Slump

Things just aren't going according to plan at the moment. I'd hoped that a couple of days in an office would break me out of the lull I've been in but either it's such a deep lull I haven't noticed the difference, or it just didn't work.

I've not been keeping up with any of my online works, and have barely touched any of my art or writing projects offline. I've barely been doing anything, really. Huge waste.

I took advantage of a Toys'R'Us voucher offering 20% off any purchase over the recent bank holiday weekend, and picked up the newly-released TransFormers Masterpiece Rodimus Prime, with it's additional (larger, openable) Matrix of Leadership and so-called 'limited edition' TargetMaster Offshoot and, frankly, I feel cheated, even having paid only £48, rather than the full £60. The main model is what I would call 'overengineered': in an attempt to get the robot looking as much like the 1986 animated movie model, much of it is basically panels that fold in or out during transformation. The upshot of this is that the original Japanese release was... flawed. The Hasbro version is re-engineered to fix some of these flaws, but the end result is still a mass of panels. They just clip together a bit more securely now.

The paint job is rubbish, too... virtually none of the scant molded detail is picked out with paintwork - the rear lights are bare plastic, his wrists are bare plastic... virtually everything is bare plastic... And what little paintwork exists is minimal compared to the Japanese version. It's basically toy accurate, rather than cartoon accurate... which is a very strange decision for Hasbro to have made.

Offshoot fell apart about 10 minutes after I took him out of the box. The piece that connects his gun barrels to his torso looks like it's screwed in place at one point, and should clip in elsewhere. Upon closer examination, it seems that connecting piece on mine is warped (so the clip doesn't reach far enough) and that the screw makes no connection with it at all... so I'm at a loss to explain what function it serves in the model.

This last weekend, I popped over to Uxbridge with a friend to see Cowboys & Aliens... which was about as good as I was expecting (which is to say, not very). For aliens that "don't see well in daylight", they were rather ruthlessly efficient when they needed to be. It was very well played by Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, while Olivia Wilde had very little to do for the most part... It seemed to suggest that Native American mysticism and aliens went hand-in-hand, but didn't really develop that concept, and the end was very disappointing. Still, I didn't actually pay for the ticket - using my Odeon card for the first time to actually buy something - so I didn't really lose anything by it.

There are so many things I want to be doing, and should be doing, but my mind isn't on any of them. I've even got a way to generate some (small, probably) income, but I can't seem to motivate myself to get on with that. Silly, really... Then again, I've always known I'm my own worst enemy...