Ten THOUSAND pages of content!

So, I've been a fan of the Tranformers wiki ever since ... umm ... I got into a big argument with a fellow fan about it. Well over a year, anyway. In that time I've been a pretty decent editor, adding my share of pages, and taken ownership over certain areas where I have a strong expertise. So, as the wiki approached ten thousand pages of legitimate content, I started to get excited. I've been a not-insignificant factor in both generating and cataloging that knowledge, so I felt a certain amount of pride. But how to celebrate?

I've got my private 'to-do' list, which has a subsection on wiki pages that I'd like to build. Normally I just bang one out whenever I get inspired to do so, but once the wiki hit 9,970 or so I started to approach things a bit differently. I still did about 99% of the work of generating a page, including uploading all the relevant images, building out pages using the preview tools and making sure that everything looked good. I just didn't hit submit. Instead I saved these pages to a text file and kept them in my back pocket. By this Monday, 12/14/09, I had gotten twelve pages like this. I had a few rules for myself. They had to be legitimate pages of content that I would have made anyway. Also, they couldn't be stubs, I had to have all the relevant info on the matter at hand. At just after eleven, the wiki hit 9988 pages, which was the magic number. I was good to go, and started queuing up my pages. However, there was an issue. One of the pages that I had ready had already been made. I looked around and saw that another user had been filling out pages of the Transformers Animated comic book adaptations of the episodes and realized that that'd be really easy to do. I whipped up that page, then cascaded down my other eleven pages, one after another. By 11:14, I'd published page number 10,000.

Which page did I choose to go with? Why, my wife, of course, the beautiful and talented Ming-Li. I had written her into the universe while naming some of the characters from Street Demon, a television show within the Transformers Animated universe. It seemed like a fitting tribute to her to make her avatar the specific milestone.

For the record, the pages I created within a span of three minutes were Eshems aliens from the IDW movie comics, bounty hunters Burn-Out and Skunge from a Marvel comic, liquid oxygen from the recently reviewed Marvel #37, Forrest Forsythe from #37 and several other stories, the Best of Transformers (v1) anthology, an EXTREMELY obscure Japanese fan contest character creator called Autosanrin, Animated Ming-Li's fellow Street Demon Roxy Sparkles, the city that I love Los Angeles, and the Junkion's ship from the classic movie, dubbed The Minnow in The Complete Ark. Someone beat me to the punch on the Eshems Nebula, so I swapped in an adaptation comic.

So, that's the story of how I hijacked the Transformers Wiki for my own personal benefit. I will fully acknowledge that it was a bit cheesy of me to do so, but I figured that it was all in good fun and no one has complained about it to me yet. Besides, most of the other milestones are equally obscure concepts, like writer Larry Leahy who co-wrote one episode of the G1 cartoon, or a satellite from a Big Looker storybook. If you use the wiki, you know how damn good it is. If you haven't checked it out, you're doing yourself a disservice. I guarantee that anyone reading this blog will find lots of interest. http://tfwiki.net/

The Ark Addendum - Webworld (part 5)

Hope you're not tired of Webworld yet. This set of models finishes out the therapy portion of the Webworld backgrounds. The upper illustration features the couch where Galvatron was encouraged to talk about his problems. This did not go over well.

On the bottom is the interior and exterior of the Exo-drama stage, a rather ominous arena where Galvatron was encouraged to act out his problems. The incessant bouncing of one of his fellow patients agitated him enough to break forth from hi bonds and go on yet another rampage, prompting the Torkuli to seek more drastic solutions ...

The top model also answers a question that people have been posting about. It's a bit hard to see, but there's a signature in the lower right of the drawing. It looks like it was drawn by Rico Rival. He certainly does Dery's style well, doesn't he? He's quite a talented artist.

Finally, this post is something of a milestone. My very first post was a year ago today. That makes today the one year anniversary of this blog. Looking back, there were exactly 300 posts in the first year (this is #301 for all time), an average of over 300 visitors per day and over 100,000 pageviews. In that time I've published two books, gotten married and seen blog contributors come and go. I like to think that we'll have as much to be proud of next year.