Jazzem

Member
Feb 2, 2018
2,706
You know, I had no idea Spoony's Ultima stuff was 2012. Looking at his IMDB, I kind of time shifted a lot of stuff up in time. I thought FFVIII concluded shortly after 2008 (hence him using the election footage in it) and FFX being in 2009/2010. I stopped watching him entirely, look at this list, I guess 2011-ish and last thing I really sat and watched was the FFXIII review. So, in my mind, he was a lot earlier, and as a result I didn't see how/why people would find out about him today who didn't know about him during that time. I would check in every once in a while and see nothing but vlogs/wrestling and leave. Still, unless you are searching for his couple of big projects (Final Fantasy stuff, Phantasmagoria, and Ultima) I don't think a lot pops up. And, even before my break-off with following him, you could see the seams coming apart even before he finished the damn FFVIII review, which had huge gaps, as was with FFX which took a while as well. Heck, compare the play though of Phantasmagoria 2 with The Ripper. And, even taking your 2012 as the drop-off year, that's more than half a decade at this point.

Also, since he was on Blip/TGWTG, I don't know what his numbers/popularity were back then. I know he won a few awards here and there, but that was almost a decade ago. I guess I never pegged him, outside of those couple of videos/projects, as hugely popular, and it'd be like me asking "what happened to Handsome Tom, or GameJew, or The New Adventures of Captain S" and so on. (I'm still sad we never got a season 2 of New Adventures of Captain S, and no one ever knows what the hell I'm talking about when I bring it up).

I'll be honest, I was conflating my view of the whole spoony thing as something broader than it should have been.

The sad thing, and I'll let it be that, is that trying to find a chronology of his stuff, I stumbled upon his subreddit, where it appears his "fans" hang out, and it's a giant mess filled with people making fun of him, stalking his girlfriend, posting intimate details of his life, and outright gleeful at their harassment of him on twitter and the triumphant banning of him on twitter. And that's like me only looking at it for like 15 minutes. It's, like, no wonder he doesn't like his fans and would blow up at them.

Oh my god Captain S, damn that takes me back.

He did a crossover with AVGN right?
 
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OP
Brian McDoogle
Oct 25, 2017
6,927
Oh my god Captain S, damn that takes me back.

He did a crossover with AVGN right?


Over a decade old, and considered a "lost" episode since not many know about it. Also, considering it is a decade old, there's probably people who had no idea the specific things it was trying to parody. I also just kind of loved how relatively wholesome it was, especially a decade ago during the height of the angry reviewer phase (Nerd and Spoony and NC included).
 
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deepFlaw

Knights of Favonius World Tour '21
Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,542
OH. There's a dark theme. Changing now and forever tyvm

No problem! I don't usually use dark themes, but the default theme here is way too light so I was looking forward to the dark theme, and then switched + never looked back after it arrived.

True, but not everyone these days really knows about how Spoony was from 2008-2012 from a contextual point of view and how steeply things fell off for him in 2012, which I would assume is the target audience for at least the Down the Rabbit Hole documentary (Mister Metokur's video on the other hand probably has a more obvious bent behind it). There could still be people these days who will see his SWAT 4 playthrough, Phantasmagoria 2, FF8 through X-2, or his Ultima Retrospective without any context who will be like "what happened to this guy, why didn't he make more videos?"

At the risk of complaining too much (I think I'm just overly annoyed I gave it that much of my time to watch/think about it, hah), the Down the Rabbit Hole doc doesn't really give any context either? It doesn't tie events together well or really comment on what any events mean for him overall; most it does is start talking about him making X number of videos a year and then sorta suddenly lean into the angle of him mistreating his fans by not making videos. If it says anything about "what happened to Spoony" it's purely how entitled fans perceived what happened and their feelings towards him as a result, not actually examining the cause of his behavior and what he was going through.

It's actually especially disappointing because I stopped watching him right before that shift happened so I would be particularly interested in someone covering it well.

You know, I had no idea Spoony's Ultima stuff was 2012. Looking at his IMDB, I kind of time shifted a lot of stuff up in time. I thought FFVIII concluded shortly after 2008 (hence him using the election footage in it) and FFX being in 2009/2010. I stopped watching him entirely, look at this list, I guess 2011-ish and last thing I really sat and watched was the FFXIII review. So, in my mind, he was a lot earlier, and as a result I didn't see how/why people would find out about him today who didn't know about him during that time. I would check in every once in a while and see nothing but vlogs/wrestling and leave. Still, unless you are searching for his couple of big projects (Final Fantasy stuff, Phantasmagoria, and Ultima) I don't think a lot pops up. And, even before my break-off with following him, you could see the seams coming apart even before he finished the damn FFVIII review, which had huge gaps, as was with FFX which took a while as well. Heck, compare the play though of Phantasmagoria 2 with The Ripper (Phantasmagoria 2 was done in 2 months. Ripper took over a year and he heavily edited it and played with a walkthrough for all of it, if I remember correctly; I never cared for that playthrough and watched it only once). And, even taking your 2012 as the drop-off year, that's more than half a decade at this point.

Also, since he was on Blip/TGWTG, I don't know what his numbers/popularity were back then. I know he won a few awards here and there, but that was almost a decade ago. I guess I never pegged him, outside of those couple of videos/projects, as hugely popular, and it'd be like me asking "what happened to Handsome Tom, or GameJew, or The New Adventures of Captain S" and so on. (I'm still sad we never got a season 2 of New Adventures of Captain S, and no one ever knows what the hell I'm talking about when I bring it up).

I'll be honest, I was conflating my view of the whole spoony thing as something broader than it should have been.

The sad thing, and I'll let it be that, is that trying to find a chronology of his stuff, I stumbled upon his subreddit, where it appears his "fans" hang out, and it's a giant mess filled with people making fun of him, stalking his girlfriend, posting intimate details of his life, and outright gleeful at their harassment of him on twitter and the triumphant banning of him on twitter. And that's like me only looking at it for like 15 minutes. It's, like, no wonder he doesn't like his fans and would blow up at them.

The timeline of it for me is very weird because I just think of it as "late middle school, very early high school" rather than years. I fell off around when Counter Monkey started being most of what he put out, and was watching those inconsistently along with Ultima. Except if Ultima was 2012, that's later in high school for me, so I think I pushed things around as well, hmm...

And yeah, his "fans" are part of my issue with how that documentary concludes, cause a lot of the active ones are indeed grossly entitled (I guess they'd have to be, to care like this years later?) and it acts like there's a moral of "don't get popular thanks to fans and then betray their good will" when I think if there's anything to be said about how his fans play into this (rather than his physical and mental illnesses) it's more "being a bit of a jerk will foster fans that are similar and worse".
 

Arkle

Member
Mar 26, 2018
61
Rialto, CA
I wonder how many people cheering on #ChangeTheChannel now are gonna turn on the former CA producers the minute their pet conspiracy theory isn't confirmed by the document? Of coruse, all the things in the document will be damning enough on their own, but some people just won't accept it if it doesn't confirm some shitty meme they saw on 4chan once.
 

mreddie

Member
Oct 26, 2017
44,776
I dunno, he seems like someone that would be best buddies with someone like Notch.

But yeah, the biggest counterpoint to LordKaT's whining is Angry Joe, who's probably the most successful person to come out of Channel Awesome.
Wasn't Joe on the VGAs that following year and actually interviewed Knightey a year after?
 

Cokomon

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 11, 2017
3,791
Wasn't Joe on the VGAs that following year and actually interviewed Knightey a year after?
I know he was at least nominated one year for "Trending Gamer", but didn't win. I mean, if LordKaT was right and all of Spoony's betrayal stuff is why he got blacklisted, the Angry Joe's career should have died there as well. He was right there in video next to Spoony screaming at E3. Yet Joe seems to be doing just fine.
 

MMarston

Self-requested ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
7,605
I know he was at least nominated one year for "Trending Gamer", but didn't win. I mean, if LordKaT was right and all of Spoony's betrayal stuff is why he got blacklisted, the Angry Joe's career should have died there as well. He was right there in video next to Spoony screaming at E3. Yet Joe seems to be doing just fine.
The thing about Joe, it seems, is that he knows when to dial down his angry schtick or do away with it altogether during more professional settings or interactions. You can even see him be visibly uncomfortable and back out when Spoony goes off during the Betrayal video.
 

mreddie

Member
Oct 26, 2017
44,776
I know he was at least nominated one year for "Trending Gamer", but didn't win. I mean, if LordKaT was right and all of Spoony's betrayal stuff is why he got blacklisted, the Angry Joe's career should have died there as well. He was right there in video next to Spoony screaming at E3. Yet Joe seems to be doing just fine.

But yeah, he got invited to Geoff's E3 panels last 2 years i think compared to him at E3 when the thing went down.

But yeah, it's gonna be interesting what gets shown tomorrow.
 

The Hobo

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,076
I remember LordKat telling his followers to stop watching his content if they had problem with what he was saying about Spoony. Then he had to desperately backtrack because people did as he asked and stopped watching.
 

Caz

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
13,055
Canada
The thing about Joe, it seems, is that he knows when to dial down his angry schtick or do away with it altogether during more professional settings or interactions. You can even see him be visibly uncomfortable and back out when Spoony goes off during the Betrayal video.
It also helps that AngryJoe, with no respect due to LordKat whatsoever, doesn't suck. Even if one disagrees with his opinion on a given game you can tell he puts a lot of effort into his "Angry Review" series and even his interviews at E3 (there are plenty of stories about how AJ will sprint from one interview to the next because he wants to cover as many games as he does during E3) whereas what little I sampled of LK from years ago on TGWTG wouldn't be found on a Z-list YouTube channel with even less of a budget than my own. LordKat didn't get anywhere because his content was terrible and TGWTG/Blistered Thumbs could only carry its worst so far.

As an aside, i'm surprised by how many creators still support Andrew "stole/steals content from women artists and literally raped a woman" Dickman. He was and in some cases still is a title card artist for former CA/TGWTG content creators.
 
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Nanashrew

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
6,328
This bit from Lindsay Ellis in the document.
  • The breaking point for me came much later. In late 2014, channel awesome brought on some new content producers, several of which I vouched for. One of these was Dan Olson. In December of 2014, Dan did some investigative journalism work which resulted in him becoming the target of organized harassment and conspiracy theorists. Dan posted an article on medium about 8-chan's willful complicity in child pornography. This resulted in a organized campaign to defame Dan Olson, declaring him a child pornographer for doing journalistic work about child pornography. The conspiracy theorists continue to this day.
  • This happened right before Christmas, on December 23, 2014. I was driving home to visit my family in Tennessee. I was about two hours from the Virginia/Tennessee border when I get a call from Mike Michaud, who was absolutely livid about something Dan Olson has done. Predictably, these organized harassment brigades started a campaign emailing Mike Michaud. Rather than seeing it for what it was, Michaud blamed the victim. And instead of calling Dan to find out what happened, Michaud called ME while I was in the car driving home to visit my family for Christmas, because in Michaud's mind, I was apparently Dan's keeper for having vouched for him when Channel Awesome was picking up new talent.


  • This was not the first time that one or several producers was being targeted by harassment campaigns, and Channel Awesome never stood up for anyone (unless it was directly related to them being demonetized #WTFU). They stood silent during the gamergate, they stayed silent while many of their female contributors over the years were targeted by gamergate. Their business model implies that it is more important for them to be uncontroversial than it is for them to stand behind their contributors who are being targeted. To be clear, Dan did nothing wrong, but was blamed by Michaud (and by extension, so was I) for attracting "controversy" from people who are somehow threatened by outing websites that enable child pornographers.


  • I left a few days later, as did Kyle Kallgren and Dan Olson.
I remember this in 2014. It's so dumb that Dan Olson was fired for doing actual, real, investigative journalism. Something no one else was doing at the time at the height of GamerGate.
 

Mivey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,974
This bit from Lindsay Ellis in the document.

I remember this in 2014. It's so dumb that Dan Olson was fired for doing actual, real, investigative journalism. Something no one else was doing at the time at the height of GamerGate.
It's about ethics in child pornography.

The more I read about Michaud, the dumber he seems. Why the hell did the Walkers ever trust somebody like this, whose greatest talent seems to be to be invisible, with what is essentially their business? I mean, the Walkers started TGWTG, and all big initiatives were led by them, written by them, and they had a hand in everything. This is so insane.
 

sredgrin

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
12,276
It's amazing how many of their issues seem like they could have been solved by hiring a few more people on the administration side Though reading stuff from the admin in the document, maybe not, they would have still just ignored it all or not trusted or delegated correctly.
 

Arkle

Member
Mar 26, 2018
61
Rialto, CA
Not done with the whole thing, but two things stand out to me so far.

1: I expected JO's section to be larger.
2: Dr. Gonzo's story is just heartbreaking.
 

Cow Mengde

Member
Oct 26, 2017
12,809
Of coruse, all the things in the document will be damning enough on their own, but some people just won't accept it if it doesn't confirm some shitty meme they saw on 4chan once.

Wait what? What's that all about? Are you saying there were rumors coming 4chan about much worse stuff? I guess I should be glad it's not true then.
 

Arkle

Member
Mar 26, 2018
61
Rialto, CA
Wait what? What's that all about? Are you saying there were rumors coming 4chan about much worse stuff? I guess I should be glad it's not true then.

Oh, a lot of that stuff has existed for years. Lindsay and Allison have openly mocked many of them in the past. And considering Allison's feelings about CA, if a rumor about them is so out there that even she calls bullshit...
 

LiK

Member
Oct 25, 2017
32,190
The LordKaT stuff was weird because even at the time, he tried to get Lupa on his stream and even she was like "ok..." at his rantings on a lot of shit.

Plus, the XCOM folks not only gave Spoony another interview later, but they did reference his Betrayal thing in an achievement. And Joe has not only considerably matured, but has continued to thrive. LordKaT's career truly ended because of LordKaT himself (and even if LordKaT did get that interview that he alleges Spoony cost him, he probably wouldn't have kept it for the long run based on how he is now)

I was a fan of LK back in the day and then he started being a bitch about several things. I don't remember specifics. I thought the Spoony video did a good job recapping events but it does skim over some other parts. LK fucked up his own career. He became such an ass.
 

Uzuki

Member
Oct 27, 2017
496
United States
My blood is fucking boiling after having to read that. Fuck CA, Fuck Mike and Fuck the Walker Brothers. I knew it was bad, but this is fucking ridiculous. It sounds like the company is ran by a bunch of egotistical frat boys using people to get what they want. How the hell could a small company like this fuck up so hard for so long?
 

CatDoggo

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
775
I'm halfway through the document and it's such a depressing 'man behind the curtain' reveal. One of the things I loved about CA back during its golden era was how it felt like a community of friends between all of the producers. Now it's pretty obvious that that was never really the case and they were just committed to making it look that way for PR. For the longest time I sort of figured CA only really started having problems around when TBF happened, but it's clear that it was a shitshow right from the start and they were always treating their producers like garbage. I guess it was around TBF when it started getting so bad that they could no longer keep covering it all up.

I still watch NC content and generally enjoy even his post-revival work, skits aside, but I'm so disgusted now that I don't think I could ever watch anything NC related again, new or old. I still have a lot of nostalgic love for the first two anniversary movies as some old school internet fun, but I especially doubt I could watch those again without feeling gross. The rest of the anniversary movies even more so now. I still remember when the first NC VS AVGN fight happened and how hyped several places on the internet was for it. I remember a few of my internet friends talking about who would win and one even drew fan art for the battle. They were especially hyped for the first anniversary battle too. Seeing all those video makers in one place, duking it out in the most silly way possible was so much fun back then. Feels awful to know what a farce its all been. I knew people who dreamed about wanting to become video producers on there someday. :/
 

CatDoggo

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
775
All of this reminds me of something. Back when the first anniversary video happened, they put out a lot of behind the scenes footage. I remember a lot of comments pointing out how James Rolfe seemed very distant and barely interacted with anyone else. You'd see like a bunch of video producers sitting together while he'd be sitting off somewhere else completely by himself and the like. He was very quiet and almost seemed kinda silently ticked off in that behind the scenes footage. I remember it getting hand-waved as 'Oh, he's just shy in real life! You guys are expecting him to be like AVGN but he's not!' Now I wonder, given how historically poor the production for every anniversary was, if he really was silently fuming behind the scenes due to various issues that must have been happening.
 

Cow Mengde

Member
Oct 26, 2017
12,809
All of this reminds me of something. Back when the first anniversary video happened, they put out a lot of behind the scenes footage. I remember a lot of comments pointing out how James Rolfe seemed very distant and barely interacted with anyone else. You'd see like a bunch of video producers sitting together while he'd be sitting off somewhere else completely by himself and the like. He was very quiet and almost seemed kinda silently ticked off in that behind the scenes footage. I remember it getting hand-waved as 'Oh, he's just shy in real life! You guys are expecting him to be like AVGN but he's not!' Now I wonder, given how historically poor the production for every anniversary was, if he really was silently fuming behind the scenes due to various issues that must have been happening.

No, James has worked with Doug many more times after. A lot of people said behind the scenes that James was just a shy guy in real life. He also doesn't know any of them or watch their stuff. It's due to him being too busy to pay attention to anything else other than his own work. James even wrote a heart felt message after hearing the news of JewWario's suicide.
 

CatDoggo

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
775
No, James has worked with Doug many more times after. A lot of people said behind the scenes that James was just a shy guy in real life. He also doesn't know any of them or watch their stuff. It's due to him being too busy to pay attention to anything else other than his own work. James even wrote a heart felt message after hearing the news of JewWario's suicide.

That's a relief. All of this news just makes me question what was genuine and what was not.
 

Jazzem

Member
Feb 2, 2018
2,706
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Arkle

Member
Mar 26, 2018
61
Rialto, CA
My blood is fucking boiling after having to read that. Fuck CA, Fuck Mike and Fuck the Walker Brothers. I knew it was bad, but this is fucking ridiculous. It sounds like the company is ran by a bunch of egotistical frat boys using people to get what they want. How the hell could a small company like this fuck up so hard for so long?

Much larger companies get to fuck up even worse and stick around, so why not?

Probably helps that literally everyone at the top of the ladder atr CA is a cis white dude.

Can you imagine a Black run media company surviving this long if the CEO was a total shithead?
 

MMarston

Self-requested ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
7,605
Mike tried to get the designer of the White House website to design the CA website.

What in the fucking world


To Boldly Flee is also one huge ass sequel to The Disaster Artist
 

hurroocane

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,889
Germany
Doug knew nothing tech-wise to the point of endless frustration. He didn't know how to record commentaries; he would just have people in Chicago sit close to the camera and record it on the on-board mic. When he had to record the Moulin Rouge commentary over Skype, he asked me to sit in and record it. I was not part of the Moulin Rouge crossover, he just wanted me to press record and sit there. Phelan called him up and explained, step by step, how to use MP3 Skype Recorder, which requires the simple press of a button to use. He ended up calling Nash and having him record it.

^ from the Obscurus Lupa part of the document

I can't wrap my head around this level of ineptitude and laziness. This kind of stuff is not forbidden knowledge from lost civilizations you can look it up and learn and it's not that hard.

Just wow.
 

Aerokii

Member
Feb 6, 2018
4
^ from the Obscurus Lupa part of the document

I can't wrap my head around this level of ineptitude and laziness. This kind of stuff is not forbidden knowledge from lost civilizations you can look it up and learn and it's not that hard.

Just wow.

Based on the full document, it has become readily apparent that it's a strong mixture of "Doesn't care to learn" and "is so arrogant he doesn't think he needs to."

Usually it's the sort of thing I see doing IT support for people who are much, MUCH older than Doug.
 

deepFlaw

Knights of Favonius World Tour '21
Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,542
Not quite done reading yet, but something becoming incredibly apparent as I read is yet another way the management had no fucking idea what they were doing: immediately (though inconsistently) cutting people loose for not publishing 2 videos in a single month after years of regularly putting out videos.

There's several stories already that I've read that end with that and I have 0 idea of why you'd ever want to do that! Like, sure, you want people to keep posting things but literally what do you have to lose from someone not posting a second video and being that incredibly harsh about it? Why would you abandon talent that, even if they're not doing amazingly, is still making you money? What could you possibly lose? It is blowing my mind trying to word this because I cannot think of a single possible reason to do that beyond just trying to make the rules important, but even then they were inconsistently applied and that's ridiculous? Just... fucking what?
 

PlanetSmasher

The Abominable Showman
Member
Oct 25, 2017
117,373
Finally finished the whole thing, and man, it just seems abundantly clear that the leadership at that site was completely poison. Grooming people to basically turn against each other, isolating contributors to abuse them privately without the support of their friends, the constant, staggering lack of managerial and production competence...

Honestly, I don't know how the site lived as long as it did. Doug's videos must've been generating a lot of revenue.

I'm kind of over the whole "angry reviewer" stick as of late (the rise of GamerGate contributed a fair amount to this, since in the early days of GG a lot of people I used to watch ripped their masks off and revealed themselves to be proto-alt-right scum), but it's such a sobering look back at that phase of my life between college and my current incarnation where everything I watched was people yelling about stuff on the internet and expecting all of them to hate it too.
 

Uzuki

Member
Oct 27, 2017
496
United States
Much larger companies get to fuck up even worse and stick around, so why not?

Probably helps that literally everyone at the top of the ladder atr CA is a cis white dude.

Can you imagine a Black run media company surviving this long if the CEO was a total shithead?

I can barely imagine a Black run media company getting to this size and prestige on the internet. Do they not realize how big of an opportunity they have/had? How they have shaped the internet and could have done so much better? People would kill to have this kind of an brand. I knew something was up during my time on the site, but this is way deeper then I thought and unnecessarily stupid. This is cartoon levels of stupidity, incompetence, apathy and general malice. And to their own creators, their own life blood, non the less! And don't get me started on those fan comments. THERE WAS AN HIGHER UP MANAGER GROOMING A TEENAGE GIRL AND ALL THE HIGHER UPS KNEW AND DID NOTHING.

Hot damn, I expect this from some crappy multi conglomerate super company, not from a bunch of nerds on the internet yelling at old movies and bad games.
 

caliph95

Member
Oct 25, 2017
35,378
Hot damn, I expect this from some crappy multi conglomerate super company, not from a bunch of nerds on the internet yelling at old movies and bad games.
This is not that surprising because a hunch of nerds on the internet who jobs is to review or rant (not thag there's anything wrong with that) are probably not kind of people who make the best business decisions
 

PlanetSmasher

The Abominable Showman
Member
Oct 25, 2017
117,373
This is not that surprising because a hunch of nerds on the internet who jobs is to review or rant (not thag there's anything wrong with that) are probably not kind of people who make the best business decisions

It probably doesn't help that Michaud seems to have gotten involved simply to be the boss of something, and he took advantage of the fact that most nerds don't have super-developed social skills and used that to bully the shit out of everyone. MarzGurl's recounting of the way he browbeat her into submission very early in the site's existence is telling - it sounds like he discovered very early on that most nerds (especially young ones) are super averse to real conflict and will generally agonize in silence instead of standing up for themselves, and made that into his meal ticket to be an abusive prick for years.
 

Wiseblood

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,536
Jeez, the bit about Dr. Gonzo wanting to organize a memorial thing for JewWario. Michaud's a fuckin' sociopath.