Something Awful

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Template:Infobox Company Template:For Something Awful, sometimes abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website based in the United States. It houses a variety of content, such as instant messaging pranks, digitally edited pictures, and humorous negative reviews of various forms of media. In addition, it has a very active set of forums, which in later years have grown remarkably. Historically, it has been a force in the promotion and creation of various Internet phenomena, which in recent months has led to conflict with the site eBaum's World (see below).

Contents

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History

Image:Somethingawful screenshot.png Something Awful is the brainchild of Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, who remains in control of the site, despite the proliferation of writers and administrators who have assisted him over the years. The earliest comedic features of the website appeared originally on Kyanka's personal site ARCCentral, but were popularized on Planetquake including Cranky Steve's Haunted Whorehouse, which at that time presented comical negative reviews of user-made Quake II maps, and other reviews, notably of a Doom comic book, and some movies.

After he was forced into resignation for publishing a derogatory Cranky Steve update on a PlanetQuake employee[1], Lowtax moved his personal features to a new site, entitled Something Awful, in late 1999. During this early period, Lowtax created some of SA's most famous and long-lasting characters and catchphrases, such as Jeff K., the Space Robots ICQ prank, and the Awful Link of the Day feature.

Something Awful met with great financial difficulties during the period from 2000-2001 that threatened to take the entire site down. Various sponsors, including GameFan and eFront, promised Lowtax payments in exchange for ad space, but none of these companies lived up to their promises. Details of the actual financial structure of SA have always been hard to come by, but most forum members assert that Lowtax has made, and continues to make, an enormous personal investment of time and money into the site to keep it running.

The 2001 decision to charge a one-time fee (currently $9.95 USD) for forums access seems to be a cornerstone of the site's present financial stability. Continuous income is generated through new member fees and merchandise sales.

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Modern Something Awful

The site's various writers post humorous articles (officially called "News posts") on the front page. The articles may be personal in tone, describing real-life experiences, but more often than not they are irreverent rants, often with a satirical, educational tone. Typical articles include "The Unwritten History of Halloween," "Learning to Cope with France," "Hello, I'm a Driving Asshole!" and "Oh TV, What Have You Done?"

Every News post concludes with an "Awful Link of the Day" (sometimes abbreviated to ALOD) in which the authors provide a link to a site (often fan submitted) which they feel is disgusting, confusing, unintentionally humorous, disturbing, stupid, or a combination. Fetish websites and web comics are a common target of an ALOD. Furry sites were once a common target for an ALOD, but that topic has since been deemed a "dead horse." Usually, all contact or discussion features (such as email, guestbooks and forums) on the targeted site receive a large number of vulgar or insulting messages.

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Personalities

  • Josh Boruff, aka "Livestock". His articles usually take a tone of ironic, naive enthusiasm. He also presents the Photoshop Phriday feature each week.
  • Kevin Bowen, aka "Fragmaster", who specializes in outright mockery.
  • Dennis Farrell, aka "Corin Tucker's Stalker". When not writing about video games, he tends to create short stories employing the narrative style most often associated with that tale's genre (pulp action, mystery, romance, sports) with characters or plot elements that are out of place or surreal.
  • Joseph Fink, aka "Maxnmona"
  • Bob Mackey, aka "BobServo"
  • Hassan Mikal, aka "Acetone"
  • Jeff K, (fictional character) a parody of teenage Internet users, particularly script kiddies and online game players.
  • Jedidiah "Jed" Kirchner, all of whose articles are stream-of-consciousness narrations by a lonely, cross-dressing teenager who works at McDonald's. Kirchner's prose style is verbose and over-the-top; it could be interpreted as mockery of the Livejournal culture or literary pretension.
  • Moof, whose writings and drawings espouse an innocent, childlike view of the world at large.
  • Zack Parsons, aka "El Pinto Grande" or "Geist Editor", who frequently writes articles about politics, tongue-in-cheek cyberpunk fiction, and war. Zack is somewhat unique among SA writers in that he often writes more serious articles, usually about war. Examples include two "War Diary" entries (set at Antietam and My Lai) in which soldiers share their thoughts about the carnage around them; and an extended Daily Dirt focusing on Japanese atrocities in World War II.
  • Reid Paskiewicz, aka "Frolixo". He writes some of the stranger articles, sometimes about farming equipment and gnomes. He is also known for getting into feuds with the other writers.
  • Shmorky, aka "Cave Deli" is the pseudonym of Dave Kelly, the flash animator for Something Awful's Flash Tub. Dave Kelly is also the author of a number of online webcomics such as Purple Pussy ("A comic for girls!"), Smut, and Lizard!.
  • Dr. David Thorpe, who mocks bad music (which, according to his standards, is virtually all music), and collaborates with Zack Parsons for the Fashion SWAT. Thorpe has appeared on behalf of Something Awful on Attack of the Show! [2], giving a tongue-in-cheek description of the site.
  • Johnny Titanium, aka "DocEvil". His articles usually mock passive-aggressive computer nerds and/or anarchic teenagers.
  • Evan Wade, aka "Pantsfish", who often employs the use of the literary device known as "sarcasm"
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Features

Other notable features and sub-sites of the site include:

  • Cliff Yablonski Hates You, run by the fictional grumpy old man Cliff Yablonski, who mercilessly mocks pictures of ugly people found on the Internet, or submitted by readers in his section. He has on occasion made front page updates where he goes on rants about various things.
  • Photoshop Phriday, a weekly feature in which members of the Something Awful forums (see below) use their computer graphics skills to make humorous images dealing with the theme of the week, such as "Misadventures of Dick and Jane" or "Breakfast Cereals Gone Wrong."
  • Movie Reviews, a biweekly look at movies that are even worse than the "so bad they're good" things people like to watch. The movie reviews use the same grading scale as ROM Pit reviews do, and have been authored by various people, including Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons and Ben "Greasnin" Platt. Currently Evan "Pantsfish" Wade handles the reviews.
  • Comedy Goldmine, where material from exceptionally humourous threads from the forums are posted. Sometimes this includes content akin to Photoshop Phriday.
  • Frequent movie, TV, game, and pornography reviews (most often selective in reviewing the very worst examples of all), which continue the tradition of Cranky Steve's Haunted Whorehouse from SA's earliest days. The Something Awful review system gives each item a score between 0 and -50. There is also the rare positive review of an item that the reviewer liked, where the scale goes from 0 to 50, such as in the case of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which received a 44. The lowest video game review score to date is -73 for Derek Smart's Universal Combat.
  • The Flash Tub, which contains short flash movies animated by forum user Shmorky. Voices are usually provided by well-known SA personalities such as Lowtax, Fragmaster, and Shmorky himself. Music is generally also written and performed by forum users, with Lowtax, Josh Jones (Colorfinger), and Brian Kendall (GuyGizmo), being regular contributors. New additions usually appear on Mondays.
  • The Weekend Web, a weekly feature on Sundays edited by forum poster "DocEvil" where Something Awful forums members scout out badly written, overemotional, disturbing or seemingly insane posts on any Internet forum, including SA's own. The feature usually consists of picks from two to four specific forums, and an occasional topical mix of posts from several forums.
  • Daily Dirt, fairly close to a blog in format, where the writer of that day's article often uses material they feel not worth devoting the main page to, or explains the rationale behind that day's update. Early postings have shed light on the history of the site. It is optional for the writer to use the feature; only a few writers make regular use of it.
  • Your Band Sucks, a bi-weekly feature which criticizes popular music artists, maintained by "Dr." David Thorpe. The feature also makes fun of the angered fans who respond, often in poorly written e-mails, to the criticism of their favorite band. The article series spawned from a board "goon"'s post claiming to be able to snobbishly tear down any band the other forum members could throw at him. Recently Dr. Thorpe has run a series reviewing amateur songs sent from readers.
  • Legal Threats, which showcases most or all of the mail correspondence (real or electronic) related to some of the numerous legal threats the site or operators have received. The site has offended its share of people over the years, most often when their sites were featured as an Awful Link Of the Day. Some have tried to bring lawsuits against the site, usually under the grounds of libel. Lowtax typically gives his opponents the run-around. Sometimes he also corresponds under the guise of fictional legal "expert" Leonard "J." Crabs. The initiators of the threats usually give up once they realize that they have no grounds for a lawsuit, as Something Awful falls under the auspices of free speech.
  • Fashion SWAT, a segment which makes fun of clothing and/or styles. Each article has a theme, such as "Comic SWAT", "Retro SWAT", or "Ganguro Madness". The name of the feature comes from the reasoning that, if fashion police are needed to correct bad fashion, a fashion SWAT team will be needed to correct extremely bad fashion.
  • Fake SA, where the front page is occasionally replaced with a humourous page that often parodies specific sites or a particular kind of site, such as weblogs or font sites. All links on the fake page lead to the real front page. The feature is not used regularly due to the amount of email received from confused readers following the appearance of the fake page.
  • State Og, an irregular weekly newsletter from a fictional industrial conglomorate which only purpose seems to be power, profit and entertainment at the painful expense of the rest of the world, customers or not.
  • The Art of Warcraft, a series of satirical guides to World of Warcraft. New additions usually appear on Tuesdays.
  • The ROM Pit, similar to the regular game reviews, except that it focuses exclusively on video games from the '80s and early '90s, and provides a download of the ROM of the game and an emulator. So far, the highest scoring game has been Wall Street Kid by SOEFL, which got the highest possible score of 0. The lowest scoring games, tied with the lowest possible score of -50, are Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu and Superman. Due to bandwidth issues, some of the earlier articles do not feature pictures. New additions usually appear on Saturdays.
  • Video Game Article, a series of articles on video games, written by Corin Tucker's Stalker. New additions usually appear on Saturdays.
  • Truth Media, in which a writer presents a review of a game, movie, television show or album. The reviews are, as explained in the index of reviews, "complete and total bullshit"; they contain intentional factual errors, made-up events and typographical errors. Readers are encouraged to post the link to the review on fan sites and forums related the reviewed material. If sufficient flame mail is generated, it is later posted in the Truth Media index. The feature has not been frequently used in recent years; however, some of the later reviews have not been listed in the index.

The site also often produces "specials" such as deliberately-poorly-drawn comics, short stories, or "guides to life". Older features, such as Jeff K's "SMARTY MAN GAEM DESIGNEAR "SURVIROR"" (Game designer Survivor)[3], seem to have been instrumental in bringing notable game designers, such as Levelord and Cliffy B to the Something Awful forums, at least for a short time.

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Forums

Template:Main The "Something Awful Forums" is the forum system on Something Awful. Many consider the forums to be more popular than the main website; a running joke is that new members occasionally do not even know that the main page exists. Despite charging a registration fee - something which is almost unheard of in internet forums - the forums are unusually popular with over seventy thousand current members and typically have between three and six thousand registered users online at any one time. At present, the forums usually get around thirty thousand posts a day. The forum members are affectionately known as Goons.

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Something Awful subculture

The culture of Something Awful is constantly evolving, but below are a few cultural themes that stand out.

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Doom House

Image:Doomhousetitle.jpgDoom House (aka Doom House 2000 or Doom Hose) is a short film by Something Awful webmaster Kyanka. It was directed by, and stars, Kyanka in addition to fellow SA writer and collaborator Kevin "Fragmaster" Bowen. One of Kyanka's cats is also in the film. The plot follows widower Reginald P. Linux as he struggles with the demons and terrorists haunting the "Doom House" into which he has recently moved. As the movie is intended to be a parody of horror films, particularly some of the films reviewed on the site, the dialogue is over-the-top or poorly delivered, and numerous bloopers and continuity errors are intentionally made for comedic effect. It was made and released in 2003.

Mood House is a sequel, of sorts, to Doom House. It is essentially a reversed, mirror version of the first movie. Roles are swapped, the scenes take place in reverse order, and the general mood of the movie itself is reversed. It was made and released in 2005.

Something Awful, which regularly reviews bad movies, reviewed both movies shortly after their respective releases, and gave both facetiously praiseful reviews. Both movies received a score of 46 out of 50, making them the only movies to receive positive scores on the site. Both reviews provide links to download the movies (see external links).

On November 16, 2005, Lowtax released Doom House on DVD, including Mood House and an animated version of Doom House[4].

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Terrible Secret of Space

The Terrible Secret of Space is an Internet meme that originated in an instant message prank in 2000 by Richard Kyanka. Kyanka told a particularly gullible young ICQ user, Corn_Boy, that he was building "space robots" to assist humans and protect them from the mysterious space secret (which, appropriately, was only vaguely explained). These included a pusher robot that was programmed to shove, and a shover robot that was programmed to push. Kyanka made a reference to an earlier incident in which a prototype robot malfunctioned and pushed his grandmother down the steps. Later in the prank, Kyanka posed as one of the robots and chatted with Corn_Boy, making references to having pushed "GRANDMA" down the stairs. Kyanka soon "returned", and appeared confused and suprised when Corn_Boy insisted that the robot was the same one that had malfunctioned. The robot soon came back into the room, and Kyanka decided to see what it wanted, leaving the keyboard. Kyanka then posed as the robot again, saying that Kyanka had "GONE DOWN THE STAIRS", and then tried to find out the Corn_Boy's location so it could "help" him as well. The prank was later posted to the site under the title "Space Robot Bonanza!".

Like the "All your base are belong to us" phenomenon, the Terrible Secret of Space spawned a song by The Laziest Men on Mars, which was later adapted into a Flash animation.

The original chat can be found here.

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Pranks

The Something Awful community has been responsible for many pranks. One of the more infamous ones involved the Entertainment Weekly "Entertainer of the Year" contest, in which votes are submitted (online or off) for their favorite entertainer. Goons quickly found a weakness in the voting system, and scripts were written to vote for Lowtax dozens of times per second, thus ensuring his victory. Lowtax was quickly disqualified when Entertainment Weekly found that many of the votes were coming from very few IP addresses. Lowtax did, however, get his name mentioned in the magazine.

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Hurricane Katrina donation controversy

Something Awful's servers are located in New Orleans, Louisiana, which was hit by Hurricane Katrina in late August, 2005. Something Awful's hosting company (zipa.com) worked hard to keep the site online, but eventually had to shut it down after a few days to conserve bandwidth. After a brief time offline, the site was returned to a "semi-functional" state, with only a message from Lowtax. Zack Parsons added a message, and Lowtax set up a link to Paypal for people to contribute money to go to the Red Cross. Lowtax put in 3000 USD to begin with, and promised to give some free merchandise to anyone who donated more than 10 USD. After more than 20,000 USD was donated in less than a day, Paypal froze the account in such a way that it was impossible for Lowtax to unfreeze it without going through a complicated and time-consuming customer service system involving entering "tracking numbers" for the purchased items (quite possibly the 'free merchandise'). Paypal's explanation was that it had "more than one report of suspicious behavior" from Lowtax's "buyers". Lowtax expressed fury that PayPal had blocked the flow of charitable donations on seemingly insubstantial charges (since Lowtax had no "buyers") and frustration at the administrative and bureaucratic obstacles that slowed down any solution to the problem. Eventually, Lowtax got into contact with a customer service representative over the phone, and asked to have Paypal donate all of the money to the Red Cross. However, he was told that Paypal could only give the money to United Way; Lowtax initially agreed, but after receiving several emails from readers, detailing corruption and inefficiency within United Way, he changed his mind and told Paypal to refund all of the money.

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eBaum's World controversy

Due to the size and nature of the Something Awful forums, members of the forum community have produced numerous images, Flash animations and audio files over the years, some of which have become very popular. Some of this content has later reappeared, rebranded, on eBaum's World, a site which hosts a vast amount of similarly rebranded content by many other people, and which has received many accusations of plagiarism. In late 2005, Lowtax sent numerous requests via email to have Eric Bauman remove the rebranded content from the eBaum's World site. After these requests failed, Lowtax asked forum members who had their content rebranded by eBaum's to join the eBaum's World forums in order to personally request that their content be removed. Shortly thereafter, eBaum's World retaliated by adding code to their front page that called files from Something Awful's servers, essentially engaging in inline linking, resulting in a denial-of-service attack against the Awful Forums.

Some Something Awful forum members also responded to the situation by putting together a song and a Flash animation [5]. The "leader" of this new movement against eBaum's world is forum user Altf4, who has had AIM correspondence with Eric Bauman. Currently Altf4 and many other forum users are compiling a large list of stolen content and contact information for their creators. They plan to contact every artist whose work has been stolen and try to get eBaum's World to take it off the site. One of their goals is also to enforce a new policy in the website, requiring explicit permission to use the content.

On January 10, 2006, the operator of YTMND.com received emails from Neil Bauman (Eric's father and business partner) [6], which included claims of threats of murder or bodily harm made against Eric Bauman by members of the YTMND forums. In response, Zack Parsons wrote a feature on SA making several elaborate and humourous death threats against Eric and Neil Bauman. [7]

A YTMND was made shortly after that featured the Neil Bauman letters being read in an overly dramatic, Shakespearean style. [8]

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External links

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Something_Awful"