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isaboo posted:soulseek still exists and is cool and good was afraid to mention slsk, glad its still around
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May 29, 2023 19:59
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Haverchuck posted:"its really amazing how the actions of goons and mods are so freaking far beyond the pale that its actually impossible for a bystander to believe." dang , something awful really does represent a decent sized chunk of humanity, huh the good and the bad it seems i can see there are 4500 users browsing, 200000+ registered. how much has it declined over its lifetime did people just outgrow it, or did their basic views change, or did sa change so much that people left and haven't come back
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May 29, 2023 20:16
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harveys zoo zoos posted:also someone mentioned something about pranks and charities and stuff that have been done here. what kinds of things pranks, well, a lot of things that have happened on the internet over the last 25 years can often ultimately be sourced back to something awful. goatse, which you've been introduced to, rickrolling(linking to a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead of whatever the person said the link was going to be), goonswarm, 4chan, president donald trump, SA has been the origin of a lot of "pranks".
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May 29, 2023 20:17
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The first page of GBS used to move like a chatroom. If it's not too depressing a topic, what legal limitations are placed on you now following your sentence and eventual parole? I'm not American but I understand that you will not be able to vote or own most modern firearms, but are there any other less obvious ones? Welcome and thanks for this thread, it's been really insightful and I hope you stick around. I share your reservations about reddit/twitter/FB/etc and I've left almost all social media myself. SA is pretty chill to hang out. I'm so glad to hear you have good people in your life like your cousin, he sounds like a real fuckin stand up guy. E: VVV holy poo poo I'm a CAD guy mostly self taught over a decade or so. I can't imagine how loving alien and bewildering that must have been without any grounding in even the basics of computers. ReelBigLizard fucked around with this message at 20:23 on May 29, 2023 |
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May 29, 2023 20:18
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When I was in jail I remember taking a vocational training course on drafting and using some CAD programs, and I was helping the fellow next to me who seemed to really be struggling. I asked him how much experience he's had using computers, and he said he'd been down for thirty years and this was his first exposure to computers at all.
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May 29, 2023 20:18
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It's a long story. Ultimately, this style of online communication just fell out of popularity. People post things because they want other people to see it. Places like reddit, twitter, youtube or tiktok are going to allow way more people to see whatever you have to say or show than anywhere else online.
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May 29, 2023 20:20
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harveys zoo zoos posted:did people just outgrow it, or did their basic views change, or did sa change so much that people left and haven't come back The facebook/twitter style of website became more popular. The likes/followers/short posts/etc. are designed specifically to keep people clicking. And there’s also no paywall so posting is easier
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May 29, 2023 20:24
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Hello and welcome back to society, and to our little corner of it especially. It's hard to summarize the past thirty years because they have been pretty wild, all things considered, but I'm glad so many people have already put in a lot of effort to get you up to date! Here are my takes on some recent and not so recent cultural phenomena, in no particular order: Cryptocurrency: As you said yourself, an obvious scam. The philosophy behind them being that you could make an economic system decoupled from governments and trade-goods, by instead basing stability and security on [math]. This made very few people very rich very quickly, a lot of people somewhat poorer, and somehow sky-rocketed the cost of certain computer parts such as graphics cards and, more distressingly, had a noticeable effect power consumption world-wide, which Does Not Help with our current main existential crisis, Climate Change. Climate Change: Remember Captain Planet? I'm pretty sure he was on in the early 90's. Back then it was all about Global Warming but the scientists have been hard at work discovering just how utterly doomed we all are and discovered it was, in fact, even worse than what we thought. And the quaint villains from Captain Planet can not hold a candle to the wholly legal activities of megacorps and governments of today, not to mention the actual shady stuff. So what are we doing about it? Aside from blaming regular people for not recycling properly? Not enough! Get ready for some exciting times as we have already passed several point of no returns and are nearing new ones with frightening speed. All the rage these days, they have mostly been covered but it cannot be stressed enough the insane pace of progress these, for lack of better term, self-learning computer programs. Within the span of a few years they have gone from Google (one of the biggest corporations on the planet) being able to "find all the dogs in a picture of a dog" with the aid of their super-computers;  To, essentially, anyone with a decent computer and a few minutes to spare being able to create fully artificial video of anyone doing or saying anything they desire, down to the cadence of their voice matching the subject to the point where you have to be actively looking (or hearing) for clues to tell the difference. This ability is, of course, mostly still used for nonsense.  It has crazy potential for scams and misinformation, but the speed at which it works to generate even a simple image like the one above ( a few seconds ) or a page or two of text on any subject you can imagine* can and will probably replace entire industries sooner rather than later. *Unless it's censored, a lot of the newer "ai's" are heavily shackled ever since the Microsoft Tay Incident, where Microsoft famously unleashed an early version of a neural-network "chat-bot" to Twitter at large and told everyone to talk to it about anything, and that it would respond with ever more thoughtful and engaging dialog as it learned how to speak from the combined data-input of all the people talking to it. It was decommissioned after only 16 hours as by that point it was posting nothing but nazi screeds. Space: The Hubble Telescope is old news. Now we have the James Webb Telescope and it takes *very* good pictures of things that are *very* far away. Also we managed to prove the existence of black holes and even took a picture of one!  If that isn't amazing, I don't know what is. We also landed a rover on Mars and sent a bunch of probes all over the solar system and are planning a return to the moon, and eventually even a manned mission to Mars, unless that is tanked by The Corporations. Mir was decommissioned but now we have the ISS (International Space Station) - where astro/cosmo/taiko/other-nauts from all over the world can float about and do science stuff, as well as the Tiangong station, of which I unfortunately know very little. Science: One of the more notable accomplishments of the past thirty years is the human genome project, the full sequencing of human DNA, which lead to great strides in genetic engineering and development of various pharmaceutical and medical procedures. Fusion is still 20-30 years away, but we really mean it this time. We are almost to the point where we get a net positive amount of energy out of the process if, you discount all the energy it took to even get the most efficient generators running in the first place. Quantum Physics is still very poorly understood, especially by the media, but there have been real tangible results as of late and the first true quantum computers have seen the light of day. They are nowhere near viable yet, sporting only single digit Qbits (of the several thousand needed to be competitive with modern computers) but as proof of concept they are very promising. If/when we solve the lingering issues of needing to keep everything extremely cold for it to work, and figure out a better way to work at the atomic scale needed to build all the circuitry, these new types of computers will be able to solve some very specific types of problems in human-scale timelines instead of universe-scale timelines and will enable some other very odd calculations to be performed. Dinosaurs: They have (had) feathers now and the brontosaurus was a fraud, it's actually just a mislabeled Apatosaurus. Sorry. Internet Activism: Thanks to the incredibly pervasive reach of social media, online-community-organized world-wide protests have sprung up against everything from Scientology to Wall Street, to corrupt Governments, with varying success. There have also been attempts to organize world spanning improvements, such as combating climate change by planting trees - with individual citizens carrying the burden of nations. Virality: One of the many dark sides of above mentioned social media pervasiveness, though it has it's pro's as well. Essentially, any person could at any point in time do a thing, and have that thing be picked up by whatever algorithm decides these things and be catapulted into a truly global spotlight. Thus what started as, say, an in-joke between two teenagers, once photographed and posted on the internet through any of the dozen major social media sites, could within a week feasibly have been experienced by a good sixth of the entire population of earth. Take some time to have that sink in. You could go from a nobody having recorded yourself dancing as a goof for your friends, to being a known house-hold-name for a billion people. In less than a week. This can happen at any time for anyone. The reasons aren't always positive.
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May 29, 2023 20:30
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About people getting dumber these days, not really. The difference is that the Internet allows these people to congregate and form an echo chamber. 30+ years ago, you'd have a guy or two who fell for scams and dumb schemes and you wouldn't think much of it. Nowadays, that guy is in a discord full for other dipshits who reinforce each other's stupidity and give each other confidence that the dumb thing they believe in is real. Since these communities are so insular, no one else shows up to tell them they are stupid. Anyone who does is declared a troll and is quickly banned.
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May 29, 2023 20:47
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Swedish Thaumocracy posted:
It's back, baby!
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May 29, 2023 20:49
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Thanks for giving me some new vernacular Harvey. Just picked up some sweet zoo zoos. Good luck, mate.
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May 29, 2023 20:54
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harveys zoo zoos posted:dang , something awful really does represent a decent sized chunk of humanity, huh Hmm, i have a graph somewhere of new registrations of this site over time, though I have so much poo poo on my phone that it might take a while to find it, or someone else might post it instead Id reckon that the basic views on this website have changed a good deal for the better with time. the early internet was a cruder place. from web1.0 to web2.0 in the 2000s, a big thing was the consolidation of social networks into the hands of a few corporations. the prevailing wisdom of the early internet was to not post too much identifying information, but with web2.0, the corps like google who once advised the former advise the opposite, as they realized there’s a ton of money to be made by creating a sort of, advertisement panopticon. it sucks lol. in the past people used to more often have their own websites, like fansites about whatever topics they’re interested in, which would be organized by webrings and directories (we may need to go back to this tbh with the deluge of rubbish created by AI systems). forums were another earlier form of community organization, they still exist but are largely used by slightly older people who’ve experienced the earlier internet. thankfully there’s been more and more backlash against these major social networks for the societal ills they’ve wrecked upon us. the smaller walled garden communities from chat rooms to traditional forums as opposed to wide open social networks is a cozier and preferable internet experience imo
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May 29, 2023 21:00
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The person that said the above is a noted artist and scholar, Harvey. A Philosopher King, even. Oh, and Snowcaps are pretty good.
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May 29, 2023 21:32
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harveys zoo zoos posted:black sabbath is one of my all time favorites Hell yeah! Now you can go wild checking out tons of stuff from them you probably wouldn’t have heard before. There’s some great demos like War Pigs with slightly better lyrics: https://youtu.be/67JcYZb8VG4 And tons of live shows https://youtu.be/Xqjify__PWw Check ‘em out in the sunshine! https://youtu.be/XKiItcuUmeE And you might be interested to know that they have inspired plenty of genres and sub genres like doom and stoner rock/metal. There have been thousands of sabbathy sounding bands now, taking the style in lots of different directions. A couple of the big ones are Sleep and Electric Wizard and I’ll stop there. Don’t wanna go too overboard with links https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qMIS2BaDilY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iVGcRNotCAE
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May 29, 2023 21:32
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the zipline story is amazing because elements of it were well made, but they just had no idea on what sort of angle to make it or how to slow them down. It was just angled straight down a valley with no room to slow down and come to a stop other than slamming into something. No one actually used it iirc, they thankfully tested it first with a sack of potatoes or something.
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May 29, 2023 21:45
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harveys zoo zoos posted:dang , something awful really does represent a decent sized chunk of humanity, huh web forums were niche even in the heyday compared to things like chatrooms. it wasn't that long ago that a lot of people just didn't have a digital presence until social media rollouts like MySpace or Facebook, and then it exploded with smartphones. now social media is splintered between age and interest cohorts like Instagram, TikTok, etc. I don't recommend using Facebook because now it's mostly aging, radicalized Boomers
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May 29, 2023 22:13
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I’m so excited that you got to experience modern theaters for the first time! That must have been a trip! I love getting Sun Maid chocolate covered raisins, popcorn and a white cherry Icee. Hell yeah.
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May 29, 2023 22:55
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OP, on the subject of SA specific things, there is one goon (me) who probably made the greatest achievement on SA history. A couple years ago, I made a post that was both the double sex number 6969, and also an average (poo poo)post count of 4.20 posts per day. Observe the most glorious of goon achievements by clicking this link right here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3973469
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May 30, 2023 00:01
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Has someone told the tale of the Smash Mouth who ate the eggs?
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May 30, 2023 00:03
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harveys zoo zoos posted:and the nfts and crypto things just seem like scams to me. did people get a lot dumber in 30 years or what. or maybe we've been dumb all along i don't know Probably not, they just got safe spaces like Reddit and Youtube to group up and form echo chambers, making them a lot more confident in their stupidity. On that note, welcome to SomethingAwful.
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May 30, 2023 00:26
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Taeke posted:I'll let others tell you about the wild stuff that has happened on SA. Some of it is pretty crazy like goons funding a guy that wanted to open up a hot dog shack but later turned out to be completely inept and racist or whatever. Or when goons went to an island (iirc, at least into the wilderness somewhere) and tried to build an off the grid community that hilariously fell apart quickly. There's too much for me to even remember and others can tell the stories better and more accurately. Goons (and people from other communities) have stalked an autistic man for 23 years, meticulously documenting every single action he has ever taken, as well as intervening personally in his life and actively tormenting him. He has his own wiki and a 75-part documentary series on YouTube, which I believe is still ongoing. This, along with Awful Fantasy, are the only two successful goon projects I am personally aware of.
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May 30, 2023 00:35
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The Bible posted:Goons (and people from other communities) have stalked an autistic man for 23 years, meticulously documenting every single action he has ever taken, as well as intervening personally in his life and actively tormenting him. And if that doesn't tickle ur fancy, we have a man spreading his anus far and wide
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May 30, 2023 01:10
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If I had the handle @fart on twitter I would be so happy
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May 30, 2023 02:18
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Private Cumshoe posted:If I had the handle @fart on twitter I would be so happy Good news: it's for sale! That's right I own the rights to the handle. I'll just need you to send me $500 in Best Buy gift cards. Act now!
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May 30, 2023 02:22
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In regard to people getting dumber: The tagline for this website is (or was) "The Internet Makes You Stupid". This is 100% correct, and given that the Internet is pervasive now, well, you can draw your own conclusions. Movie theaters: Theaters these days are basically trying *anything* to get asses in seats, since they are competing with streaming services now. More and more people have very big TVs with nice sound systems at home, which means they can watch movies in their living room without having to go through the hassle of driving to the theater, getting tickets, blah blah blah. Goon stories: What about that guy who was going to walk across the US, only he made no preparations and thus made it like a mile?
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May 30, 2023 02:46
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blah blah *hack* *hack* *hack* what was covid like in prison OP?
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May 30, 2023 02:48
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I don't think people are getting dumber, it's just they are getting louder because dumb people are all online now as opposed to when all this started when the barrier for entry was higher.
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May 30, 2023 02:48
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3749412&pagenumber=1&perpage=40 This thread is where people post funny quotes and bits of goon history, it's very entertaining.
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May 30, 2023 02:52
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The world has really hosed itself since you went in. We all liked cat pictures for awhile, but now we all have our own personal soapboxes and echo chambers in our pockets. If you were indeed locked up for nearly three decades I could imagine how overwhelmed you must be. I hope that you can adjust after such a long incarceration.
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May 30, 2023 03:04
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This video pretty much covers everything that has happened to society for the past 27 years. Hope it helps bring you up to speed. https://youtu.be/sizz8hYl_Cw
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May 30, 2023 03:08
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I’m going to give the tv show The Walking Dead a fair chance OP. I’m not really big into zombies but I think I’ll be able to get into the characters from what I have heard. Have you watched many shows?
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May 30, 2023 03:24
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Presto posted:Goon stories: What about that guy who was going to walk across the US, only he made no preparations and thus made it like a mile? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3714480 IIRC highlights included using a cheap cart for a cross country walking trip, routing through the Arizona desert in summer, traveling via the interstate system on foot and camping out a few hundred feet from the road every night, and planning his trip around the online ramblings of some dude named "Hobo Nick". It's a fun classic SA read and I highly recommend reading through it but if you want to just skip to the ending he started in a park in San Francisco and didn't even make it out of the park before having a breakdown and begging some poor strangers for help. A GIANT PARSNIP fucked around with this message at 04:10 on May 30, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 04:08
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This thread is like when a new kid transfers to our school. I'm like 6 pages behind but another "famous" goon was Vilerat who died in Benghazi. Google search tip: put words in quotes if they are very important to your search. Searching Zoo zoos recipe chocolate chips peanuts might bring you a bunch of irrelevant zoo zoos that have chocolate chips, but Zoo zoos recipe chocolate chips "peanuts" will only return things that have peanuts. Who were some other people you had in your corner to support you? I have a brother-in-law in jail, and his dad is always concerned about being his connection to the outside world in order to keep him from being institutionalized; anything stick out that was a particularly helpful lifeline for you?
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May 30, 2023 05:35
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Negostrike posted:Has someone told the tale of the Smash Mouth who ate the eggs? I was just thinking of Smushmath. I’d retell but my memory is spotty while medicated. Edit to avoid spoilers. That story is too fun to risk diminishing. BGrifter fucked around with this message at 06:06 on May 30, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 05:45
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harveys zoo zoos posted:i can see there are 4500 users browsing, 200000+ registered. how much has it declined over its lifetime SA's decline can be explained by a number of factors, but chief among them was its old webmaster, Lowtax's stubborn refusal to change with the times as the internet evolved from the 00s into the 2010s and beyond, because, well... he just kind of sucked as a person and managed to successfully capture the sentiments of a bunch of shitlord teenagers and their lovely edgy sense of humor in the year 2000, but failed to mature and develop along with them as they grew into 20 and then 30 somethings. People drifted away from the site as it sort of calcified and got stuck in time because there was no real incentive for folks to stick around here long term, especially as sites like Reddit, Twitter, and 4chan emerged and muscled in on SA's turf as a place for general internet discussion, sharp comedy, and edgy shitposting, respectively. Another big factor that contributed to SA's decline in users but ultimately led to it becoming a better place in general was when Lowtax banned anime porn from ADTRW, the anime discussion sub. Before that, the sub was a festering hive of the worst perverts on the internet and was heading for a run-in between Lowtax and the authorities if things kept up apace, so the Tax man went "gently caress all of you creepy weebs, get the gently caress out and go post your loli poo poo somewhere else, it's banned on SA now." And they did. En masse. One of the folks who got permabanned in the great hentai purge was a dude known as moot who went on to found 4chan explicitly as a "Something Awful, but with anime porn," and it quickly eclipsed SA by being the new beacon to attract the worst of the internet's worst. 4chan would later go onto play a major role in Donald Trump becoming president, but that's another equally insane story. Anyway, flash forward about a decade and Lowtax is a perpetually drunk loser rear end in a top hat who missed the boat on selling SA to a TechBro billionaire backer and getting it off his hands for good, so he's perpetually miserable, hates the site and its users, and hires and fires people who don't know how to code to run it, so it's constantly falling apart and in danger of crashing and dying for good. In 2020, it came out that Lowtax constantly beat the poo poo out of his ex-wives after he made his new girlfriend an admin out of nowhere, and then beat the poo poo out of her too and she posted a veritable hostage video of herself in a hotel room telling people not to judge him too harshly... for beating the poo poo out of her. This led to a user revolt among SA's remaining userbase, with a bunch of people either leaving the site in protest or Lowtax just banning them out of spite for calling him out for being a wifebeater, and eventually led to Lowtax's ouster as site owner and he sold the site to then-head admin Jeffrey of YOSPOS, it's current own. Within a year of Lowtax selling Something Awful he committed suicide by blowing his brains out with a shotgun after he purposefully spent his entire life savings to make sure his ex-wives and multiple children didn't receive a dime in alimony or child support because he was a shitbag right to the end. So that's why SA is in the state it's in in Two Thousand and Twenty Three Anno Domini.
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May 30, 2023 06:09
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Actually, he blew his brains out with a FN 5.7 And we did all raise tens of thousands of dollars to donate to his family afterwards.
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May 30, 2023 06:19
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my kinda ape posted:Actually, he blew his brains out with a FN 5.7 no one gives a poo poo about what stupid firearm he used you gun weirdo.
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May 30, 2023 06:27
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Chinatown posted:no one gives a poo poo about what stupid firearm he used you gun weirdo. did you know that linux is a kind of "hip hop" operating system?
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May 30, 2023 06:28
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Chinatown posted:no one gives a poo poo about what stupid firearm he used you gun weirdo. it's important to recount our shared history properly!! it's like if you said he spent all his money on Twinkies when it was actually absurdly expensive Goldbelly cookies, both of these things indicate how he loved to spend money on dumb poo poo for morons \/\/\/ just short of $96,000 https://www.gofundme.com/f/helping-a-friend-in-hiding my kinda ape fucked around with this message at 06:41 on May 30, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 06:32
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I think forums user "my kinda ape" was actually highlighting the fact that goons raised over 20000 dollars for lowtax's spouses and kids rather than correcting someone on the type of firearm lowtax used to end his pathetic existence, but what do I know, i guess i know how to read posts at least
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May 30, 2023 06:39
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