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.
Which IS pretty much the size of it, yuppers. These guys are determined to prove that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters CAN produce…er…SOMETHING. Nothing useful, nothing informative, just…SOMETHING.
i’ve been reading the “proposed wiki entry” link that kirbywarp posted, and it’s so adorable. it’s like they plan to just wholesale replace the existing entry with their own and think that will work.
also: i love how they are forced by wikipedia rules to be honest and how uncomfortable this makes them.
As a reader and avid anti-gator: HA. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
As a graphic designer: Ew.
Reading people talk about the book reminds me of this webcomic… http://oglaf.com/bilge (link safe for work, comic in general is not)
Their book is terrible in most every way, and everyone involved knows this. Yet, they just can’t bring themselves to give up, and the end product will just reinforce their image as a bunch of borderline nazis (and, in some cases, actual nazis).
I’d ask why they thought this was a good idea, but I expect that if anyone had that level of self-awareness, they’d have quietly slunk away long ago…
Not quite; the analysis indicated that ~500 twitter accounts posted to the hashtag more than once a day, and accounted for over 50% of the hashtags activity. This number does not account for those “loosely attached” to #GamerGate, or those involved in other ways (stalking Wikipedia editors to get them banned, spamming companies with emails, trying to think of a meme for tumblr that isn’t stupid and/or racist, etc). This is useful for establishing the lower boundary (if a person keeps tweeting day after day, they probably haven’t changed their mind and are less likely to be a sock), but not as helpful for establishing the upper boundary – as indicated by the remaining volume of those who tweet less frequently, there are those who just aren’t that vocally invested in #GamerGate, even if they agree with its aims. The numbers further suggest that as many as half of this “loosely attached” group are socks, based on comparisons to other hashtags (some 60% of tweets originating from computers, compared to around 30% for most anothers; numbers are from memory, so they’re probably off). It’s also impossible to tell when they realize this is something they really don’t want to be associated with, because they weren’t active enough for their absence to be noted.
Unfortunately, this lack of clear data also makes it nearly impossible to persuade the average gator that they don’t enjoy popular support; there’s enough fanatics that they’ll be surrounded by enough pro-GG noise that it feels alive, and they can point to the 13,000 or so “quieter” members to claim that a “silent majority” supports them.
All in all, they’re most likely pretty small, though – just big enough to make people’s lives hell if #GamerGate notices them.
“/pol/ was right again.”
Wait, when was /pol/ ever right? Unless you’re a right-wing anti-Semitic unabashed racist, I mean.
I think these fellows would have been better off starting a Fight Club. They’d be getting exercise at least, and they wouldn’t be leaving these sub-standard dreck all over the internet.
Just when you thought pompous stupidity couldn’t get any worse (as in, more laughable), this came along.
seraph:
Exactly – and that’s exactly what these scumbags want, if it means they’re the ones doing the abusing.
WWTH:
Ouch! XD
Kakanian
Oh for a time machine to dump this dude on old Sigmund’s couch and divert him from his creepy theories about women …
There is no borderline about them, they ARE Nazis. If there’s something that has beem consistent about GG’s output, it’s casual anti-Semitism.
Someone’s been taking graphic design lessons from the MRAs. That 1984chan one would have been a complete mystery to me if I hadn’t seen the same title upthread.
Except “Atlanta Nights” was bad on purpose. Still, this crap is amazing and make me wish Fandom Wank was still populated, because they’d get a huge kick out of these.
@b.tom.darga, are you new? I hope you’ll stick around, because your title suggestions are hilarious (and I always appreciate a Hitchhiker’s Guide reference).
My favorite quote in the proposed Wikipedia entry link:
So close to an epiphany. Yet so far away.
YOU. OWE. …me a new keyboard.
It’s funny, every activist I’ve known never focused on important stuff like comics, video games and Internet message boards. They always blathering on about boring shit like legal rights, employment, housing, medical care, unions, living wages, the environment…
This is why I didn’t think for a second that “Unser Kampf” was an accident. If /pol/ is involved then a nontrivial percentage of these guys are literally Nazis.
You think any of these yahoos have even read 1984?
That’s the one where the bad guys take away all the free speech, right?
Well… I suppose we can take credit for Emma Goldman, Andrea Dworkin, Shulamit Firestone, Judith Butler and a few more (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_feminists) but no female emancipation overall wasn’t one of our secret plots we totally have to control just everything, as proud as I would feel were it the case 🙂
Now did you notice that last bit about “Literally Who” finding and mocking this all? You gotta love how that lady’s fighting back and winning the bunch of cowards hiding in anonymity.
She’s not only super smart as you can tell from how she writes, she’s also awfully brave and strong. Also she has awesome hair.
Zoe, if you’re reading this, you rock and are a great inspiration to never, never give up.
(Just you seem to have some bad taste for boyfriends. Can’t be perfect you know.)
English language. Became to be known as? Really?
Also, b.tom.darga wins the war of the titles, with an honorable mention going to Hyena Girl for “Mein Kampfy Chair”.
The reason why GargleGables are writing a proposed Wikipedia entry is because Jimmy Wales dressed up as Eris and threw a golden apple.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-challenges-gamergate-to-write-neutral-entry/
Hilariosity ensues.
that’s fantastic! i had no idea!
did genocide recently appear on word-of-the-day calendars?
Reading people talk about the book reminds me of this webcomic… http://oglaf.com/bilge (link safe for work, comic in general is not)
One of the most awesome moments in Gamergate was when, in the wake of Anita Sarkeesian’s warm welcome on the Colbert Report, it slowly dawned on the GGers that every famous person they admired saw them as horrible creeps. Nerd heroes like Wil Wheaton and Joss Whedon had Tweeted against them! How could this be?
Even webcartoonists hated them! The Penny Arcade guys, despite not being big feminists themselves, had already given Gamergate a big nope, and so had most other gaming cartoonists. (I followed David “Shortpacked” Willis’s Twitter feed with evil delight while they tried to win him over. He’s the biggest liberal and feminist on the planet, as anyone could figure out from three seconds of reading his comics.) Finally someone commented, “At least we still have Oglaf,” to which my immediate response was, oh, you poor little boys. Sure enough, they went running to the Twitter feed of Oglaf creator Trudy Cooper, who responded with something along the lines of, “I have no idea what that is. …Wait, it’s that? No, why would anyone think I’d support that?”
(Possibly they didn’t know Oglaf is drawn by a woman. Possibly they did know and are just that self-deluded.)
So now, as far as I know, they’re boycotting all webcomics. It brings a warm glow to my heart.
Remember when they tried to recruit the creator of Bayonetta and he called them insects and asked if school was out for vacation where they were? Good times.
Now I remember what strategy does this resemble. It’s like the intro $ciento/ogy material, that is full of basic mental exercises, promises and platitudes. Once you’ve sunk a lot of money and got conditioned enough to not question the leadership, they start pushing the freaky shit like Xenu and superpowers. The are attempting to dilute the message in order to try and sucker some people into the group – but I doubt they can do it because they’re raging ideologues, not shrewd scammers.
And THAT happened because he just wanted the GimpleGrizzlies to stop clogging the arbitration board with gigantic screeds. Arbitrations are supposed to be last-ditch requests and in 500 words or less. The smallest request made by a Gater was 2000 words, and in total they filled ArbCom with 60 PAGES of irrelevant bullshit.
I suppose GurgleGoggles read Oglaf just for the naked women and the dick jokes. I stand by my hypothesis: they just can’t consume culture in any way besides the utter superficial.
Remember when they tried to recruit the creator of Bayonetta and he called them insects and asked if school was out for vacation where they were? Good times.
That was a beautiful thing. They were sure he’d be as outraged as they were that one reviewer criticized Bayonetta on feminist grounds, and instead it turned out he’s a normal human who can take criticism without flying into a foaming rage, or indeed giving much of a shit.
The failure of pretty much anyone who actually works in the video game industry to support Gamergate used to bother them, but now it’s just evidence of how deep the conspiracy goes. It turns out every single game designer and programmer and the entire staff of companies like Blizzard are all in the pay of Feminism (and the Jews)! Whatever will Gamergate do?
Oh, what other webcomic artists have issued statements against them, out of curiosity? A couple of weeks ago, I tried to look up the gaming webcomics I’d drifted away from to see if anyone had said anything really stupid, but I was only able to find statements from PA and Nerf Now. I never really followed many gaming webcomics to begin with, though… I don’t think I even know who the more popular artists in the genre are, anymore.
That said, I was surprised when I saw Willis’s rebuttal to #GamerGate – not because of his stance (I’d expect him to grow three arms before I’d expect him to be wrong on this topic – at least that would explain how he’s able to keep his buffer so full), but rather that anyone would have argued with him over it. I’m really not certain how they could have heard of Willis without also hearing that he’d be rather hostile to their hate campaign. Then again, I was also confused as heck when I saw that they were surprised that Whedon spoke out against them. It kind of feels at times like they’ve never actually listened to the people they say they idolize.
I didn’t actually know that Oglaf was created by a woman… Since the name of the author didn’t seem to appear anywhere on the site, I just assumed she wanted to be anonymous ^^; . And I really never expected to hear about #GamerGate being anywhere near Oglaf! Geez, hearing about stuff like this sometimes makes me think I should have a twitter account…
One of the few silver linings to this shameful display has at least been that it’s given a lot of high-profile people the opportunity to firmly rebuke those who want to insist that games should be a men-only club. Over the last few years, I got the impression that people like this believed that everyone was quietly on their side, since there wasn’t much pushing back against them – being very publicly shone that not even their favorite devs support them will maybe hopefully snap them out of it, or at least shut them up.
Or maybe they’ll just retreat back to their echo chamber, complete with “anonymous developers” promising they’re totally on their side, swearing revenge against those darned feminazis who… Demanded that devs put more thought into their plots. Because DiRGA. Or something.
1984chan
Really?
There really needs to be a moratorium on idiots using anything by Orwell to bolster their idiocy. Particularly when they’re such bad writers.