The Video is Complete! Behold FROGSTAR!

We finished it.

Our first music video, for the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets' music video contest. I've got a good feeling about our chances. At long last you can see what we've been slaving over, and see me as the terror from space.

The Kids Are Losing Their Minds... the BlitzWING Bop!

My 9th official Transformers prose tale, Blitzwing Bop, is now up in the members-only area of the Official Transformers Collector's Club. It's a Shattered Glass "mirrorverse" tale done in the style of the old 80s cartoon. My Co-Writer, Greg Sepelak, and I put in a lot of hard work on it.

Since Blitzwing Bop is members-only, you'll have to join the club to read it (and you should!). If you want to read some of my other TF fiction, however, the New World and Force of Habit are both available for free.

Check it Out.
-Trent

Flea Market Adventures

This saturday, Travis and I went to the flea market, as we often do. Once upon a time, the core of my Transformer collecting was the flea market. Around 1996, when I started collecting again, the line was lucky to produce 26 figures in a given year (for reference, the first wave of figures for a given line now approaches those numbers. Thankfully, I'm not a completist). And there was a lot of older material to pull together. So the flea market was a great place to go for TFs. It was also before a lot of nostalgia collecting hit hard, so figures could be found relatively cheap, and I had the sort of time on my hands where I didn't mind buying six figures in crappy shape to combine the good parts off them into one, good condition figure.

Now, the flea markets are primarily a source of raw material for the Pete Promethius film production. I buy a lot of helmets and nerf guns and broken electronics that wind up being costume parts, ray pistols and control panels for an imaginary spaceship.

Well, this weekend I had one of the better 'classic' Flea Market runs, wherein I go and I find stuff that I like for a great price. In this case, I found what amounts to about five sets of Heroscape, for four dollars. For the whole set.

All this in addition to three new nerf guns to make into ray pistols. A good haul indeed.

And now, to counterpoint that rather dull brag at my ability to find nerd-supplies on the cheap, I give you a routine by Dara O'briain:

It's beginning to look a lot like Trent-mas...

Greg arrived in town yesterday, and we're geared up and ready to embark on a quest... A quest to find the true meaning of Trentmas, and to put an end to Snarflawq, the dragon of vaguely-defined despair.

The second element of this quest is made more difficult of late, however. Since Obama's election, Snarflawq has taken up residence at Fox News Headquarters, as it is now all all-you-can-eat buffet of vaguely-defined despair for him. Also, its well known that Snarflawq supports tax cuts for the rich and gay marriage.

Now, long trips are always a point of panic at their earliest stages. Everything must be gathered up, checked, doublechecked and then stowed in some fashion that makes it able to be located. And if you forget it, its miles away by the time you remember. As someone who operates poorly with this human 'memory' thing, the essence of panic is tangible. I think I've got everything packed away and ready to go.

For those who are keeping tabs, today is the first day of Trentmas. As such, its time for you all to set up the wreath of regrets, in Trentmas tradition. For those of you waging the War on Trentmas (and I think you know I know you know who you are), a wreath of regrets is a wire hoop that you fasten your regrets to (in the form of notes scribbled on grocery store receipts you saved for Science-knows what reason). Throughout Trentmas, as regrets come to you, banish them to the wreath. At the end of the holiday, the wreath is burned or fed through a woodchipper to be used as pet-cage liner.

This symbolic act has a noticable placebo effect and will keep you regret free the whole year long.*

Today's Trentmas Carols are Livin' in a Box, the dirge of Keyboard Cat, and Bananaphone.

Well, its that time. I'm gathering up my +2 sword of stabbing and we're going after the dragon that's trying to eat Trentmas. Merry Trentmas to all, and to all a robot-filled night!

-Trent

*This blog post does not consitute medical advice. 'Year' as expressed may refer to a literal year or one of the following: cat years, dog years, horse years, mouse years, tapir years, fruit-fly years or capybara years. By reading this blog you have surrendered your right to sue in favor of arbitration. All aribtration will be delivered through an angry bear. Offer void in Wisconsin.

Spore or Less

Everytime I want to post about Spore, the temptation to do a bad pun for the post title is too much and I back down. But not this time.

I won't go into a big time review of Spore. Its simplistic in some ways, but is really fun in others. I've started a 80's Nostalgia Sporecast, which should surprise all of nobody. Its big, but it still needs expanding. He-Man has helped, what with the swarm of monsters and vehicles, but there's still more to do. Some stuff, the Popples, the Carebears, the Gremlins, I'm holding out on until the Creepy and Cute parts pack hits, but other stuff is just dependent on me getting around to it. I'm debating whether I want to go with Thundercats or MASK for my next big update push. The goal is that, eventually you could theme a game after my Sporecast and encounter nothing but a hallucinatory swarm of mis-matched 1980s cartoon strangeness.

In the meantime, look upon my works, ye normal, and despair:

A minor thought.

I promise to fall in love with the girl that sings to me the way Natalie Merchant sings.

There is a 70% chance of similar results when one substitutes Stevie Nicks for Natalie Merchant.

EXCALIBUR!

At long last I have found it... The perfect blue-line pencil!

I like sketching in blue-line. Its easy to drop out during scanning and you don't notice the pencil lines as much so there's no ink/pencil confusion during the inking process. But the problem is that most blue pencils are terrible.

Prismacolor makes almost all of them. Oh, they work, in that they are blue and they are pencils, but the leads are, for lack of a better term, greasy. They're soft, lay on thick, smear easy, and worse: they repel water, and thus, ink. So you go through the process of inking something, but the ink doesn't stick. It fades when you go in to erase something or it just beads up.

I found a better blue-line pencil, though it took buying one each of all the blue line pencils offered by an online art supply store (it wasn't that extravagant, they cost about 50 cents each and there were only three varieties). Of the three pencils I obtained:

Pencil 1 is a Prismacolor Verithin 761 1/2 Non-Photo Blue/Bleu Inactinique. Same old story. Greasy, thick, soft as my midsection. Practically worthless!

Pencil 2 is a Prismacolor Copy-Not 1298 Non-Photo Blue. Getting warmer... this is an actual hard-lead blue-line pencil! The telltale sign is that this pencil has a real eraser on the end... one of the crappy pink ones. This pencil was made for architects rather than artistes (in my experience the architects get all the coolest supplies). On normal paper, this thing would rock. Sadly, I don't use normal paper for most of my sketching. I've fallen in love with a #234 Paris Bleedproof pad from Borden & Riley... the pages are like velvet and ink doesn't bleed on them, at all... but our Copy-Not's lead is too hard to leave much of a mark at all on the almost tractionless surface of the page...

Pencil 3 is our winner. It is a Staedtler Non-Photo-Blue 108 30 / 0 31901 10551 8. First off, its from Austria... which means it was made with that sort of Schwartzineggerian Knockoff of German efficiency. Its sales barcode is printed right onto the pencil in negative space between white lines for Genius' sake! No crappy sticker wrapped around the haft for this pencil! Moreover, the lead is the perfect balance of tone and hardness. No greasiness, not to light, not too dark and the line quality is beautiful.

All hail the new king of blue pencils!

As an aside, I've been considering posting art to the blog. Would anybody want to see that?

New Text Story Online

Members of The Official Transformers Collector's Club can now read I, Lowtech, the latest TF story from myself and Greg Sepelak, in the members portion of the website. Here's the official Blurb:

The Official Transformers Collectors Club is excited to present the final installment from its trilogy of TransTech illustrated short stories by Greg Sepelak and S.Trent Troop. Noted Transformers comic artist Nick Roche illustrates this members-only tale with colors by Winston Bolen. I, Lowtech is the third text story set in the teeming TransTech Metropolis known as Axiom Nexus and serves as a follow-up to the previous two stories: Gone Too Far and Withered Hope. I, Lowtech also offers a glimpse into the final hours of the current Transcendent storyline which concludes this November.

Something horrible has happened in the depths of Axiom Nexus. Bulletbike, a member of the TransTech elite, has had his life stolen from him. His fevered climb to regain his position will take him from the lowest of the Offworld Zones to the heights of TransTech society amid mystery, madness and murder. You will see the rise and fall through his optics as his one-Transformer struggle against his faceless enemy brings him into contact with beggars, thieves, smugglers and a seemingly unstoppable killer.

All this and three, count them, three Swindles!

---

Hyperlinks have been added for the Transformers impaired.

The Dungeons and Dragons in my Garage

The 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons just came out. It looks like a good system and has a lot of unique and interesting elements to it. Eventually, I'll review it. That, however, will require playing it and since I haven't got a group together, I'll have to settle for a more generalized examination of D&D as it pertains to my own life.

My parents weren't the most objecting parents around on average, but they had their things they didn't like. Mom rejected G.I.Joe as a pro-war cartoon avatar of the military industrial complex and forbade He-Man for its 'occultism' and, I expect, for its rampant commercialism. I recall several times when dad would throw what can only be described as a 'fit' over the costumes of female comic book characters. Still, I had my childhood obsessions: Star Wars, dinosaurs, Transformers, the X-Men and the various 8-bit heroes of the NES... because seriously, the Genesis? Every kid in the neighborhood with a Genesis was a dick. Don't ask me to explain it, that's just how I recall things.

But there was one thing that terrified them both. And that was Dungeons and Dragons.

Mom had an easy excuse... her church said it was of the devil (literally) and at the time she didn't question that sort of thing (she's gotten better.) Dad claimed that they both knew people who had 'taken it too far', but neither of them, when pressed, could sum up details or even names. The latter claim was rather scurrilous, given that I was born in the same year as D&D, and the supposed friends were typically 'from college' in the stories... which would date them before my birth and thus, before the invention of the game they took too far.

All this from parents who informed me, quite matter-of-factly, that the Easter Bunny and Santa were imaginary, but that I shouldn't tell my cousins because it would ruin it for them. Go figure. Like all kids with overzealous religious parenting, I was surrounded by wonderful ironies. Santa, the Easter Bunny and leprechauns (which I found more compelling than the other two put together, for some reason) were stupid fairy-tales... but Jesus, the devil, the angels and demons were all real (if you asked mom. Dad, who didn't buy into any of it outside of a Jeffersonian deist perspective, avoided such talk to avoid hacking off mom.) D&D and He-Man were evil, but Thundercats, the Hobbit and Greek Myth got a pass.

Oh yeah, Gary Gygax was peddling 'taken from real magic', soul-damning, demon-summoning, satan-worshipping darkness and that wouldn't be in the house. Of course, that didn't stop me. It made it all the more tantalizing. Anything I was explicitly denied I sneaked, and I was involved in D&D and other roleplaying games since Middle School. Heck, we even played a second edition campaign on the bus on a church field trip. We got caught, the stuff got confiscated, and the other kids, after getting the 'demon talk' wouldn't resume play, but we did it. I got the lowdown on episodes of the D&D cartoon and He-Man that I couldn't sneak from my friends at school. And I had a stash of roleplaying games as a young teen that I hid with more cunning than my collection of skin mags and racy catalogs.

After awhile, D&D became a point of natural rebellion for me. On my last church-based trip (a trip to Russia I undertook because it was a good opportunity, long after I had learned to become a 'stealth atheist' and before I shifted to 'militant agnostic') I toted around a D&D novel, for which I was proclaimed, by my fellow travelers, 'ballsy'. Eventually, I won my youthful rebellion, by no fault of my own. Mom's church, a nationally-recognized-as-a-cult assemblage called the World Wide Church of God, fell upon itself when the founder's incest, embezzlement and general malevolencies came to light. The D&D players were still standing and the paranoid, apocalypse-loving cross wavers were KO'ed.

The ultimate irony is that role-playing has benefited me greatly. My first published bit of writing was for Dragon Magazine, Octavirate draws in decent sales on our old 3.0/3.5 d20 gaming library, and I'm gearing up to write some new 4th edition stuff. The irony is furthered by more upcoming projects pertaining to other forbidden elements of childhood. I'm going to break down and review D&D 4th edition but the lesson of this article is clear:

The things I was most forbidden as a child have become what I am doing for fun and profit as an adult. Parents, let your kids play D&D and forbid them from experimenting with Pulitzer-prize winning journalism and best-selling adult fiction. That's the kind of rebellion that pays well.