Something Awful

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Something Awful LLC.
Type Company
Founded 1999
Founder Richard Charles Kyanka
Headquarters Lee's Summit, Missouri, United States
Key people Richard Kyanka, Zack Parsons, David Thorpe, Kevin Bowen
Industry Web Based
Products somethingawful.com
Awful Video
City Name Sports Team
MoofWear
Awful Gear
Awful Mart
Flat Falls
Website somethingawful.com

Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a variety of content, including blog entries, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as it grew, so did its contributors and content. Since then, the website has influenced Internet culture[1] and helped to perpetuate various Internet phenomena.[2][3][4]

Since the website's creation, its forums have amassed over 100,000 registered users, and the website in general has been involved in an array of events and conflicts. These include a conflict with the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, a Hurricane Katrina relief fund being caught in PayPal's red tape, and an exhibition boxing match between Kyanka and movie director Uwe Boll.

Contents

[edit] History

Something Awful was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka,[5] who remains in control of the site but is supported by other contributing writers and administrators. Kyanka's status as the webmaster has earned him an Easter Egg in the video game Icewind Dale II.[6]

Kyanka started Something Awful several months before being forced to resign from his job at PlanetQuake for writing a derogatory website update about a fellow employee. He moved the "Cranky Steve" personality in question to the site in 1999.[7] In the years immediately following Something Awful's launch, several sponsors, including GameFan and eFront, failed to compensate Kyanka as promised for advertising on the site.[8][9]

In 2001, the site began charging a one-time fee (currently US$9.95)[10] for forum access. Currently, non-members can view most of the forums, but are not able to post messages or threads. The site and forums draw continuous income from fees for new accounts,[10] forum upgrades such as custom avatars, and merchandise sales. Some suggest that the forum fee keeps undesirable users out.[11]

[edit] Spam Prevention Early Warning System

On July 20, 2003, the spam filtering organization Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) added an entire class-B subnet with the Cogent ISP to their spammer list, since Cogent was hosting a known spammer that SPEWS found difficult to block. Something Awful was added to the list in the process, disrupting its ability to communicate with its customers. Upon appeal, SPEWS initially refused to unblock SA. The Something Awful administrators responded by telling their users to spam the SPEWS-affiliated newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting. The administrators claimed that SPEWS was attempting to hack the Something Awful server. Forum users responded by threatening to perform a distributed denial of service attack on SPEWS, although this type of behavior was strongly discouraged by Kyanka and assistant editor Zack Parsons.[12]

[edit] Taxes

In December 2003, prosecutors in Thurston County, Washington filed charges against Something Awful, LLC for failure to pay taxes on revenue. The tax warrant was satisfied in March 2004 and vacated in 2005.[13] Kyanka has stated that the tax charges were the result of an accountant's error after his move to Lee's Summit from Seattle.[14]

[edit] Hurricane Katrina charity

Since the website's servers were located in New Orleans, the site temporarily went offline in August 2005 during the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. After the site was brought to a semi-functional state, Kyanka set up a link to a PayPal account where people could donate money to the survivors of the hurricane via the Red Cross. Kyanka put in $3,000 of his own money,[15] and promised to give some free merchandise to anyone who donated more than $10.[16]

In under half a day, visitors helped to raise US$27,695.41 before PayPal froze the account under suspicions of fraud; automated messages informed that there had been "more than one report of suspicious behavior from your buyers."[16][17] PayPal stated that they would unfreeze the account once it was provided with proof of shipping from aggrieved buyers. Due to the nature of the collection, there were no actual "buyers", and it was impossible to provide proof of shipping for an intangible good such as a donation.[17] Eventually, Kyanka 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 would only give the money to United Way of America due to their business affiliation; Kyanka initially agreed, but after receiving several emails from readers detailing alleged corruption and inefficiency within United Way, he changed his mind and told PayPal to refund all of the money to the individual donors. PayPal refunded the money, but did not refund exchange and handling fees for international donors.[15] Kyanka has subsequently encouraged his users to boycott PayPal.[citation needed]

[edit] Uwe Boll fight

Main articles: Raging_Boll#Critic_boxing_matches_.28Raging_Boll.29 and Raging Boll

In June 2006, Kyanka accepted an open challenge from German movie director Uwe Boll, who had offered to fight critics of his movies in a series of 10-round boxing matches. Something Awful had posted a humorous and derogatory review of one of his films.[18][19] The event took place in Vancouver, British Columbia on 23 September 2006; after being knocked down several times and eventually counted out by the referee in the first round, a battered and exasperated Kyanka claimed that he had been told by Boll, a trained amateur boxer, that the fight would be just for show. [20]

[edit] Shooting deaths

In 2005, William Freund, a mentally disturbed SA member in Aliso Viejo, California, sought advice in the gun subforum about purchasing Hevi-Shot ammunition several days before embarking on a shooting, in which he killed two people before committing suicide. Freund had stated in the thread, which was closed before the killing spree, that he intended to use the ammunition to defend his Halloween pumpkins from vandals.[21]

On September 25, 2007, forum member "West" posted a thread (only viewable with an archives account) about a double homicide in Oviedo, Florida that involved an acquaintance of his. As the thread grew, other users said they had known the victims, and the users eventually found the website of Andrew Allred, who posted on the forums as "Bomber166". The website contained significant details about the victims and the murder; Allred's account was subsequently banned, and he is being held without bail and faces two counts of homicide, attempted murder and armed burglary.[21]

[edit] Site content

Something Awful is home to a variety of humorous content, including photo manipulation, parodies, pranks, satirical reviews of products, and reviews of obviously poor websites, video games, and movies. The material is written by several different editors, and occasionally by members of its forums as well. On July 12, 2005, David Thorpe —the author of the features Your Band Sucks and Fashion SWAT— "represented" the website on G4's Attack of the Show, although he made several absurd claims, such as that the site started up as a monster truck rally newsletter and that the forums were a front for a cult that required a registration fee of $80 per month.[1]

On June 4, 2007, website columnist Jon "DocEvil" Hendren wrote "The Art of Wikigroaning", coining the term wikigroaning. Wikigroaning is a game in which readers explore two Wikipedia articles with similar topics of contrasting seriousness, such as half-life (the scientific concept) and Half-Life (the game), and compare the length and comprehensive depth of the articles. Hendren's article was featured in the Wall Street Journal.[22]

[edit] Forums

The site is home to a collection of Internet forums, which charge a one-time registration fee of US$9.95 and fees ranging from US$4.99 to US$9.99 for additional features. The forums have helped to perpetuate Internet memes, such as All your base are belong to us[3] and Tourist guy.[2] The forums users (referred to colloquially as "Goons") often organize creative activities in which any member can participate. One such weekly activity is "Photoshop Phriday", where users will modify existing images to create parodies through the use of image-editing software such as Adobe's Photoshop.[23] Another periodic activity is "The Blue Ball Machine", where users create animated images that tile together in such a way as to appear like a seamless whole; these tiles are incorporated into a screensaver which displays them in random order. The feature gained popularity when users on the website YTMND looped the animation to music from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.[24] The website also highlights some of its best forum threads in its weekly feature, the Comedy Goldmine.[25]

Something Awful formerly hosted file sharing subforums "NMP3s" ("No MP3s"), "BTB" ("Bit Torrent Barnyard"), and "DPPH" ("Don't Post Porn Here")[26][27] for distributing music, movies, and pornography, including copyrighted material. Kyanka shut down the subforums on January 1, 2005 in light of the legal problems they caused.[28] Something Awful's FAQ currently states that these file-sharing forums never existed, that discussion forums exist for discussion, and that individuals who joined the forums specifically for file-sharing reasons are "thoroughly retarded".[29] Users who ask for access to these subforums (or other file-sharing activities) are typically ridiculed and may be banned.

During Entertainment Weekly's "Entertainer of the Year" contest, in which votes are submitted online, forum users quickly found a weakness in the voting system, and scripts were written to vote for Kyanka dozens of times per second, thus ensuring his victory. Kyanka was quickly disqualified when Entertainment Weekly found that many of the votes were coming from very few IP addresses.[30] Kyanka did, however, get his name mentioned on their website.[31]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b David Thorpe, Kevin Pereira. Somethingawful.com, Pink Five, Chris Gore [television]. G4 television.
  2. ^ a b Tourist of Death. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  3. ^ a b All your base.... Guardian Unlimited (2001-02-28). Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  4. ^ All Your Base Are Belong To Frogstar. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  5. ^ Lynch, Steven G.. Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (html). Retrieved on 2007-05-10.
  6. ^ Icewind Dale II - Lowtax reference!. Retrieved on 2006-05-15.
  7. ^ Kyanka, Richard (2005-05-10). Here's Mud In Your Eye, Batman (html). Retrieved on 2007-05-10.
  8. ^ Dan Knight (2000-10-11). Something Awful & Express.com. Low End Mac.
  9. ^ Tim Johnson (2001-03-13). eFront: What Went Wrong?. The Duke of URL. Archived from the original on 2002-06-17.
  10. ^ a b Jeremy Turnage (2006-01-23). Something awfully funny. Retrieved on 2007-02-13.
  11. ^ Sameer Pitalwalla. "A friend for every buddy", Daily News and Analysis (DNA), 2006-11-11. Retrieved on 2007-03-12. 
  12. ^ John Leyden (2003-08-08). Something Awful going on with SPEWS. The Register. Situation Publishing Ltd..
  13. ^ Washington State v. Kyanka, [1] (Thurston Superior 2003).
  14. ^ Lowtax (2003-12-26). oh no CRISIS IN WIKIPEDIA DOT COM!!!. Retrieved on 2007-04-10.
  15. ^ a b Farivar, Cyrus. "PayPal Freezes Out Katrina Aid", 2005-09-08. Retrieved on 2007-02-18. 
  16. ^ a b Koprowski, Gene J.. "Feds Investigating Fraudulent Katrina-Related Web Sites", 2005-09-26. Retrieved on 2007-02-18. 
  17. ^ a b Demerjian, Charlie. "All your donations are belong us", 2005-09-04. Retrieved on 2007-02-18. 
  18. ^ Kietzmann, Ludwig. "Uwe Boll does something awful to another critic", joystiq, 2006-09-25. Retrieved on 2007-03-12. 
  19. ^ Chris Baker. "Raging Boll", Wired, 2006-12-01. Retrieved on 2007-03-12. 
  20. ^ Tillson, Tamsen. "Boll K.O.'s crix in the ring", Variety, 2006-09-24. Retrieved on 2007-05-10. 
  21. ^ a b "Murderer leaves clues for forum users", 2007-09-26. Retrieved on 2007-10-07. 
  22. ^ Brophy-Warren, Jamin. "Oh, that John Locke". Wall Street Journal (June 16, 2007): P3. 
  23. ^ Photoshop Phriday. Something Awful. Retrieved on 2008-02-02.
  24. ^ James Lee (July 2006). 1 Web Site, 250,000 Idiotic Clips. LOL!. Wired News. Retrieved on 2006-08-11.
  25. ^ Comedy Goldmine. Something Awful. Retrieved on 2008-02-02.
  26. ^ Lowtax (2004-02-06). CALLING ALL GOONS! We have a MAGENTA ALERT! I repeat, a MAGENTA ALERT!. Retrieved on 2007-10-25.
  27. ^ Lowtax (2004-06-13). yay someone filled my btb request for Police Squad. Retrieved on 2007-10-25.
  28. ^ "Police, IFPI make bacon of OiNK BitTorrent tracker", 2007-10-23. Retrieved on 2007-10-24. 
  29. ^ Forums Support FAQ. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
  30. ^ Adam Gaffin (2001-11-30). The most useless software ever. Network World. Retrieved on 2007-02-06.
  31. ^ Michael Small (2001-11-30). Fan Flare. Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved on 2007-02-06.

[edit] External links