Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
spinderella
Jul 15, 2017

by FactsAreUseless

maskenfreiheit posted:

I’m pretty new but after some lurking I hope to be an Fyad superstar

Go to FYAD, they will LOVE you.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

maskenfreiheit
Dec 30, 2004

Spinster posted:

Go to FYAD, they will LOVE you.

I’m new maybe when I’ve been here a long time

The Glumslinger
Sep 24, 2008

Coach Nagy, you want me to throw to WHAT side of the field?


Hair Elf

WebDog posted:

I joined based off the stories that were posted on the frontpage's Comedy Goldmine section. Namely the interesting stories of people in different professions, like background extras or being shanghaied into going to a Rocky Horror screening. Clearly embellished to spice things up. but a fun read on a slow day at work.

I suspect that lead to the rise of GBS superstars, if you didn't sign on to show off your photoshop skills you had a tale to tell and even a simple thread recounting lovely customer service could end up with someone with an interesting story get asked for more tales.

2004 onwards lead to the rise of Humper Monkey, Bruiser and Ten Foot Ant who latched onto the attention this gave them. Angry Bee Dance was one of the last as it became clear that he ran out of poo poo to make up about being a kung fu hotel worker in Brisbane. And there was a Helldump to send him off.

10 Foot and Humper were the same people. The search being completely broken made it so people were unable to tell that 10 Foot has a bit of a Walter Mitty thing, once claiming to have been the victim of an airshow crash in Germany during the Cold War in Germany. He persisted with this despite showing photos of him shirtless with pretty much no scars you'd expect from having burning jet fuel splash over you.

This lead to the creation of Humper Monkey, a grizzled Cold War vet cliche, complete with ex-wives and trying to beat the Goku out of bastard sons along with past stories of getting trapped in abandoned munition stores and eventually Nazi ghosts that tipped people off. I think Humper conveniently "died" shortly after this tale got called out.

Later on 10 Foot became some "horror stories from DnD" star with tales of slovenly nerds making GBS threads up his gaming sessions.

I wish the internet were still a place where that kind of poo poo could have survived. Like, I loved reading the poo poo out of those stories, even if they were pretty obviously fiction (or heavily enhanced)


Anyone else remember Microbe? He was the best

Though I vaguely recall that thread melting down in furry drama towards the end

Hemingway To Go!
Nov 10, 2008

im stupider then dog shit, i dont give a shit, and i dont give a fuck, and i will never shut the fuck up, and i'll always Respect my enemys.
- ernest hemingway
There's still a lot of superstars who kind of tell things like that on Reddit, some subreddits are just for telling stories and the craziest most unbelievable ones get the most upvotes.

spinderella
Jul 15, 2017

by FactsAreUseless
You still can here, it's just not done much. I did a big multistory autobiographical type thread in GBS because that's what I had read and enjoyed the most while lurking. Amazingly I wasn't flamed at all, it was a miracle in retrospect, but I wasnt.

Kirk Vikernes
Apr 26, 2004

Count Goatnackh

I don't remember how the thread turned out, but sometime around 2005 so, goons were abusing a telephone system for deaf people to prank call each other. Goons were posting their phone numbers and calling each other and leaving each other retarded messages. It was hilarious at the time.

Stabbatical
Sep 15, 2011

The Glumslinger posted:

Anyone else remember Microbe? He was the best

Though I vaguely recall that thread melting down in furry drama towards the end

That was the CYOA thread that came out around the same time people were hyping Spore, right? I never did see how that thread ended, didn't have an account at the time.

Bust Rodd
Oct 21, 2008

by VideoGames

Spinster posted:

You still can here, it's just not done much. I did a big multistory autobiographical type thread in GBS because that's what I had read and enjoyed the most while lurking. Amazingly I wasn't flamed at all, it was a miracle in retrospect, but I wasnt.

The difference, Spin, is that while you pop up in lots of threads, you tend to just post original content, ask questions when you plainly don’t get a reference, and aren’t jumping up and down figuratively screaming for attention.

If your thread had been “who is ready for this crrrraaaaaaazy wild ride that is my cuckoo life!” then yeah you’d probably get poo poo on, but the trigger is almost universally “acting like you are special”. Behaving as though you are more important or special than anyone else is like the cardinal sin of SA forums politics and that’s honestly why it’s the only website I frequent on the internet.

Something Awful is in many ways a digital Mecca of smarm, sarcasm and sass. I began lurking in 2003, roughly 9th grade or so, because of Fashion SWAT, Hentai Review and Cliff Yablonski. These jokes were funny but vicious and mean-spirited at their core. Like a nerd whose only defense was to make fun of the bullies’ alcoholic loser parents until he cried in gym class, Something Awful appreciated anyone’s ability to detract or take something down, pull it apart, and show us how stupid it was. We were all watching in silent horror as our species unlocked and refined the ability to process, store, and access all of history, information, and science onto the internet and it was absolutely making everyone stupider in very real time. Something Awful’s community surely leaves plenty to be desired, but it had always struck me as the most genuine atmosphere of “hanging out at the nerd store with your nerd buddies” that the internet had ever produced.

The audacity of someone coming into this equalized, median nerd space and asserting that they were funny or interesting enough for us to give them our attention is like leaving a hot pie to cool off on a windowsill, it just drags us out of the woods because Something Awful (and by extension most of nerd culture) has to be an even playing field to work at all.

The modern day SA Super Stars are more often than not simply high-volume, low impact posters who show up in every thread and just kind of do their own thing as consistently as possible, but what determines their longevity is how they respond to the initial brunt of goons taking them to task.

My favorite examples from recent times are probably Dad Gay, So What and Pick. At times in the last year they seemed virtually omnipresent across GBS with their identities intact in their posts, so even after a few self owns they still keep on truckin’ and then once that happens you become a member of the team, you’re in. We have these highly illustrated caricatures of our personalities (known colloquially as ‘gimmicks’) and as long as everyone excepts that it doesn’t matter if you’re funny or cool as long as you don’t demand we acknowledge how funny or cool you are, then you’re fine.

I have never wanted a Lowtax effort post more in my life than I do for this thread.

(Dad Gay, So What is my favorite poster of all time if only because I recognize them as a meme more than a poster, and I always like Pick and her threads because she understands the humor in selectively triggering extremely fragile cracks common in internet male psyche and exposing super dumb poo poo all over the forums, but in a way that is both funny and also kind of a massive self-own because she has no problem breaking herself down as much (or usually much harder) than anyone else can take them down. Part of the culture of Something Awful is and has always been “If you can’t laugh at yourself, we will absolutely do it for you.” and the people who show up and try to impress without getting that are dead in the water before their “jokes” get off the ground.

let it mellow
Jun 1, 2000

Dinosaur Gum

Bust Rodd posted:

The difference, Spin, is that while you pop up in lots of threads, you tend to just post original content, ask questions when you plainly don’t get a reference, and aren’t jumping up and down figuratively screaming for attention.

If your thread had been “who is ready for this crrrraaaaaaazy wild ride that is my cuckoo life!” then yeah you’d probably get poo poo on, but the trigger is almost universally “acting like you are special”. Behaving as though you are more important or special than anyone else is like the cardinal sin of SA forums politics and that’s honestly why it’s the only website I frequent on the internet.

Something Awful is in many ways a digital Mecca of smarm, sarcasm and sass. I began lurking in 2003, roughly 9th grade or so, because of Fashion SWAT, Hentai Review and Cliff Yablonski. These jokes were funny but vicious and mean-spirited at their core. Like a nerd whose only defense was to make fun of the bullies’ alcoholic loser parents until he cried in gym class, Something Awful appreciated anyone’s ability to detract or take something down, pull it apart, and show us how stupid it was. We were all watching in silent horror as our species unlocked and refined the ability to process, store, and access all of history, information, and science onto the internet and it was absolutely making everyone stupider in very real time. Something Awful’s community surely leaves plenty to be desired, but it had always struck me as the most genuine atmosphere of “hanging out at the nerd store with your nerd buddies” that the internet had ever produced.

The audacity of someone coming into this equalized, median nerd space and asserting that they were funny or interesting enough for us to give them our attention is like leaving a hot pie to cool off on a windowsill, it just drags us out of the woods because Something Awful (and by extension most of nerd culture) has to be an even playing field to work at all.

The modern day SA Super Stars are more often than not simply high-volume, low impact posters who show up in every thread and just kind of do their own thing as consistently as possible, but what determines their longevity is how they respond to the initial brunt of goons taking them to task.

My favorite examples from recent times are probably Dad Gay, So What and Pick. At times in the last year they seemed virtually omnipresent across GBS with their identities intact in their posts, so even after a few self owns they still keep on truckin’ and then once that happens you become a member of the team, you’re in. We have these highly illustrated caricatures of our personalities (known colloquially as ‘gimmicks’) and as long as everyone excepts that it doesn’t matter if you’re funny or cool as long as you don’t demand we acknowledge how funny or cool you are, then you’re fine.

I have never wanted a Lowtax effort post more in my life than I do for this thread.

(Dad Gay, So What is my favorite poster of all time if only because I recognize them as a meme more than a poster, and I always like Pick and her threads because she understands the humor in selectively triggering extremely fragile cracks common in internet male psyche and exposing super dumb poo poo all over the forums, but in a way that is both funny and also kind of a massive self-own because she has no problem breaking herself down as much (or usually much harder) than anyone else can take them down. Part of the culture of Something Awful is and has always been “If you can’t laugh at yourself, we will absolutely do it for you.” and the people who show up and try to impress without getting that are dead in the water before their “jokes” get off the ground.

ok

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Nude
Nov 16, 2014

I have no idea what I'm doing.
dad gay. so what? Is a really good username and I feel like that plays a large role in posts.

I also really liked that one poster's seizure-inducing cat avatar, although I don't know what they posted about.

  • Locked thread