#oneaday Day 451: Random encounters

Popular Internet wisdom has it that you should never read the comments. And, for the most part, this is fairly sound advice. Because if you do read the comments, there is a significantly greater-than-zero percent chance that you will run into someone like "Steven Woolf" here, a thoroughly disagreeable individual who did me the questionable courtesy of leaving a particularly rancid comment on a five year old MoeGamer article earlier today:

I have never encountered this person before. Their email address was unfamiliar to me. The fact they showed up in the comments of an article from five years ago suggests to me that they stumbled across MoeGamer via random Googling. And the fact they took such umbrage at me using a naughty word to discourage "AI people" from feeling in any way welcome on my site suggests to me that they are, themselves, an "AI person" and thus, by extension, a cunt.

Comments like this are always sort of fascinating, because there was evidently some sort of thought process involved — and one that is alien to me. What was Steven Woolf doing reading a five year old article about a character from an obscure Japanese beat 'em up? The nature of his comment suggests that he wasn't there to celebrate his love of Japanese video games, otherwise he might have, you know, mentioned Japanese video games. Instead, he chose to absolutely, spectacularly lose his shit at a disclaimer halfway down my site's sidebar presented in a 12 pixel high font. Why is that? Could it be because he's a cunt? All signs point to "yes" thus far.

What's even better is that because MoeGamer (and likewise this site) has an "approval" process for new commenters, meaning that his furious, impotent raging at my discouraging of AI cunts from using my site as the basis for any of their lake-boiling bullshit will remain completely invisible to the rest of the world for all time, with the only record of it being a snarky post on Bluesky (which he doesn't appear to be on, and which will be deleted at the end of this week anyway) and this post here, which he will probably never see because it's on a different website and he's almost certainly too stupid to track it down for himself despite 90% of the URL being the same.

And even if he does find it, all he'll really encounter is the simple and indisputably correct assessment that he is, in fact, a cunt.

So well done, Steven Woolf. You gave me something to write about today. You have officially become content, and that's not a fate I would wish on anyone, except you, because you are a cunt.

I hope you're having a better day now you got your little tantrum out of the way. If not, I recommend you go and play some video games or something. I hear Denjin Makai is pretty good?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 341: Rabbit (ass)holes

A random bit of Internet rabbithole-diving this evening brought me into the realm of "King Assripper". The name pretty much says it all, but in case you were in any doubt: this was a man who, as far as I can make out, became famous for eating a lot and farting. Particularly farting.

His most well-known work is "King Assripper Farts On His Roommate's Door", which, in this age of clickbait, is refreshingly honest about what it offers. Sadly, the originally posted video of this spectacular display of flatulence no longer exists — good old link rot strikes again — but, as with most things on the Internet, it has been archived for posterity by other people who, I'm sure, are more than happy to get some YouTube ad revenue from the hundreds of thousands of people keen to see a fat man guff really loud.

Except it goes deeper than that. I decided to look into whether there was any more information online about King Assripper, or if the above masterpiece was his one and only work. Besides a KnowYourMeme page on the "Farting On Roomate's [sic] Door", I also discovered what appears to be a complete archive of everything King Assripper has ever contributed to Internet culture, where else? The Internet Archive, of course.

The Internet Archive is a curious organisation, and I'm thoroughly grateful for its existence. It plays host to so much stuff, and it's fascinating to see what has been recorded in there. Looking for old magazines? Chances are you can find them in the Internet Archive. But, at the same time, you can also find the entire video output of a guy who liked to stuff his face and then fart thunderously.

In a sense, I guess it's important to archive stuff like King Assripper, because whatever you may think of his, uh, content, he has nonetheless had an impact on popular culture. This whole little adventure this evening was mostly set in motion by Arin from GameGrumps happening to mention "Farting On Roomate's Door" during an episode. My thought process ran something like "oh, I vaguely remember that", closely followed by a nigh-uncontrollable desire to see someone farting on their roommate's door.

From another perspective, I guess one could look at it as a little worrying. Consider the cultural output of previous centuries, and how much of it has been painstakingly archived, reproduced and, on occasion, updated to make it more palatable or understandable to a modern audience. Then consider someone in 200 years' time (assuming we haven't boiled the planet by then) looking back on the culture from today that we've preserved, and stumbling across the complete archive of King Assripper's videos.

Now there's one thing you never see in sci-fi, eh? You never see them looking back at galactic history in Star Trek and Worf going "I learned that in the 21st century, humans communicated by farting on one another's doors", and Picard having to explain that no, that was only something that happened under particular circumstances, and should by no means be taken as representative of the entire cultural output of the 21st century.

I bet Riker farted on a few doors in his younger days, though.

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#oneaday Day 282: A lost art - the GameFAQs Legal section

If you've been playing video games for as long as I have, doubtless you remember how important GameFAQs once was to folks trying to beat games, before commercial games websites worked out that the SEO juice for posting one (probably AI-generated) "guide" per individual thing you have to do in a game was more potent than a thousand reviews.

One of my favourite things about the FAQs that were posted on GameFAQs was when the author decided to use the "Legal" or similar section to have a good old rant about something which obviously meant something to them. Here, for example, is the copyright section of "Kertra"'s 2003 guide to Metal Slug on NeoGeo:

This FAQ is for personal use only. Do not distribute it or use it for profitable purposes. If you want to post this FAQ on a website, contact me before doing anything and send the URL of your site. Plagiarism is a crime, just ask. I have no objection on my FAQ being posted on someone else's site but you must give credit where it is due. 

Also, please keep in mind that under no circumstances, are you allowed to make any changes to this FAQ! It must remain as it is and moreover, you are not allowed to rip off part(s) of this FAQ to put in another FAQ. No banners or advertisements are to be attached to it and it must remain in its original form (NO HTML!). Moreover, the site must be a non-commercial and non-profitable one. 

This document is protected by US Copyright Law, and the Berne Copyright Convention of 1976. I'm well aware of my rights and will not hesitate to take legal action against you if you don't follow these guidelines. If you wish to take some info from this FAQ to include in a more elaborate one, write to me first and tell me what it is all about and I'll think about it.

This is excellent stuff. I love how it gradually builds and escalates as it goes on, culminating in threats of legal action under both United States copyright law and the Berne Copyright Convention. Amusingly, they'd researched enough to know that the Berne Copyright Convention existed, but got the date wrong on it: its most recent revision appears to have been 1971, not 1976. It goes deeper, though; 1976 is actually an important date to copyright law, because there was a revamp of the United States copyright legislation that year.

The exhortation to not attach banners or ads to the FAQ and the stern NO HTML! appears to have not been legally enforced by poor old Kertra, mind, as GameFAQs is now owned by Gamespot, and I suspect if I turned off my adblockers to look at it, there would be at least one banner ad somewhere, and the site now automatically HTML-ises all FAQs rather than hotlinking directly to the text files.

Let's see if we can find some more of these. Here's a good one, from DingoJellybean's Final Fantasy VII FAQ of 2001: (As a bonus, check out this archive link for DingoJellybean's old GeoCities site, featuring some delightful early 21st century HTML jank and an early example of a blog.)

NOTE: From now on 1/10 Final Fantasy 7 messages regarding how to beat the game will be answered. If you ask me a question already on the walkthrough, your email will be submarily deleted. Use Crtl+F to search what you are looking for. Even if you beg me to read the email I will most definitely delete the message. Too many stupid questions already in the walkthrough has been asked of me. I got over 700 emails regarding this game alone, I will delete those with the subject Final Fantasy 7 on it. If you do subject a title something else, but you ask a Final Fantasy question on the message, your email will be permanently blocked, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I updated this FAQ massively, in hopes that questions will be answered in the FAQ. I've included everything to make sure dumb emails won't come to me again. If I'm in a good mood, I'll answer your email, but when I see another FF7 question that puts me out on a bad mood. If you want to talk that's fine, but I know what is in my FAQ and what is not. I will read your message occasionally and decide what to and what not to reply, and if you flame me or criticize me negatively I will send a flame right back at you and block your email address so that you can never contact me again unless you create a new email account and behave. This is also quite possibly the LAST time I will ever update the FAQ. If enough requests comes in(which I doubt) the FAQ will be updated if you are specific in which areas needs to be updated. Also take a look at Mr.Prolific's million dollar worth FF7 FAQ, its great and has massive information only Kao Megura can provide.

Now that's a quality rant. Okay, it's not a "copyright" or "legal" section, but this is another prolific subgenre of GameFAQs rants: people who wrote an FAQ getting absolutely apoplectically furious that anyone emailed them about their FAQ, when more often than not they put their email address in the FAQ.

I'm a particular fan of the threat to "submarily delete" [sic, obviously] your email and the tonal whiplash that is "if you flame me or criticize me negatively I will send a flame right back at you and block your email address so that you can never contact me again unless you create a new email account and behave". Magnificent stuff.

Let's see if we can't find another good one. Oh, this one is nice, not for being mad (which it isn't), but for actually being remarkably pleasant. I would place good odds on this one, from a Sonic the Hedgehog FAQ written in 2003, being by a girl, just because of the sheer lack of overtly aggressive posing:

If you are going to use this guide on your site, the least you can do is ask permission first by e-mailing me at <REDACTED BY PETE>. Make the note short and sweet. If you're e-mailing me about anything, whether it's related to this guide or another one or what, put what you're talking about in the subject line of your message. I need to be able to differentiate the spam from the important stuff. I really can't keep people from stealing guides, I mean, it's going to happen, what can I do? But you know. Whatever. Just ask before you do it. Most people can do it with little or no problems.

If you use my guide on your site, you may HTML-ize the text or change the way it's set up on the page, but don't change a single letter. All words must remain the same - don't alter anything whatsoever. I would like to see screenshots added to some of my guides though. I always thought that would look super-sweet.

"Snow_Dragon", as the author calls themselves, also gives a shoutout to their Dad in the credits section for "moving the big computer into my room". Sweet.

It's weird to say, but I miss this. All this represents a long-gone era of the Internet, replaced, as with so many things, by social media. There are still folks out there writing FAQs on GameFAQs — and God bless 'em, as I'd still always rather go to GameFAQs than a clickbait guide on a commercial website, even if GameFAQs is part of Gamespot now — but the earnestness, the passion, the inexplicable fury of those little personal asides in late '90s/early '00s GameFAQs submissions is just one of many things that I don't feel like we really see any more.

Oh well. At least all those lovely examples of the art form in its prime still exist. Here's hoping GameFAQs is around until the very end of the Web.

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I thought your teenage years were the time to not conform, but as I get older, non-conformity becomes more appealing.

As the stereotype of growing up goes, when you're a teenager you're supposed to decide that you want to "rebel" and be something other than the person that your parents took great effort attempting to craft you into.

For me, I don't think that really happened. I mean, sure, I had plenty of the obligatory stroppy teenager moments, when I'd get angry with my parents for what I saw as irrational or unfair decisions, but I never really stepped into the realms of what I'd describe as "counterculture" in any way other than that which I already was: a computer nerd.

And, in our household, that wasn't really counterculture or rebellion at all; our whole family were interested in computers and video games, since they'd been part of our culture at home since before I was born. Not only that, but my father and my brother regularly contributed to the Atari magazine Page 6 (later New Atari User) — and as I moved into my teenage years, I started to contribute a bit also.

But I digress. Nostalgia for times gone by isn't the point of what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about how homogeneous "Internet culture" has made people today — and how, at the age of forty-one years old, I crave nothing more than rebellion against that homogeneous culture, and feel nothing but frustration at the hordes of people all acting and talking the exact same way.

I'm sure this has always happened in some form or another, but the global nature of the Internet makes it feel like people are losing their own unique (often local) identities. Now, wherever you go, it feels like everyone describes things in the same way, and uses the same often nonsensical turns of phrase.

Every opinion is someone "lowkey thinking" something, even though that doesn't really make any sense.

Every misunderstanding is confronted with "Tell me you haven't [done thing] without telling me you haven't [done thing]."

Every vaguely energetic YouTube video is accompanied by people going "me on the way to school [doing something urgent]."

I feel constant embarrassment at the prospect of linguists of the future looking back at this age and seeing people unironically using the word "pog" at every opportunity.

And there are myriad more, which I'm sure you can think of yourself if you're in a similar position to me.

I can understand why everyone wants to "conform". It's the thing of not wanting to be the outlier, and of wanting to be understood by everyone. But it's boring. If everyone talks about things the same way online — and often has the same opinions, spoon-fed to them by their favourite YouTuber, as often happens — then speaking to one person is much like speaking to any other. You might as well not bother.

Which is why I find myself making a point of very deliberately making use of outdated, very local British slang whenever possible. Yes, it's contrarian, yes, it's childish and stupid, but it's my own little way of feeling like I'm actually my own person rather than being subsumed by the festering, slimy monster that is "Internet culture". Even though I completely recognise that what I'm doing is essentially the exact same thing, only using '90s games magazines as my model.

I think also part of it stems from my Asperger's. Since my diagnosis a few years back, and understanding what that means for my mental health, I feel like I've become much more conscious of the things that sort of "set me off", as it were. And one of those things happens to be predictable, formulaic, repetitive structures, particularly in speech and written communication.

YouTube videos that are always the same drive me bonkers. RuPaul's Drag Race drives me insane for the same reason. And, as I've described, people who all communicate in the exact same way frustrate me also.

I guess in some ways we should perhaps celebrate the way in which people have found how to be near-universally understood online, but I can't help just finding it a bit dull and annoying. I'll keep describing bad things as "bobbins", thank you very much, and replacing the phrase "okay, I understand" with "bonza, Toadie". And there's nothing you can do about it!