Jump on, ya' wee lassie!

That's right, take a ride on this here bandwagon! Yee haw!

OK, strange Scottish/Cowboy accent over, let's get down to business. Back in august, BrickArt!san gave birth to a monstrosity... a monstrosity that turned into a community-wide phoenomenon - Transformatank. Yes, note that I'm not including those two stupid Taus (τ) - BrickArt!san is very annoying in terms of adding in over-elaborate punctuation.

So yes, here it is: the mother of all Transformatanks, in its dark green glory. Actually, looking back on it now, it seems quite lame, but it was the idea that got everyone going.

So then BrickArtisan (I've given up on that exclamation mark he has in his name - what an annoying idea that was) milked it (so to speak) and came up with a 'logistics variant' of his newborn, retarded bastard baby:

 And that got everyone going. He even created a group, with what used to have a 'moderator recruitment thread', which is a sure sign of the fad going a bit too far. Now, there's been loads of more Transformatanks, made by people like Tadashistate, Delucks, and Crimson Wolf, but I'll just pick out the most interesting...

There's been a lot of large-scale Transformatanks, which I really don't like (and, as a recently deleted picture showed, BrickArtisan himself agrees) - the idea of having something turn from a vehicle into a mecha is as old as time (which, in this instance, is as old as Transformers), so this sort of thing from 'The one and only Mr R' doesn't really belong with all the clever microscale 'Tanks.

I really like Moose Greebles' 'Heavy Bob' 'Tank which comes with a free witty description:

Heavy Bob was the loneliest  тransformaтank in the Flickr group pool. All the other тransformaтanks made fun of his ridiculously large mechanical housing. They told him that he would never be able to transform like them. One day a magical blue, brick-built fairy came to him while he was crushing an old man inside his car. The fairy was touched by Heavy Bob's sad situation and after an excruciatingly long winded motivational speech convinced him that he too had the courage and pistons needed to transform.

It's a clever idea, and well pulled off, with style, flair and of course wit. It makes quite a contrast to some of the run-of-the-mill Transformatanks out there. And who cares if it doesn't stand up quite right?

One of the most annoying things is Tau (the small T BrickArtisan used in Transformatank). There's a discussion topic in the Transformatank group about how to type it on the computer, and the Artisan himself replied with:

"T = т which happens to be a letter in Russian Crylic"

OK. Firstly, Cyrillic. I'm sure there'd also be a secondly and thirdly, but then I'd just be ranting on about Cyrillic letters and how they are used in a lot more languages than Russian. I'm still a bit confused about how Tau (Tau is a Greek letter which looks similar, I can't remember the name of the Russian letter) "happens to be a letter in Russian [...]". So, its original purpose was for Transformatank, was it? Then the Russians nicked it and used in in their own language? The swines!

Believe it or not, I have a lot of respect for BrickArtisan. Sure, his elaborate use of symbols and punctuation can be annoying, but he's created something unique and brilliantly ingenious. So well done, BrickArtisan, who is only thirteen (last I heard) - you should be congratulated. Let's just hope that the Transformatank fad comes and goes before it gets severely annoying (we don't want another Cave Racers).

~John