Something Awful
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| Something Awful LLC.
<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;">Image:SAlogo.gif</td></tr> | |
| Type | Company |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1999
<tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Founder</th><td>Richard Kyanka</td></tr> |
| Headquarters | Lee's Summit, Missouri, United States
<tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Key people</th><td>Richard Kyanka</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Industry</th><td>Web Based</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Products</th><td>somethingawful.com |
Something Awful, sometimes abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website based in Lee's Summit, Missouri, 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 recent years have grown remarkably. Historically, it has been a significant force in the promotion and creation of various Internet phenomena.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] History
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 to resign from Planet Quake for publishing a derogatory Cranky Steve update about a fellow 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. All front page updates prior to the end of August 2000 are missing due to server problems during this time period. 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 some 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 US$9.95) 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.
[edit] 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, white supremacist 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". [citation needed] 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.
[edit] Personalities
- Andrew Stine, aka "Linguica", one of the earliest guest updaters, former movie reviewer
- Josh Boruff, aka "Livestock".
- Kevin Bowen, aka "Fragmaster". Although he has been a longtime contributor to the site, most of it has been sporadic. He was unceremoniously fired from the Sunday frontpage spot in 2005 after an update that Lowtax found lazy and unfunny. [2]
- Kevin Wilson, aka "TheGoblin", former Sunday frontpage writer. Currently writes the ROM Pit.
- Dennis Farrell, aka "Corin Tucker's Stalker".
- Seth Knisley, aka "Terrorsaurus", former Sunday updater.
- 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. Almost all of his articles were 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.[citation needed]
- Tom Davies aka "Moof"
- Zack Parsons, aka "El Pinto Grande" or "Geist Editor". He is notable among SA writers for his love of World War II history and has authored a comedic book, entitled My Tank is Fight!, about the exotic weapons of that conflict.
- Reid Paskiewicz, aka "Frolixo".
- Shmorky, aka "Cave Deli" is the pseudonym of Dave Kelly, the flash animator for Something Awful's Flash Tub.
- Steve Sumner, aka "Malak". His first post was on June 2nd, 2006. His persona is that of a stereotypical gaming nerd.
- Terry Taft, aka "worfsonofmogh". His first post was on August 1st, 2006. He is a Deviant.
- Dr. David Thorpe, writes the 'Your Band Sucks' articles, and collaborates with Zack Parsons for the Fashion SWAT. Thorpe has appeared on behalf of Something Awful on Attack of the Show! [3], giving a tongue-in-cheek description of the site. He was hired as a writer after a long-running thread in the forums where he boasted that he could snobbishly tear down any musician. [4] Thorpe also writes a column, The Burn Unit, for the alternative paper Boston's Weekly Dig.
- "Johnny Titanium", aka "DocEvil".
- Evan Wade, aka "Pantsfish".
- Tekky Andrew-Jaja, aka "Jumpman16". Current Comedy Goldmine writer.
- Leonard "J." Crabs, (fictional character) The "lawyer" for the website.
- Ryan Adams aka "OMGWTFBBQ" former Comedy Goldmine writer.
- Nick Dunn aka "Mayor Wilkins" former Comedy Goldmine writer.
[edit] 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 a theme, such as "Misadventures of Dick and Jane" or "Breakfast Cereals Gone Wrong".
- Comedy Goldmine, where material from forum threads deemed exceptionally humorous are posted for public consumption. This often includes stories/anecdotes from forum members or image series 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.
- 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", in which posts from various Internet forums are displayed. Something Awful forums members scout out various Internet forums with posts they feel are badly written, overemotional, disturbing or seemingly insane, 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, 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 monthly 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. Dr. Thorpe has a long-running series known as the "Demo Roundup" in which he reviews demos sent in from readers.
- Legal Threats, which showcases most or all of the mail (conventional and electronic) correspondence related to some of the numerous legal threats the site or operators have received, and the responses of the operators. 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. After using the title "Cliff Notes" for a "Your Band Sucks" piece, Cliff Notes threatened to sue SA. [5] The title was quickly changed to "Thorpe's Notes" without any attempt to wring humor from it.
- 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. Two writers (typically David Thorpe and Zack Parsons) will criticize multiple featured images in the article but will rarely mock the clothing or fashion exclusively.
- Fake SA, where the front page is occasionally replaced with a humorous 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.[6] The "Rich Dork" parody of Pitchfork Media [7] was mentioned in a slate.com article about Pitchfork haters. [8]
- Pregame Wrapup, a biweekly mock-educational column about sports and popular athletes.
- State Og, an irregular weekly newsletter from a fictional industrial conglomerate.
- The Art of Warcraft, a series of satirical guides to World of Warcraft. Updates were suspended from the end of May 2006, however following a crossover article with Weekend Web in October it appears to have been reinstated.
- Video Game Article, a series of articles on video games, written by Corin Tucker's Stalker. New additions usually appear on Saturdays.
- The Awful Movie Database (AMDB), a parody of the Internet Movie Database featuring fictional film entries of exaggerated poor quality.
- Truth Media, a series of reviews of games, movies, television shows or albums. 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. [9] If sufficient flame mail is generated, it is later posted in the Truth Media index.
- Second Life Safari, a series of articles depicting happenings in the MMORPG Second Life video game. Articles typically deal with the obscene in the game, such as furries.
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)[10], seem to have been instrumental in bringing notable game designers, such as Levelord and Cliffy B to the Something Awful forums[citation needed], at least for a short time.
[edit] Forums
Something Awful is particularly well-known for its forums, which require a one-time registration fee. The forums generate a significant amount of front page content, especially for Photoshop Phriday, the Comedy Goldmine, and the Weekend Web, and have helped to create or perpetuate several Internet memes, such as All your base are belong to us<ref name="ayb guardian">>All your base.... Guardian Unlimited (2001-02-28). Retrieved on 2006-11-24.</ref><ref>All Your Base Are Belong To Frogstar. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.</ref> and Tourist guy.<ref name="tourist guy">Tourist of Death. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.</ref> They have also been featured on Attack of the Show, where the host conducted an interview with Dr. David Thorpe. The interview, however, was largely farcical. As of Novemer 2006 the forums have received approximately 45 million posts by over 85,000 members[11] despite the unusual features of strict moderation and charging an initial fee for posting privileges. The majority of features on the forums, such as changing an avatar or having the ability to search threads, also carry a fee.
The forums were created on November 16, 1999, by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka. They run on a heavily modified version of the vBulletin software; recently forum administrator Radium, who is responsible for most of the site's technical aspects, has begun to replace modules of vBulletin code with his own software, named Titan, which is designed for the exclusive needs of the Something Awful forums. Members of the site are called "goons".
The forums cover a wide span of topics, including video games, technology, political debate, sports, entertainment, drugs, guns, and pets. There are also forums to organize meetings between members, known as Goonmeets, as well as forums to trade goods and services. Within most of the forums, there are subforums that deal with more minor topics that generate moderate discussion within the parent forum (for example, a sports forum with a subforum dedicated to fantasy teams). The three main forums, which are also the most popular, are General Bullshit, which is analogous to the "off topic" forum, Fuck You And Die (FYAD), and BYOB. Posting in FYAD lowers a user's postcount by one, while posting in BYOB has no effect. For a fee, users can also gain access to the forum archives, which contain older threads from all of the forums.
[edit] Something Awful subculture
The culture of Something Awful is constantly evolving, but below are a few cultural themes that stand out.
[edit] Doom House
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 positive reviews. Both movies received a score of 46 out of 50, making them the only movies to receive positive scores on the site (except for Steve Summer's review of Conan the Barbarian.[12])
On November 16, 2005, Lowtax released Doom House on DVD, including Mood House and an animated version of Doom House.[citation needed]
A Collector's Edition of the DVD was released shortly after Comic-Con 2006, featuring Doom House, Death Hat (by the Mega64 team), Doom House vs. Death Hat (by Wesley Baker), Doom House Anime (a.k.a. The Doom Housu 2001, by Dave Kelly), Kill Cabin (by Matt Wilson), and a trailer for Doom House: The Game (by Shaolin Funk).
[edit] 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 surprised when Corn_Boy insisted that the robot was the same one that had malfunctioned. Allegedly, 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 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.
[edit] 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. Allegedly, 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.[13] Lowtax did, however, get his name mentioned in the magazine.[14]
[edit] Gaming
In its earlier days, Something Awful targeted much of its humor at the world of computer gaming, poking fun at industry personalities like John Romero [15] and Derek Smart [16]. Though the focus of the site's content has since changed to reflect an expanding reader base, gaming continues to be a popular activity in the community. There is a goon presence in many MMORPGs in the form of goon-only guilds or alliances, usually under the name Goon Squad. Goons tend to have a very ironic, often esoteric sense of humor, which many other players often find offensive, leading to exclusion and discrimination from both goons and outsiders, which in itself usually doesn't have any big effect as the sheer size of goon guilds usually makes it possible for a goon to team up with another goon at any given time.
[edit] Hurricane Katrina donation incident
Something Awful's servers were located in New Orleans, Louisiana when it was hit by Hurricane Katrina in late August, 2005. Something Awful's former 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 $3,000 to begin with, and promised to give some free merchandise to anyone who donated more than $10. After more than $20,000 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 customer service system involving entering "tracking numbers" for the purchased items. PayPal's explanation was that it had "more than one report of suspicious behavior" from Lowtax's "buyers". Lowtax expressed anger that PayPal had blocked the flow of donations on such charges (since Lowtax had no "buyers" per se). Eventually, Lowtax contacted 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 to the individual donors.
[edit] eBaum's World controversy
SA content has reappeared, rebranded, on eBaum's World, one of several incidents of plagiarism and copyright infringement against eBaum's. In late 2005, Lowtax sent numerous requests via email to have Eric Bauman remove content from the eBaum's World site. After these requests failed, Lowtax asked forum members who have produced content rebranded by eBaum's to invade the eBaum's World forums in order to personally request that their content be removed, flooding the EBW forum and crashing their system. 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.[citation needed]
Because eBaum's World continues the practices that lead to this controversy, images in the Photoshop Phriday column have been given a new watermark (rather than a brand) beginning with June 9, 2006 update.
[edit] SPEWS.org Controversy
On July 20, 2003, the spam filtering organization SPEWS.org (Spam Prevention Early Warning System) added an entire class B-subnet with the Cogent ISP to their spammer list. As Cogent was SA's latest ISP, many users and business partners whose ISP and companies used SPEWS found that communication with SA was cut off. In two Front Page News updates (August 3 and 7), Zack Parsons informed readers of the blackout, warned network administrators against using SPEWS, and outlined the (fictitious) origins of SPEWS and its founders. SA has since switched ISPs more than once. This was not SA's first public run-in with internet filtering. Some time before, SA discovered, via forum users, that the government of the United Arab Emirates had blocked all access to the site. Access to SA is often blocked by commercial internet filters.
[edit] Criticism
Various private persons who have had their website linked on the "Awful Link of the Day" have reported having been heavily harassed and stalked by fans of Something Awful. The sudden increase in visitors to a site linked on Something Awful is often called a "Goon Rush", and often causes a severe strain on the link's server. Though a common occurrence, SA does not endorse the harassment of individuals by their members or intentional attempts to hack, flame, or strain the server of linked sites. "Goon Justice", as it is sarcastically called, is a bannable offense.
