User:Propaniac/Sandbox

Content

The site's central content consists of humorous articles from various contributors, selected by Kyanka. The articles are sometimes personal, describing real-life experiences, but are more often irreverent rants that are frequently written in a satirical educational tone. Typical articles include "The Unwritten History of Halloween"; "Learning to Cope with France"; "Hello, I'm a Driving Asshole!"; and "Oh TV, What Have You Done?"

Prior to the February 2007 site redesign, each daily update included an "Awful Link of the Day" (or ALOD) to a website chosen by that day's author as being especially disgusting, confusing, disturbing, stupid, or otherwise unintentionally humorous. ALOD targets are usually submitted by readers and commonly include fetish websites, white supremacist websites, and web comics. Furry sites were frequently chosen as ALODs in the past, but that topic has since been deemed a "dead horse." Usually, all contact or discussion features on the targeted site (such as email, guestbooks or forums) receive a large number of vulgar or insulting messages. As of February 2007, this feature has been dropped from the daily article, though an archive of past ALODs remains.

Regular Features

Notable Something Awful features include:

• Cliff Yablonski Hates You, in which a cranky, mentally unstable, alcoholic parody of the “grumpy old man” stereotype mercilessly criticizes people in pictures submitted by fans. Yablonski also occasionally writes rants for the site’s front page.

• Fashion SWAT, a segment mocking clothing and/or fashion trends in different themes, such as "Comic SWAT," "Retro SWAT," or "Ganguro Madness." The name of the feature stems from reasoning that, if fashion police are needed to correct bad fashion, a fashion SWAT team will be needed to correct extremely bad fashion. The writers criticize multiple images in each article but rarely focus on the clothing or fashion exclusively.

• Jeff K., a long-running fictional character who is a parody of teenage Internet users, particularly script kiddies and online gamers. He has become something of an internet meme. Despite once claiming to be a "l33t hax0r," Jeff now claims to be a "COMPUTAR CONSULTANT BECAUSE HAX0R IZ ILEGAL" (sic). Jeff K.'s writing style is characterized by generally horrible spelling, replacing "-er" with "-ar" in some words (as in "usar" and "summar"), and alternately writing in all caps and all-lowercase.

• Legal Threats, showcasing most or all of the mail (both conventional and electronic) related to threats of litigation against the site, along with responses from the Something Awful team (often under the name of the site’s fictional lawyer character, Leonard J. Crabs). While most such threats are ignored as unfounded, a few have resulted in cooperative action. A "Your Band Sucks" piece using the title "Cliff Notes" was quickly changed to "Thorpe's Notes" following a legal threat from the Cliff Notes company.

• Second Life Safari, a series of articles depicting happenings in the MMORPG Second Life video game. Articles typically deal with the game's more obscene or bizarre elements, such as furries. The series received international press attention after posting images and video of a "griefing" incident involving famous Second Life character Anshe Chung.

• The Weekend Web, a regular Sunday feature consisting of especially badly written, overly emotional, disturbing or insane posts copied from selected Internet forums. Most entries are culled by members of Something Awful’s own forums, which are occasionally targeted in the feature.

• Your Band Sucks, a monthly feature in which popular contributor “Dr.” David Thorpe criticizes popular music artists. The feature also mocks the angry fans who respond to the criticism of their favorite band, often in poorly written e-mails. Thorpe has a long-running series known as the "Demo Roundup" in which he reviews demos sent in from readers.

Among Something Awful’s other content are Photoshop Phriday, the Flash Tub, and both sincere and satiric reviews of movies, video games, TV shows, pornography, and music, including “Truth Media” reviews filled with intentional errors to bait fans into sending flame mail. The site also produces "specials" such as deliberately poorly-drawn comics, short stories, or "guides to life." Older features, such as Jeff K's "SMARTY MAN GAEM DESIGNEAR "SURVIROR"", seem to have been instrumental in bringing notable game designers such as Levelord and Cliffy B to the Something Awful forums, at least for a short time.

Contributors

Some of the site’s most notable contributors include:

• Kevin Bowen, aka "Fragmaster." A longtime contributor to the site, although mostly sporadic. He was fired from the Sunday front page spot in 2005 after an update that Lowtax found lazy and unfunny. [1]
• Zack Parsons, aka "El Pinto Grande" or "Geist Editor." Notable among SA writers for his love of World War II history and has authored a humorous history book about the exotic weapons of that conflict, entitled My Tank is Fight!
• Dave Kelly, aka "Shmorky" or "Cave Deli." Flash animator for Something Awful's Flash Tub.
• Dr. David Thorpe. Writes the "Your Band Sucks" section, and collaborates with Zack Parsons on "Fashion SWAT." Thorpe has appeared on behalf of Something Awful on Attack of the Show!, giving a tongue-in-cheek description of the site. He was hired as a writer after a long-running thread in the forums where he boasted that he could snobbishly tear down any musician. Thorpe also writes a column called The Burn Unit for the alternative paper Boston's Weekly Dig.