A to Z Challenge: X-Brawn vs Hooks X

Not surprisingly there weren’t a lot of options for X. There is at least one Autobot toy starting with X: X-Brawn. There was a Brawn from the original series but I guess they put an X in front because he’s an X-Terra and more X-treme than the old one, right?

I never watched that series so I can’t really say much about him from personal x-perience. But, hey, he x-ists! Here’s some stuff on the Internet:

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/X-Brawn 

 

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There isn’t much for the Decepticons for X, really just one, so then I thought I’d talk about my own personal Decepticon back in 1996-1998: some dude who called himself Hooks X.

So back in 1996 I joined a Transformers newsgroup. It was fun for a couple of months. Then this Hooks X guy and someone called “Qweena” got into a row that went on and on. Some people began to think “Qweena” was a sock puppet. I didn’t really give a shit one way or the other. And I posted a thread saying as much. I think because there was a thread saying he should shut up and another that she should shut up, I posted a thread saying they should both shut up. Because, really, who gave a shit? Of course this was before I realized that the point of Internet message boards is mostly for pointless bickering of one sort or another.

A short time later Hooks X was apparently feeling vindicated for whatever reason and in a gloating post said, “Everyone but [me] has apologized.” And I’m like, “Why the hell should I apologize?” I hadn’t insulted him; I just said their argument was a stupid, pointless, waste of time.

From there it was on. So I guess thanks to Hooks X I got into my first Internet flame war—but of course not the last. He posted an April Fool's joke the next year about the Beast Wars show being cancelled and stupid me fell for it.

The kicker came when he forged an email from me to make it sound like I made racist comments to him. The stupid thing is this is 1997 on a newsgroup, so how would I know what he looks like? It’s not like I could go look up his Facebook profile or something. And he lived in California I think so it’s not like I ever met him IRL. It didn’t make sense, but of course people are gullible and stupid, so I’m sure some people bought into it.

Eventually I left and never heard from him again. I could probably try to look him up, but why bother? He was just the first in a long line of trolls I’ve fought with on the Internet. I should probably know better, but sometimes I just get sucked into something and then it’s on and like a bulldog with a bone I don’t want to let it go.

At one point I collected a lot of the material from my Transformers newsgroup flame wars and saved it somewhere. I still have it in a folder of my backup hard drive, but while it might surprise you to realize it, I don't really have much interest in looking back on those things. The past is past, right?  

Christopher Dilloway might remember the one before Season 2 of Beast Wars where Optimus Primal was seemingly dead but a promotional picture seemed to show a Maximal who looked like a new Optimus Primal. I said as much on the newsgroup and of course people were like, “No way! That’s not him! He’s dead, dead, dead!” It then became a whole big thing. But guess what? I was right. Suck it, losers. (If you wonder how “fake news” could sway a presidential election, people on the Internet have never been very bright.)