All original content (c)
Ben Cremeens

The Day the Allspark Grew A Pair
A Tale of Woe, Misery, and Stupid Juvenile Pranks by Obs

So our story starts on the evening of September the 4th, in the venerable IRC channel known as #wiigii!. Kyde happens to find a few pictures of some TransTech sketches (TransTech was a line of Transformers toys in development at Hasbro a few years back.), and also finds that Transtech Starscream went so far as the modelling stage. These pictures are indeed quite nifty and something that is rare for the fandom to see. So Hooks and Kyde decide they need to let the folks on the Allspark know.

But they need someone to host the pics. No problem, I have plenty of webspace on my account. I slap them up in a directory where they continue to stay. Hooks asks for a "thumbnail teaser" to put by the news item that ends up on the Allspark's first page, and I take a few minutes to set him up with a thumbnail, and it all goes up on the Allspark.

Kyde starts the main thread, and there are murmurs of appreciation, discussion of the meaning of all that translucent plastic, and the obligatory people who claim that this is much better than the Energon line we're getting next year or the Armada line we got his year and that the grass is always greener on the other side of that damned fence. Oh, and one of the trolls finally put his foot in his mouth deeper than usual and got banned for a while. And all was good.

Two days later, I get bored.

I noticed that the thumbnail image for the news post on the first page was leeching directly off my website. Not really a big deal. I was already hosting the two big pictures, and getting hits from several other websites including Snakas' in Japan. I was well within my bandwidth quotas, seeing as no one reads my blog or looks at my lame fan art or visits the Paradron Medic Shrine that I keep moving for no good reason. But still, I had the power to put any file I wanted there, and it would show up on Allspark's main page. I was amazed that none of the mods (and there seems to be a lot of them) had caught this.

I could HAXX0R them. I could be l33t like Jeff K. I ask you, could you turn down the opportunity to be as cool as Jeff K.? I think not.

My first thought was Goatse Man. But then I got to thinking, "Man, I'd have to go look at the picture long enough to download it, resize it in Photoshop, and then upload it to my site." Couldn't do it. Don't even think about tubgirl. That one makes the bile rise.

Anyway, that was really too malicious. I mean, little kids could see it.

That's when I decided to give Starscream a wang. The original plan was to tap a true expert on wang drawing and ask him to do the honours, but he was gone for the weekend and I had to improvise. I found myself wondering, "If the Wacom Tablet people knew their peripherals were going to be used to draw wangs on unreleased test models of robots, would they have still made them?"

The new thumbnail pic went up on the front page of the Allspark around 2 in the morning on September 7th. I sat back and watched the fun for a while, expecting someone to fix the link any minute. It stayed up well into the morning, with some folks noting it in the original thread. One even went so far to exclaim, "What an ass," which I find odd since you really can't see Starscream's ass in that picture.

Then another thread popped up in the morning, and the pic came down somewhere between 9 and 10. So for roughly eight hours, 'Screamer was shaking his wang at everyone who bothered to look down at the third news item down on the front page. Not a bad amount of time, even if it was on a Sunday morning.

And thus was my brief but l33t career as a haX0R, D00d. It was probably the stupidest, most juvenile, meanest thing I've done in almost three weeks. But it was fun while it lasted.

Now to clear up a few points: