Once again, you can find me this weekend at Mid-Ohio Con!  I'm going to be somewhere in the Columbus Convention Center on Saturday and Sunday.  It's weird having a convention that's just a few miles downtown.  I swear, I'm gonna leave the convention hall late Saturday and be confused when I step outside and it's not Hartford or Seattle out there.  I will approach the first local I see and ask what a good local joint is, and they will respond "Donatos Pizza."  And there will be this great tumult in my brain.

Tomorrow morning Maggie and I are driving back to Indiana for my grandfather's funeral, and will be returning Thursday afternoon, hopefully in time for Maggie's mom to arrive, for she is visiting!  It is a busy week for us, apparently.   We may or may not still have one hamster left when we return.  Gnngh.

Today I watched the new DC animated direct-to-video thing, Batman: Year One.  Since I've read the comic itself enough times, and this cartoon adaptation was extremely faithful, I was actually pretty damn bored with it.  That story needs a beginning, middle, and an end, am I right?  Bryan Cranston was excellent as James Gordon, but I feel like he was starring in a calendar, not a movie.  But, tell you what, if you like your Frank Millerspeak, this is the movie for you.  And I know some of you do, so that's not intended to be an indictment.  Plus it's very beautifully animated.

Thankfully, Arkham City is here to pick up any batslack.

This here is Fractyl!  His only real toy was from BotCon 1997, the year before I started attending them, so I've never owned a Fractyl.  Now I own a fake Fractyl!  He's the last 3H Wreckers guy I intend to make.  I'm technically missing the Alpha Trion repaint of Beast Machines Snarl, but if I'm gonna waste time and money painting something, I kind of want to direct that effort towards a character appearance that actually has a character appearance.  No, the one blurry two-panel fly-by silhouette doesn't count.

I like Fractyl.  He's a scientist.  He's a nice scientist.  The Botcon 1997 toy theme seemed to be "sympathetic bad guy and a jerky good guy."  Y'know, to mix stuff up a little.  And so he's this awkward antisocial creature who just wants to study some rocks, dammit.  Stop shoving him into his locker, Inferno!  Oh, what a geek.

And the Transmetal toy that they never made would have been beautiful.  Too bad.  My attempt at recreating it kind of sidestepped some of the beauty.  I wasn't able to find the proper greens.  My Fractyl is a reasonable approximation, but it falls short of the ideal.

Yay, Fractyl.

Boo, funerals.

So I've been sitting on this extra Club Nightbeat for a few years, meaning to eventually kitbash it into Shattered Glass Nightbeat.  What's kept me from doing it for so long is that there was paint removal required, and after removing paint from Obsidian to make Rotorbolt, I felt confident in the procedure.

After all, the most important thing to remove is the tampos, right?  Those came right off Obsidian, no probs!  Like wiping spilled soup off the table.  If the normal paint doesn't come off, that's fine, since SG Nightbeat just needs to paint over everything with black.  It's just the flames on the doors that have to go before I can start painting him.

So I throw Nightbeat into a vat of alcohol.  It took Obsidian about 24 hours before anything began to fall off of him.  But 12 hours later, all of Nightbeat's paint is wiping off.  And, grargh, you guessed it, his flames remained.  Well, okay.  I took most of Nightbeat out, kept the doors in the alcohol and... it's been three days, I think, and I'm still trying to get rid of those stupid flames.  I have a brush and I have some paper towels, but the only tool that's making headway is my own fingernail.

It's quite infuriating.

Oh and apparently the alcohol made his translucent knee-roofs brittle and they broke.  But that is absolutely fine.  Really, it is.  As you can imagine with an owner of a Hot Shot Shrine, I have an extra Energon Hot Shot or two.  I'll just repaint and swap out those translucent pieces, no big.

Still.  Grrarghghglglgglllghrg.

Yay, it's Rotorbolt!  You might be thinking, meh, why should I care about Rotorbolt?  Well, let me tell you.

The premise of the Beast Wars was that there were two camps of Transformers stranded on prehistoric Earth, the Maximals and the Predacons.  But the thing is, the Predacons seen on the show weren't your normal everyday Predacons.  They were criminal outcast Predacons, even among their own kind.  So you really got the impression from the cartoon that all Predacons were all scheming thugs, even if they're not.  Also, that they transform into animals by default.

Enter Rotorbolt.  He's just a normal Predacon!  He's not a criminal or a thug or a warlord or a mad scientist.  He's just a Predacon.  And, as fate would permit,  he's one of the handful of Cybertronians that escaped Megatron's virus.  So he gets to hang around with the Wreckers.  He's got a problem, though, you see.  He's hung up on his reputation that he's stealthy.  And he is!  His rotors are as quiet as a sigh... in vehicle mode.  In robot mode, however, you can't even hear him talking (constantly, about how stealthy he is) over the roar of his rotors.  Why the decibel change?  I don't know, and I don't care.  It's just endearing.

And of course since Rotorbolt was never in the Beast Wars, he doesn't have a beast mode.  He's just a helicopter.

The original plan way way back was that Rotorbolt was gonna be made from the show-accurate Beast Machines Deluxe Class Obsidian.  However, that toy never got close to completion before the line fizzled out, so we're stuck with him being the original slightly-less-show-accurate Basic Class Obsidian.  Later, Obsidian was redecoed for the Universe line in indigo and brown with red rotors, which was veerrrrry close to Rotorbolt's colors.  Close enough that people used Universe Obsidian for their Rotorbolt, anyway, and certainly close enough that it guaranteed a real Rotorbolt would never be made.  Why would you pay buttloads of convention-exclusive cash for something that's 30% different from what you can buy in stores?

So this is my Rotorbolt.  I started with a Universe Obsidian, of course, expecting that I'd just strip the "energon surge" deco from him, paint his brown purple, and be done.  Ha ha ha ha ha no.  Stripping the paint took about 36 hours of soaking the toy in alcohol.  And even then I had to sort of sand what was left away.  Finally, I started painting the guy's legs, but it was then I realized that, wow, U-Obsidian is waaaayyy bluer than I thought he was.  It's hard to tell when he's got silver-and-purple energon surge deco all over his torso, but with that gone, and his legs painted a more vibrant purple, it's way more obvious that the guy's just dark blue.

And so, after having spent 36 hours stripping paint deco from him, I ended up just painting over all that anyway.  Rats.

I'm less satisfied with him than with Devcon.  Devcon's paint application is pretty even, but Rotorbolt looks kind of sloppy to me.  Plus those legs of his just do not want to keep their paint.  And, yikes, a good portion of the front of Rotorbolt's torso is just gearing for his transformation, and painting gearing is just kind of a no-no but it's right in front and a not-small area, so you kind of have to do it.

This is what I was gonna do with that extra Beast Machines Mirage I wanted.  I ordered one off eBay shortly after getting home from Sunday's toy convention, and I realized the next day that, hey, I could proooobably paint the one I have while I wait for the new one to get here.  Plus, well, the roommate who owns the table is getting her own place tomorrow, so it might be a good idea to get him done before then.

So here he is!  Devcon!  Renowned Autobot bounty hunter, temporarily inhabiting a Vehicon body.  I'm going to say an unpopular thing and say that I liked Wreckers Devcon.  Yeah, he was a jerk, and people say he wasn't that jerky in his original cartoon appearances, but if I have to choose between watching The Gambler or reading the 3H Wreckers comic books, I'm gonna choose the latter every time.  The Gambler is a terrible episode.  Terrible.  If I had to live through that episode, like Devcon did, I'd be kind of a jerk, too.  (And I am.)

And, frankly, the common wisdom that Devcon wasn't as big a jerk in The Gambler versus Wreckers is a bit overinflated.  That episode's so uneven, and original Devcon is indeed a  jerk at moments while he's nicer in a sparingly few other moments.  Watch as much as you can stand some time, and you'll see what I mean.

I am not a good painter.  In fact, I'm a terrible painter.  But sometimes I luck out.  I think I lucked out as much as I'm able to with Devcon.  He looks pretty okay!  And he's all the right colors, as far as I can discern.  I tell you, the red was a bitch, since it goes over black plastic.  I put a coat of, ahem, silver Sharpie marker on the legs first before painting red over them.  There was kind of a weird chemical reaction in places between the two kinds of coloring, but after going over the bad parts a few times, I was able to get a good smooth, bright red on the black plastic without having to put like fifty layers over everything and burying too much detail.

The ball joints are silver Sharpie, too, though the attached limbs are the proper light gray paint color.  Silver Sharpie coats pretty thinly and fuses almost immediately to the plastic, so I figgered it'd withstand wear and tear better.  And without painting the balljoints, they're kind of obviously Mirage's yellow.  I'd hate to look at the thing.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the results.  And now he can go in my Wreckers display.

[gallery]

So, like, I already knew this Bill Spencer guy was awesome because once upon a time he custom-built models of Nightbeat and Hot Shot's car modes. So he was definitely on my rader. (He also likes Batmobiles!)

But he showed up to New England Webcomics Weekend (NEWW) today with probably the best thing ever. He made me a Gardening Batman out of the old Kenner New Batman Adventures figure. It has a hat and a shovel and a potted plant. The whole damn thing is repainted, too, because that's just how hardcore he is.

Seriously. Like, holy crap. And I got so many friggin' compliments on him today. He is a hit. I have to, like, build a shrine to this thing or something. Dude.

I have dozens of other photos from Saturday to show you, but I want to make sure I give proper attention to this first.  I'll try to get those other photos up tomorrow if I can.  Lots of great commissions!

You know how you can never find what you're looking for, instead finding other things you weren't looking for?  That's what happened with my old half-finished Dr. Biggles-Jones kitbash.  I tried to find her, no deal.  Months later, I'm digging around in the attic for something else, and, hey, here she is!  Well.  NOW WHERE'S FRIGGIN' LASERBEAK THAT'S WHY I'M HERE.

Long story short, I'm finally trying on the white ROC Cobra Commander labcoat.  It's pretty big on her!  I'm probably going to have to add "Dremel down the shoulders" to my list of things that she needs to be complete, along with "probably repaint entirely" and "finally get the Scarlett torso to accept the Lady Jaye arms."  And *cross fingers* find a paint that matches her skintone so I can paint over her gloves.

Meanwhile, Cobra Commander looks like a friggin' evil butler.