#Something Awful

[3liza]

the new Down the Rabbithole video is on Boatmurder and once again we must pause and offer our respects to Something Awful for being one of the most singularly influential websites of all time, but also because every time I'm revisiting forums lore I am impressed all over again at how ahead of the curve the SA username culture was. current year Tumblr username sensibility is about where SA was in 2006ish

[justplainsimon]

I wonder how much Groverhaus contributed to the 2008 financial crisis

[xxx3m0-r3viv41xxx]

wait….. some of the kids in the creepypasta fandom WEREN’T alive for the creation of slenderman on somethingawful?????

[littlewalken]

Attention Bajoran workers, I'm doing this for your own good

[tobisaurus]

Happy 16th Birthday Slender Man!!

[jlinebeck]

Seeing the new Strange Aeons video reminded me of how the first time Tumblr and Something Awful really interacted with each other (and that is putting it extremely kindly) was because of the Danganronpa 2 Let's Play on the LP subforum of SA.

I think the breaking point was the unironic "intriguingly moe" post in that subforum.

[blogofbonelord]

"THE SLENDER MAN" - VICTOR SURGE - THE SOMETHING AWFUL FORUMS

[everythingisahoax]

Big Groverhaus energy

[facts-i-just-made-up]

What was up with that Slenderman thing anyways?

It's a folklore type monster based on the fear we share across the entire species that we will encounter anything invented by Something Awful Forum users.

[viledictorian]

Stuck Inside Slender Verse

Greetings Marble Hornets and slenderverse people! Behold my offering to you and your nostalgically profitable community! A friend of mine pitched the idea to me, and I owed him for helping me cause the endangerment of the bee species, so he wrote the lyrics, made the story board, I recorder, we both made the art, and all in 20 days! Sorry if the audio isn’t the best. I threw my microphone at the wall in a fit of rage.

[sreegs]

remembering when the something awful forums made a word filter that changed the word "females" so it was surrounded by Ferengi emoji (we called em 'smilies' not emoji back in the day) so it looked like this:

because someone was sick of incels using the word to refer to women

[3liza]

"why do you talk about something awful so much" it has surprised me quite a bit as I've gotten older but the 2000s-2010s SA culture has only become more relevant to current events and media as time goes on, i assume from the natural watershed effects from people aging into their 30s and making media properties that go on to become incredibly influential. I was never a big poster there, I was a lurker 99% of the time and had zero influence on the site, so it's really not personal for me except for stuff like Dropsy, since I was there for the original thread. the SA millennials started popping up in noticeable ways as early as 30 Rock (recall the "lemon party" recurring joke for example) and as the younger members age into their prime output years we're just going to keep seeing more of it.

[dayfalwastaken]

Notable Slenderman designs from over the years

Something Awful: As the users of the original Create Paranormal Images thread took to calling him, "Poo Poo", the first Slendy on this list is sort of a composite variant of his first depictions. After Victor Surge had made "the Slender Man" people started creating their own photos and a couple even drew him. Designs varied, but many featured arms that turned into tentacles or tree branches, and blank faces with either few or very pronounced facial features. These first drawings gave me the impression that Slendy was a creature that attempted to blend in and look human, but if examined its nonhuman aspects would become apparent almost immediately, empty face notwithstanding. As such, while his suit gives the impression of a well-dressed man, if one looks at it from a small distance they'll note the lack of buttons, pockets and other such accessories, so in a way the suit is like a second skin as opposed to actual clothes. Merely a disguise.

Marble Hornets: The Operator! Version that got many people into the Slenderman mythos, the Marble Hornets rendition streamlined the many variations of the Something Awful forum into a simple yet iconic design. This guy is very tall, and makes it clear that he's the furthest thing from human. Proportion-wise, his torso is not even half of his total height, while his arms almost reach the ground. Weirdly enough, his hands don't seem to have fingers? And look to be morphed into the suit, though they could be wearing fingerless gloves. He has a straight upper body and shoulders, and in most entries has barely if any shadows on his face to enunciate human features. As in, most of the time his face is completely blank, although there are entries where you can spot the outlines of a nose, mouth and eye sockets.

TribeTwelve: To me, the Administrator is a more grounded (heh) Slenderman. If you ignore the times he's shown to tower over humans, this guy, while tall, isn't abnormally long. He even has human-looking skin and visible eye sockets! With regular proportions for a Slenderman depiction, he's pretty tame in appearance when he doesn't have his tentacles or spider legs out. So really, he's just a regular man in black with no face, which makes him a bit more believable but still creepy as all hell.

DarkHarvest00: Gorr'rylaehotep! This dude's like a streamlined version of the Marble Hornets Operator, which was himself a streamlined Slendy. He's like an expected evolution of a live action Slenderman, where his body isn't elongated so much as it's scaled up for him to appear larger. That said, he's in no way thick, being quite thin for a big guy in a business suit. Luckily, that doesn't take away from his scare factor, as he's remains an imposing figure throughout the series... In the shots where he doesn't move too much, that is… Having fewer overall appearances in DarkHarvest00, he's also the most consistent Slendy on this list to keep a totally blank face with no features. Neato!

Slender: the Arrival: This guy isn't slender. Like, at all. He's well-built for a Slenderman and, dare I say, kind of muscular-looking. If you shorten his arms, he's just a big human, but I think that strengthens the unease you have when you see him. The others, aside from the TribeTwelve design, don't really hide their uncannyness. Once you’ve spotted them, you know there's something wrong when you look at them. The Arrival Slenderman takes it a step further. He gets all up in your face, not even stalking you all that much. He almost refuses to blend into the background, opting to terrorize you up close. He doesn't obscure the fact that he's an otherworldy entity that shouldn't exist, and I think that's great. His ragged skin and ears melted into his skull offer him an incredibly distinct look, and given how well the game uses him, he's super scary to play against. He's also among the first Slendermen to feature a red tie, which will go on to be a very popular design choice when depicting this character.

The ways people chose to draw/show/model Slendy have always intrigued me, so I made this lil thing to show off the differences in a few designs over the past decade! I hope you've enjoyed reading through this, and I'll see you next time when I'll draw and analyse five more. Have a good day!

[catoperated]

Every time somebody brings up theyfab coming from 4chan I remember troon came from something awful and both are fucking terrible websites to be trans on cause they foster this culture of “to remain accepted you gotta attack other trans people for our amusement” and being an egg on SA were the worst years of my life but I also met my wife through there soooo… yeah.

Most queer former something awful users have stories like this.

We huddled together in our weird niche sub forums (let’s play in my case) and laughed nervously at all the other horrible shit said because speaking up against it early on could get you banned. Being cringe or a buzz kill could get you banned, depending on the whims of the moderators—who were like proto reddit mods to give you the modern equivalent.

And then you had to pay another 10 bucks to get unbanned. I know this sounds incomprehensible now but nearly every something awful user back in the day had a misplaced sense of superiority over every other goddamn forum cause of the $10 bar for entry and the fact so many things (slenderman, homestuck) originated there. The DONGS bit in early homestuck? Something awful reverence. Boatmurdered? Also from there.

We thought ourselves the tastemakers of internet culture and it’s as ridiculous it sounds.

SA and 4chan are inexorably linked because 4chan came into being when posting porn (in the forum called Don’t Post Porn Here/DPPH, to give you the tip of the SA forums culture iceberg) was banned—purely on the grounds of avoiding liability with their credit card processing service, as are most porn bans—and the founder of 4chan took personal offense to that.

I feel weird being involved in this bit of internet history. Back then I was desperately trying to be “not like other girls” and wouldn’t figure out I was not a girl until long after I reset my password to gibberish and pointed my recovery email to a fake address so I could never recover my 2003 reg date account.

But yeah, troon was originally a portmanteau of trans and goon—goon being the now unfortunate term for users of something awful. It was absolutely used in a derogatory sense, and jumped to widespread use by TERFs cause when SA got slightly more accepting of trans people the biggest transphobes all fled to 4chan so they could trash trans people without risking having to drop another 10 bucks to get unbanned.

One day I’m gonna be 80 and still remembering all this early internet bullshit that escaped containment into the wider world and just won’t die, a la these formerly forum-specific slurs.

[cat-mermaid]

the wayback machine is a blessing upon blessings! i randomly remembered this fucked up website from like 2002-2006 i used to read called "Ecchi Attack" that had written reviews of the most fucked up Japnese Hentai media (at the time), so i went to check if it was archived on the WBM and it was! Even better? I found another website i used to check out on Ecchi's links page! Solid Sharky!

This is the website that had the Princess Maker 2 review that wildly misrepresented what the game was actually about, but made me think about for a few years...

...then someone on the old Something Awful: Lets Play forums started posting a playthrough of the same game:

and i finally said HEY I'M GONNA DOWNLOAD IT cus it was abandonware by then and man was i confused when i found out Princess Maker is basically just Monster Rancher #1 but with a little girl instead

[hanakogames]

I know none of you guys share my love of really weird Let's Plays of obscure old games with bizarre mechanics. BUT

This game is nuts. It's a racing game...

... but it's also a life sim (stats, money management, time management) and a kitchen sink mix of whatever the heck the developers felt like throwing in (a dungeon???), plus some very strange humor.

And while that is in itself bizarre, this LP goes EVEN MORE over the top bonkers, mixing a deliberately bad (machine) translation with car facts, period Japanese commercials, and home-made stop motion animation with toy cars to illustrate the story events.