"Our Laughs Are In Danger!"

[Tuxedo Prime]

A sequel, of sorts, to my post regarding the limbo that the World's Worst Site is (still) stuck in.

They say that the Internet never forgets -- but with Usenet increasingly harder to access and the Internet Archive having gone out of service following a mass hack and DDOS attack (EDIT: It's back up as of this morning. I think we'll still need to rely on Google Groups for the fics, though), I find our lack of funny.... even more compounded than when I first learned that the World's Worst Site was in a deletion queue.

Attempts to contact the two masterminds of the World's Worst Fanfic have gone unanswered. So too have requests for information on the Book of Faces and by email to Steve Stonebraker, Keeper of ATT's FAQ.

So, under that old maxim of "Can I do less?", I've gone and used what I could find before the hack to give us a revised and somewhat expanded World's Worst Fanfic Universe, over on the Fandom fanon wiki.

Well, that's one phase of a salvage operation. But the harder thing would be finding a home for the actual fiction. (I mean, there are hosts such as FF and AO3, but trawling and saving copies might prove a labour or three....and then we need to make sure of accreditation.)

Anyway, I did at least manage to find one of the guys who started all this madness on this very board, so that's another good thing.

Is anyone else out there willing and able to Rescue the Funny? Too much of Web 1.0 fan-made content has already been lost.... I know I would rather not have one of the few things that brought me joy in the turn-of-the-millennium disappear as well.

 

[Echowarrior]

I'm sorry for not jumping in and helping with this more quickly. Real life has lots of demands on me at the moment. I do plan to help with this, however!

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

I'm sorry for not jumping in and helping with this more quickly. Real life has lots of demands on me at the moment. I do plan to help with this, however!

You did warn me that such would be an issue, and it's not as though I haven't had similar (especially these three months of the year!).

I made sure to leave the affiliated cast members of your works to you alone. Terrorclaw is a bit of a grey area as Pic and co. seemed to have taken a liking to him, and used him in their own material, but aside from adding a hyperlink I've left his article as is as well.

And who knows, maybe if you spread the word more will hear and read it.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

Okay, so this is a little bit tangential, but....

Rhinox's article is up on the fanon wiki, and linking it to something that came after the Beast era and the WWFF heyday (to wit... oh go look for yourselves, you'll see) got me thinking about other ideas that came a bit late but seem almost tailor-made for the setting....

So, at one point in desperation fighting a bunch of Shattered Glass combiners, Megatron tries to augment his forces by ordering random Decepticons to try forming new superwarriors. I think it went something like:

MEGATRON: Blitzwing, Dirge, Shrapnel, Reflector, MERGE FOR THE KILL!

(the Decepticons in question look at each other)
SHRAPNEL: F--- you, f--- you.

Anyway, years later the Enigma of Combination was introduced to fiction and then this happened:

While the important business remains salvage and restoration of what we have, I can't deny the idea of a sillier take on Galvatronus would be one of many things I'd like to see, should a relaunch ever happen.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

Today marks the 27th anniversary of the World's Worst Fanfic (at least, as its own concept as opposed to just a label).

By curious coincidence (OR IS IT--? Nah, it's coincidence), there are 27 articles collected on the Fanon Wiki about it.

An anniversary fic would be nice, but alas my attempts to reach the two masterminds have borne no results so far....

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

While running some errands, I decided to ask "what if Pic and Perc had lasted long enough for Drift to join the G1 and SG casts"?

Of course, SG Drift would be a self-demonstrating article....

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

So.

After unanswered e-mails, fruitless Facebook posts, and the equivalent of an online milk carton photo, I finally got word from Steve-O, keeper of the alt.toys.transformers FAQ (still!) -- via Reddit of all possible channels.

I quote him below:

...the short version is that they aren't interested in any projects involving WWFF stuff, definitely aren't interested in writing more, and they don't have any archive of old material that you wouldn't have already found while going through whatever is/was still publicly out there.

They've moved on in their lives and feel no need to go back to it... Archiving what you could find is a nice tribute to all the old laughs, but it's something that the creators lost interest in a long time ago, ESPECIALLY because of the baggage it has....

I'm guessing that last refers to their writing Optimus Primal as having impulse control disorder.

At any rate, it's sad that I had to find out by proxy, and that it took years to even find out what became of them, but there we are.

But The Funny, at least, shall not pass, even if the World's Worst Site now is consigned to the same fate as so much of Web 1.0 - era fandom activity....