stunt_muppet

First off, and I'm assuming this wouldn't be a problem anyway but I just want to cover my bases:

Please do not link to my posts, locked or unlocked, on Facebook or Twitter. My LJ and my Facebook/Real Life are kept separate for a reason, and I'd prefer to keep them that way. I have disabled this feature on my own journal. and will never intentionally crosspost any content from your journals.

So okay, that's over with.

So you may have overheard that I've been having a rather hard time getting my fangirl mitts on the two bits of TF merch that I really, really want, namely the Arcee figurine and the AllSpark Almanac Vol. 2. Specifically, I couldn't seem to find them anywhere.

So I decided that, one morning, I was just going to the local Toys R' Us and ask them to hold an Arcee figurine for me when it came in. You can do that, right? Especially since it's a Toys R' Us exclusive.

Except it turns out that Arcee is specifically sold to be rare, with only one or two of her in each new shipment of her Animated toy wave - and there's only one small shipment at a time, since most of the Transformers section of my local Toys R' Us is taken up with Bayverse toys, so the odds of her showing up are already slim. And because it's listed in the store catalog as just "Animated Deluxe-Class Figurine" - the specific figurine isn't listed, so there's no way for them to order it individually or check its stock status.

Oh, and because Arcee is such a rare figurine, area collectors tend to arrive before opening time when the pallets first come in and buy her toy on the spot on the rare occasions she's in the order, so she rarely ever even gets to the store shelves. And a lot of the people who buy that way are toy scalpers, which explains why all the Arcee figurines I can find on Amazon are double or more the retail price.

So unless I want to be one of those people who stalks the toy trucks at six in the morning, no Arcee for me. And no, I'm not ordering the thirty-five dollar ones off of eBay or Amazon. Because that would be letting the reselling jerks win. *stubborn face*

So I decided, screw it, I'll get the Almanac instead, surely that'll be easier to find. But then I thought that our Local Comic Shop had closed, and that was supposed to be the main venue for distribution of this thing. So, checked Barnes and Noble, since they had a comic book section and it usually carries a handful of TF comics, but not only did they not have it, none of the B&N in my entire area had even a single copy. So once again, no way to order it.

Driving around with J and M yesterday, and it turns out that Local Comic Shop has indeed not closed! It's merely moved from the mall it used to be in to the shopping center across the street! So, today, I decided to wander on over there and check to see if they had it. Naturally, not only did they not have it, but there seemed to be no record of it ever even being in stock.

The girl at the counter was very nice, however, and offered to look up the Almanac to see if there was any possibility of ordering it, which meant that we ended up on Amazon. And while there was apparently one copy left that was still at the retail price, all the other copies, new and used? Were upwards of two hundred fucking dollars.

I would like to re-emphasize this. TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS. For a comic book (effectively) that came out maybe two months ago and, so far as I can tell, isn't even out of print. What exact kind of craziness is going down here.

So, yeah, I just bucked up and ordered it on Amazon, even if that means I won't get the book until almost October. At least I got to pay retail for it instead of two hundred dollars.

It's so strange, though. It's like if you don't want to buy a Bayverse toy, you're shit out of luck unless you're ready to jump through a whole bunch of hoops. I'm trying to give you my money, Hasbro. Making it more difficult for me to do so seems like kind of an assbackwards business plan.

So. Ahem. I just had to get the complaining out of my system. At least the Clerk Lady also pointed me to the Wonder Woman Blackest Night event series, which is only three brief books long and looks amazing, so, it's not all bad at all. Freaking Bayverse.

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Mostly unrelated point: How much would you all judge me if I used a Nightwish lyric as a fic title?

I'm normally very bad at titles; if I don't cop out and use a song or a line of poetry, my titles tend to be very descriptive and flat, often only one word. So, more and more I've been turning to songs, flicking through my playlist until something catches my fancy.

Unfortunately, the one lyric I've decided might be a little bit perfect for the Optimus/Blackarachnia springkink  fic is "Bring Me Home (Or Leave Me Be)"; I feel like it kind of gets the mood and the themes of conflict, trust, and rejection in there. But it's also from a Nightwish song. Specifically, it's from "Ghost Love Score", which means my fic is going to be irrevocably connected to various Epic Roll cracks. Not a great mental association.

Of course, there are times when I have the opposite problem - i.e. I have a title and one or two lines but no content - but that doesn't happen nearly as often as the No Title problem. Thus far there's only two free-floating titles I've got, one for the Prime/Primal springkink  fic ("Apres-mois, la Deluge", because if I can't have a song lyric I will have a pretentious-sounding quote in a language I don't know that I've probably misspelled) and one for that AU I keep meaning to write where Sari never meets the Autobots and "grows up" as a not-quite-normal human girl until unusual things start happening around puberty ("The Dead-Leaf Hands on the Radium Clock", a lyric from a B-52s song, and I actually have only two sentences of that fic besides the title).

So, flist that writes, how do you come up with titles? If you use lyrics, how do you choose which ones to use, and how do you get over the creeping feeling of being judged over your musical tastes? If you eschew lyrics, how do you know when a title's just right?

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UGH WHY IS IT 2 AM AGAIN. Good night, you guys. I'm sorry I whined at you for like an hour.