Something awful what is lf

Bowen: After he got fired from GameSpy, his desire to keep writing articles didn't go away, but now he was free of having to be Quake -specific or having to specifically focus on gaming.

He could pretty much write about everything. Kyanka: "Something Awful" was a catchphrase that I used to use. As in, "Wow, that Del Taco burrito sure is something awful. So I did, and I moved my original site I had on Tripod. Bowen: What I remember about early SA, I remember most of it being Rich just sitting there in his apartment writing every day. I don't think the site was really big back then. It wasn't in the start, but for a good, long period of time, it was just Rich writing every day.

He had very little help, especially in the beginning. Kyanka: I would wake up and instead of going back to sleep like a normal person I would start writing. Most of the time it would be dumb, but it would be stuff that entertained me. That's all I really cared about. Parody, satire, stuff about…I don't want to say current events, but crappy internet things. I would find a page on horrible, scary dolls and I would review the dolls. Parodies of wonks who were saying the internet was the future without saying, 'Well there could be a possible downside to the internet.

Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how shitty the internet could also be. A long time ago, if somebody said they really wanted to fuck a pillow with anime on it, if they went out in public and said that, they would be laughed at.

There would be some element of shame. They would keep that inside and say, 'Well, I want to fuck a pillow with anime on it but I can't tell anybody. Then other people would say 'I want to fuck anime pillows, too. The typical person does not want to fuck a pillow with anime on it. This, of course, was back when fucking anime pillows was fresh and new.

I found it to be very interesting that these subcommunities would sprout up and their numbers would grow and pretty soon it's Pillowfuckers United, Inc. And I found that whole process back then—it was even happening in the usegroup days—I found that whole process incredibly interesting, how the groupthink would manifest itself and increase exponentially over time. It was something that all the media outlets were ignoring at the time. It was before Twitter, before Facebook, before Reddit. It was kind of unique.

It was his personal vehicle for writing humor stuff. Humor focused on internet culture, video game stuff. He had the Jeff K character, who was a parody of a really shitty teenager who was just getting on the internet for the first time, being really adamant about all of his shitty opinions.

I think there were a lot things that people who were pretty heavy internet users at the time responded pretty heavily to. Kyanka: People would submit work to me and my whole criteria was if it made me laugh I would let them be a writer. I have never run Something Awful like…what is that stupid-ass site? BuzzFeed is essentially McDonald's. They're giving people a cheap and easy way to just go there and see the 12—Wait, I'm sorry, it has to be an odd number, usually—the 13 wackiest kittens or the 15 top epic lul fails that you've gotta see to believe or whatever like that.

People want to see that. They're just giving people what they want, and I've never been interested in that. I've been interested in giving people what I want, basically, because I feel like I don't understand a large portion, like 99 percent of people, and so the only thing that I can do is be true to myself and give what I feel is funny.

I found it weird and didn't really understand the humor, but I kept going back for some reason and eventually I found some articles Rich had written that I liked and really connected with me. I spent a year obsessively posting whatever came to my mind and trying to be funny before they eventually offered me a job and I stuck with it for 15 years. Jon "Docevil" Hendren, former SA admin, moderator and writer fart : I kind of fell ass-backwards into the writing gig.

I dropped out my sophomore year, got my GED. I lived in a little town called Los Banos, which is actually "the bathroom" in English if you translate it. It's one of those towns on I If you're on your way to LA you pass it.

It's kind of in the middle of nowhere so there wasn't really anything for me to do work wise unless I wanted to do fast food or Walmart. Probably the greatest asset as far as writing gigs go was the only real rule was write about whatever you want, do whatever you want, you're not fired as long as it's funny. So I ended up writing about 70 of these " Roamin' Dad " articles because they were easy and I thought they were pretty funny.

There were actually a lot of bad ones but I didn't get fired. Bowen: A lot of stuff spawned out of SA. Rich and I would make videos. I guess Doom House is the most visible one. I had my own site where I did my own flash animations under Fireman Comics.

And I would do a lot of voices and write some of the flash stuff. But there were viably only like three or four movies that sold with any volume. Thorpe: There's a lot of funny people who orbited around Something Awful. Some of them were writers on the front page, some of them emerged from the forum community and were hilarious there and continued to be hilarious elsewhere. A lot of people follow dril on Twitter, and he was just a guy who was posting funny stuff on there, he wasn't a front page writer.

And then Jon Hendren is a really good friend of mine and a really good dude and he was an excellent front page writer but he was just as much a personality in the community. Boruff: It was before social networking. All the other forums that existed at the time…there was nothing all that like it. There were things that were kind of similar, but it was kind of unique in its reach and its style.

Before Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, and Twitter came along and bled off most of their users, web forums were the primary place people went to talk about things online.

Rich says he never kept track of analytics, but he claims that, at its peak, SA was the web's largest paid forum, if not its largest, period. Today, the site boasts , registered users. They call themselves Goons. For about five years, from around to the middle of the aughts, Goons operated the engine that made internet culture go. If you saw something funny online during that time, the odds are good that it bubbled up through the cauldron of the Something Awful forums before erupting onto the wider web.

Anything-goes hellzone 4chan, Slenderman, Let's Plays and an uncountable number of memes and other web ephemera can all trace their ancestry to the SA forums. Some even argue that Something Awful has left an indelible mark on internet culture. Thorpe: One of the interesting things about Something Awful is that it was this comedy website that had sort of internet focused humor for the first couple of years that I think drew a lot of people in and then had a forum community—not as an afterthought, but it wasn't the main focus of the site initially.

Eventually it got to the point where the forum community was outrageously popular by the standards of the day and it was the draw, rather than the humor website that it sprung from. Kyanka: We've got the largest active paid community on the internet and that all started as an offshoot of the front page. It was a few hundred people at first. I never thought that that many people would be interested in actually talking about my site, because I just thought it was me writing stupid-ass, random, insignificant shit, but a lot of people did sign up.

Bowen: I think probably the porn forums, when they existed, did help. Those were eliminated pretty early on, but that was probably the source of a good chunk of users. But more significantly probably were the Photoshop threads.

Threads where people would start Photoshopping and trying to outdo each other, what are now called Photoshop Battles. Back in the early s this was a more novel thing and Something Awful had some really talented people at it. Boruff: Rich was more more hands-on at the time and I think he was doing a pretty good job of fostering a sort of weirdo spirit there.

It's hard to define, but he was good at cultivating a sense of chaos, and getting the right people there and antagonizing the wrong people and getting them to explode and then running them off. It was just sort of a weird, chaotic, and interesting place. It was kind of just a weird mishmash of goofy outcasts from the internet that all came together and created something unique and different that was, as far as I'd seen, something unlike anything else on the internet at that time.

Hendren: One thing that's different in a lot of ways from a lot of communities is Something Awful is very much a dictatorship. You had your main guy and then you had a couple lower main guys and you had five or 10 administrators under that and everybody followed everybody else up to the top. Boruff: If someone was just a terrible, incoherent writer they would get run out. If someone was a racist or an idiot they'd get run out. There was never any desire to coddle people or hope they'd improve.

You had to perform at a certain level or you were banned. Or, as a more amusing punishment, you'd be quarantined to a really bad forum with all the other idiots. There was a lot of that sort of thing and I think it helped improve the quality, but I think at a certain point when you had so many rules it also became kind of restrictive. You started to lose a lot of the spontaneity and randomness that made it interesting in the first place.

But I know for a fact he didn't kill himself because he tried to register another account after that. Kyanka: I find Twitter's situation to be of their own making. They never concretely set out a set of rules. When I first started the forums, I wrote four pages of rules and a catch-all at the end: If there's something else we don't like, we're going to ban you.

We have every right to ban you and that's it. With Twitter, they never defined anything. They never said what's allowed, what isn't allowed, what will happen. They just kind of floated around. If something got really out of hand they would get rid of it, but since they had no concrete rules, they had no active moderation, people didn't know what was or what wasn't allowed.

They dug their own grave and now they're way too far into it to dig out. Hendren: Whereas on Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr if you have a problem with something you shoot it off into the void via a form and you don't know who's going to answer it.

Probably some entry-level kid. And there's no guarantee that anything's gonna happen even if you complain a lot. Something Awful was a little more personal, but I think it adds a lot more stress on the people at the top because if it's people on a forum it's not a big deal, but if it's , people then it's like, "Oh, jeez, I'm managing a small city here and they're all whiny babies.

Boruff: It was an insane amount of work. You're trying to do your best to make the place better and you're getting shit on constantly. There's just no way to win, so you just do your best to enforce the rules that everyone agreed on and hope that some lunatic who got banned doesn't try to post your address, which has happened to most of them. I primarily ran the business, the advertising, but then I ended up running the forums as well. We primarily worked out of [Kyanka's] office, which was just a room in his basement.

It was one of the strangest jobs I ever had. Nition on April 16, root parent next [—]. Not sure if this applies to Gamequoter's posts specifically, but for a while there was a site called Waffleimages that was created basically for SA in the same sort of way Imgur was created for Reddit when all the other image hosts sucked.

Just about everyone used Waffleimages for a while and when it eventually went away, tons of images went with it. Something Awful really set the stage for a lot of what followed in internet culture. The template of the modern meme. Rules were followed because they were simple and mutually agreed with.

I don't think anything like it could happen today. Something Awful certainly spawned a lot of things. But it's funny, I sort of have the opposite opinion of SA in regards to its content.

I understood why it needed to happen, it got too popular for its own good. However, I couldn't help but feel that once it created a barrier to entry a lot of the "aliveness" got sucked right out of it. A really interesting comparison of Reddit and SA takes place in Eve Online, where massive fleets clash on the regular.

SA has a huge history there, and tons of political heroes vilerat! This resulted in a lot of good fun and chaos. Now there are whole companies devoted to new players Brave Newbies. Quantity went down, but quality increased.

I mean, that's what barriers to entry are about: they keep out the lowest-common-denominator trolls, while those who actually care about the community have no issues paying the entry fee sometimes several times, as they get temp-banned. While FYAD may have given birth to the shitpost, shitposting is only allowed in the designated shitposting zones. If you want to talk or read about a massively popular topic: cars, guns, motorcycles, games, money, pets, health, houses, coupons How ever quality happens to be defined in that particular forum.

I wouldn't say that quality increased at all, however it certainly made managing the forum a lot easier. I think around or 09 I shit posted a ban me thread with numerous images of god and the dinosaurs until I was culled. I had had an account since ' I found by the time I had been banned that the quality which is of course, subjective had been lost by becoming exclusive.

Sort of the same way an NYT Paywall made me lose interest in it. The decline did take a while, but I would say that when they instituted the paywall it was "Day 2" as Bezos said.

The beginning of the end. TulliusCicero on April 15, root parent prev next [—]. That's an understatement. By the time I started seeing tl;dr being used in its original meaning elsewhere on the internet, it had already long been a bannable offense on the SA boards.

It's your typical "how to grow a community" dilemma. There are many private forums still out there that are invite-only or have an entry fee, and some of them have communities as large and "healthy" as SA during its hay day.

How to find them? Any links or requirements to get links, etc? Neliquat on April 16, root parent next [—]. They tend to find you, and your quality commenting, on other sites and invite you. One thing written-out of the official history. Somehow, Lowtax shut this down before he got busted for it, but if anyone ever mentioned it for years afterward, insta-permaban.

The real rules had nothing do with "quality" and were always opaque and deeply political. Pretty much a Lord of the Flies scenario -- which was great if you loved internet drama, and they weren't coming after you. SA's business model was essentially semi-randomly banning people who would re-register. I haven't been back in more than ten years, so things might have changed. But to pretend they were trying to foster some great community Just no.

Goons were acknowledgedly horrible people engaged in online barbarism. Scuds on April 15, prev next [—]. I have all sorts of conflicted feelings about my time with SA during the Bush years when I was a college student. The people I knew of that went off to the Microsofts, Googles, Apples, and various startups of the world were more focused in their studies and their technical passions and didn't pay too much attention to many of the things that concerned Goons video games, politics chatter, the ongoing internet popularity contest.

In the end, SA's culture was something I should have put down earlier if I wanted to get ahead. Message boards are not where the 'A' players of the world spend their time. My eyes are rolling out of my fucking head.

There were many brilliant people there. Dare I say, they spurred me into learning more. You get what you give. On the other hand, a lot of successes spawned from something awful forums - e. Cards Against Humanity. When you look back at those successful people everyone so desperately want to be, in tech a least, they often frequent various types of message boards.

Reading forums won't cause you to not be successful in life. Not doing stuff will. I know many successful people PhDs, government employees, "popular twitter users", SW engineers who used SA to make weird jokes to get over boredom in college. The most successful people either became mods or were permabanned. SA admins liked to take their life problems out on the forum by breaking it, a kind of self-harm, and then ban you if you complained. Also liked to claim anime forum posters were "child molestors" and ban them as a joke, one of the sources behind 4chan's growth.

Those guys can be amazing game QAs if they make the leap to trying to make a good game great by trying to find all the weird corner cases that can ruin someone's experience of the game. As one described it to me, he's trying to protect the reputation of games as a creative medium by pushing back against bad works of the craft. I'll basically never be an A player, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I wish I could upvote you twice.

Now I work at Google and life isn't nearly as fun. Some days I wish I could go back, so cheer up m8. As I hit my mid 30s, I look back at all of this and I find myself missing it terribly.

It's not like today is bad. But back then, it was really neat. I was too young to experience BBS and Usenet; I grew up with AOL and Geocities, and when the s hit and I could convince my parents to get a cable modem, things were just off the wall.

I spent a lot of time on forums too, overclocking this or that, or waking up for alarm clock-ops in EVE. I met people at LAN parties who I ended up working for later; set up servers to host our Unreal Tournament matches and learned to edit and repackage files so I could run around Jedi Knight as Deadpool with a lightsaber.

I cringe thinking about some of the stupid arguments I got in, things I wrote on my blog, my livejournal, on the forum. I like to think I learned a lot about how people feel their way through an argument, and how a flame war gets started.

One evening, when I'm not trolling HN at 1AM, I'll sit down and write how the early s affected us all and set us up for today. I wish it was so fresh and new like it felt to me then. But I don't feel like today isn't as fun As someone approaching mid-thirties, aside from EVE that's pretty much me you're describing.

Jedi Knight was my first foray into modding. I also working on two UT and UT mods after that. Then there were the LAN parties, coping tons of crap from each other computers in between Quake and whatnot. And the flash stuff! The drama fascinated me too: the TTLG forums and their colorful cast of characters, Digg 'selling out' and this new 'reddit' website, etc.

It's far back enough in the past to be worth writing about damn, makes me feel old and yet I can't help but feel understanding those developments, or discussing them chronologically, will play an important role in understanding our current world.

It kinda hurt that I tried to impersonate jeffk in this thread and got downvoted into the negatives. I think people thought I was serious. Now I know for sure that I'm out of touch. Good enough for me. My career is going fine and I'm learning new skills at work every year. I look back on those years and remember a lot of fun nights with friends. In fact, sometimes I miss it!

Scuds on April 16, root parent next [—]. HN is a nice stream of links with comments, not a community with a revolving cast of characters like SA. Totally different use case. Yeah dude.

You've totes graduated to the 'A' players message board. I think that it's reasonable to feel conflicted. The internet is interesting and addictive, especially the social corners. Other commenters have pointed out that SA, HN, FB, etc are potent time sinks--it's all too easy to spend more time than you should. Of course, whether a site is a good use of time isn't an all-or-nothing proposition.

The awful spectre of civil war looms over the country. It's a good job they didn't go camping last weekend - the weather was awful.

They live downwind of a pig-farm and sometimes the smell is awful. Not of good quality. You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics: Serious and unpleasant.

B2 [ before noun ] very great :. Fortunately it won't make an awful lot of difference if I don't pass the test.

It was an awful risk to take. There's an awful lot of smut on television these days. There's an awful lot of work to be done. It's an awful bore cooking a meal every night. It takes an awful long time to travel across the city on public transport. I'm feeling an awful lot better , thanks. Related word awfulness. The weather was awful the whole time — cold and wet. Fox TV has canceled the truly awful sitcom "Monty" after a short tryout. Awful also means very great or large :.

We're spending an awful amount of money! Idiom an awful lot. Translations of awful in Chinese Traditional. See more. Need a translator?