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Something Awful

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Something Awful, sometimes abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website based in Lees Summit, Missouri, USA. 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.

Contents

History

Something Awful front page.
Enlarge
Something Awful front page.

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 for publishing a derogatory Cranky Steve update on a PlanetQuake employee[link], 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.

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." (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.

Personalities

Features

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

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)[link], seem to have been instrumental in bringing notable game designers, such as Levelord and Cliffy B to the Something Awful forums[[Citing sources citation needed]], at least for a short time.

Forums

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.

Something Awful subculture

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

Doom House

right
Doom 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 positive 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[link].

Recently, it's been announced that a new version of the Doom House DVD will be released which features Shorts from Bonus Stage's Matt Wilson, Shmorky according to the Flash Tub released on May 22nd, 2006.

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.
[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.
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.
Spoilers end here.
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].

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.[link] Lowtax did, however, get his name mentioned in the magazine.[link]

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[link] and Derek Smart[link]. 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 these games, community members have created goon-only guilds or alliances. Because of the sheer size of the goon community, these guilds and alliances tend to be very large, and they are often very visible and powerful in their respective games. Goons tend to have a very abrasive, ironic sense of humor, which many other players often find offensive. This only adds to the visibility of these groups. These guilds and alliances are almost always named Goon Squad, with rare exceptions. World of Warcraft, which splits its players into Horde and Alliance sides, has two groups, naturally named Goon Squad Alliance and Goon Squad Horde. In EVE Online, since a squad of ships is called a fleet, there is a Goonfleet. In Guild Wars, since guild sizes are limited, an alliance of goon guilds was made, with guild names usually originating from catchphrases from either the forums or the main page.

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.

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, which has received many accusations of plagiarism and copyright infringement, hosting content without crediting the original creators and copyright holders and without their consent. In late 2005, Lowtax sent numerous requests via email to have Eric Bauman remove content he believed to be rebranded from the eBaum's World site. After these requests failed, Lowtax asked forum members who claimed to 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.[[Citing sources citation needed]]

Some Something Awful forum members also responded to the situation by putting together a song and a Flash animation [link]. 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) [link], 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 humorous death threats against Eric and Neil Bauman. [link]

See also

External links

 

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