tf_bunny_farm | Bayverse: I Am Become Jazz, the Creator of Memes (Reply)

So, see, before they did the whole falling rocks thing at the beginning of the first movie, the Autobots camped out offplanet, but close enough to eavesdrop on our satellite communications. Maybe on the Moon, maybe on the Ark, I dunno. (Ignoring the other two movies for this.) Now, Jazz is their spy and communications expert. He is equally capable of annoying people to see how they react and just quietly sitting and listening, absorbing how people interact when they don't know he's there. And sometimes he strikes a happy medium.

Because they have such long lifespans and the 'Cons aren't that close behind them, they spend eight years lurking. They learn languages, they learn political and cultural systems, and they explore the wide wonderful crazy Internet, which is analogous to something they had back home.

And Jazz? Somewhere in that eight-year timespan, Jazz constructs enough of an online identity to get a free LJ account.

His blog is still up. Inactive since 2007, but still there. Recent comments are divided between spam and "Hey, Jazz, buddy, are you OK?" See, he had quite a following among a geeky crowd who appreciated the conceit of an alien trying to learn human culture. Science fiction fans, anthropologists, etc.--they met at Jazz's Lookout and talked about what first contact would really be like, how genderless or alien-gendered aliens could choose a human gender and whether they even should, what if the aliens could translate their alien expressions through a hologram and what appearances could/should they choose for their holographic projections, how to plan a social occasion when one guest's meat is another guest's corrosive contaminant, problems of differences in body scale, Jazz's Weekly WTF (he posted a bunch of links to stuff that confused him and people tried to explain it), etc. There's art contributed by people who sketched holoforms for Jazz's imaginary friends based on his descriptions of their personalities. There are a lot of good discussions, some horrific pun battles, and a few really silly filks. All with the blogger known as Jazz keeping up a seamless act as a visitor from another planet trying to write a guidebook for tourists. He makes friends. He starts memes. He writes some entries for HHGTTG Online. And then he just stops posting. Jazz, buddy, where are you?

So, the blog is still there, and that's the fic. I mean, the fic would be set up to look like a series of blog entries, complete with comments.

I can see Jazz's Lookout in my head, but doing this bunny justice would take time and skills I just don't have. I hereby set it free.

Also: The other Autobots don't know about Jazz's Lookout. They know that he participated in online activity as part of deciding how to interact with humans after they landed, but they don't know that he ran an actual blog. In a way, it was his escape. Maybe somebody who knew Jazz stumbles over it after his death.

Also also: Personally I explain Jazz's wince-inducing blaxploitation act by saying that he is a bit of a meatspace troll, famous for deliberately annoying people back home on Cybertron; online he "speaks" "correctly" (that is, like a college-educated American without ties to an immigrant or marginalized native-born subculture, although some readers suspect that he really does speak English as a second language, not just in his persona as an interstellar alien). Or he knows very well that he's acting like a caricature and does it initially in order to put the privileged white teenager at ease by pretending to be an entertainer like the ones the kid watches on TV and lower in the power structure to boot. Or maybe he doesn't realize that he's not doing a good job of putting what he learned online into practice IRL. Any of these explanations would fit a Jazz's Lookout story. Or use your own.