ZMFTS Update Log (2004)

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!  

(11/8/2004)

KITBASHES:

• Added a handful of projects that I've had done for a little while, but just never got around to uploading.  The first of these is a die-cast version of the Foot Cruiser, the TMNT vehicle from Dimension X that just happens to look like a Cadillac.
• Speaking of die-cast toys, I did a scale-model version of Cliffjumper, which is mildly silly since it pretty much ended up being exactly the same size as the original G1 toy.  (I'm very slowly going to be re-photographing all the old die-cast projects.  I've still got new ones in the works, too.)
• Finally, I took a broken Bumblebee keychain and turned it into Ladybug, the character I created to represent the the red Bumblebee toy.  She appears in the fanfic "Bugs."

(10/31/2004)

KITBASHES:

• For this Halloween, I built a Soundwave costume that's accurate to his appearance in the G1 cartoon.  I'm very proud of this project, which took me over two months to complete.  Come have a look!

POP CULTURE:

• I added about a dozen more Transformers references in pop culture, including a new and surprisingly relevant Sally Forth comic strip.

(10/26/2004)

FANFICS:

• I finally finished "Children of Cybertron" Book Five, which has been posted to alt.toys.transformers and is also online for your perusal.  (It's about one-and-a-half times the length of Book Four, which is also online now.)

(8/19/2004)

KITBASHES:

• Here's a figure I've been talking about on and off for years, but since Hasbro hasn't gotten the hint yet I decided to take matters into my own hands.  It's C-3PO (Ewok God) from Return of the Jedi, arguably the golden droid's shining moment in the trilogy, if you'll pardon the pun.

(8/10/04)

KITBASHES: FANFICS:

• Actually uploaded something to the ZMFTS that isn't a kitbash.  (See, we really are multi-faceted on occasion!)  It's a story called "Bugs," which deals with a small scout patrol sent to find what happened to the missing Ark and its crew.  I've also written character profiles for the two main characters of the story which you can find here and here, but please do yourself a favor and read the story first.
  
  By the way, "Children of Cybertron" is still coming along.  The next book will be ready when it's ready.

(7/31/04)

KITBASHES:

• Did a PVC figure of Starscream based on his appearance in the early Marvel Comics.

(7/25/2004)

I've got a nice, big batch of kitbashes that I just finished uploading today. Some of them are old projects that got a facelift, but a few of them are brand spanking new creations.

The first of these is a kitbash based on my fan character, Anthrax, who appears in my fanfic "Children of Cybertron." (And yes, before you ask, I'm still working on the story.) Now, I originally designed Anthrax about ten years ago, and didn't ever expect to be building a transforming toy in her likeness.  Despite the limitations inherent to the medium, though, I like to think I stayed pretty true to the original look:

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/anthrax_kitbash.html

Next up is a project I've hinted at here and there for over a year now, but only just recently got around to finishing. I took a Barbie doll and turned it into April O'Neil from TMNT, complete with tailor-made, screaming yellow jumpsuit:

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/april_o'neil_fashion_doll.html

I also did two new R2-D2 projects. I've always thought that it was really unfair that Luke and Leia and Han get new action figures for every single outfit they've ever worn, but the droids rarely get new toys, even after all the predicaments and situations that have changed their appearances pretty significantly. So, I give you R2-D2 (TIE Fighter Damage) from A New Hope, and R2-D2 (Endor Malfunction) from Return of the Jedi, complete with tools popping out every which way:

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/r2-d2_tie_fighter_damage_kitbash.html

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/r2-d2_endor_malfunction_kitbash.html

I also made some changes to the two Star Wars model kits I painted a few years ago, adding a new paint deco that goes a long way to making them look a little more authentic to the films:

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/c-3po_model_kit.html

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/r2-d2_model_kit.html

I also gave all my Phantom Menace astromech droids their own respective pages, but all the links are on the home page if you want to see them. (I do have my limits as far as how many completely off-topic links I feel I can reasonably share here.)

(6/6/2004)

It's been so damn hot lately for the past few days, I'm basically *forced* to spend all day dowstairs because it's almost bearable down there. And while I'm down there, I kitbash.

The first new project is something I've been planning for months, but given the subject matter, I'm sure there must have been some level of subconscious wish-fulfilment or something at work. This guy would have come in really handy over the weekend. It's Liquidator, the watery villain from Darkwing Duck who talks like a Junkion. He's made entirely out of Sculpey modeling compound and painted to resemble his animated appearance (yes, this is me taking the visuals far too literally again):

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/liquidator_sculpture.html

Or, if you're a robotic type and would rather stay away from large bodies of water if you can help it, how about taking a dip in a nice, refreshing pool of golden electrum? That's what Starscream did in "The Golden Lagoon," and I've come up with a physical likeness of the character to match. Once again, I decided to stick as close as possible to how the character appears in animation:

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/pvc_starscream_electrum_repain t.html

I've also started uploading new, non-crappy pictures of some of my old projects. I picked some of my favorites and did them first, but I'll be getting to the ones people specifically mentioned they wanted to see (like Galvatron and the Dinobots) soon. Well, soon-ish. Anyway, I took new pictures of my Aqua Teen Hunger Force sculptures (soon to appear on an upcoming ATHF DVD); my sculpture of the Typewriter Guy from Sesame Street; my LEGO Shredder figure; and my Micromaster version of Optimal Optimus:

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/athf_sculptures.html

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/typewriter_guy_kitbash.html

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/shredder_lego_kitbash.html

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/optimal_optimus_micromaster_kitbash.html

Well, that's it for this installment. If the weather continues like it's been, and we don't get our swamp cooler fixed soon, you can expect lots more projects on this order very, very shortly. :)

(5/18/2004)

I seem to once again have fallen into posting these updates in really huge chunks. I guess it's probably best this way, since otherwise I'd be inundating the group with all these little tiny update messages. Besides, I don't like messing around with FTP (FortuneCity has actually been remarkably good to me in this respect, but waiting for files to upload is still a pain), so I'd rather get it all done in one big batch.

I mentioned earlier that I'd gotten a couple of crazysteve's very excellent "Mockery of Life" sculptures, based on the Megatron-Ratchet fusion from U.S. #70. Well, I still haven't gotten around to painting mine, so I just uploaded the picture of the one I did for ViceGripX. There's also a special work of fan art on this page that may be of interest:

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/pvc_mockery_of_life_sculpture....

Also, I've been doing a few more repaints of the generic Decepticon jets. The first one is a third-season character Derik Smith discovered recently from "Five Faces of Darkness" part 1. He calls the character Deadbolt, which is a particularly appropriate name in light of his color scheme:

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/pvc_deadbolt_repaint.html

I also did the trio of generic Decepticon troopers who stopped Wheeljack and Bumblebee en route to Iacon from "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1. Now, this is the part that's probably going to offend people. The yellow guy you probably know as Sunstorm, well... I'm not calling him Sunstorm. (I'd already assigned a name and personality write-up to the character many months before Takara took notice of him and decided he was a supernatural being. I think that's a ridiculous idea, so I'm sticking with my own name and personality for the character.)

By the way, don't let the filename for Flamethower's page fool you. I included his flamethrower weapon, complete with feeder tube, detachable backpack, and hand-carved removable flame effect, so it's really more of a kitbash/custom job.

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/pvc_flamethrower_repaint.html

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/pvc_aftershock_repaint.html

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/pvc_heatwave_repaint.html

Finally, I did a couple of Darkwing Duck projects. I don't know if anybody here gives a flying feather about these, but I'll be dipped if I can find an appropriate forum to share them on, so I'm doing it here. (Besides, you guys have always been really receptive to my TMNT projects, so I figure I may as well push my luck.)

One of them is a representation of the original Negaduck, the result of Darkwing being split into his good and evil selves. He looks like a photographic negative, basically. I think his eyes are really spooky.

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/negaduck_repaint.html

The other you may have already seen, but I updated the page with new photographs and images. This is the *other* Negaduck, the one who's basically Darkwing's evil twin from an alternate universe. And he has a chainsaw now.

http://members.fortunecity.com/zobovor/negaduck_ii_repaint.html

(I've been going through my Darkwing Duck tapes again, and I'm discovering that there are a *lot* of incarnations of the character in different outfits and disguises and such that I'd completely forgotten about. I seriously doubt I'll ever get around to doing all of them, but a few of them are quite intriguing. Dark Warrior Duck from "Time and Punishment," for example. And I totally forgot that Negaduck had his own negaverse-equivalent of the Thunderquack jet. It almost makes me want to pick up another one off eBay and paint it. I'll probably do a Drake Mallard figure one of these days, too.)

That's it for the time being. I've got art projects I need to get done, but I wanted to spend a few hours squeezing out a site update before I got back to work. I did put a couple of new pictures of the kittens on the home page, if anybody's interested. (I've taken dozens of pictures of the little rascals, but I don't have the energy or patience right now to put together a gallery. I'll probably just keep sprinkling them on the home page for now.)

(4/10/04)

SPECIAL EVENTS:

• After much procrastination, hesitation, and general slacking off, the results from the ZMFTS Coloring Contest are now available online.  I've uploaded all the entries that I received, including the winner of the contest.

KITBASHES:

• I'm starting to add some projects to the site that I finished a while ago, but couldn't come up with photographs that were worth sharing.  The first of these was a silly little repaint I did a couple of years ago of a PVC Megatron figure, which is based on his Marvel Comics color scheme.
• Next up is a project that's a little less than a year old.  For our seventh marriage anniversary, I made my wife a Utah Jazz toy, made out of an Autobot Jazz reissue and some custom-designed stickers.
• Finally, a few months ago I finished my repaint of Alternators Smokescreen into more appropriate G1 colors.  (I was originally gonna sell it and make some money off it, but now I can't stand to part with the thing.)

(4/6/04)

Hey, I got my G1 Hoist and Dirge reissues from amazon.com today.  I've never owned a Dirge toy before.  He's delightfully Dirge-a-licious.  I could barely tear myself away from my new toys long enough to do an actual site update.  Just thank your lucky stars I didn't try to write reviews for them today.  (You know, I review nearly every toy I buy, but for some reason I never put the reviews on my web site.  I have no idea why.  Too much work, one supposes.  Maybe that needs to change.  Oh, look at Zob.  He gets one day off, and suddenly he thinks he's got free time on his hands.  That probably explains the new logo and site buttons.)

So, anyway.  I've been doing some painting and photographing.  Y'know, the new camera is great and everything, but putting together all the HTML pages is still a heck of a lot of work.  I could have painted two or three more of these little buggers in the time it took me to get all this stuff online.  Y'all had better appreciate it.

KITBASHES:

• I took a PVC Perceptor figure and rebuilt it into his microscope mode.  He's just painfully cute.
• I've also been painting more PVC figures into the many generic Decepticons from the G1 cartoon.  There's a lot of them, so I'll be doing this for a while.  Among the characters I've finished are Starcraft, Twilight, and Starlight (all from "More Than Meets the Eye" part 3); Blue Moon, Limelight and Goldwing (from "Divide and Conquer"); and Phantom and Slaughterhouse (from "Five Faces of Darkness" parts 3 and 4, respectively).

There's more on the way as I find time to take more pictures.  I'm enjoying taking these pictures, but I'm sure the updates will fizzle out once it starts to feel like a chore again.  Like Mr. Stylor Man said, enjoy it while you can.  

(4/2/04)

Hey, look.  Zob remembered that he's got a web site.

There have been lots of things going on lately.  Very few of them are relevant to the site, but I don't have a blog so I'm just going to have to talk about them here.  First off, I've been spending lots of time vacuuming and scrubbing and mopping (including an entire four-day weekend, which somehow ended up being devoted entirely to housecleaning) in order to get the house ready for the landlord's annual inspection.  (A week after the inspection, we had ourselves a nice 78 MPH wind storm that literally tore the shingles off our roof.  Go figure.)  The good news is that we passed with flying colors, which means that the kids can now officially resume spilling Hi-C all over the carpet and the cats may begin to once again barf on the rugs with abandon.

Speaking of cats, Flea-Byte (the mother of the feral tabby cat family mentioned here earlier) had another litter of kittens on March 24th.  This was not expected.  I began to suspect she might be pregnant roughly five minutes before the baby cats started popping out.  Color me dim, I guess.  (In retrospect, I should have realized that the reason she's been gnawing all the fur off her belly was to make her nipples more easily accessible.  Hey, I've never owned a long-haired cat before, so I had no idea they did stuff like this.)  Also, just  tonight, Mystery (one of the formerly-feral tabby cats we're attempting to domesticate) also had a litter of kittens.  This was expected, due mainly to the way she's been crawling into Flea-Byte's maternity box for the past few days and trying to nurse Flea's kittens.  Now that Mystery's kittens are born, the kittens appear to see the two moms as pretty much interchangeable.  I've read some things about kittens getting confused over stuff like this, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.

See, this is the sort of thing I deal with now.  My life was a lot less busy before I had cats.  Of course, it was also a lot more empty.  So, there you go.

Oh, yeah.  Web site.  Okay, well, there are some kitbashes and repaints on the way.  I actually got a digital camera, one that's pretty damn expensive by my standards.  I'm such a hypocrite.  I've always said that this web site was just a simple hobby, and that I would never go out and spend money on things like a camera or dedicated web server.  Well, I guess I can rationalize this by saying that I'll also use it to take pictures of the kids and the cats.  It's a fantastic little piece of technology, it really is.  Of course, now I've got to go and replace the sixty thousand grainy images on the site.  (Don't expect me to do it all at once.  This will take some time.)

I'm sure I had more to say, but my fingers grow heavy and it's becoming harder to strike the right keys.  I hate working such long hours.  There's almost no time left to be a human being.  I used to console myself by reminding myself that at least I'm making lots of money, but I barely have time to enjoy the things I buy.  Obviously, the solution is to quit my job, go back to being poor, and spend all day kitbashing.  (Yeah, I know.  April Fool's Day was yesterday.)

(1/13/04)

No update for the new year.  This is the first job I've worked where my hours haven't immediately been chopped in half right after Christmas.  Good news for me, obviously (it's nice to still have money to buy toys with), but not-so-good news for the ZSNTS (Zobovor's Sadly-Neglected Transformers Site).  There are still assorted kitbashes and fanfics and things that I've been tinkering with here and there, but watching movies with the wife and playing GameCube with the kids and domesticating the feral cats will always come first.

I'm waiting to hear from TM2 Galvatron, the winner of the coloring contest.  Please contact me by the end of January or forfeit your prize to the runner-up.