Comments on: Metababy

Metababy

2sheets — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:01:31 -0800

Metababy Returns - "Metababy is an experiment in collaboration, a Web site created by its visitors. You're welcome to post anything you want on Metababy, and anybody else is free to change it. "
Content subject to change at any moment, so NSFW.

By: Eloquence

Eloquence — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:12:32 -0800

Woohoo! Like wiki, but without the usefulness!

By: Space Coyote

Space Coyote — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:13:12 -0800

Yay, two people are fighting constantly reposting each of their respective poems that involve g_____.cx

By: Space Coyote

Space Coyote — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:18:56 -0800

Funny, somebody just posted this thread to metababy. Oh shit, Space Coyote! You shoul've logged off before putting this up!

By: Space Coyote

Space Coyote — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:20:48 -0800

D'OH!! Holy shit that's scary...

By: Orange Goblin

Orange Goblin — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:21:29 -0800

What a great idea! Goatse really needed a mirror!

By: tittergrrl

tittergrrl — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:23:40 -0800

Apparently Metababy is a wide-spread success!

By: homunculus

homunculus — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:30:03 -0800

"You are the Goatse man! You are Greater than you think! You are Limitless! You are Infinite! You are Able! Expand! Expand!"

By: nthdegx

nthdegx — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:30:58 -0800

I'd advise everyone to not waste their time with this at the moment. Definitely definitely NSFW.

By: PrinceValium

PrinceValium — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:32:20 -0800

* deletes cache, sighs *

By: elwoodwiles

elwoodwiles — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:38:29 -0800

This is why we can't have nice things.

By: dakotadusk

dakotadusk — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:39:20 -0800

Gah. Excuse me while I go pour bleach on my eyeballs.

By: 2sheets

2sheets — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:41:34 -0800

Perhaps it'll be more fun when the 12 year olds are in bed.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:41:58 -0800

damn. here I'd managed to resist seeing tubgirl ... and quonsar (or some quonsar wannabe) fucked that up. Eat hot death, metababy.

By: WolfDaddy

WolfDaddy — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:43:46 -0800

Zathras can never ever have anything nice. But that's okay. Zathras has come to expect it. Even enjoy it, after awhile.

By: elwoodwiles

elwoodwiles — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:45:45 -0800

Evidently, goatse has been a problem at this site so the creators have a way of redirecting the goatse images in the options: here

By: riffola

riffola — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 18:01:41 -0800

Greg Knauss, of eod.com and suck.com fame, created Metababy.

By: fuzz

fuzz — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 18:11:14 -0800

Keep hitting reload, it's first-rate conceptual art. I got TubGirl, a couple of personal pages from egomaniacs on speed, Bush's "Protection from Pornography" announcement, a few bad jokes, and a recipe for smoked turkey, all in the space of 2 minutes.

By: BentPenguin

BentPenguin — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 18:45:21 -0800

for the same concept art, and just a dash more civility, see here

By: Mayor Curley

Mayor Curley — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:00:38 -0800

This is why we can't have nice things. This made me really laugh, and then I was asked to explain why I was laughing, and it's not funny out of context, but it's the funniest remark ever on Metafilter.

By: waldo

waldo — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:22:10 -0800

This has been done for a couple of years by the Thomas Jefferson Center for Freedom of Expression. They intend to construct a physical version of this in downtown Charlottesville sometime in the next couple of years.

By: tittergrrl

tittergrrl — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:25:13 -0800

homunculus: that link redefined my life. Thank you so very much.

By: mildred-pitt

mildred-pitt — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:34:01 -0800

Careful mildred-pitt, remember to log out.

By: gd779

gd779 — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:42:38 -0800

Zathras can never ever have anything nice. But that's okay. Zathras has come to expect it. Even enjoy it, after awhile. Zathras have sad life, probably have sad death, but at least there is symmetry.

By: troutfishing

troutfishing — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:56:17 -0800

Metababy needs one goatse-ing big pair of Meta-diapers to contain all the flying sh_t coming out

By: sharpener

sharpener — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 20:51:28 -0800

Has someone got a Sam Neill fetish or something?

By: mildred-pitt

mildred-pitt — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 20:57:10 -0800

Thanks anonymous person!

By: Quartermass

Quartermass — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 21:24:57 -0800

Barf! I need to learn to not go to a site when people say things like "Excuse me while I go pour bleach on my eyeballs."

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 21:31:17 -0800

uhm.. yay.

By: taz

taz — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 23:25:39 -0800

That's nice, BentPenguin.

By: iamck

iamck — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 23:29:48 -0800

After playing around with it, I realize that I never, ever want to visit that site again. Ever.

By: meech

meech — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 00:43:18 -0800

For those of us that have been cautious web viewers could someone please take the time to describe these two [tubgirl and goatse] images in mild language? I am curious but by the sounds of it not so curious that I want to actually see them.

By: Orange Goblin

Orange Goblin — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 00:57:58 -0800

Ok meech - nasty, and really nasty. So nasty, that you want to pour bleach on your eyeballs.

By: t r a c y

t r a c y — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 01:03:53 -0800

this has so much potential, too bad about the dimwits overrunning it. i had fun posting this: =^. .^= you are what you post and then someone adding that tv snow bground and changing the words to "you are nice things", then someone changed it to you are ed's hairy thing haha. dumb but funny. still, too much dumb tho'. meech - kill that curiosity right now or you'll live to regret it, seriously.

By: Eloquence

Eloquence — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 03:32:25 -0800

The Wikipedia article shock site describes various of these sites. Ironically, Wikipedia is a site that everyone can edit and that produces useful content (thanks largely to all the good things which Metababy doesn't have, such as a simplified syntax, a page history, diffs, a changelog, watchlists etc.).

By: davidchess

davidchess — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 03:46:20 -0800

As a long-time fan of Metababy through its several incarnations, I'd urge everyone to get over the YUCK factor of the images (they're just images, people, they can't hurt you) and maybe even manage to enjoy the chaos. (The images: goatse is a man with his back to us, leaning over, with his fingers holding his anus open to an extent that will surprise most first-time viewers; the color and texture of his skin and limbs are perhaps as disturbing as the actual act and body parts; he is a terrifyingly concrete object. Tub-woman, who isn't posted nearly as often, is a woman of a certain size sitting in a bathtub wearing only a panty (or something like a panty), apparently masturbating, with a rather unappealing expression on her face. Neither will kill you! There are also sometimes images of excrement and excretion, people of various genders naked and/or having sex, and so on. Those won't kill you either.) The last time Metababy was around, I gathered and put up a modest gallery of (non-goatse non-tub mostly non-disgusting) pages snatched from the roiling chaos that is mb. Looking at the gallery will really give you a rather deceptive picture, as much of the fun is in the dynamics, but at least it's a place you can get some pale idea without the risk of seeing much in the way of taboo body parts (gasp!). While it resembles it in mechanism, metababy is nothing at all like Wikipedia. It is art and life and chaos, not information and structure and meaning. Set your expectations accordingly...

By: meech

meech — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 04:01:11 -0800

Thanks davidchess for the description of the images - I will continue with the avoidance strategy. And in response to the rest of your post - I think that images CAN hurt you and I'm sure if I googled for a bit I'd come up with support of the psychological damage that can occur. On another point, your description of the site as 'art and life and chaos' is incredibly appealing but when it comes to the uncontrolled, open, no-consequnces parts of the internet it often tends to 'porn and swearing and chaos'. Which judging from the comments above sounds a bit like metababy.

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 04:31:37 -0800

errr. tub-girl (at least, the one that i saw yesterday on metabay and was linked from here maybe a month ago) is a different image to that described above. someone kneeling in a bath tub, head down, arse in the air, spewing out diahorrea towards the camera. and it's not about taboo body parts (gasp). it's about seeing things that evoke empathy, disgust, sympathetic pain - emotions that, it seems to me, come from an emotional involvement with the image that is largely based on imagining yourself to be part of what is depicted. when you see these things as "just images" then you've lost something. you may be more urbane, cynical and worldly-wise, but you are still the poorer for it.

By: davidchess

davidchess — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 06:29:35 -0800

Oh, is that the one people mean by "tub-girl"? Could be. They aren't generally labelled. *8) That one does show up more often than the seated woman. "I think that images CAN hurt you and I'm sure if I googled for a bit I'd come up with support of the psychological damage that can occur" If you get a chance, I'd be interested (the question comes often in the context of violence on TV, the first amendment status of certain kinds of porn, etc, and there doesn't seem to be much hard evidence). But I'd be pretty surprised if you found a study suggesting that something on the order of five minutes spent browsing on metababy could do anything describable as "harm". Nice points, andrew. I said "just images" to try to tone down the "eeew, icky, I have to go cleanse myself now" tone of some of the (admittedly amusing!) previous postings. Yeah, there's lots of gross and even disturbing stuff on mb, but that's part of the ambience, and I'd urge people to try to get past it far enough to see what else is there. By "just images" I didn't mean "just images and therefore powerless" (because as you point out images can be utterly involving). I meant to convey more "just images, and therefore nothing that you risk permanent harm from letting yourself take an inquiring look at". And meech'll have to find some very interesting web pages to make me change my mind on that latter point. *8)

By: davidchess

davidchess — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 06:33:35 -0800

(P.S. It's probably sort of condescending and all, but I can't help myself: "porn and swearing" are part of "art and life". If you really love the latter, you can't entirely dismiss the former. Not that I wouldn't be pleased if more of the parts of art and life that _aren't_ porn and swearing would show up on Metababy; but it is what it is. Wondering about the reasons that it is what it is is part of the attraction for me...)

By: dgaicun

dgaicun — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 06:41:36 -0800

I just saw goatsee, after managing to somehow avoid it for a very long time. It looks really painful and damaging. I wonder if any doctors have commented on it anywhere on the net. A Dan Savage column recently mentioned another practice that made me cringe. People who pull their colons out of their rectum for a sexual thrill. Dan didn't seem too amused at the practice, which can be fatal. Another unfortunate Internet thingy I happened upon was a dude who inserts gummy worms, nails, and pencils into his dick and jerks off. I didn't click on the pictures, but the description sounded positively monstrous. I dunno though, pencils and nails just sounds fake. As for tub-girl that isn't "diarrhea" per se Andrew, its more like somebody got a hose inserted in their ass, and removed for photo-op geyser effect. The disturbing part is her posture which ensures the entire dirty stream is all landing on her face and open mouth.

By: troutfishing

troutfishing — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 07:53:58 -0800

Yick.

By: dgaicun

dgaicun — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 08:38:38 -0800

Yick. You're right. I'm sorry, it was bad manners to comment w/o supporting links. Here's the gummy worm thing from Eros blog. People more curious than I are free to inspect the pictures and pontificate their nature and authenticity. Here's the Dan Savage column I mentioned, where he gets ultra-goatseed over Email whilst eating breakfast.

By: glenwood

glenwood — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 11:06:35 -0800

tubgirl made me sad about the world for several days after i first saw it. i'm calling bullshit on the idea that "images can't hurt you".

By: Prospero

Prospero — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 12:42:22 -0800

Just for the reason that two of the most renowned graphic images on the Internet have been described here in some detail, this is one of the most educational threads to be posted on Metafilter in some time. Thank you, describers of graphic images, for suffering so that others do not have to. (Even though dgaicun's description of Tubgirl seems like a topological impossibility, I'm still not curious enough about it to go to the site.)

By: moonbird

moonbird — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 13:48:12 -0800

Someone just posted: "Derek Arnold is the antiquonsar guy." Quonsar, your influence spreads far and wide, apparently.

By: inpHilltr8r

inpHilltr8r — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 15:16:43 -0800

I just saw goatsee, after managing to somehow avoid it for a very long time. It looks really painful and damaging. I wonder if any doctors have commented on it anywhere on the net. There's an interview with the owner of the anus in question in bmezine (warning NSFW, which should be no surprise). Everything is normal for me. All of the "anal destruction" I've done was done by me with care, and my ass is as normal as yours is... Although sometimes when I'm taking a crap it's huge because I've now got the capacity to really stock up. My digestion is trouble free though, and I've had no problems at all

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 15:47:54 -0800

Thank you, describers of graphic images, for suffering so that others do not have to. Optimist. Over a long enough time span, everybody's goatse/tubgirl-exposure probability approaches 1.

By: davidchess

davidchess — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 05:22:04 -0800

The (one?) reason I like Metababy, I think, is that it shows us one end of the continuum; other open and/or collaborative sites have structures and rules and protections and expectations that put them somewhere on the scale from controlled to chaotic. Metababy is solidly at the chaotic extreme, and it's interesting to see what happens there. I don't think it's an unalloyed cesspool (at least I hope it isn't, because I'm not sure I want to think of myself as having such a good time in a cesspool!); it's a more complex and noteworthy thing than that. And it helps fill any wondering we have about what that end of the continuum might be like. If Metababy didn't exist, someone would have had to invent it. *8) So (issues of what "harm" means aside) I'd urge people to take a second think on it, even if a second look seems inadvisable for whatever reason...

By: crunchland

crunchland — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 05:41:32 -0800

I think it's hilarious the way some people cling to their pages, changing them back whenever someone else changes them. It's like they're completely missing the point.

By: t r a c y

t r a c y — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 10:53:02 -0800

I think it's hilarious the way some people cling to their pages i know...! that's why i had a lot of fun deleting everything there last night, bwah! won't do that again tho'; talk about tedious. i'm still amused by the way people fuck with my =^. .^= and change or add to the quote. i think a lot of people here ignored elwoodwiles' suggestion to use metababy's options feature, to block out goatse images, in favour of just ignoring the site altogether and that's too bad.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 11:58:16 -0800

t r a c y, I have a confession to make: The =^. .^= is yours? I'm the one who keeps putting a <p style="font-size: 50em; line-height: 0"> container around it. I'll stop now. Promise. ^_^

By: t r a c y

t r a c y — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 12:10:29 -0800

haha brownpau, no that's ok...! it isn't me that keeps changing it back to a normal size. i'm just sitting here watching it get tossed around. see, at metababy there's enough room to swing a cat ;-)

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 12:28:27 -0800

I saw the =^. .^= thingy last night and I put "we are what we are" underneath it. An obscure reference to a first season episode of X-Files. Someone changed it to read "We are what we blah" or something that just wasn't funny enough, so I kept changing the last word. We are what we smell. We are what we coagulate. We are what we killfile. And someone kept changing it BACK to the boring blah one. So I just copy pasted a whole buncha variants at the same time. Figured that'd keep the ol' fuddy duddy busy for awhile. =) Oh. And "Joe Rogan does not approve."

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 12:50:30 -0800

...I remember now! The boring blah one was "You are what you post." That was it! ...oops. *waving* Hi Tracy!

By: zarah

zarah — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 13:24:56 -0800

Someone must have known you were out playing last night because one of the meta pages was zachsmind.html and it said something about dawnie being too young you pervert :D

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 13:41:10 -0800

LOL! That Dawnie reference musta gone up after I went to bed. I concur that she's too young for me, were I interested in Michelle Trachtenberg in that way but Dawnie's just my favorite post season four BtVS character. Pre season four, my favorite BtVS character is Oz, and I'm not interested in hairy men in that way either. But it's an inevitable hazard of MetaBaby that everything atrophies to vulgar sex references and blue humor. Most people can't be amusing unless they go blue.