Wow, that alone makes the new Transformers movie legitimate. That and the fact that it’s not directed by Uwe Boll. But where’s the vocoder voice going “Robots in disguise?” Hee…although to be fair, I never was much of a Transformers kid. Dunno why. I had a friend who lived and breathed them, but I was more about M.A.S.K. and G.I. Joe I guess.

The classic music video was awesome, especially the laser effects on Stan’s axe. And did that sound naughty? I assure you it was not intended to.

Oh, and mad props for your Oatmeal Slammage. If I ever met the real Stan Bush, I would present my minidisc recorder and tell him I’d give real money if he’d just scream out “Wilford Brimley Oatmeal Slaaaaam!” But instead he’d probably call security and have me escorted out.

Speaking of that old chat room stuff, I was searching for some ancient files on some equally ancient CD-Rs last night when I ran across a most amusing directory filled with text files I’d apparently kept during those heady days when I basically lived at Mer’s. Most of the files consisted of three lines: A chat handle, an IP address and some variant on the words “NUKE THIS FUCKER.” Ah yes…good old Windows 95 and the unpatched buffer overrun bug, and that handy little script kiddie utility called WinNuke. An oh-so effective deterrent.

There were also some excerpts from saved ICQ conversations between me and Reaper (excuse me…”Bean Bandit”) during which Reaper was informing me of the parade of drunk football fucks from D.C. that he and Todd apparently ran across one night while out driving. Inspiring of particular mirth was his recollection that Joe Miller stopped his truck in the middle of the street at one point, essentially fell out of it and then staggered drunkenly about, waving at everyone including Todd and Reaper, as if they were supposed to be there.

There was lots more, too. Lots more really old, weird, extraordinarily scary stuff.

Haha, of course I remember the anonymous and deadpan call of “Semprini” whenever somebody was nuked. That was great shizz. In that magical directory of lost goodies I mentioned earlier, I also found a three-part documentation series about how to hack Beseen chat rooms, probably written by Oji Suisse or Sailor Iron Mouse or one of those 31337 types.

I distinctly remember not being able to understand a word of the document back then, and when I read it today I understood why…it was mostly a tease; doesn’t really say anything of substance at all. It’s more like “You’ll want to do this kind of hack,” but when when it gets down to explaining how to do it, all it says is “You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.” Probably just as well, or I might have evolved into a black hat.

Good old WinNuke. Or bad old, perhaps I should say. Although it did collectively save us from “OWNER,” “LAWYER” and his various flooding clones on a few occasions. Amusingly, a few years ago — this is back when I still had my old legacy DOS utils folder on my hard drive — I was doing a full virus scan of my system, and received a virus infection warning. My AV scanner had identified WINNUKE.EXE as a malicious app. At first I was freaking out, then I realized that yeah, that’s exactly what the damn thing was — and that’s why we used it, heh heh. I’ve long since deleted it — not like it’s even been any use for going on a decade now.

Yep! Good old Oji! I remember his Gunsmith Cats page, all right. (For that matter, remember Bean Bandit’s Gunsmithing?) I also remember playing the old version of Wolfenstein one day during the chatroom era (the one that still printed that three-letter “code” next to your score when you finished an episode), and upon beating the game, I received code OJI. Hahaha.

The magical directory also contained a screenshot I remember Chris took while he was on the chat at my place, trying to combat an OWNER flood of the moment, and then out of nowhere a Javascript alert dialog appeared that said only: “Stop doing that!” We were never able to figure that one out.