue once more, but at least I get to claim the fault all to myself instead of blaming technology for all my problems.  (Speaking of which, I know a lot of the images on the site look like crap.  You can thank the old, burnt-out monitor for that.)

KITBASHES:

...You know, maybe I just need to change the name of the site to Zobovor's Single-Faceted Kitbashing Site and be done with it.

(7/18/2003)

KITBASHES:

(7/1/2003)

Got a new computer.  AOL decided to spontaneously crap out on the old machine, and there was no way to reinstall it since the CD-ROM drive was busted.  It was time for an upgrade anyway, since the thing was a virtual dinosaur.  Unfortunately, my attempts at networking the two machines together have been unsucessful, which means that I can't move any of my old files to the new computer or get them online.  (I had to download a copy of AOL Press and grab this page off the web just so I could update it.)  So, no updates until I get an external CD-ROM drive so I can install the file transfer wizard to switch everything over for me.

Which is not to say that I've got some huge, phenomenal update coming.  Months ago, I painted a model kit of Robot B-9 from Lost in Space and did a die-cast version of Tracks' flying car mode, but I never quite got around to uploading the pages.  More recently, I started working at Wal-Mart which means long hours and a good paycheck, but not much free time.  Plus, I'd rather hang out with my wife and the kids and the cats and occasionally post mindless rants to alt.toys.transformers.

The fifth anniversary of the ZMFTS is in two months.  That's a pretty big milestone, and I've got this vague sense of obligation that I need to do something special to celebrate it, but the truth of the matter is that I just don't feel like it.  There was a time when I would spend months organizing a big site update and would actually worry if it wasn't finished by the beginning of the new year.  I look back on that now and realize I had my priorities seriously mixed up.  Maintaining the site is supposed to be fun.  The instant it becomes work, becomes a chore, it's no longer worth doing.

So, there are aspects of the site that I will probably never touch again, because of this pervading sense that I "have to" continue work on them.  Maybe one day, if I ever manage to shrug off that feeling, I'll pick it up again, because it will have become new and fresh and fun again.  Until then, I'll probably just keep tooling away at my little kitbashes and fanfics and things, adding them to the site because I want to share them with the fandom, not because I feel guilty for not having added anything to the site in a month or two.

Watch this space for the next batch of CybCon exclusives.  They're gonna be something special.

(3/18/2003)

KITBASHES:

(3/7/2003)

KITBASHES:

(2/13/2003)

Two new projects for this month, both of which have been incubating for quite some time.  I also need to upload Book Four of "Children of Cybertron" as soon as I do some minor proofreading.  (It's on alt.toys.transformers now if you want to see it now, but it's not the definitive version that will be archived on the site.)

KITBASHES:

(1/20/2003)

Before we go any further, I wish to announce to the world that Kmart sucks.  Thank you.  We now resume our regularly-scheduled web site, already in progress.

KITBASHES:

(1/4/2003)

ART:

REVIEWS:

(1/1/2003)

There is an update of sorts on the way, but I've been extraordinarily lazy about putting it together this year.  The problem with doing New Year's updates, I'm finding, is that they come so soon after Christmas.  Quite frankly, I wasn't up for slaving away at the keyboard and wrestling with FTP when I could instead be devoting my time to more gratifying endeavours, like creating hand-made gifts for my friends and family (a yearly ritual which I've sadly strayed away from since I created this site), baking holiday-themed cookies, and building snowmen with the kids.

As you can see, though, I still found a moment to jazz up the site with a revised logo and some new graphics, and I've sunk my teeth into a couple of fairly monstrous new projects which I'll get around to uploading at some point.  (I also got a new digital camera recently, so I'll likely be replacing a lot of the old, crappy images with some new, halfway decent ones eventually.)

KITBASHES:

RiD FAQ:

VOICE ACTORS:

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