I used to like his SA articles when I was a kid. Probably not good for a forming mind but whatever. RIP and thanks for the laughs.
I thought he was still alive. I know he and Retsupurae had a falling out, but I didn’t think it was over something like that.
Ehh… Something Awful was a big reason people used to hate furries, so I never really had a fondness for the guy.
I had no idea he killed himself
As someone who grew up on the 90s internet and really came into things in 2000-2004ish (arguably prime somethingawful era) I’m a little shocked this wiki is so light. There’s so much more lowtax drama. But I guess Wikipedia isn’t gonna mention the mangosteen incident
Or the thousand dollar chair.
There was an edit battle if you look at the history. Someone is keeping his page small.
What is that? I can’t seem to find anything about mangosteens?
He was shilling for some mangosteen supplement on the forums and when people bitched about seeing sponsored products on a forum they were paying for his face fucking melted, which actually happened a lot. Dude was unhinged.
Dude was very bitter and had the unwarranted ego of a 90s tech bro who constantly failed upward
He basically succeed because of timing. His humor was bad like a lot of late 90s internet shit. People will sometimes defend it but it’s still there to read, Jeffrey didn’t take the front page down when he bought the site. And the other shit from that era too, Maddox, penny arcade, realultimatepower, etc
It’s just such shit. Like I don’t think that being crass or offensive inherently means you are unfunny but that was the era of white dudes being like “crass offensive thing hurr durr act like im angry beef jerky ha” or just lol random non sequitur then a curse word or slur. It’s humor for a cod lobby
Like read any of these:
https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01/
https://www.somethingawful.com/feature-articles/ask-jeff-learn/1/
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=litter
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/02/requiemaa-strip
ugh. This shit was all gold in 1998-1999. The internet was a cesspool. I mean it still is, but it was too
The frontpage was always shit, he was a bad writer, he knew it. The only reason he had any success was because success on the internet in 1998 was to appeal to lowest common denominator tech dorks, write semi coherently, know basic html, and update on a semi regular basis. That was enough to get him a decent number of readers but never enough to earn a living.
What earned him a living was making the precursor to social media, basically, and this was mainly timing. And frankly he didn’t even do this. There were plenty of other general interest forums. People talk about the “quality” of somethingawful and I will admit it was a good forum, I spent a lot of time there, but the history that has been whitewashed is that they had forums for piracy from like 2002-2005 or so. They were serious too, they adopted BitTorrent almost immediately, they had private ftp top sites for mp3s, they had dc++ hubs for general shit and a separate one for anime. Those file forums were only visible if you paid to register and there were thousands of accounts that clearly only registered for that purpose. He deleted those forums “for the good of the community because those users were shitting up the place” but realistically it’s because by 2005ish the heat on torrenting was getting huge and he didn’t want to deal with it
Fun fact: the dc++ for anime (from adtrw) was called raspberry heaven, after the ed for azumanga daioh. It was in the chat for that server that moot, shii, nem, and some others eventually created 4chan. This is probably why 4chan’s futaba has some style cues from SA to this day, like (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) in red. It used to have more references but they’ve been patched out over the years I think, I don’t really go on 4chan anymore. Probably also why 4chan culture is so heavy on image macros. I got a lot of my anime from that server back then and it’s where I started to learn Japanese
His bitterness led to him banning all those users btw when 4chan was clearly more successful than SA a couple of years later (like 2005ish). And a couple of years before he died he did an interview where he was so salty about shit “from the forums” that blew up like 4chan, slenderman, dril, etc and said something to the effect of wanting a piece of each. He would absolutely be the scumbag boss who demands 40% of your startup because you had the gall to start a company while working for him even though he contributed absolutely nothing
I frequented Something Awful Forums and Television Without Pity between 2000-08 and it’s interesting to see the contrast on the type of users that posted there.
While SA was into a lot of racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic humor (that admittedly I found funny), TWoP’s “woke” (I mean that in a good way) outlook confused me at the time. Nowadays, TWoP is how the internet (well, mostly) conduct themselves and SA adopted that too over the years. I too find my SA antics (that I carried over to other forums and social media) shameful.
That said, it’s no surprise that when the more recent Lowtax fiascos happened, he never received any sympathy from the forums and they quickly moved to oust him. Compared to when the first instances of his bad behavior bubbled up the surface (how his engagement with Emily ended) from 2002 wherein he got plenty of support. He even wrote a lengthy piece about it despite proclaiming his hatred for what he calls E/N.
He and a lot of dudes on that forum were the older creeps that hang out with teenagers then get pissed off when those teenagers grow up and suddenly are no longer into calling everything gay
One of them wrote a book about how the culture of “ironic”homophobia, racism, sexism, etc in places like fyad ultimately was a key contributor to the current climate. Basically something like everyone was doing ironic stuff but eventually the group grew too large and people stopped getting the joke + you had nefarious actors like weev that would use the pretext to groom and recruit people
whoops
Hell, I forgot all about SA. I stopped going to the forums about 14 years back, when the mods’ response to my reporting a user for publicly harassing and attempting to doxx me was, and I quote, “LOL removed”. Such fond memories.
I don’t recall the mangosteen bit, but even without that there’s hardly anything in this article.
I used to visit Something Awful sometimes. I remember “mangosteen” being mentioned, but I never knew what it was.
I seem to remember a bunch of drama posted about this guy around either digg or early reddit. But I forget the details.
I remember him from his days writing for PlanetQuake. You could tell even then he was fenced in and trying to eat hay from the other side.
I never followed him to Something Awful, i grew up, i guess? But it irrevocably influenced the Internet as a whole.
Sucks that he turned out to be a shitbag
What does that mean, eat hay from the other side?
He wanted to write about more than just one video game
I watched his several of his last livestreams. I’d loved Something Awful back in the day. When I heard about his suicide, I felt hollow in a way I never expected for a person I’d never personally met.
