Something Awful and Friends - The roller-coaster train-wreck embarrassing downfall of a Web 1.0 giant and its tick offspring like from Cloverfield

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Ironic racism is still racism unless you're a mentally ill man in a dress.

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Yo, I don't post or read SA much (aside from current drama lately) but I've noticed all the trooning-forgivenessing is all MtF. I know FtM is rarer, but do they get the same sort of forgiveness-hugboxing on SA or is it still REEEEE PENISHAVER?

This was my shower thought for the day... and I was genuinely curious about it and thought someone might know.
 
Yo, I don't post or read SA much (aside from current drama lately) but I've noticed all the trooning-forgivenessing is all MtF. I know FtM is rarer, but do they get the same sort of forgiveness-hugboxing on SA or is it still REEEEE PENISHAVER?

This was my shower thought for the day... and I was genuinely curious about it and thought someone might know.
MtFs outnumber even actual women by an order of magnitude in the current SA. Odds are they can stay there as long as they walk the tightrope of accepting every request fat nerds in dresses ask them.
 
I cannot wait to see a judge, in court, reading Lowtax's posts aloud as they are presented to hi by Ashlii's lawyer
 
I'm surprised full-fledged adults still don't understand that if you're declared innocent of doing a crime by a court of law, then that's the best possible evidence that you didn't do a crime.

They're SA goons, they'll believe fucking anything, especially if it's absolute bullshit like the charges against Kobe Bryant. The only rule is believe whammens no matter what because they're literally incapable of lying apparently.

Plus troons are the most racist white pieces of shit alive. Even if they wouldn't believe such flimsy accusations against a white troon, they'd always believe it against a black man.

I cannot wait to see a judge, in court, reading Lowtax's posts aloud as they are presented to hi by Ashlii's lawyer

Something I've seen cross examiners do is actually have the person who wrote the shit say the shit in court themselves, forcing them to read back their own shit. "Did you write this?" "What does this say?" "What did you mean by this?" "Uhhh, uhhh, derp derp derp."

Then watch them realize what an utter monster they sound like.
 
They're SA goons, they'll believe fucking anything, especially if it's absolute bullshit like the charges against Kobe Bryant. The only rule is believe whammens no matter what because they're literally incapable of lying apparently. *

* Unless it's a Lowtax Ex Wife.
 
Lowtax is running a business, and he's been an absentee owner for basically 10 years. He's mooched off his Patreon for a couple years, and with revenues down, he decides to visit the office for the first time in a long time.

He walks in, and finds the customers, filthy, shuffled into a few lines and apathetic workers. He decides to clean the place up.

To engender goodwill, and to show he's past his previous nepotism, his first hire is his latest hookup, whom he bangs in between incoherent ramblings about his ex-wife. She convinces him the business needs new machinery -- she's a marketing expert after all -- so pushes bringing back the main feature people always loved, the front page! Lowtax thinks this is a good idea because if he doesn't his marketing expert might stop sleeping with him.

Lowtax has a homeless problem too in his shop -- namely the dregs from TGRS and CSPAM, who kind of crowd everyone out of the place and assault anyone dumb enough to walk through the doors. He won't clean them out though, that takes work. He can't fire the incompetent staff, that takes spine -- and Lowtax's spine hasn't worked right for years.

When you think about it, Lowtax's degeneration from leafwife to now is a metaphor for SA in general. We went from this:

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to this:

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yikes.
 
If there was a way to be obsessive with video games, there was at least one goon doing it. There were goons that would buy literally every game listed on any given console's app store. There are plenty of goons in the Steam SA group who own so many games, their game list doesn't even load. Here's a random one I plucked out that has 6,300 games. Fuck. I even remember seeing goons complain that Rock Band 3 had a limit of 2,000 songs loaded at a time - as in, even if you bought every single export for every retail Rock Band game (excluding Beatles), and all the track packs, you'd still need to buy over 1,600 songs for a dollar or two a piece.

I don't play MMOs, but I heard about the Elitest Jerks WoW clan and how apparently they had some of the top players in the entire world. I'm sure there have got to be plenty of stories of goon lunacy from the world of MMOs.

It's a bit of a Necro but the Elitest Jerks lore is very simple.

Back in the day (and now, ofc) but a Something Awful guild is just that, a Something Awful guild. Made up typically of 100% goons and "pubbies" (non goons) are all garbage trash and should be regarded as subhuman. The World of Warcraft guild, <Goon Squad>, was like this and had several thousands members (it's hard to know for sure, because WoW only tracked ~500 people in a guild at a time). <Goon Squad> also had horriffic stories of people neglecting thier wives and children to play the game.

Because of the game and the guild size, some people formed smaller cliques - EJ was one of these cliques. They didn't want to focus on spamming memes in guild chat or helping make bags or whatever, this smaller group wanted to focus on being the "best" at the game and would form a raid group - the problem is that other goons were awful at the game; in terms of seriousness, ability, care, whatever so the EJ clique discovered that the aforementioned "pubbies" were not all that bad and frequently were better than their SA counterpart and would frequently drag out drama onto the main forums. Drama got so bad at one point that the entire EJ clique was banned en-mass from the somethingawful.com forums.

They fucked off and made <Elitest Jerks> (being branded that by the SA crew that regarded them as traitors) and went on to be one of the most influential guilds in the game's history - to a point where several of them were hired on directly by Blizzard, most notably the game's current director Ion Hazzikostas while <Goon Squad> basically floundered and did nothing of import besides the occasional "500 people showed up to a place" memes.
 
It's a bit of a Necro but the Elitest Jerks lore is very simple.

Back in the day (and now, ofc) but a Something Awful guild is just that, a Something Awful guild. Made up typically of 100% goons and "pubbies" (non goons) are all garbage trash and should be regarded as subhuman. The World of Warcraft guild, <Goon Squad>, was like this and had several thousands members (it's hard to know for sure, because WoW only tracked ~500 people in a guild at a time). <Goon Squad> also had horriffic stories of people neglecting thier wives and children to play the game.

Because of the game and the guild size, some people formed smaller cliques - EJ was one of these cliques. They didn't want to focus on spamming memes in guild chat or helping make bags or whatever, this smaller group wanted to focus on being the "best" at the game and would form a raid group - the problem is that other goons were awful at the game; in terms of seriousness, ability, care, whatever so the EJ clique discovered that the aforementioned "pubbies" were not all that bad and frequently were better than their SA counterpart and would frequently drag out drama onto the main forums. Drama got so bad at one point that the entire EJ clique was banned en-mass from the somethingawful.com forums.

They fucked off and made <Elitest Jerks> (being branded that by the SA crew that regarded them as traitors) and went on to be one of the most influential guilds in the game's history - to a point where several of them were hired on directly by Blizzard, most notably the game's current director Ion Hazzikostas while <Goon Squad> basically floundered and did nothing of import besides the occasional "500 people showed up to a place" memes.

The series of gaming spin-offs from the SA forums was a constant thing. A group of players who found each other via SA threads would go to a game, figure out most of the goons that played with them were horrible people and worse players, and then spin-off into their own website/group. A lot of these were successful then and are still going, because they scooped the good people that bubbled to the surface via sheer volume and left the rest to die and go on to reform in the next game. EJ, Starfleet Dental, Slam Whales, Bad Games Crew, BMW, Goonrathi, etc, all kind of formed this way. What was left without new blood, is what you have now in WoW: a few hundred terrible players creating a "safe space" for trans posting, lead by a self-admitted suicidal and depressed troon who cannot clear 15 year old content.

SA has always failed to capitalize on the best of what it created, in games and outside of them, and you see what's left.
 
The series of gaming spin-offs from the SA forums was a constant thing. A group of players who found each other via SA threads would go to a game, figure out most of the goons that played with them were horrible people and worse players, and then spin-off into their own website/group. A lot of these were successful then and are still going, because the scooped the good people that bubbled to the surface via sheer volume and left the rest to die and go on to reform in the next game. EJ, Starfleet Dental, Slam Whales, Bad Games Crew, BMW, Goonrathi, etc, all kind of formed this way. What was left without new blood, is what you have now in WoW: a few hundred terrible players creating a "safe space" for trans posting, lead by a self-admitted suicidal and depressed troon who cannot clear 15 year old content.

SA has always failed to capitalize on the best of what it created, in games and outside of them, and you see what's left.

What's typical now (because of dying membership) is that Goons invite "pubbies" into the guilds, even the most famous guild (Goonswarm) is largely pubbies now.

It's worth pointing out that outside of huge games (EVE, WOW, FFXIV) that goon guilds tend to die out very quickly - as a whole bunch of goons show up in a "goonrush" but very few of them stay with it more than two or so weeks. It's also worth pointing out that they typically have a stupidly complicated authentication system to "prove" you're a SA goon (or if you're a "pubbie" that you're "sponsored" by an SA Goon) and gigantic set of rules to match - most notably that if you're banned on SA that you (and anyone you sponsored) will be removed from the guild(s).
 
I knew it was over for goons playing games when Mapgoons (another spinoff goon discord group) wouldn't allow anyone to play nazi germany in Hearts of Iron IV -- a game that is entirely focused on you managing a nation during world war 2. A player controlling germany was "too problematic for some," and therefore the typical antagonist nation that made every game engaging and fun was eschewed entirely.

The game devolved into the United States adopting communism (of course) and fighting India, which had separated from the British Empire and had also, indeed, adopted communism.

Everyone allied the Soviet Union.
 
What's typical now (because of dying membership) is that Goons invite "pubbies" into the guilds, even the most famous guild (Goonswarm) is largely pubbies now.

It's worth pointing out that outside of huge games (EVE, WOW, FFXIV) that goon guilds tend to die out very quickly - as a whole bunch of goons show up in a "goonrush" but very few of them stay with it more than two or so weeks. It's also worth pointing out that they typically have a stupidly complicated authentication system to "prove" you're a SA goon (or if you're a "pubbie" that you're "sponsored" by an SA Goon) and gigantic set of rules to match - most notably that if you're banned on SA that you (and anyone you sponsored) will be removed from the guild(s).

Yeah, isn't that why a lot of goons have a weird code in one of the entries on their SA profile? Authenticating for anything SA-related was always a pain in the ass.

And yeah, goons tended to suck at games, though one anomaly I discovered was their private TF2 server where I got annihilated the few times I ever played there. I didn't play it that much but could hold my own well enough on random public servers, but on the SA server, I was completely useless. Go figure.

I'd be down to hear more stories about gaming goons and what went on with them.
 
Yeah, isn't that why a lot of goons have a weird code in one of the entries on their SA profile? Authenticating for anything SA-related was always a pain in the ass.

And yeah, goons tended to suck at games, though one anomaly I discovered was their private TF2 server where I got annihilated the few times I ever played there. I didn't play it that much but could hold my own well enough on random public servers, but on the SA server, I was completely useless. Go figure.

I'd be down to hear more stories about gaming goons and what went on with them.

Yeah - part of the authentication process is adding a string to your SA account and having someone (manually in the old days, a bot these days) verify it and then tying that information to your various accounts, mainly discord these days. For some of the guilds you also have to apply and maintain an account on an offsite (like wowgoons.com). There are people that would have to go through and manually verify 2,000+ accounts when a "goonrush" started.

They treated basically every game like this - even on private servers of emulated games (Star Wars Galaxies, Ragnarok Online, etc) where only 14 goons showed up - one of them was going to be checking the other 13 through some complicated ass process.

Currently (AFAIK) there aren't any hilarious stories - just the same sad decline as SomethingAwful.com, a lot of guild chats are focused on LGBTQIA+ issues and wrongthink is strictly forbidden. You will unironically see a lot of "as a trans person...." and "when I started transitioning...." in your video game guild chat, with maybe the exception of the WoW Classic guild.
 
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