Welcome to Fanmode 2.0
Regular Fanmode readers would have noticed some changes over the past few days — some good, some bad.
The bad was losing six weeks of updates after our server host’s hard disk array went kablooey over the weekend. This was deeply frustrating but we’ve managed to recover some data from Google’s cache and (re)updated our Busou Shinki, Figma, Revoltech and S.H.Figuarts checklists. Unfortunately, we’re missing our recent Bandai S.H.Figuarts Kamen Rider 1 review (dated 25 September 2008) and August 2008’s Fanmode Faves (from the first week of September). If any reader has these articles in their cache, please contact us.
That’s the bad.
Thankfully, there have been a lot of positive changes as well. The most obvious one is the change in themes. Being adventurous devil-may-care types, we’ve switched WordPress themes, making the dramatic change from Brian Gardner’s Vertigo theme to … Brian Gardner’s Vertigo theme. (Trust us, it makes sense.) We’re not quite done modding the new two-column theme so expect some minor changes over the next few weeks.
In a bid to streamline the site and reduce our workload a little, we’ve stopped republishing toy-related photos from Flickr released under the Creative Commons CC-BY, CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-ND licenses. We’re deeply appreciative of those generous Flickr toy fans whose photos we’ve republished but it was time-consuming locating suitable photos released under those specific licenses and especially difficult since we further restricted ourselves to using only one or two photos per photographer.
We’re really happy Fanmode readers who happen to be Flickr users have been regularly contributing photos to the Fanmode Flickr pool and to show our appreciation, we’ve made the Fanmode Flickr pool photo thumbnails as prominent as we could. This should hopefully provide this link blog with the visual pizazz it’s otherwise lacking.
In terms of functionality, we hope to make the site’s archives a little more useful. We’ve added search term highlighting to make it easier to find specific toy links but we think sifting through the thousands of toy-related links in this site’s archives can be further improved and we hope to implement some under-the-hood changes soon that will accomplish that.
Coverage-wise, we’ve pretty much settled on the topics we intend to spotlight. Broadly speaking, we started the site with a view to encourage toy fans to do something with their toys. Find a new fanmode, customise the toy, write about those toys, take photos, have fun. Most toy-related sites tend to centre on serial consumerism with an emphasis on product previews. There’s nothing wrong with that. But we’d like to focus on the fun, creative things toy fans are doing with their toys. Check out those excellent customs and amazing digiramas, and read those amusing photocomics and insightful reviews. There’s a lot of them out there. We know because we’ve been looking for them for five days a week for 52 weeks now. Join us for the next 52.
Toy links
Red Guardian.
An excellent custom figure of a relatively obscure Marvel character.
Ratbat 2008.
Clever work by Jin Saotome.
Kyle Robinson’s battle-damaged Master Chief.
“… probably the first custom you’ll see using one of the NEW 12 inch halo 3 figures … I picked up 3 of them and whipped this guy out the same day. ”
Chris Morada’s Mainframe.
“For this custom I used DC Superman Steel for the base and few parts from DC Black Manta, the rest is scuptured.”
My Little Lady Frankenstein.
“… nothing on her is glued.”
L’uomo Ragno.
Giorgio Verrone’s Spider-Man strikes a pose. (Not to be confused with Italian Spider-Man.)
ElDave’s Regult.
“You can keep your Autobots and Challenge of the Gobots, but I have one question for you. Do you remember love?”
I never drink … wine.
R_O_B_O’s cool portrait of the Sideshow Dracula figure. (See also.)
“He gives cops a bad name.”
Shaun Wong gets topical with this ripped-from-the-headlines sixth-scale diorama.
Transformers who looked nothing like their cartoon versions.
“Here are nine of the worst offenders of ‘the toy doesn’t match the animation model’ syndrome that left the children of the ’80s with crippling trust issues we’ve never quite gotten over.”
The underappreciated art of Ed Norem.
“Norem’s career spans 50+ years. He’s created hundreds of works of art. He’s worked on well know and beloved properties like GI Joe, Transformers, Masters of the Universe, Conan and Star Wars …”