Yesterday, longtime GamerGate bete noire Gawker Media filed for bankrupcty. On KotakuInAction, Reddit’s main GamerGate hangout, the regulars cheered what they saw as Gawker’s long-deserved demise:
![AntonioOfVenice 76 points 1 day ago GAWKER IS DEAD. GAWKER DOESN'T HAVE TO BE YOUR LIBELER. permalinkembedsavereportreply [–]Cosmic_Mind89 25 points 1 day ago Gawker is over. permalinkembedsaveparentreportreply [–]Neo_TechniDon't demand what you refuse to give. 18 points 1 day ago Those obtuse wailing shitslingers permalinkembedsaveparentreportreply [–]TeuthexAwesome Person 3 points 14 hours ago We don't have to be their audience.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/gawkdead.png?ssl=1)
Of course, Gawker isn’t actually dead. Bankruptcy gives the company some financial breathing room as it tries to deal with the $140 million in damages a court ordered it to pay former wrestler Hulk Hogan after Gawker idiotically posted a sex tape involving the oversized human.
Still, the GamerGaters celebrated this “victory,” perhaps none of them harder than the odious embarrassment to humanity known as Matt Forney.
This overgrown Cabbage Patch doll is a man well acquainted with media failure — after all, he’s the former “editor” of reactionary gaming site Reaxxion, Roosh Valizadeh’s hilariously inept (and quite short-lived) attempt to cash in on the GamerGate fad.
(You can read more about Mr. Forney’s illustrious career at Reaxxion here, including the time he posted a GamerGate manifesto that, unknown to him, was almost completely plagiarized from an old John Birch Society newspaper ad, with the words “John Birch society” replaced by “GamerGate” and “Communist” replaced by “SJW.” No, really.)
But Forney didnt let his bittersweet memories of the utter failure of Reaxxion stop him from taking to Twitter to “rub [Gawker’s bankruptcy] in the faces” of Gawker writers and editors by sending them harassing Tweets. He was so proud of what he called his “quality sh*tposts” that he collected them in a Storify,
Let’s just say that Forney is no Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
Here are some of the Tweets he sent to Gawker Media dudes. You may notice a theme here.
In his Storify, he declared these last two Tweets virtual “TKOs.”
Forney took a different tack with women. You may notice a theme here, too.
Many of his Tweets were responses to self-deprecating jokes and sarcastic comments from Gawkerites, which led to an assortment of cringey failed zingers like this one:
And this one, in which Forney reminds us that in addition to being a failed Twitter comedian he is also a raging semi-Nazi.
Some of Forney’s Tweets were just puzzling. Is this Tweet suggesting that its recipient commit suicide, or take a lovely relaxing bubble bath?
And here he worked in a cultural referent that ceased to be fresh roughly half a century ago:
When Gawker employees took a few seconds of their time to block him on Twitter, Forney did a little victory dance, which inevitably took the form of more uninspired Tweets.
It’s a bit odd that someone who looks and acts more like an overgrown baby than any other adult human I can think of would consider this a brilliant insult.
Fuck, I went to check the news on Grimmie, and there’s just been a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando.
The gunman is apparently dead.
Grimmie was shot in Orlando too. It would be fucking bizarre if there was some connection.
For those who haven’t heard the news, there’s been a shooting at an LGBT+ nightclub in Orlando. You can search twitter for more news under #Pulse and #PrayForOrlando
I’m gonna spend 4-5 weeks in the US this summer, and I’m genuinely worried for my safety. Something really needs to be done soon.
Press conference in Orlando, they are talkng and talkng but giving out almost no information. Multiple deaths. Shooter had assault rifle. They’re calling it terrorism, but have given out no info on why.
Now saying approx 20 dead.Jesus.
@IP
That’s just the thing. She was nervous. Like this was her Apollo moment. Like she was about to blow everyone away with her talent and message. Yeah, no
I mean, ‘incredibly white, Canadian mom raps about the school system’ sounds super cringe, but also super cute. Go off on school lunches or zoning regulations, and the novelty, if nothing else, might help get your point across. Stick to what you know, cos trans people ain’t your area of expertise. And for the love of all things holy, BREATHE!!!
@David
That was fast. I’d have assumed there’d be more hand wringing about ‘crazed, lone wolves’ or something. 20 fucking people…
On topic, scrolling through that Storify really made me cringe. The insults and attention seeking are so embarrassing in themselves, but the fact that he’s proud enough of his harassment to celebrate his own childish behavior in a Storify is just too much. Especially considering the timeline of this tantrum is just: “I called this guy a f****t! And after destroying him with my witty insult, I moved on to calling THIS guy a f****t. Leaving those f****ts in a crumpled heap, I devastatingly called this woman a wh*re. LOL!”
I opened a new thread for discussion of the Orlando shootings.
@Axecalibur
White conservatives doing little “rap songs” actually makes me rage. You just know that they’re cartoonishly racist assholes, yet they use a traditionally black art form to bring attention to their bigoted message. It’s disgusting.
@IP
Totes get it. When you put it that way, it sounds pretty horrendous. If there’s a ‘correct’ reaction to this, yours is probably it. However…
See, I often get a little self conscious about this kinda thing. I’m black, so I’m ‘supposed’ to be offended/hurt by white people appropriating rap (and a buncha other things), but I’m not. Really at all. She’s a transphobe and she’s definitely teaching her kids that bullshit. That she decided to tell the world how shit a person she is thru that specific genre is the least fucked up part of this for me. Emphasis: for me
@ David,
true, no one yet knows why he did this terrible thing. Only as we already know, RoK et al never let lack of information get in the way of furthering their agenda. I’m just making a prediction here, it would be good if I were wrong.
@ Nequam,
I confess I’d never heard of Rebecca Schaeffer, I just looked her up on Wikipedia. That was so sad. And in that instance it really was a case of entitlement gone to the worst extreme.
@Ray of Rays:
(Escapist talk ahead, yaaaaay…)
Given the way that Archon let his true political colors fly in the wake of GrombleGrit, it’s sadly not surprising to me that the website has by and large turned into a breeding ground for libertarian absurdities. After systematically pushing away every even moderately liberal voice they had on the website with the exception of Grey Carter, it was kind of only a matter of time before the swing of things would go such that progressives aren’t terribly welcome around there anymore.
Of course, the part that really gets me is that you can’t go to practically any video game forum without seeing all of these #grater jerks anymore, so I’m not sure what unique stance The Escapist is really trying to pull by making up strawmen to say “We’re so centrist because every other gaming site is so leftist and they’re all attacking us Real Gamers(TM) and calling every gamer on Earth misogynists (even though that would include themselves)!!!”
@dslucia
Don’t be silly. The people calling the GamingGatekeepers misogynists aren’t gamers. They’re fake gamers who probably only play Farmville and Candy Crush.
@kupo:
I do believe that was partly implied if not explicitly stated in the latest article by the EiC, so you’re not wrong. EDIT: I mean, I know that I certainly haven’t been playing games like Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Half-Life 2, Portal (again), Hard Reset Redux, and many others lately.
Though, the other bit was that they’re accusing other websites of doing this whole “attacking gamers” thing, when literally the only articles I know of that they could even use to back that up are those “gamers are dead” ones which could only possibly be used as ammo if you have no idea what you’re talking about. Individual users are calling out misogynists, but I’ve never seen any website claim that gaming as a whole is mostly comprised of misogynists, as seems to be the idea that Mr. Vanderwall has latched onto.
Yes, Forney. If a company you work for goes bankrupt, future employers will assume the bankruptcy was your fault and refuse to hire you. That is absolutely the way things work in the world of employment.
I wrote for a Gawker site for a while. A number of key writers for that site have left recently, partly because of the restructuring at Gawker, but mostly because they have book deals and stuff.
I’ll second the question about the flag.
I know it from somewhere, but I just can’t put my finger on it.
(I like way too much F&SF stuff to keep my fictional universes straight sometimes)
Sorry if the question has already been answered and I missed it.
I recognize the flag as a different-colored version of the CK2 Germanic Pagan religion symbol. I assume it’s from a historical germanic symbol.