What's In A Name

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick post to explain our blogger.com name, i.e. "Daddy Didn't Think This Through".
Mat and I LOVE our obscure references and inside jokes and this is just one that's followed us for a while. This came from an episode of American Dad and we just kept on quoting it so, yeah, it's as simple as that! Still makes us giggle.




Mat and I are working on a couple of other posts at the moment, including one about how we got our two dogs, one about *shudder* Bayformers, and I'm eventually going to put together one on our thoughts about the DC Rebirth event that happened last week.

As always, if you want to comment on any of our posts, feel free to do so, we'd love to hear from you. We now also have figured out how to get the darn subscribe function to work, so if you want to know when we've posted, just pop your email into the box at the top right of the blog page and apparently some magical internet fairies will let you know when there's something new.

Ok, that's all for now.

Jamie :)

Clothing Site Of The Month - We Love Fine

www.welovefine.com

First Things First... this is NOT an ad. I haven't been paid to write this, I'm just genuinely a fan.
In case you haven't heard of this site before, let me give you the run down.
This is just as they say in the logo, it's by fans, for fans, which means that while they stock a lot of clothing for different fandoms, they are technically not "licenced" pieces.
That said, one of the great strong points of this site is that they allow artists to submit designs and they can be voted on to create a collection for a given fandom.

We bought a whole lot of t-shirts from them a few months back, but they have become the "site of the month" for their EXCELLENT customer service.

But on to the merch. Here's a few of the pieces we bought.....

For Mat... a lot of Transformers

For Me... 

in women's sizes. It's a fitted tee so I go a Medium (i.e. I size up so it fits better).

Got this one in a medium too so I could wear shirts underneath. It's a sheer fabric so...but how AMAZING is this design. I wonder if I could get away with wearing it around the office. Hmmm...

For Connor. Yep, they have Onesies and Kid/Toddler tees.

Sooooooooooo cute!
As you can see, they have some excellent designs. In the case of the Transformers shirts, there are a lot of "obscure references" as we call it in our house, which are the kind of shirts we like. A shirt that only a true fan of the series would fully understand (the sharkticonado shirt with the Quintessons is a perfect example).
Besides the design excellence and the HUGE RANGE, the customer service is unreal.
Mat wore the Sharticonado shirt once and when taking it off it tore around the collar. Not just a little bit, I mean a "no way we can repair this" kind of tear.
So I sent the photos of this (as shown) to the customer service team, just to let them know that they might have gotten a bad batch of shirts. I honestly wasn't expecting anything from them.

To my surprise I got a response within 12 hours which said the following....
"Hi Jamie,
We greatly apologize for the inconvenience, normally replacements/refunds are done if the item is returned within 30 days. We will go ahead and issue a replacement for the damaged item as a one time exception. Since you are located in Australia, the cost of returning will surpass the item cost and is not worth it, please discard the item as you see fit. Once your replacement shirt ships, an email with tracking information will be sent. Please let you know if you have any other questions or concerns, we remain at your service"

Wow. Seriously Wow. Lets face it folks, shipping from the US to Australia at the best of exchange rate times is like US$25-$45, so for them to do that for us was amazing. 

For that alone, they deserve this high praise on the interwebs.

ok, enough of my carrying on.

Happy T-shirt shopping my friends!

Jamie :)

The Wreckers

Whilst waiting on the next issue of 'More than meets the eye' I decided to see what other Transformer books were out there for me to read. The Transformers Prime tv series mentioned the Wreckers more than a few times (even had a couple members around). So feeling like I was missing part of a bigger story I've just finished reading the Last stand of the Wreckers and The sins of the Wreckers, Both were great books.

For those who don't know, the Wreckers are group of elite Autobots who work outside of the chain of command they're reckless and dangerous but they get the job done every time. Some of the members are familiar if you watched the tv show and the 1986 movie, Springer, Perceptor, Cup, even Ultra Magnus (as a commander, or more to try and direct the chaos), and the other faces are well fleshed out characters in their own right.

Whirl - One of my new favorite characters, not seen much in these 2 books but is in the more than meets the eye series a lot. The easiest way to describe him would be to call him the Harley Quinn or Deadpool of the Transformers universe, Occasionally breaking the fourth wall, insane, dangerous and a whole lot of fun.
But his story is a major part of the entire Transformers war and the Cybertronian  history in general. I could write an entire post on him completely but for this I'll stick to dot points
 - Pre-war Cybertron had a terrorist group/ political movement called the functionists, long story short they believe you must choose your job based on your alt form (transformation). Whirl transforms into a helicopter but chose to be a watchmaker. As punishment he was mutilated, his head and hands replaced for a head with no face and claws for hands.

- He joined the police force after that, and during his time as a cop (a corrupt cop at that) he was ordered to kill a prisoner in his cell, a pacifist caught up in a bar brawl, some guy named Megatron.

- Before he could finish completing his order he was caught and arrested by one, Orion Pax.

- After the war was in full swing between the Autobots and Decepticons, Optimus Prime approached Whirl in prison where he'd had a hard time and offered him early release if he offered his very special set of skills to the Autobot cause, and that's how he came to be a Wrecker.

Impactor - Another bot like Whirl, his life has been intertwined with some of the major events on Cybertron.
Long before the war, before there was even Autobots and Decepticons, Impactor was a miner who worked with and was friends with Megatron. Megatron was some what of an idealist at this point and had started writing a lot of his thoughts down.

Impactor thought Megatron's nonviolent solutions to Cybertron's class warfare were cute, and reminded him that there would always be a pecking order, no matter how large or small the equation. (tfwiki)









But everything changed for both of them, and all of Cybertron in general, when the 2 of them were interrupted during a few after work drinks and Impactor got himself into a fight.
That led to Megatron being arrested and the things that happened to him whilst in custody changed his non-violent ways.
Meanwhile Impactor was sent away to serve his sentence at Garrus-1 a prison, sometime after the war broke out Impactor joined the Wreckers.






Impactor went on to lead the Wreckers for a while, but any info on how or why he didn't stay their leader would be spoilers for the books.









Last but not least is Verity - The human member of the Wreckers, I personally don't know much about her but everything I've seen of her makes me want to find out more.
All I really know is that she was a stow away and Ultra Magnus has kind of taken her on as a ward.
She is pivotal in The Sins of the Wreckers though.

And an extra little Easter egg in More than meets the eye, Ultra Magnus uses her likeness as an avatar when they need to travel or be places where a giant robot wouldn't be wanted or practical.

Back to the books themselves, Last stand of the Wreckers, follows as a group of new recruits to the Wreckers go on their first mission, to rescue an Autobot prison which has been taken over by the Decepticons, More specifically a Decepticon named Overlord, he's a Phase Sixer (all but indestructible unstoppable warrior)

And The Sins of the Wreckers continues from where the Last stand of the Wreckers left, but has a completely different tone as Verity has set out to uncover Autobot corruption and Deception by Prowl.

So to finish off, I have been prattling on too long, if you're a Transformers fan and want to read about the other sides to the war, because being an Autobot doesn't always mean you're the good guy, I recommend giving these 2 books a read.

 
p.s. I know this next pic isn't from those books, but after talking about Whirl it seems fitting

                                                                                                           MAT

Tool box radio

It all started out as a little side project whilst I was an apprentice car mechanic in a little shop with a lot of free time on my hands.

I didn't have much money but had some spare parts so I cobbled together a working radio system using a second hand car radio, speakers, car battery charger, key switch form a petrol compressor(freebies), a tiny 12v battery and put it all together in a rusty old tool box from out the back of the workshop, it was ugly but it worked.

The second incarnation came 2 years later when we were moving to Queensland and lugging this big ugly rusty toolbox was impractical, so a quick trip to the hardware store later and I had a new container to house it all.

 Not quite enough room for speakers, and the car charger had to be disassembled to make it all fit but it worked.

The third incarnation came 4 years later when I was sick of lugging all the extra weight of the battery( which wasn't able to hold enough charge for the radio without the charger plugged in). The local electronics store sold transformers (240v AC to 12v AC), with the help of 4 diodes mocked up to make a rectifier to convert it to DC (needed for car radios).

This set up has been working great but recently I upgraded the radio (left over radio from an upgrade on my Mazda) and fried the transformer (my fault, crossed wires) this inspired a Fourth incarnation.

This time I've added a volt meter, USB charge points speaker terminals (for fast speaker changes) and 12 volt test points, for the little electrical jobs/testing I do at home.

The volt meter and USB charger.

The test points and speaker terminals

A bit of a wiring diagram of what is going on inside the box.













And a pick of whats going on in there








I know this was a bit of a boring post for those not into this kind of thing but it's been taking up some of my time this week. Promise next time it'll be more of a geeky post.

                                                                                                          MAT

Missed Opportunity: LEGO Flash

Hi Everyone,

Last week I found some LEGO I just had to have. I have an unnatural obsession with the Flash so, of course this happened.

I love it. But there is an obvious missed opportunity for any fan of Young Justice or Justice League animated series.

As you can see, Flash is holding a can of "Power Bolt" (and how super cute is Cold holding an Ice Cream!?!?!?!?!).
But as any fan of Young Justice would know, if Flash should be holding ANY can of soda, it should be REACH.... Cue the music.......

Alternatively, they could have skipped the soda altogether and gone with Flash's favourite power bar...

All that said, I'm not disappointed, please see the humour in this!

God I miss these shows...think I'm going to binge watch some Young Justice. If you're not doing that already, you totally should. I hear the US Netflix (immensely superior to Australian Netflix) has YJ and if enough people watch it, they may renew the series for the MUCH NEEDED third season. I named my son Connor after this incarnation of Superboy, so no doubt I'm passionate about this.

So, go binge my friends, sorry to get preachy at the end here!

And Reach for a Reach.....then again, best you don't........

Jamie

#RenewYJ #YoungJusticeSeason3 #BingingYJ

People Watching

Sitting in the park today with the little man Jamie and I partook in a hobby we usually reserve for overseas holidays. People watching, we started doing it in Europe about 3 years ago, it's a lot more interesting than it sounds, when we're out and about with nowhere in particular to be we just pay attention to everyone else around us, sometimes it's just us being bitchy or mocking other people, and sometimes people are doing interesting things or look lost.

Either way, when it's just the 2 of us and we have our little inside jokes and fun I could probably sit around and watch people and crowds for hours.

                                                                                             MAT

May the fourth be with you

It's star wars day again, time tonight for another Star Wars movie marathon (like we need an excuse).
I stole this viewing order from 'The Big Bang Theory' , but it does work - start with episode IV and episode V - then watch episodes II and III as flashbacks after finding out Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker - then round the story out with Return of the Jedi.

But now we get a new addition though, The Force Awakens, it's going to be a long marathon. The best part is that we don't watch The Phantom Menace, even though there is some parts to like about it (namely Darth Maul).

If you're looking for another Star Wars fix,  especially waiting for Rouge One to come out, I strongly recommend Star Wars Rebels. (watch it, watch it, watch it). I've been hooked since day one, and the second season just knocked everything up a notch......... BAM

But seriously watch it, if you enjoyed Star Wars the Clone wars series there's a lot of nods and easter eggs for you as well.




                                                                                                 MAT

Welcome to Australia: land of Torrenters/Pirates

Hi Everyone,

Why I Refuse To Feel Sorry For Torrenting Game Of Thrones

Mat came across this article recently and it perfectly sums up the situation we regularly find ourselves in here in Australia.

You see, we don't get TV shows at the same time as the US, so when a show like Game Of Thrones comes back on, like it did this past week, we need to see it as soon as possible. Either that, or no longer be online until the show comes out on DVD or BluRay (yeah, not gonna happen). Let's face it, people are going to put spoilers online, even if they don't intend them to be spoilers. And that SUCKS if it's a show like GOT.

Because our "free to air" tv is so behind, and FOXTEL (essentially, Australian Cable) is so expensive, AND we don't want our shows spoiled for us, Australia continues to have the record for torrenting/pirating television shows.

I thought maybe those of you overseas would be interested to see what it's like for us here (I know, first world problem, right!) compared to wherever you're situated in the world.

Before I sign off, let me be clear: just like the guy in the article, Mat and I DO buy a helluva lot of BluRays. If we love a show or a film, we gladly purchase. If only the networks would catch up, we'd be watching on TV too, but......

As always, we appreciate any comments on our blog, questions, or even you might like us to review something.

Yarrrr!!!



Jamie :)