User talk:Jeysie/Archive

Good job!

Well, dang. You and FortMax really took care of the missing images in short order. Kudos! It's really helpful!--Rosicrucian^Talk 00:18, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, you're awesome! I used your list to feed the 'bot. ^_^ --Derik 00:24, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome. :) Although the big thanks really goes to Mendel's lists from Wikia and Opera's Links panel. :> --Jeysie 00:47, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Gorlam Prime

Thanks for uploading that. I'll probably upload a second one of the inhabitants in their transitional state once I dig my scanner out. At least now there's a "before" image of the planet to keep folks from sticking the "after" image up there.--Rosicrucian^Talk 14:56, 11 October 2008 (EDT)

Not a problem. :) As for the transitional state of the actual inhabitants (I was kind of wondering if that was what you were really going for, but decided the planet pic would work better for the moment), I can upload that one too if that would make things easier for you. I'm not sure where to put it myself, though. I'm thinking either the intro or the SL:Nightbeat section would need expanding somehow? --Jeysie 15:16, 11 October 2008 (EDT)

I'm actually fairly unconcerned if such a pic extends into the Spotlight:Hardhead paragraph, as that's a bit that touches on their evolution too. I was thinking of scanning the frame from Spotlight:Nightbeat where he's just looking at the cyborg inhabitants walking by.--Rosicrucian^Talk 15:25, 11 October 2008 (EDT)

Works for me, then. I figured that was the frame you had in mind. *goes off to work on it* --Jeysie 15:40, 11 October 2008 (EDT)

Fanfiction

Hey. I noticed on your user page that you write fanfiction as well. Do you have a link to your stories? It would be nice to read something decent without having to dig through all the crap on fanfiction.net to get to it. --Nightshade83 00:52, 27 November 2008 (EST)

Heh, sure... well, I hope it's decent, anyway. FF.net: [1] There's a few extra ones on my DA page, too: [2] (though I definitely don't guarantee the non-TF ones necessarily actually being good, since they're old), and my Mosaic scripts (with links to the end result comics in the comments): [3]. --Jeysie 01:32, 27 November 2008 (EST)

The main page

You're the one that made our main page, right? The recovered version needs fixing. --FortMax 23:58, 16 March 2009 (EDT)

I'll see what I can get done to it. (Sorry, was in power page-saving mode yesterday.) --Jeysie 18:36, 17 March 2009 (EDT)

Thanks for the recovery, but a little thing I noticed... the [''view''] link that takes you immediately to the day's page is missing. --M Sipher 10:35, 18 March 2009 (EDT)

It's hard to tell without having the original wikicode, but IIRC that's actually something to do with the "This Day in History" template itself rather than the Main Page... i.e. Derik did something where the template shows the View link if the date page is on the Main Page/transcluded anywhere (whichever is the case).

Either that, or I remembered the code wrong in how to transclude the date pages.

So I'd ask him about it first. If it turns out I did misremember something, let me know and I'll fix it - I just want to make sure our templates are fully restored. --Jeysie 20:49, 18 March 2009 (EDT)

I'm sure others will echo this, but your restoration efforts are hugely appreciated, despite the small snags mentioned just above. I only wish I'd had the time and knew what I was doing (a little experimention proved neither was true) in order to help.--Apcog 12:08, 18 March 2009 (EDT)

You're more than welcome... I'm rather proud of what we've all built here, so anything I can do to help save it, I'll gladly do.

Plus... I consider recoding the Main Page specifically to be a favor to me as well... call me biased, but I like my restructure way better than the stuck-in-the-90s-on-Geocities-esque Wikia structure. (I dunno if it's the absolute best Main Page design we could have, but I do think it's at least a big improvement over what we did have.) --Jeysie 20:49, 18 March 2009 (EDT)

Because seriously, holy crap.

You are presented with this Gigantion Award

In recognition of users who help in ways both big and small.

This is the second time you've stepped up in a big way to help the wiki, so you most certainly deserve this. Consider it a slightly more nerdy barnstar.--Rosicrucian^Talk 23:21, 23 March 2009 (EDT)

Ooo, nerdy is good. :D But thanks, I'm always happy to help (and let's just say that it's nice to be somewhere that being helpful is appreciated). --Jeysie 04:55, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

Fan Club stories

I wanted to respond to what you were saying on Talk:Mech, but the discussion has gotten tangential enough that it's not worth adding more to that already-cluttered page. You expressed surprise that your opinion about term-usage in the Fan Club stories generated the strong responses it got. And I do think that your interpretation of the Fan Club fiction's place in the grand scheme is not uncommon, but that's also why a lot of folks (myself included) quickly jump to its defense. Since the very first BotCon comic, people have been dismissing the relevance of fan-club/convention material in all sorts of contexts, so we few who care are on an endless crusade to school the unenlightened in the egalitarian ways of TF canonicity. It's hard to imagine smaller potatoes than the "mech" debate, but for us it's very much a principle-of-the-thing thing. Especially since there are Fan Club content creators here (again, myself included), it's always going to be a tender spot. Sorry you had to wander into the line of that fire when you thought you were in light, completely non-controversial territory. - Jackpot 03:57, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

I think it's one of those things where what I'm used to in other scifi fandoms tends to clash with how TF does things. In any other fandom, stuff written by fans for an official fanclub just wouldn't be considered near as "important" as anything written by the official creators.

I mean, like I said, it's no surprise that a group of fans go and write fanon terminology into a story once they get the chance. I don't even have a problem with that as a general principle. But from an information standpoint, it ends up being, you're writing your own citation. It's technically official, sure, but it's... weird.

But this was a small thing. It's really more stuff like the Primus thing that bugs me. I mean, I don't have a problem with fanclub stuff being canon for the most part, because usually it doesn't affect anything. What's one more continuity off doing its own thing in a franchise that already has a billion of them, right?

It's when you have niche fanclub stuff written by fans busy trying to retcon stuff written by other writers in "mainstream" stories that it gets annoying, and I'll wager that's the exact sort of circumstance where most other fans' dismissal comes in, too.

I mean, it doesn't hurt anything to say Shattered Glass is canon because it doesn't make a difference to anything else, and I doubt you'll see most fans complain about that sort of thing. But when someone's saying stuff like, "Well, the Movie and Animated both have to have Primus 'cause of this retcon written by a paid fan that about 1% of the TF fandom has read..." ...yeah. *shrugs a bit*

Of course, being a bit of a continuity purist who thinks that, if you have to allow retcons, only that continuity's writers should get to do so, affects my own thinking a little. If something like the upcoming "Thirteen" story from IDW goes and retcons every continuity into having the same origin, that would bug me a lot, too. It's just that, since it'd be written by a pro writer for a mainstream release, it would have enough weight that one would have to pay attention to it, even if you hate the idea.

I don't consider any of this to be an insulting thing at all, I should note - I rather like some of the fanclub stuff I've gotten to see, and I'm sorely tempted to drop some money to get to read the rest of it even though I don't care about the club toy stuff. It's just a matter of practicality and being realistic about market share and clout. (Although admittedly there is a little bit of awareness of the risk of "Running the Asylum" problems.)

There's also the fact that the wiki's declaration of everything being canon is (for the moment, at least) nothing but our own treatment on the matter. So you're schooling people in how the wiki does things, not in any official stance.

In any case... sorry I got off from the "mech" topic there, but I honestly didn't really care about that specifically... this is just all the sort of thoughts in my head that generated my opinion on the matter. --Jeysie 04:49, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

No, no, it's not your fault that the Talk:Mech conversation segued into a tangent; it was a tangent that the rest of us jumped on because we care about it. For what it's worth, the everything-with-Hasbro's-stamp-is-canon idea is a fair bit older than this wiki. I started participating in the online fandom around 1998, and I think it already had currency by then. Those of us who have been championing it see it as the only objectively logical position to take with a property whose creators have never made any declarations on the matter. For example, the question of what counts as a "pro" writer versus a "fan" writer gets murky very quickly. And the question of distribution is dicey as well, since this is a worldwide property with all sorts of different markets that get all sorts of different material. We aren't interested in making judgement calls about whether various obscure releases are too small to count. Using the Hasbro brand as a standard is simple and easy and the farthest thing from arbitrary that we can get.

On yet another tangent, I do agree somewhat with your thoughts on retcons and how we treat them, though that has nothing to do with Fan-Club officiality. Some time back, PacifistPrime suggested that allowing a retcon to run roughshod over a past series actually violates our everything-is-canon standard because it doesn't protect the integrity of that series in its own right. In most cases, this is a very academic distinction, but I've seen a couple of cases where I felt that particular hackle get raised. Sometimes I wonder, if each of us had absolute control over the wiki in parallel universes, how different would our wikis look?

- Jackpot 05:32, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

I think the problem is: on the one hand, there's canon as in, the difference between what's official and what's fanfic. On that note I have no problem with our "anything with the Hasbro brand on it is official" philosophy. But there's also canon as in "what's true (or must be true) for a given storyline", and that's where the real questions lie.

My philosophy tends to be: Anything that that the storyline's writers (or designated "storyline keepers") have as true for that storyline is such, including being able to retcon their own work. Additionally, they don't have to care about what's true for any other storyline unless they want to.

So, Sunbow is its own thing. Marvel US and UK are their own separate thing. The Arrival is in canon with the Animated cartoon because the comic's writer is the same as the cartoon's head writer and has declared it all as such. AHM unfortunately retcons stuff in the -ations and Megatron Origin because the IDW "overseers" have declared it's all in the same storyline. And so on. Here the question of what's more important than what doesn't apply, because everything's only messing with itself, so to speak.

Then we have where stuff starts overlapping. For instance, Beast Wars takes parts of Sunbow and Marvel as its past. And TransTech takes bits of everything as part of itself. But can BW and TransTech go and retroactively change the series it's borrowing from? I personally would say no. Some other people might say yes. However, this is still pretty easy to reconcile, as you can always treat it as splinter/different continuities. The question of importance still doesn't really apply.

But then we get to the real messiness of stuff like Wreckers and possibly the Thirteen doing retcons to all of the continuities. And that's when something just has to give. That's when there has to be some kind of "weight" hierarchy. If Wreckers and The Thirteen give two different retcons, which do we pay more attention to? If the Movie or Animated end up doing their own thing with their origins, do we get to say that the retcon has been retconned, or do we have to do "Well, Primus still exists even though he's completely pointless now because he's neither Cybertron nor the TFs creator" sort of mental gymnastics? And so on.

I should note that this all has absolutely nothing to do with questions of quality, by the way. I think Cheap Shots is cool, but it's still on the "fanclub" level for me. I think AHM is terrible, but it's still on the "official for the comics" level for me. Van Reyk and Knowler might be ascended fans, but the IDW folks declared their Jazz story as part of the IDWverse, so it has more weight than the fanclub stuff. And so on. Which is why I said I don't consider my assessments thereof to be insulting in any way.

(No I don't spend silly amounts of my free time pondering this sort of thing, why do you ask? :P)--Jeysie 06:14, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Right there with you on pretty much all of that (except, of course, the default lower-hierarchy status of the Fan Club stuff). I've debated the one-Unicron idea here before, and from those discussions I've gathered that the general opinion on multiversal retcons is a hierarchy of chronology. If "The Thirteen" presents an entirely new Unicron/Primus paradigm, it will supersede the existing one by dint of being more recent. My personal strategy, if I were in charge, would be to resist any multiversal retcons as strongly as possible; for instance, I suggested framing the current Unicron paradigm as "Ramjet's story" in Unicron, the way that everything that came before it is documented as "So-and-so's story". I cut my TF-debate teeth with the likes of Raksha and Skyfire, old G1 purists who were bucking the BW tide, and one of my favorite arguments against their BW-hate was that BW wasn't doing anything to their beloved old cartoons. Their tapes were still there on their shelves, exactly as they always had been. That principle led me to conceive of TF continuity as ever forward-moving, not backward. This philosophy became even more relevant when BM came along, and many BW fans were up in arms about what they saw as unforgivable changes to the characters and cosmology. My philosophy recognized that BM did incorporate BW events into its own backstory, but BW could still be viewed in its own bubble independent of BM's retcons. Was the Matrix-dimension actually something called the AllSpark? From the perspective of BM, yes; from the perspective of BW, not necessarily. That spirit is what I would ideally see preserved in this wiki, even in the face of ever-more-ambitious retcons. - Jackpot 06:48, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Sounds like you and I are mainly in agreement with much of this. I obviously approve of the idea of "series integrity" and resist cross-storyline retconning. In an "ideal world" I would ignore both Fanclub and IDW or otherwise cross-retcons except as an obligatory note.

Although in my case it's because I'm a writer at heart... to me the idea of someone else coming along years later and overwriting part of my already-written story is an icky feeling that would tick me off. Not to mention it totally screws up any chance at coherency, because the original story was written with different assumptions and nuances. (I could go into a whole essay about how the Primus retcon totally screws up some of the Quintesson storylines from a narrative/emotional standpoint, let alone from a coherency standpoint...)

But... in any case, since such ignoring isn't done here, the question has arisen in my mind on how to deal with any contradictory facts that can't be neatly split off into separate continuities.

The idea of chronological precedence for retcons seems like a reasonable way to handle it. But, I should note that some people would want to cling to certain retcons even if some later fiction did go against it (witness this discussion that made me want to have an epic facepalm...) --Jeysie 19:34, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

I couldn't help but overhear your conversation! :) The way I take "everything is canon" is a little complicated. Unicron and Primus are muliversal singularities in the Universe continuity. That is to say, in the Universe continuity, Unicron and Primus exist in the G1 cartoon and Marvel comics as multiversal singularities. However, in the G1 cartoon continuity Unicron and Primus are not multiversal singularities, because the G1 cartoon is canon. Unicron was made by a monkeyfish dude, Primus doesn't exist, and the first thirteen cartoon continuity Transformers were assembled by Quintessons. None of which was likely to be Vector Prime. Does that make any sense at all? Sort of a meta-multiverse - Starfield 20:02, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

That does make a lot of sense, actually. (Well, as much as multiple multiverses co-existing can make sense, but that's Transformers for you...) --Jeysie 20:16, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Hey, the more, the merrier, Starfield. It's nice to have a discussion that doesn't hinge on some specific decision that people are all invested in making immediately. Your point of view is pretty similar to mine, though perhaps a tad more extreme. When it comes right down to it, I don't know how far I can take my philosophy if an aggressive retcon really gets up in its grill. So far the TFverse hasn't presented a retcon that I see as being inescapable (since the one-Unicron thing - in its very specifically troublesome interpretation - came out of the mouth of a lunatic), but it could.

As for your thoughts, Jeysie, though I'm in agreement about series integrity, I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out that the possibility of having one's literary work messed with or nullified by future additions is the price of doing business in a long-running franchise. You say that retcons within a single series are more palatable than cross-series retcons, but those often still involve one writer overturning another's work. It's kind of arbitrary to declare the series the fundamental unit of continuity (yet I agree that it is). There are all sorts of circumstantial reasons for drawing the line at series - breaks between series usually represent transitions to different creative teams or interruptions over spans of time - but those factors can exist within a single series as well, and still I wouldn't advocate dissecting a series when that happens. There's just something nicely... definite about a series, and I think each one deserves its own space. For instance, I'm very happy that our standard article layout is structured around series distinctions. Even though many people are more cavalier about cross-series retcons than I am, I can still use the article structure to write in accordance with my own perspective in most cases.

Oh, and to respond to the link you cited, I do admit that the every-universe-has-a-Primus retcon is logically very difficult to undo, since (as Thy said in that discussion), you can't prove a negative. We only take author intent so far here, so the only way to truly contradict the pan-Primus retcon is to somehow demonstrate within a story that Primus can't exist. While I would love to see that happen, I honestly can't think of a ready way how.

- Jackpot 04:48, 21 April 2009 (EDT)

Now that I look on it, I think "storyline integrity" is the better phrasing.

For instance, things like the IDWverse and the Marvelverse have different writers (and in the case of the IDWverse, multiple miniseries as well), yet it's all part of the same storyline because it's all handled by the same overseeing production team. Armada, Energon, and Cybertron are all series in the same storyline. And to borrow from other scifi as examples, it's the same with Trek: there's multiple series, yet they're all the same story/timeline, created by teams that are connected to each other in terms of working on former series, all being overseen by the same production company, etc.

But then you have Beast Wars, which has a different creative team than the Sunbow cartoon, and thus it can't all be considered the same storyline in the sense of Beast Wars stuff changing Sunbow stuff.

It's just that in TF, "series" usually is the easiest "storyline" definer, since so very few proper sequels actually exist. (In fact... I think A/E/C is the only proper set of sequels, isn't it? The IDWverse miniseries don't really count, IMHO.)

As for being unable to prove a negative, I think my summary of "OK, so... we've established in such-and-such that Cybertron is just a planet, and the TFs creation didn't involve any gods... so Primus still exists somehow, he's just got jack all to do with what gave him any story purpose whatsoever in other continuities" about fits my thoughts on the matter should such a scenario ever occurs. Sure, the retcon technically still valid, but to the point of... trying way too hard, to put it politely. Any reasonable person would recognize that the retcon has effectively been ignored because the writers wanted to do something different for a change.

Because, it's one thing to downplay author intent in favor of what actually got printed/shown in that author's storyline. It's quite another thing to tell an author they don't know what is or isn't in their own story because you expect them to have to pay attention to what happened in an entirely unrelated story written by an entirely different creative team. ...know what I mean? It's like telling the people writing the Batman Begins/Dark Knight movies that they can't use a plot point because some completely unrelated Batman comic story arc did it differently. --Jeysie 05:44, 21 April 2009 (EDT)

Re: "storyline integrity":

I think you're venturing onto the shaky ground of mere textual analysis. One of the reasons I like falling back on "series" as the fundamental unit of continuity is that it's a concept defined and contained by multiple elements (like marketing), not just our opinion of where creative teams and storylines and so forth begin and end. For instance, you cited the Unicron Trilogy, but the thing is, Cybertron was created as a standalone series. The Japanese creative team was in reboot mode, but the American dub team shoehorned the results back into continuity. So does the UT count as one "storyline," able in our eyes to retcon itself with impunity, or should its component series be granted more individual sovereignity, along the lines of the G1 'toon and the BW 'toon? My series-based philosophy quickly and easily says the answer is the latter. (And, for what it's worth, mini-series don't count; in my eyes IDW-G1 is a single series.)

Re: proving negatives:

As you say, "should such a scenario ever occur". Right now we've got two active series where the creators have declared there to be no Primus (IDW-G1 and Animated), but nothing has actually happened in either one that fits the bill that you're describing. If a conflicting origin story is published/aired, then okay, it'll be time to dust off the current paradigm and hold it up to the new light. In the meantime, though, the statement "all universes contain a Primus" is not very contestable. I do believe it should be qualified (I prefer something like, "it has been claimed that all universes contain a Primus"), but in terms of the fiction itself, it hasn't been contradicted. This doesn't mean that we should, say, talk about how the misfortunes of IDW-G1's Cybertron are "the convulsions of Primus, weakened but regenerating within his planetary prison." But neither should we say, "Without a god at its core, Cybertron has borne the brunt of the war much harder than in other universes." Where IDW-G1 is concerned, Primus is something of a Schroedinger's God.

I said before that I found it hard to imagine how to retcon this particular retcon, but I've realized it would be quite easy if the new story acknowledged the multiverse. The same way that Primus was retconned into every story with a few lines of dialogue, he could be taken back out. Maybe Unicron could dimension-hop into the IDW-G1verse, where he anticipates little resistance because he knows that no Primus has ever existed there. Something like that. In the absence of dimension-hopping, though, a sufficiently thorough origin story might also do the trick.

- Jackpot 22:58, 22 April 2009 (EDT)

Well, "series" works OK enough for TF because, like I said, AFAIK we've never had anything that was really a "true" sequel to anything. If we ever had a situation like Star Trek where more than one series are considered to be definitely linked, it'd be a lot dicier. Admittedly I don't see that ever happening, but I wanted to try to clarify what I meant by what units to take together and why multiple writers on a given thing aren't necessarily a problem in terms of what should be considered to fit together. Even with something like IDW.

As for the Primus situation, well... IDW has shown it doesn't give a hoot what Furman planned for his storyline (pity, I found the organic origin hints kind of interesting...), and Isenberg's the head writer, not Wyatt. But the fact that there are creators who want to get away from Primus and Unicron means the matter might crop up eventually. (And the movie is definitely doing something weird with the original TFs, but who knows what yet.)

I kind of like the way to handle it that Starfield suggested, though. I mean, even if some folks don't want to use the twin gods, there's no reason why creators shouldn't also be able to opt-in to the Primus multiverse if they want to, as well. --Jeysie 23:35, 22 April 2009 (EDT)

May 8 greeting.

I really like the idea, but I can see a problem in a few years. Is there a way so we don't get the 31th, 32th, and 33th anniversaries displayed? I know this is half a decade in advance, but I hope TFs and this wiki are still going strong. Since it's a feature being worked out, now seems like the time before it gets forgotten. --Bluestreak7 16:58, 7 May 2009 (EDT)

Am I missing something? Why wouldn't you want those anniversaries displayed? --abates 17:05, 7 May 2009 (EDT)

He means he wants any anniversaries ending in 1, 2, or 3 to have their proper suffixes, as in: 31st, 32nd, and 33rd.

That actually did occur to me as well; I'm just too lazy to figure it out right this moment since it won't matter for tomorrow specifically. (Points for honesty? :3) But I do have a method in mind that I think will work; I just need to spend some time mucking around with the String Functions parameters.

Addendum: Or we could just re-word the greeting somehow to have just the year number with no suffix, but let's see if I can be all geeky and figure it out this way first. --Jeysie 17:07, 7 May 2009 (EDT)

D'oh! Now I feel silly. This might help. --abates 17:24, 7 May 2009 (EDT)

That... is incredibly useful and more elegant than what I had in mind, thanks! I think I'll go fix that right now, then. --Jeysie 17:33, 7 May 2009 (EDT)

Screencap templates

Assume for a second that you could get "{{screencap}}" to insert "{{screencap|from=|description=}}" (or whatever.)

How would you lay out the links then? -Derik 15:07, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

Fun with lists, prolly, either inline:

• General
  
  • {{hastak}} * {{comicinterior}} * {{comiccover}} * {{screencap}}
• Comic Cover
  
  • {{MarvelUScover}} * {{HMcover}} * {{MarvelG2cover)}}
• Comic Interior
  • {{MarvelUSinterior}} * {{HMinterior}} * {{MarvelG2interior}}
• Screencap
  • {{titlecard}} * ({G1cap}} * {{BWcap}} * {{BMcap}} * {{RIDcap}} * {{TFAcap}}

Or this:

• General
  
  • {{hastak}}
  • {{comicinterior}}
  • {{comiccover}}
  • {{screencap}}
• Comic Cover
  
  • {{MarvelUScover}}
  • {{HMcover}}
  • {{MarvelG2cover)}}
• Comic Interior
  • {{MarvelUSinterior}}
  • {{HMinterior}}
  • {{MarvelG2interior}}
• Screencap
  • {{titlecard}}
  • ({G1cap}}
  • {{BWcap}}
  • {{BMcap}}
  • {{RIDcap}}
  • {{TFAcap}}

Turned into a dropdown thingy. Like, except both in proper CSS style that I'm too lazy to code up right this moment but can later if you want. --Jeysie 15:26, 12 May 2009 (EDT)