Robert Jung
unread,Feb 22, 2024, 2:46:40 AMFeb 22You do not have permission to delete messages in this group
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Well, looks like I'm going to be one of the last ones to post here before the lights shut off for good. I wish I had something witty or profound to say here, but I don't, so you'll have to settle for me blathering mindlessly instead.
By my cursory calculations, I first posted Transformers-related stuff to alt.toys.transformers almost 40 years ago. Holy zarqon flying fish, that makes me feel older than Kup, and I don't mean that in a good way (I wish my knees were as easy to replace as his missing rotator cuffs). I don't even remember 90% of the stuff I posted to a.t.t, but I'm sure it's all embarrassingly stupid -- Hot Rod wasn't the only turbo-revvin' young punk in those days, if you know what I mean. Primus knows I will NOT be digging through the archives to find my old posts, thank you very much.
But if there's one thing that I will fondly remember from those nascent days of Transfandom, it's the sense of community that we all shared. Let's be truthful, we were all a bunch of socially-awkward nerds, hiding from the cool kids behind our computers playing with this weird thing called "Usenet" so we could talk about a niche line of plastic toys -- how much nerdier can you get than that? But we didn't give a slag, we were having fun, bonding with each other over our shared geeky arguments like RIBFIR vs. RIRFIB, or who could sing "The Touch" loudest at BotCon. Hell, we were thrilled in those days that Hasbro didn't cancel the then-fading Transformers toy line outright, and we were desperately clutching our garish G2 repaints in hopes that Transformers wouldn't go the way of Polly Pockets. In those days, if someone had told us that we'd actually get multiple LIVE-ACTION movies, or animation-accurate STUDIO SERIES toys, or multiple Unicron toys that DIDN'T look like a beach ball on acid, or comic books that treated our beloved characters and settings and mythologies with the gravitas we yearned for, or that Transformers would end up as Hasbro's BIGGEST product line... well, we'd think he'd be crazier than Galvatron.
And yet, in those intervening almost-forty years, Transformers bounced back better than ever, our nerdery became cool, we're now actually arguing over which version of our beloved toys and cartoons and movies and comics and whatnot are the best...
...and alt.toys.transformers is going to become One With The Matrix.
Dammit.
...
Eh, it's not so bad. After all, Transformers fandom isn't going away; it's just spread out into a million different outlets. Instead of a handful of newsgroups, we've now got TFWiki and toy reviews on YouTube and retrospective podcasts and a zillion websites and subreddits and whatnot. And Dave Van Domelen is still writing toy reviews, Walky is still throwing out hilariously bad jokes to anyone in earshot, I'm still blathering nonsense that nobody cares about, and I even heard a rumor that Raksha's still tending to her snakes and snarling over Hasbro's treatment of Nightbird these days (joke!).
So yeah. alt.toys.transformers is going bye-bye.
But we're not (or at least not yet), and that's what's important.
Eh, I'll shut up now. This old man's gotta get to bed or I'll throw a piston rod.
Bah weep grahnah weep ninibong, y'all.