What point does the collector newsletter serve?

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My latest copy of Master Collector and the Transformers Collectors Club Official Newsletter recently arrived and as usual I just don't feel as if this has any value to me in any way whatsoever.

Perhaps my career in publishing has jaded me to dated content. To some degree I'm at the forefront in web publishing of heavily-worded content. Receiving a bimonthly full-color "zine" feels like a waste of dated content and misuse of resources in 2005.

The internet and the web destroyed the function that zines and newsletters such as this served prior to 1998 or so. The Master Collector trade paper is affected by Ebay and other auction sites in much the same way.

Others may disagree.

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Much of the issue is devoted to an article entitled "My BotCon '05 Experience" by Shaun Christopher. Today is December 5, 2005 the Dallas BotCon is now several months old. Since Master Collector ran the con and also publishes this zine the review is somewhat suspicious since some of the comments seem to be almost 180 degrees from a lot of what I've heard in the general fandom.

I've especially shocked… yes shocked… by the description of the dealer room.

…and there seemed to be just as many dealers and tables as past events.

Um. Were you on crack? This show was far smaller than in previous years and I don't think it is a perception issue brought about by the smaller venue space. If it wasn't then Master Collector needs to ante up the actual figures for the number of actual dealers there. I'm not talking number of tables either. Actual dealers! I'd love to know the number of paid attendees too because when I compare notes with Evebird, as well as photos I took last year and this year, 2005 bombs bigtime.

Personally, I can't disagree more about the Saturday Night Awards Dinner comments, an utterly pointless and event for the most part. Christopher states that the "food was good and the entertainment was original and entertaining". See, if that entertainment was original he must have been smoking crack. It was the same old derivative "let's make the voice actors do something barely witty" scripted banter that I've been exposed to far too many times now.

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Zero Mayhem's Victory Leo art shown in the issue was excellent. I'd love for a poster to be made of this. It so needs to be 18x24, matted, and framed.

Kudos to RainKing's Hot Rod and Rodimus Prime 3D work.

Clay Thomas' Alternator Menasor is also top-notch!

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There was an entire page of "filler" with all these pictures of a G.I. Joe figure.

Utterly worthless.

Now if the page had been about people from the con trying on Michael Chain's frilled leather jacket then I would be all over it.

Alas. It was not.

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No comment on the mini-comic that's in this newsletter suffice to say that I just don't see the point in this fiction in this setting. It amounts to little more than filler to me.

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What's really disappointing is that the "Next Issue" blurb will include "More Botcon '05 Coverage". So 2 months from now they'll still be spreading thin what didn't amount to all that much substance anyway.


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This page contains a single entry by Nala published on December 5, 2005 1:26 PM.

The pug drool is still warm... was the previous entry in this blog.

He's very space-shuttley this time around. is the next entry in this blog.

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