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
Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most
infamous hack,
masher-upper,
digi/net artist.
His work stands for a
growing culture of artists who
run wildly through
animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted
data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI
renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the
Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net
art be set to
infect the real,
fleshy world, like a rampant
Conficker Worm? Has
YouTube become the truest reflection of our
anthropological selves? Are we destined to roam the int3erw£bs like the
mythic beasts of yore, hoping,
in time, that
digi art can free us from the confines of this fleshy void?
[...
previously]
posted by 0bvious
on Dec 8, 2009 -
20 comments
A Blast From The Past: Ass Chaps Man A piece of classic American Webiana, still hilarious after all these years. Does anyone know of other classic Web pieces that somehow missed the MeFi front page, probably because they were so well known at the time? [
With thanks to quonsar. Safe for work, I'd say, but a close call.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jun 9, 2003 -
23 comments
