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Something Awful Forum Hilariously Hijacks CBC Anthem Contest

dbarefoot — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:30:11 -0800

Something awful in a new CBC anthem. The CBC's Hockey Night in Canada is one of the highest-rated programs on Canadian television. It's something of a national shrine to our beloved sport. For the past 40-odd years, it's had a distinctive theme which most Canadians could hum. After something of a fiasco, the CBC lost the rights to the theme. They're running a contest to replace the venerated theme. A Something Awful forum user composed a truly dreadful entry ("mostly comprised of cat and sheep sounds, baby cries, and gunshots/explosions"), and got the community to 'vote it up' on the Anthem contest site. You really need to hear the awfulness to truly appreciate it. The SA commmunity has responded, and now it's the most viewed, top rated, and most commented-on submission on the site. There's a Facebook group and a spectacularly bad animated version on YouTube.

He let them down. He ran around and hurt them.

lysistrata — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:07:55 -0800

A few days ago a post appeared on the Something Awful forums noting a curious website called Notes to Mary. The notes are a series of threatening letters from a high schooler named Robert to his crush, Mary. The goons figured out pretty quickly that they had an ARG on their hands and went to work on solving the puzzle. Several other forums picked up on the game. Robert began interacting with players, sending them strange messages and several series of numbers that appeared to be some sort of code. A Flickr pool was started. Players even created an IRC channel to swap clues and information in real time. The Notes to Mary site offered a link to a login. All effort was made to crack the user/pass combo. Finally, several days after the game began, users were finally able to log in. The game was solved. The players would be rewarded for their hard work. Where did the login lead? Here. "Robert" had just pulled off the most epic rickroll in intertubes history. The author of the game had never really intended for it to be a game at all. He just thought it would be funny to put up some creepy notes and see what sort of attention they got. When SA goons decided it must be an ARG he decided to play along. The numerical "codes" he sent out? Random numbers and dates plucked out of the air. Three hours before the solution was to be revealed he set up the redirect to the rickroll video. Some background on how all this came to be is here. You can also view some of the email he received as the "game" progressed. To see the rickroll in action log in to the Notes to Mary site (the question mark in the upper right corner is the login link) with the user name "mary" and the password "dies".

Pro's and Cons - Kickass Guitar Solos.

Lord_Pall — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 23:43:23 -0800

Like em or Hate em, Something Awful asks and answers the question: Do guitar solos make non-guitar solo songs better? A-HA, Beach Boys, Britney, Backstreet Boys. Rest of the thread.

wiremommy — Thu, 17 Aug 2000 17:25:48 -0800

Something Awful is one of my favorite game-related sites, full of goofy immature humor, game reviews, bad movie reviews and more. But the webmaster is having a hard time getting paid for the ads he hosted as part of the Gamefan / Express.com network... (more)