I do have an "official" new year's post planned, but I've been a bit too busy to get to it during the past week. In the meantime, here are some recent Scary-Crayon links and a few more toy photos!

Much of what I've been up to lately (in an unpaid capacity, anyway) has involved SC, since I couldn't let the site go without a January 1 update! In addition to Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #103, which takes its cue from the most recent episode of "To Catch a Predator," I posted a (late, I know) summary review of my most favorite holiday special: George and the Christmas Star. Some of you may already have seen it, but -- if not -- the review also contains two clips of musical numbers from the special. For geekier readers, the review is also littered with Transformers, Doctor Who, and other fun references.

Also, in the hopes of adding a little more diversity to SC in the coming year, I have also posted a lengthy list of guidelines for submitting content! Most of this stuff probably goes without saying, but one can never be too careful when it comes to this sort of thing. So yes, if submitting to SC sounds like something you'd like to do -- and I would especially like to see pieces from some of you who know who you are (!!!) -- slog through the guidelines and send me some ideas. 🙂

And now, more toys!

Red X has been around here for a while -- I think I acquired him shortly after "Teen Titans" stopped airing -- but I brought him back up to my room after I got the Neo Shifter because it came with an extra piece that reminded me of a small container of xenothium (which Red X is holding in the photo). Dalek Thay and Martha, however, are my first toy acquisitions of 2008! I did order them in the final days of 2007, but still.

Thay is more or less the same as all of the other Character Options Daleks in my collection, but what differentiates him is the rear panel "damage" that he incurred in Series 3. I liked it a lot less in theory and in the online pictures -- the toy just looked like a messed up Dalek -- but now that he's here I rather like it because it differentiates him from my other CO Daleks. Technically I already have a Thay since I have the Cult of Skaro set, but since there's no way I can tell him apart from Jast and Caan I tend to think of them all as being "regular" Daleks. But now I have an identifiable Thay to stand with Sec. So while something happened in my continuity to cause the rear panel damage, that ridiculous Human Dalek shit never happened.

Martha is another figure that I wasn't too keen on upon seeing the online pics, but I like her a lot more in the flesh... er, soft plastic as well. The facial sculpt really is a lot better than it appears in small pictures (and even this larger one doesn't do it as much justice as I'd like) -- it might even be my favorite human sculpt among the CO figures. Most of them have a kind of dead mannequin look to them, but Martha's got this slight smirk that imbues her figure with a little more life. And like Thay, her backside is rather nice and complements the toy well. 😉

All for now -- more from me later regarding my optimistic hopes for 2008 that were subsequently thwarted in rather violent fashion. Hope y'all are enjoying the new year thus far, though! Ja.

Been fooling with the light tent more -- here are some of the latest shots. I think I'm starting to prefer the grey background over the white!

Godzilla requires no explanation, really.

Neo Shifters are giant robots that fold up into balls. They're kinda neat, though I'm not sure I'd recommend them for kids -- unless, of course, the parent is willing to go through the lengthy and potentially headache-inducing assembly process. Putting them together isn't quite as involved as, say, Lego Daleks, but it's enough for me to not want to do it again unless I come across one of these things at a hefty discount.

And speaking of those 150+ piece custom creations, here are the Lego Daleks with Dalek Sec and one of the shuttlecock brood. Apparently I was mistaken before, as the Legoleks are actually a little larger than those guys. One of these days I'm going to have to see if I can crowd my entire Dalek collection into the light tent -- but with the current count at 21 (3 shuttlecocks, 2 Legoleks, 1 shower gel, 5 of the 5" Character Options figs, and 10 paper), I'm not sure they all could fit. 😛

In other news, I've added some new shirts and other merchandise to the Scary-Crayon store -- these ones are based on the new site header and lack the decidedly not-family-friendly hockey mask-wearing crayon. I've also reduced prices by at least $1 on all items (base Cafepress prices are still kinda high, though, so that's not saying much). So if you were ever contemplating getting a SC shirt but didn't want to freak out your grandmother with mentions of homicidal cock-blocking, you may now do so. I'm looking forward to ordering one of the black tees myself!

So I watched this year's "Doctor Who" Christmas special this morning. It wasn't fantastic, but I did find it to be rather enjoyable. It was probably the best holiday special that the current series has yet produced, though I suppose that's not saying much since the first was essentially an introduction to the 10th Doctor and the second was utterly ruined by that horribly annoying Racnoss thing. Still, I think that Russell T. Davies should stick to writing Christmas holiday episodes and nothing else -- the Doctor-as-Christ parallels are tolerable in them (see the above image), but any and everywhere else they're just bloody irritating.

I was saddened by the absence of Daleks in the Series 4 teaser.

I have begun fooling around with the light tent -- here is the result of my first round of experimentation. After having gone to such lengths to increase the exposure of the previous photos -- both using the camera's exposure setting and the white balance adjustment as well as the Xpose! plugin once I got the images onto the machine -- it's kind of weird to not need to do any of that with this contraption. I actually had to turn the camera's exposure setting down to produce this image. (I suspect that has a bit to do with Bizarro's skin tone and its apparently reflective nature -- Ravager and Slade appear pretty much the same in the shots with different settings -- but still.) And I would prefer a white background rather than the grey or blue choices that came with the tent, but that has to be ordered separately. This'll work fine until I get around to doing that, though.

As far as the figures pictured go, I've had Ravager for quite a while, but I broke her out again to pose with her dad, who I received last week thanks to De's tip about the sale over at Sci-Fi Genre. And this Bizarro is the same one I mentioned not being totally into before (or at least liking less than I like Batzarro), but this time I had a coupon that made him a bit more attractive.

Anyway, all for now -- hope y'all had a happy holiday!

So here are those additional Lego Dalek pictures I promised! I've left the digital exposure down on these photos so that the Special Weapons Dalek doesn't blend completely into the background, but you can see here that -- at 3.5" versus 5" and 4.5", respectively -- the Lego Daleks are quite a bit smaller than my official Character Options figures and paper Daleks. (They're about the same size as the shuttlecock Daleks, but for some reason it didn't occur to me to include them in this photo at the time of its taking.) I figured they'd be about this size given the sizes of the Lego pieces I used to make them and whatnot, but it's still kind of odd (yet neat!) to see a 3D render that's been blown up on my laptop screen reduced to a tiny tangible 3D object formed from a bag of 150+ even tinier pieces. 🙂

And here they are closing in on the 9th Doctor! Despite the smaller scale (and I really can't think of any way to rectify that without messing up the proportions), I'm rather happy with how the Lego Daleks turned out. They were fairly sturdy to begin with, but I've made some further improvements to the designs using extra Lego pieces I had around (namely internal adjustments to the primarily hollow structure of the original base that fill in spaces) to increase their stability even more. The most unstable part of the Lego Daleks, however, was the Special Weapons Dalek's cannon, which was kind of wobbly at first and was prone to falling off if I tilted the figure forward too much. I've since tightened it up by painting the interiors of the endpieces with clear nail polish, so now it's perfect. Feels kind of like cheating, but it's not like I glued or cut pieces or anything. 😉

In other news, one of the Christmas presents I have already received is a 16" x 16" x 16" lighting studio, so the digital exposure adjustment trickery should soon be a thing of the past! Look forward to seeing tests with that in the near future. Also, for those of you that are interested in checking it out, I posted that Madballs review and comparison article last week on SC. For old folks that actually remember the original 1986 Madballs, it's at least worth a look for some of the comparison photos. 🙂

Anyway, that is all for now. Hope y'all are having a happy holiday season! As Tiny Tim might say, "God bless you -- every one." Except I'm not Tiny Tim and don't really go in for "God bless" statements, so feel free to modify that statement accordingly -- while more or less retaining the general sentiment -- and pretend I said it. 😉

I'm really too exhausted to say a whole lot about them right now, but the Lego Daleks have crossed over from concept to reality! I'll write more later, but suffice it to say that they're pretty cool. Hard to believe that I went to the trouble of designing these things from scratch, but assembling them seemed way easier on the digital front. Fiddling with 150+ tiny pieces to put together each of these bad boys gave me a monster headache, to say nothing of what happened when I accidentally dropped one and it exploded into a mess of scattered bricks.

They do rock, though -- I'm looking forward to ordering more. 🙂