Talk:Transformers Animated: The AllSpark Almanac

Book in hand... we have to disambig "Solon Kitakaze". This thing is awesome. :D - Chris McFeely 08:28, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

OH MY GOD SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS the number of things that get obscure in-jokey referential names will implode the wiki it is awesome - Chris McFeely 08:39, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

I wasn't gonna buy it, but now... And they reference Solon? Really? It warms my heart whenever its obvious that the official Transformers people are reading out wiki (especially when its articles I wrote!). --DrSpengler 11:09, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

Solon's not the half of it!! Solitarium! Death's Head! The Twilight! Eddie Fairchild and Matt Conroy for pete's sake!! - Chris McFeely 11:44, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

Damn. I'm going to have to get that book. --Detour 13:30, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

I AM MAKING SWEET SWEET LOVE TO THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW --ItsWalky 14:15, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

Well, when you guys are done sodomizing your copies, please make an article to accompany this talk page. I won't be able to get mine until next week. :( --DrSpengler 14:34, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

Considering the book is by Sorenson, I'm not really surprised by any of this! -Mazenoise 15:08, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

About one-third of the book's pages are bathed in Cybertronix. Given what they just came out and said in the book--what with SKY-BYTE AND EVERYTHING ELSE--I literally cannot even imagine what might fulfill their own standard of a "hidden Easter Egg" to be encrypted in another language. Aaiiiiieee. Also, I fucking call dibs on writing up the Visionaries reference. --Thylacine 2000 15:57, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

"The Swiss bank account number of the Bavarian Illuminati".

Is that just a joke on our part or did the writers go crazy? ---Blackout- 14:59, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

That was just a joke, presumably as a proxy until someone actually starts work on translations. Believe you me, I don't intend to run afoul of the Bavarian Illuminati ... again. --Jimsorenson 15:06, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

OK.....

*takes two drinks* ---Blackout- 15:28, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

Ah'm doin' translations tonight! - Chris McFeely 15:55, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

oh sweet jesus this is going to take forever - Chris McFeely 16:21, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

For the love of.... the first bit of Cybertronix is the introduction from the instruction manual of the 1988 video game, "Wasteland". My head is fit to explode. - Chris McFeely 16:46, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

Sorenson, you've played Wasteland? I must worship you now. --Jeysie 16:59, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

Does this book give the names of all the Starscream clones BTW? Considering the toy bio for Sunstorm at least has been a source of confusion.. -Mazenoise 16:32, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

Yes, all the clones are named now.--Rosicrucian^Talk 16:33, 21 August 2009 (EDT)

I will take your answer to mean, yes "Sunstorm" is in the Almanac and yes it identifies the show sycophant clone as "Sunstorm." - Starfield 12:06, 31 August 2009 (EDT)

Annotations

Got 'em done. check 'em out on this rather unglamorous bit of webspace; if anyone's feeling very brave, they might try and add some of this to the article. - Chris McFeely 18:40, 25 August 2009 (EDT)

The DS9 pilot was just "Emissary", no "The" (originally shown, and presented on the DVD, as a single double-length episode). "The Emissary" was a TNG episode, stardate (per MΑ) 42901.3. - SanityOrMadness 18:59, 25 August 2009 (EDT)

Also, note the "-" in front of the universal stream indicator for the writers. That means they're from a Shattered-Glass-like negative polarity universe! (I suspect Quadwal or whatever is the "real life" universe, which would work hand-in-hand with it being a "live performance" stream. Note that the authors are criminal versions of themselves, which again seems right considering the negative polarity.) --ItsWalky 19:07, 25 August 2009 (EDT)

Oh, and you got your Archa Nine and Archa Seven switched. --ItsWalky 19:08, 25 August 2009 (EDT)

Typo: "...Irwin Spoon, a journalist who appeared in a three-party story in Marvel UK's..."; three-part, yes? - SanityOrMadness 19:09, 25 August 2009 (EDT)

The Farscape monologue is from S1 & 2. It changed for S3, and again for S4. - SanityOrMadness 19:17, 25 August 2009 (EDT)

The Dune fan in me screams at the misspellings in "He is the Kwizatz Haderach He is born of Caladan And will take the Gorn Jabbar" (it's supposed to be "Kwisatz" and "Gom"). Is this how they're spelled in the actual song? —Interrobang 20:44, 25 August 2009 (EDT)

Digimon FAQ? Haha. But anyway: "An observation of the events of the first issue of the Animated comic by the trans-dimensional Vector Prime" Please tell me there's a picture of Animated Vector Prime. Also, "The team is thrashed by real-life football team West Ham at Tigatron Stadium" This might be a reference to West Ham apparently being Furman's favorite soccer football team. -Mazenoise 03:45, 26 August 2009 (EDT)

There is no art of Vector Prime. --ItsWalky 08:19, 26 August 2009 (EDT)

I want this book so much right now. But I seriously need to try and ignore the stardate for "Babel": as much as I hate to say it, that episode still scares me. ---Blackout- 08:27, 26 August 2009 (EDT)

Dude, McFeely? "Quadwal" as the universal stream is a joke. Quad=four. Wal=wall. "Fourth wall." It's the "real world." And it's not a negative universe, it's a negative number. 9/25/3760 BC. That's the day calculated for Creation by adding up the ages of everyone in the Old Testament and subtracting back from the birth of Christ. (And it's a "live performance" because, uh, yeah.) FUCK ANYONE ELSE WHO POINTED THIS OUT ALREADY, IT'S FIVE AM AND I CAN'T SLEEP. Hooper_X 04:52, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

I had already figured out that the date was probably referring to the day the universe came into existence (just forgot to actually mention that here like I'd meant to...), but I'd still been stumped on the "Quadwal" part. --Jeysie 06:50, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

You may consider my mind officially blown. - Chris McFeely 07:34, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

Are we not dealing with pointing out picture stuff? Like on page 171 there's a kid dressed like Destro (and another one dressed like a Joe?). Are the guys on 184 at the bottom (1-5) supposed to be anybody? Just curious. --Crockalley 07:21, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

Similarly, is it worth mentioning anywhere in the article (or associated articles) about the flip-book animated Pocketbot at the bottom right of the right-hand pages?

Also, having gone over the book, I am amazed you could read the Cybertronian writing enough to figure out what it said, Chris. Maybe my eyes are just that bad now, but a lot of it seemed far too faint to distinguish, never mind the large portions obscured by overlaid art. Did you get layered files from which to study or something?--Apcog 07:55, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

Naw, I just turned on every light in the room and squinted at it like the dickens. I translated what I could of the very first two passages and googled them to see if they were referring to something, so when I discovered that they were straight transcriptions of other sources, I circumvented the obscured-by-art problem by just started translating some of the large visible patches of text and googling it to see what it said. Would you believe that typing patches of the final narration of Robotech into google gets you no relevant hits? Seriously, the only relevant hit you get for "his homeworld and his past" is now my fricking annotations. As to pictures, I was focusing on getting the references added for the book, rather than pre-existing ones from the show and comics themselves, which is what those kids dressed as Joes would be (that said, I shamefully admit I didn't spot them - I've still not, ahem, read the book fully and properly, and probably would have mentioned them just because that's awesome.) - Chris McFeely 07:59, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

I used to work with Krista Kohlhausen. The likeness between the real person and the EMT character model is, well, perfect. There must be other people out there who look exactly like Derrick Wyatt's drawings too. Maybe he unwittingly creates them, like the narrator-author from "Stranger Than Fiction" who accidentally controls Will Farrell's life. Or maybe he wittingly creates them, like the author from "In the Mouth of Madness" who uses his simulacra people to summon Cthulhu. --Thylacine 2000 10:49, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

References as a part of the article

Now, I can hardly claim to be an unbiased party in all of this, but it seems to me that there is value in having a wikified list of references as a part of the article, rather than shunting people off-site to a web page that may or may not be there in perpetuity. I can't think of another instance of us saying that we shouldn't be codifying legitimate information because 'there is a large amount of it.' At worst we put that information in a sort of side-page, like we do with Optimus Prime (G1)/Generation 1 cartoon continuity and whatnot. Also, the hyperlinked version allows one to more quickly navigate around, rather than having to laboriously type in each search term. Finally, I won't lie, I'm tickled pink to see a 25K list of just the Transformers references in this book.--Jimsorenson 21:44, 1 September 2009 (EDT)

I agree, plus there should also be a list of who got profiles like in other books. - Starfield 22:09, 1 September 2009 (EDT)

aren't references present in other stuff like Divide and Conqure (Real World and Transformers references both) and Nemesis Part 2 and RID episodes and linkage and so on?