ZMFTS Update Log (2009) I'm always making little changes here and there that won't merit a mention in the updates log, but just about 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 current links! 10.20.2009 Welcome to the ZMFTS! relaunch, which neatly coincides with the site's tenth anniversary.  Have a slice of cake—it's raspberry flavored.  For those of you who don't know, large chunks of my site (including the all-important index page) were on AOL, which was completely trouble-free for a decade until they up and decided to terminate their web hosting service.  This left me with a slightly neutered version of the site and thousands of sub-pages that pointed to a home page that no longer existed.  This obviously required extensive work to fix, which also gave me an opportunity to clean up some of the older sub-pages, many of which still had formatting that was ten years old. The old ZMFTS! was too big.  It consisted of well over 3000 individual files and that's a lot to keep track of, particularly since—unlike a lot of the other sites run by Big Name Fans—I don't have a team of people updating the site and checking the HTML coding for bugs.  It's just lil' ol' me.  So, I've effected a content reduction, making us slightly less multi-faceted.  Ten years ago, I didn't really know exactly what I wanted the site to be.  I just knew that I liked Transformers and I had a lot of ideas and knowledge I wanted to share.  See, back in the day, there were a lot of projects that made a lot of sense.  There was no encyclopedia-style reference available for Transformers, for example, so I slowly began the task of putting one together myself.  Today, there's a very good (and very snarky) wiki site that duplicates nearly everything I was attempting to do, so there's no real reason to continue working on my version.  (It's not nearly complete yet, but I think they can get there okay without my help.  Now they just need to quit swiping content from my site.)  Along the same lines, back in 1999 there was content I wanted to make available, like my research on voice actors and points of interest from the G1 cartoon and recordings of the electronic toys that you couldn't find anywhere else.  Today, there's the Internet Movie Database (whose Transformers voice actors section is largely based on my own research) and YouTube to provide such things.  Also, every single original Transformers episode is widely available on DVD, which means, in a lot of ways, my vast knowledge of trivia about the show has gone from extremely useful to largely obsolete.  (Which maybe is for the best, since nobody comes to ATT looking for answers anyway.)  It's interesting how things can change, but I choose not to dwell on it too much. I'm also streamlining the site because there are all these little things that don't seem as important as they used to be.  I believe in a certain economy of design and the site had just gotten too cluttered.  Webrings were a great way of promoting other fan sites when there were only a few hundred of them in existence, but with the advent of  modern search engines it hardly seems necessary now.  I also got rid of my links page for pretty much the same reasons (and because it was a pain to keep current).  The guestbook was fun for a while, but it got abused too much.  I also used to maintain online copies of all my toy reviews and essays and things, but since these were originally posted to alt.toys.transformers, they're all still available in the Google newsgroup archive, when it chooses to cooperate.  (Besides, people only read toy reviews when they're topical—when the stuff is actually in stores.  Who in their right mind is going to hunt down a toy review I wrote in 2002?) So, going forward, the ZMFTS! will be less of a data archive and more of a home for original content.  There are so many web sites out there that just serve to duplicate or document the official Transformers content out there that this seemed like a natural direction in which to go.  This will also enable me to redirect my focus on the fan activities that are most important to me—kitbashes and fan fiction.  There have been lots of features on the site that came and went, but these are the ones I keep coming back to—what I've consistently been doing over the past ten years.  Creating stuff.  Making new stuff.  Adding to the Universe instead of merely talking about it.  That's what I like.  (Well, and bloopers, because of my inherent superiority complex and proving that I know better than anybody else.) kitbashes I've known for a while that I had 350+ completed toy projects listed on this site, but it's difficult to accurately gauge that when I'm constantly adding new ones.  Something I've been thinking about doing for a while is tallying them up and assigning chronological numbers to each project (so that my cartoon repaint of Kup, to name a random example, is officially project #148).  I did fudge the numbers in a few places because there are completed projects that I never added to the site, and they deserved their own numbers—but there are also multiple toys that got squished together into one project (like the CybCon exclusives) so I think it all approximately balances out in the end.  More or less. Anyway, there are currently a grand total of 441 completed projects!  Wow!  I'm astounded.  Over the ten-year lifetime of the ZMFTS, this averages out to about one new project every eight days.  That ain't a bad production rate for a one-man operation, if I do say so myself.  As long as I was updating the links, I wanted to take the opportunity to fix the page formatting so that it shows up properly on different screen resolutions.  (I got a new widescreen computer monitor earlier this year, and suddenly all the stuff I designed for 800 x 600 looked really lousy at 1024 x 768.)  To prepare them for the relaunch, then, required me to redo the coding by hand and FTP the new pages for all but the most recent projects, one at a time.  You're welcome.  There are still a few images I need to redo (which means a handful of links are broken), and I am aware of these—but let's work on one major upheaval at a time, okay? bloopers I've expanded my bloopers guide to incorporate my second-favorite animated series, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.  I've reviewed the first sixteen episodes of the show so far, comprising the entire first and second television series, with plans to hit them all eventually.  They are not online yet, but they will be soon.  Oh, don't worry—I haven't given up on Transformers completely.  Believe it or not, most of my G1 bloopers research was completed back in 1994 and logged by hand in a little spiral notebook.  To actually prepare it for online viewing requires me transcribing my old notes and grabbing relevant screen shots from each episode, so it does take time to do.  Also, I was at a point a few years ago where every time I posted a new set of bloopers, people lambasted me for making fun of Transformers instead of being a fan.  (To me, the two are not mutually exclusive.)  Most of my detractors seem to have moved on to bigger and better things (like making fun of Transformers themselves, interestingly enough), so I'm at a point where I feel comfortable resuming my bloopers guide again.  I have not updated the formatting to my bloopers pages yet, but the Transformers: the Movie page will serve as a template for what they will eventually look like.  As I said, one project at a time. fan fiction "Children of Cybertron" Book Six is finished!  This installment introduces the Rotor Force, Laser Rods, Go-Bots, and Cyberjets—and we finally find out what happened to Optimus Prime!  (It's actually been completed for about a year, but the fictional events of the story mirrored real-life events for a friend of mine in an unfortunate way, so out of respect for him I felt compelled to put the story to bed for a while.)  It's arguably the most epic Transformers: Generation 2 story ever written—and I've been saving the really juicy stuff until now!  As with the other sub-pages, this one got a formatting overhaul, which will eventually extend to my older stories as well.  (I changed the filenames of almost all my fan fiction to conform to my current naming scheme, so if your shortcuts to my stories suddenly don't work, this is probably why.) I also took the opportunity to revamp my TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE: GENERATION 2 profiles, which document 36 of the unsung-yet-lovable characters from the Transformers: Generation 2 toy line (all of whom are scheduled to appear in "Children of Cybertron").  I had originally uploaded the illustrations as GIF files but they had some transparency problems, so I've redone them as JPEG files and also fixed the HTML formatting to bring them closer to the appearance of the original TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE by Marvel Comics, which of course is the whole point.  Not many people know this, but these are profiles and illustrations I did when I was a teenager, back when the toys were actually on the shelves in 1994-95.  All the illustrations predate the ZMFTS by several years—they were all hand-drawn and colored with Crayola markers, which is why some of the colors aren't as crisp as others.  (I colored Dirtbag, Hubcap, Roadblock, and Road Pig on my computer, but all the other illustrations were done the old-fashioned way.)  I also added a "front cover" done in the style of the old TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE books.  It's new to the site, but longtime fans may recognize this illustration because it appeared as the cover of an old Transformers fanzine about 15 years ago.  It sounds like I'm kidding, but I'm not.) Along the same lines, I also fixed the formatting for several TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE profiles featuring my semi-canonical fan characters.  What I mean by that is that with the exception of Anthrax, who appears in "Children of Cybertron," none of my fan characters were invented entirely from whole cloth—they all have an official basis in some way.  Steamer and Scrounge are two of the "extra" Constructicons we see in "Five Faces of Darkness" part 4, and I wrote them into a time travel story called "A Thing of the Past."  Ladybug and Blow-Out are my names for the red Bumblebee toy and yellow Cliffjumper, and they appear in my fanfic "Bugs."  Septimus Prime and Deceptus are among the early Autobot and Decepticon leaders, respectively, who appear in "Five Faces of Darkness" part 4, and they also appear in "A Thing of the Past" (as well as another unfinished story I'm working on). I also wrote one very small new scene for "Army of the Undead" because I felt horrible about artificially inserting Huffer into Ironhide's shuttle crew from The Transformers: the Movie when you and I both know good and well that he just wasn't there.  I still found a way to get him onto the shuttle so he could become an undead Decepticon zombie, but it's a slightly more organic approach.  Let me know what you think. 1.20.2009 As I write this, huge chunks of my web site are offline because AOL decided to cancel its web hosting service in October.  (I didn't actually notice until last December.  Shows you just how much I pay attention.)  I had been planning to do some kind of big tenth anniversary thing for the ZMFTS, but that sort of thing is hard to do when the site up and disappears without warning.  This actually couldn't have come at a more convenient time, since I really didn't have time to do anything special in the first place.  So, anyway.  Ten years.  Hurrah. Anyway, I've still been finishing projects and posting the page links to alt.toys.transformers, even though the pages themselves don't link to anything else.  At some point this year I want to move the entire site to Fortunecity, but if I'm going to upload  all those files, I want all the HTML formatting to be consistent and up to my current standards, and that will take a lot of work.  (It's just one of those ongoing projects, like photodocumenting my 3700+ collectibles or taking new pictures of my 350+ projects.)  Anyway, these links will be available once the site goes live again, so I'm adding them here.  Plus, as I've said before, I'm notoriously unconvinced of my own nonproductivity if I don't have documentation of it somewhere, so if nothing else, this will be useful for the updates archive. KITBASHES: 2009 will be, I hope, the year I finally get done all those PVC figures of generic Decepticon jets from the G1 cartoon.  There's only a handful of them left to go, actually.  I've been saving two of the more important ones for last, namely Harbinger and Herald, the two purple guys who harassed Sideswipe and Sunstreaker in "More Than Meets the Eye" part 2.  (Yes, technically they already did a BotCon version of one of these guys, but the colors are a bit off, and I insist on having figures on my Heroes of Cybertron display shelf that look like the characters from the cartoon.) I also painted up a Robot Heroes version of G1 Frenzy, intended as a counterpart for the existing Robot Heroes version of Rumble.  (You're not gonna believe this, but he's actually in Hasbro toy colors, not Sunbow animation colors!  I know—I'm shocked, too!)