Founded in 2004 as a place to catalog LiveJournal drama rejected from Wikipedia,
Encyclopedia Dramatica rapidly became the premier site on the web for all manner of
lulz. Intended
"in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary," ED grew into a sprawling crowdsourced compendium of memes, subcultures, communities, personalities, and the endless feuds and controversies spawned by
4chan and
other anonymous imageboards. While comprehensive, the site developed a reputation for nastiness -- full of "ironic" (?) racism, gratuitous porn, organized attacks on other sites, and disturbingly thorough dossiers on perceived enemies, all dripping with vicious snark (just check out
their entry on MetaFilter). But now, after more than six years, it appears the troll has become the trolled. Founder Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo, allegedly
disillusioned by the site's
legal woes and
nihilistic trajectory, has
permanently shuttered the site and replaced it with
OhInternet, a slicker, cleaner, Web 2.0 effort modeled after more respectable internet guides like
Know Your Meme (which recently sold to
Cheezburger Networks for a cool
$N million, discussed
here).
Backups and mirrors abound, but as for the source? Pool's closed...
forever.
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 15, 2011 -
85 comments
Social news site
Reddit recently held their
"Best of Reddit 2010" awards honoring key players in the site over the last year, including the progenitor of
the Rally to Restore Sanity, the clever drive-by cartoonist
Sure_Ill_Draw_That, unofficial image host
Imgur, and feel-good story of the year
"Today you, tomorrow me." But perhaps most interesting was the winner for Best Big Community:
FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU! Originally inspired by 4chan's popular
Rage Guy meme, F7U12 (for short) is a clearinghouse for user-made web comics, slice-of-life affairs that
tell a story or
share a common frustration using
a small collection of crudely drawn yet highly evocative facial expressions. Several have become small memes in their own right -- the wily
Trolldad, the doormat
Okay, the prideful
Fuck Yea, the melodramatic
Gasp. And
one comic, inspired by the warped text randomly generated by
reCAPTCHAs (
previously), has given us
Lord Inglip --
god of
a dark religion now
rivaling FSM whose
cryptic commands marshal
loyal armies of
gropagas,
falcows,
Sellicks, and...
canary into exploits both
monstrous and
inconvenient (
timeline,
wiki). Obey him --
or else! More fun with F7U12:
rage face origins,
rage faces in real life,
Twitter feed,
search comics,
create your own (
alternate).
posted by Rhaomi
on Feb 8, 2011 -
168 comments
