How I've been passing time lately

The recent surge in the amount of posting done by Bourgeois Deviant has shamed me into dusting my own intarwebs off and running some material through the pipes. I'll get to some of the observations I've made over the past couple of weeks about all this presidential stuff this weekend. But before I get to that, I wanted to catch up with the random fluff in my life.

TFs: The new series debuted a couple of weeks ago with a 90-minute feature length first episode. I liked it. There was an edge to it, a sense of danger, that's been missing from the series since... well, ever. Also, the voice actor they wrangled for Starscream is in-freaking-credible. It's like Chris Latta re-incarnated. There are certain words and certain inflections that Tom Kenny just nails. (Does his name sound familiar? You might have heard it in conjunction with the voice acting role he's much more well-known for: Spongebob Squarepants.) I'm not sold completely on the animation style, and it's far too early to say whether the storylines will hold my attention, but it's a much more interesting start than anything from Armada/Energon/Cybertron gave us. Oh, and I could not be more pleased that it's not CGI.

I was really and profoundly disappointed in the figures that came out in 2007. After doing so remarkably well with the Cybertron and Classics lines, they really screwed the pooch with the movie line. About the only one I actually like from the movie line is the leader-class Optimus, and it took me six months to actually get it. Hasbro just had miserable problems with distribution, and the eBay vulture jackasses just couldn't get enough of them.

So my collecting in 2007 was largely centered around G1 reissues and Japanese exclusives. The best stuff I got last year: G1 Sixshot, Encore Optimus Prime (another reissue of the original, but the first one I've ever owned), THS-02 (which is well worth the money), Big Convoy (it's a given that I would own a Transformer that turned into a woolly mammoth), the Revoltech Optimus and Megatron figs, and the 2003-ish reissue of Landcross.

For as simple as they are, can I just say that the Landcross set is a hell of a Transformer. It's a character from the latter Japanese series Victory, and is made up of six smaller bots. The figures are all of a sophistication you would expect from any Transformer hailing from the 80s (not a lot of movement aside from what's necessary to go from one mode to the other, not very accurate vehicle designs, etc.). The really fun thing about these guys - for me, anyway - is that each of the six individual robots can combine with any one of the other five (one becomes the lower body, the other becomes the upper) to form a new, larger robot. So you have the six individuals, 30 different permutations of 2-bot combos, and the 6-way combiner. That's 37 different robots, people! The mind boggles.

Rubik's: I was looking for a present for the secret Santa exchange at work last month, and decided on a Rubik's Cube. At the same time, I picked up a Rubik's Revenge for myself. Now, I never had figured out how to solve a cube back when I was first given one in the early 80's, though I did learn the unique art of taking it apart and putting it back together in order. It was unsatisfying, and like most Rubik's Cubes from the 80s, it sat in a drawer or a box until it was finally given away.

Mom brought me a 25th Anniversary cube to play with when she came to visit me at WHC a couple of years ago, but aside from making that checkerboard pattern, I didn't really delve into it at all, and it too sat around on a bookshelf for a couple of years.

Buying the cube for a co-worker and the Revenge for myself tugged on that peculiar thing in my brain that starts obsessing over a thing, and for the past few weeks it's been my mission to once and for all figure out the Rubik's cube.

When you buy a Rubik's these days, you get a little instructional pamphlet that optimistically calls itself "7 Step Solution Guide." Yeah right, I said.

There are two things that are key to understanding how to do a cube, and both of these things I was clued into by the Guide: 1) You need to figure out just what "U R Ui Ri Ui Fi U F" means, and 2) You need to stop thinking about solving the cubes in terms of sides, and think more along the lines of edges. The second one is a pretty fundamental concept to actually solving the thing, but had never really occurred to me. Instead of just shooting for one side, then moving on to another, trying not to mess up what you've already done, think about getting the green pieces all on one side, but making sure that the green, yellow and orange corner ends up in the right space. Surprisingly enough, once you get through this first quantum level of understanding, the little instruction pamphlet actually works.

Now, this being 2008, people have had almost three full decades to work out the math behind the cube. Surprisingly, an optimum solution (what they call God's Algorithm) has been theorized but still not found. But there are a bewildering array of strategies for solving the cube. They have names as obscure and intriguing as opening chess gambits (Fridrich method, Petrus method, ad nauseum), and all are - at this stage in my Rubik's evolution (Rubolution?) - entirely unintelligible. I'm still - and may ever be - at that stage where I can parrot the moves to get a cube from scrambled to not. But I really what to figure out and understand natively how to get pieces pointed in the right direction.

Parallel to this, I've also been discovering the culture that exists around the Rubik's cube. The most popular iteration of this are the Speedcubers. They, as you may have already guessed, try to get the shortest times in solving a Rubik's cube or any of its ancestors (the 4x4 Rubik's Revenge cube, the 5x5 Professor's Cube, pictured above, and even a 7x7 custom-made cube). There are sites that discuss the various solving strategies, sites that show you, step-by-step, how to solve your hopelessly scrambled cube, and even a few places with software you can download and play with virtual cubes as large as 20x20 (!).

So, sitting on my desk right now are unmolested Rubik's Revenge and Rubik's Ice cubes (because solving these things is fundamentally different from solving a standard 3x3 cube), the aforementioned 25th Anniversary cube, and a 3x3 cube keychain. And I'm just getting warmed up.