Lovers of literary catastrophes rejoice! Some GamerGaters are crowdsourcing a book about what they see as the death of 4chan and the rise of GamerGate, and so far the results have been even more amazingly awful than that even sounds.
So far all the Gaters have managed to produce have been some rough drafts of a lyrical prologue written almost entirely in mixed metaphor, a somewhat plodding first chapter, and a rough outline of the rest of the book. But there is much comedy gold in these rough pages.
And so I would like to present to you The Nine Most Ridiculous Quotes from The Crowdsourced GamerGate Book That Were Actually Written by Real Human Beings Who Thought What They Were Writing Was Awesome.
1) The endless sea of ones and zeroes
We would not be forgotten in the endless sea of ones and zeroes that many other events have been dissolved by, but drowned by liars who could only just grasp the lowest bars of the social ladder.
2) The Steps We Took To Pull Back the Curtain
Let’s take a walk through no man’s land. What you will find here among the ash piles are evidence of lies, deception, ill-gotten gains, facades, and false morality. You will also find the mark of our footprints; the steps we took to pull back the curtain and expose the corruption around us.
3) Never Stop Riding
Hold on to your seat. The ride never ends.
4) Like Terminator or Something
I’m writing in nostalgia of a now lost past, and fear of an uncertain future. You know, like Terminator or something.
5) Fighting in a Maelstrom of Pettiness
The ugliness on both sides, and the villains, and heroes, all fighting in a maelstrom of pettiness for a future that doesn’t care for them.
6) Something Larger in the Vacuum
While on the surface it just seems like trolls feeding trolls, death threats, and angry nerds on the surface, the picture painted is of something larger moving through the cultural vacuum that is the modern west.
7) Calculated and Painful
We were scattered by a well calculated and painful defeat.
8) Like Many a Writers Have Commented
4chan is probably, and like many a writers have commented before us, one of the most important websites of its type in the English world; known even to have affected how other unrelated websites published content and worked.
9) Not Technically Illegal
Despite being a minor, a majority of Poole’s early updates to 4chan were adding explicit boards. Many critics claimed the content of these boards were of borderline legality. Originally in /b/, and later /h/ (hentai) and /d/ (hentai/alternative), anime pornography of children (lolikon) and anime pornography depicting extreme fetishes such as necrophilia (guro). Poole responded to these complaints, by reminding them that this type of pornography is not technically illegal, and the content would not be removed.
So what will this new masterpiece be called? Well, there have been many suggestions so far. A few of my favorites:
1984Chan – The Rise and Fall of 4Chan
The point is MOOT (moot does not mean what you think it means) -40 keks
Our Kampf
So whats the deal with 4chan?
To Reign in Hell: The Fall from Grace
The Willing Executioners
Poole’s Closed
404 – (Chronicle of the Executioners), (4chan Not Found), (Freedom Failed to ` Load), (Freedom Not Found)
The Caliphate of the Internet
To Kill |Crush| a |Mocking| Cloverleaf
Ooh, someone took high school English!
The heroes who rose from the pariahs
Tales of the struggles of modern-day Huckleberry Finns
Oh, yet another High School graduate!
How we tried and slew Leviathan
How to win friends and crash your community, by MOOT
We are piss babies who like to suck diaper farts
I don’t think that last one was meant completely seriously.
(I am also aware that the bit about the Terminator was probably added by a troll.)
H/T — To Literally Who herself for pointing me to this literary masterpiece. She is also organizing a crowdsourced dramatic reading of the book’s prologue.
BONUS: Here are a few more of the proposed book covers.
Hi everyone.
What is really interesting about this to me is the change in tone over just the last month. You will know more about this than me but when I arrived here via GG the tone was primarily antifeminist because of the zoepost and Anita. Then Brianna. Enter death of gamers and the ethics smokescreen. Once the MSM covered it, who shows up but the RW, Elam and his crew and the PUA Brigade with their hate, racism and antisemitism. And GG doesn’t seem to get it at all that they are now just click bait, like lambs to the slaughter.
I am not naive, I know there is an element of this on the Chan’s, but GG has become a recruiting tool for the likes of Yiannopuolos and others. I think the majority of GG is young guys who want a cause, who are vulnerable and pissed that they aren’t dating and find power in the collaboration. I wonder how many of them would express themselves this way face to face.
I’ve been on Twitter watching the process in Ferguson and have read a lot of racist shit in the last few days. This is not a lot different and it is just so damned stupid.
Laptop arrives tomorrow, thank heaven, then I can better join in.
Please keep Ferguson in your thoughts today, grand jury is done. Thanks.
Chaltab
I love that image
@Bogdan Cvetkovic These places draw right-wing extremists and bigots because they are the only places they aren’t banned outright. Most places have a moderation policy that disallows bigotry, harassment, personal attacks, etc. Places like 4chan and reddit have a policy that is basically “if it is not literally illegal, we won’t interfere. If it is literally illegal, we will gently ask your self-appointed mods to think about interfering.”
So basically, they aren’t allowed in decent spaces, and most decent people don’t want to be around the cesspools that do allow them. Hence they become concentrated in these spaces.
That red gentleman from Buffy.
The monster which first silences you, then takes your life.
I wonder if GG has enough self-insight to identify with it,
or if they just project it onto us oh-so-horrible SJWs…?
@deniseeliza
And how creepy is it that these are the places that are being mined for follower.
I agree with what was said above somewhere, GG has no idea that the fact that they originated on 4chan and that their silliness is documented for anyone to see makes them look like the fools they are. (Was that today? Or yesterdays silliness?)
Oh, Contrapangloss, I love your prologue! But I used my 1337 haxor skillz to snag the first page of the REAL introductory chapter:
Gather ’round, me mickle malchick droogies, and listen well; Times past count I done the Tell. This ain’t one body’s story, it’s the story of us all. What you hears today you got to tell the birthed tomorrow. Looking behind us now, across the count of time, down the long haul, into history back go I….
I sees the end what were the start: It’s the Pox-Eclipse, full of Lulz! The So-Chill Just-Iced Warriors, they ran with old Mister Dead, chopping off the yarbles of manly mens in order to put the silencers on them. There was the Four Not-Men of the Pox-Eclipse, and they did not never not have no yarbles to speak of in the firstest place, me malencky malchicks.
The mostest double-plus ungood Not-Man was Fem Nist Freak Quincy, Breaker of Alphas. She shot blue pills straight from her woo-tube and into the glazzies and earholes of the malchicks what goes their own ways……
That’s enough of a spoiler for now, I don’t want to trample all over their Intellectual Property rights!
I once read a book in which a doctor tried to out the conspiracy that denied him a leading position in one of Vienna’s largest hospital.
He said that the reason why he could not get the position was that a cabal of witch-doctors active in that very hospital and every other hospital in Austria has been hypnotizing the population by putting musical hexes on the nation’s ground water.
I whished the guys here would at least be that original, but I guess taking pages from the Elders of Zion is easier as that book’s probably freely available as digital text.
@deniseeliza
4chan HAS a rule against that shit, its just a combination of a screwed up users/mods ratio and flat out lazy enforcement screws it up
“You will not post any of the following outside of /b/: Trolls, flames, racism…”
the old joke goes that if rule 3 was actually enforced most of the users would be fucking gone
Fridayjones
Woo tube!!!!!
Unless it’s paedophilia, rape and incest. Reddit and 4Chan are all for that, to the point of one of Reddit’s former mods distributing child porn and admitting to raping his stepdaughter (unless the media gets involved, of course).
And it’s that article that started the obsession with Gawker that became the target of the “journalistic ethics” smokescreen.
The reaction to that article on reddit was the event that made me delete my original account.
Kirbywarp – thanks for posting the link to the wikia. They are trying so very hard, and taking it so very seriously, I would need a heart of stone to read it without laughing out loud.
My favorite bit was the admission that all the links to Breitbart had to go, because Wikipedia doesn’t accept it as a reliable source.
The original edition of Mein Kampf, taken from Hess’s typewritten transcript of Hitler’s rants in prison, had either 10,000 or 100,000 typos in it, depending on which source you ask. (I tend to suspect that it’s closer to the latter.)
It’s nice to see these people keeping up to that sort of standard.
Good grief! This is so badly written and so pompous it could pass as a Vox Day’s prose!
they really do think this shit is like watergate, ans questions like “what did moot know, and when did he know it” are of general interest to the wider public.
“Talk about the growth of our new chan. Don’t mention it by name.” Why not? Is there some kind of stigma to it that I don’t know about or something?
OK, I just now read this, and I have to ask – why do none of these men have eyes?
These covers are so creepy.
Isn’t it obvious? Chan culture encourages users to be as shocking, offensive and extreme as they can in order to make an impact. Fascists have been perfecting the trade for centuries.
Normally I appreciate soft furnishings, but I think putting up curtains in no man’s land is an empty gesture.
I appreciate their font choices for the cover; I have trouble reading them, so I don’t have to be annoyed or upset when I read them. Can they be convinced to the use the same font on the inside?
@Moggie, new title suggestion:
Curtains in the Cultural Vacuum
This stuff is so contorted it couldn’t be translated back into the original German, especially since these guys don’t have Rudolf Hess around to clean up their mistakes.
@Harry Thornton: The stigma is that the new chan is where the Gamergaters all fled to, or if you prefer, that the new chan wouldn’t exist if not for Gamergate. (This is written under the assumption that I didn’t fall for blatant sarcasm, haha!)
That being said, considering that everybody with an internet connection is aware of 8chan’s raison d’être – or can at least look it up – I still have no effing clue what in the nine hells they think they’re going to accomplish by keeping the new chan’s name SUPER SEEKRIT.
Puddlegum:
Nice, but maybe not purple enough? How about “The Drapes of Wrath”?
Ooooh, I like it.