A Recommendation and a Question

I'm not generally inclined to make direct recommendations here - links over on the side are as much for my own convenience as to suggest further reading to visitors - but I recently had a video from the YouTube channel Valaverse pop up in my feed, and found it quite fascinating. It seems as though the guy behind the channel is a former Hasbro toy designer who - along the same lines as the folks from Boss Fight Studios - decided to take a big risk and go it alone. Rather than create a wholly unique action figure toyline (and then let it stagnate, its most interesting concepts left unexplored, while churning out licensed products left, right and centre) he purchased the license to 'Action Force' (which is what the smaller GI Joe toys were originally called in the UK, being a spin-off of the larger format 'Action Man') and produce his own characters, costumes and accessories for that.

So, I did a thing...

I've mentioned before that Thew Adams is one of the few TransFormers YouTubers I can bear to watch, because of his (normally) quickfire reviews, canny avoidance of the frequently painful step-by-step demonstration of transformation and, perhaps most important, the plethora of puns and percipient portmanteaus that are as much his stock-in-trade as his enthusiasm for shape-shifting plastic robot toys. During one of his recent videos, he mentioned that his G1 Outback was knackered... and, since my iGear Mini Warriors Bushwhacker had been up on eBay for a while, I figured I could do worse than cancelling the listing and 'donating' it to Thew.

So imagine my delight, when tuning in to his latest "Dammit, Open!", I see that very figure unboxed on-screen - the very first item in the video.

And imagine my surprise when he actually seems to like it...

Seriously, though, I'm glad Bushwhacker has found an appreciative home... Though, honestly, seeing it smashed on a Knockoff Beatdown would, I think, be quite cathartic. I almost wish I'd sent him my decaptitated Leonidas now.

A Valuable PSA

But not from me this time. While I'd imagine anyone making their way to my little blog will already be aware of YouTube and the myriad TFTubers operating therein, I feel it's worth drawing special attention to this very timely video from The Lazy Eyebrow.

I've only bought a handful of figures from the War for Cybertron series, and have been lucky to find only minor QC issues thusfar, but I'm genuinely shocked by the shoddiness of some of the figures I didn't buy. On the one hand, this video makes me feel glad I didn't waste my money on them but, on the other hand, it's a seriously shitty legacy for John Warden.

#tfytchomework RE: 3P, KO... When did it all become the same thing?

OK, I honestly didn't expect over a month to pass in between updates here, especially since that last post was completed quite some time before it went live, and I've had another draft in progress since before then... I'm having trouble with blogging generally, but today I found the opportunity to try something a bit different.

One of the things I quite like about YouTube is that, while it prioritises the channels I've subscribed to, the parameters for its recommendations are accurate enough to pick up on other material that I might actually be interested in, and one such video was this one from smsno1. It's a valid question, and there's at least one part in there that's worthy of deep consideration.

I know the point of these things is to provide a YouTube response video, but I'm still very much of the mind that I don't want to be a YouTuber, so this 'ere blog post will have to suffice...

The Question of Video

I think I've made enough disparaging comments about the phenomenon of 'Video Reviews' on YouTube to be fairly sure that I'm not going to go that route myself, but this little blog has occasionally featured video snippets, normally to illustrate the irritating sound effects given to some G1 TransFormers or, more recently, to demonstrate some of Trypticon's features.

While Blogger allows video to be embedded, I've found several times that my browser of choice will display them for a while, then suddenly - and with neither warning nor explanation - replace them with empty white boxes. I believe this may be the browser arbitrarily deciding that the extensions required to play the video are somehow 'insecure' and in need of update. Which is very tedious.

So, to counter this, I've decided to replace the embedded videos with YouTube videos, which seem to work nicely (and display larger by default). I've only done Trypticon so far, but will get to the Shackwave and G1 Galvatron posts as soon as I can.

This may then encourage me to include video clips in other posts, if they seem appropriate...

The YouTube Question

A bit of a random post today, on the subject of YouTube video reviews of TransFormers toys.

By and large, I find them irritating beyond my ability to adequately express. There's something utterly redundant about watching someone repeatedly fail to keep a toy in frame while discussing its merits and weaknesses, and narrating their unedited, often clumsy attempts to transform it with such helpful phrases as "and then you wanna get in here and do this" while their hands are actually in the frickin' way. On the rare occasion I've forced myself to watch a video review - generally because I'm not clear on a feature after looking over all the photos I can find - it feels as though I've wasted about twenty minutes of my life voluntarily participating in a faltering experiment in psychological torture.