#old cds

This whole thing started when I was looking for a particular CD-R that had a Super Mario World ROM on it, which would be useful in the event that I decide to start hacking again. I never did find the disc. I'll have to pull my old laptop out of the garage and see if I left it in there. In the meantime, I figured I might as well look through all the other CD-Rs I had in my room. Most of these were full of old Transformers and GoBots-related pictures and videos I downloaded in the early 2000s. There were plenty of screenshots from the shows, and the GoBots ones eren't of the best quality. There were also examples of my efforts to "metalize" various G1 characters the way I had seen fellow Transfan Nightwind do. I dismissed those too, but grabbed the actual Nightwind pieces off the CDs. Most of the rest was fanart and official art from Dreamwave Productions, and I decided to keep that stuff too. I'll probably post some of those in the future. First, though, I think I'll share some of the stuff from those discs that I made.

I'll start with what might be the weirdest thing. It's supposed to be the Combaticon Onslaught. The circumstances that brought this about are actually kinda tragic though. I may or may not have mentioned my mother's abusive second husband here on this blog. I know I've mentioned him elsewhere though. One of the awful things he'd do when in a rage is break stuff, usually by throwing it. That's what happened to my first Game Boy Advance SP. I was playing a bit too loud late at night, and woke him up while he was asleep and not feeling well. He responded by grabbing the thing and throwing it against the wall with such force that it broke the screen internally and warped the battery. The damage to the screen produced something that, to me, sort of looked like Onslaught. I figured I'd get just one more use out of the busted handheld before getting rid of it, so I took a picture of the screen and edited it in Photoshop. I could probably do better now, but this was 2004. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about my current stepdad breaking my current SP. He's a much better man.

Here's more Photoshop shenanigans. Back in my sophomore year of high school, I had written a short Beast Machines fanfic that involved an Aero Drone getting possessed by Starscream. The fic is long gone, having been hand-written instead of typed out. It's probably pretty bad anyway. It would, however, inspire this years later.

One thing I liked to play with online sometimes was the Bright Lights Clickamajig on Nick.com. It was basically a virtual Lite Brite with several Nicktoon-themed patterns to light up. It also had a freeform mode where you could make anything you wanted, so I had to try my hand at doing some Transformers. Some of the bulb colors would have to be changed in Photoshop for these.

This may be the only surviving picture of Kicker, a cat I had from 2005 to 2007. It's not the best, but it was taken with a low-end webcam from the 2000s. The little kitty looks pretty happy here. I just wish that, of all the things my mother held onto, she could've held on to the better pictures of Kicker she had on her old computer.