As a relatively long-time denizen of some of the internet's more seedier corners, I must admit I did not expect to see the name of Shadman grace the hallowed halls of Substack. While I'm only passingly familiar with the MrBeast Kris Tyson imbroglio (I realized following internet drama online was, surprisingly, bad for my mental health), reliving all the stuff about our friend Shadman was certainly a trip down memory lane.
At the risk of inviting blowback to my own internet reputation: in an earlier phase of life, back when I had some fledgling artistic ambitions of my own and was into it deep learning gesture drawing and basic shapes and lighting online from youtube tutorials, I remembered seeing some of Shadman's YouTube videos on art being in my recommended feed: i.e., Shadman recording monologues of his own artistic journey over a timelapse of a (relatively tame, which by Shadman standards isn't saying much) painting. These would be meditations on how to pursue your art dreams, how to get an audience, how to deal with haters, etc.
When taken out of context, these videos had an undeniable charm and wisdom to my youthful mind: if nothing else, you couldn't say Shadman wasn't experienced in the field of taking public blowback and continuing to pursue your dreams regardless of what the naysayers in your life said. And make no mistake, for all of his other flaws, he was very good at the kind of profane, take-no-prisoners monologue that young teens interested in seedier artistic pursuits might enjoy.
Of course, I soon discovered that Shadman was known for a lot more than just releasing inspirational art videos about following your dreams, and it became somewhat difficult to hold him in high regard thereafter. But I remained fascinated by the seemingly enduring popularity of his fanbase (which, for a brief time, involved real artists and not just edgy 14-year-olds on newgrounds), and on certain days, if I closed my eyes and tried really hard not to think about it, Shadman's voice telling me to pursue my dreams and not care about what society thinks almost sounded inspirational in the right context.
To be up front, Shadman's proclivity for drawing things intended to arouse disgust in the general population wasn't limited to the Humbert Humbert genre; if I recall correctly, he also dabbled in bestiality, organs and gore, necrophilia, coprophilia, gay butt stuff, and everything else under the sun. (I may be misremembering, and for obvious reasons I don't have a burning desire to google this to fact check, but I remember Shadman once saying that he lost more followers when he drew simple gay homoerotica than anything involving extreme gore or lolis- which, if true, tells you something about his fanbase.)
I suppose a lot of his fans found his obvious moral provocations easy to forgive because at least he seemed to be the kind of guy who genuinely believed in the ideal that art should terrorize the comfortable and who was willing to go to any fucked-up lengths to commit to the bit, rather than someone who seemed likely to actually drive a van around offering free candy to kids in real life. In one of his YouTube videos, I remember Shad pretty emphatically saying that thinking about real-life bestiality or real-life kids having sex made him want to vomit, but that he believed in freedom of expression, or something. Now clearly, there are obvious reasons to question Shad's truthfulness as a reliable narrator in this regard, and I'm not going to make the claim that just saying "artistic freedom of expression" means normies should find cartoon pictures of kids and animals doing certain activities hunky-dory. In retrospect, it was kind of obvious that someone who would draw "Hilloli Clinton" with a straight face wasn't exactly going to have a great character arc. (Also, it takes a special kind of person to make someone feel sympathy for Keemstar.)
But if we want to explain how someone so patently offensive could rise up to a measure of genuine fame before crashing down in horrific fashion, I think there's something to be said that for a certain moment in internet time, Shadman was an emblem of the belief that we lived in a society that deserved to have its boundaries pushed in the service of finding one's own truth, and that no provocation, not even descending to fictional cheese pizza, was too far in support of that. Looking back, I'd also admit that Shadman was a canary in the coal mine as far as the notion that "fiction is separate from reality" was ever a thing- that gratuitous violence and horrific sex in pictures on the internet, as disturbing as they were, were still separate from their real-life counterparts. I suspect Shadman himself became painfully aware that he'd destroyed this party for everyone when he decided to drag Keem's daughter into his world; at that point, whatever scraps of high-minded artistic value he might have claimed to defend by drawing fictional little girls evaporated the moment he'd decided to focus on a real one for internet lols.
Also, up until that point, Shadman was well known and loved/hated in the relatively niche R-18 art world, but he'd escaped the civilizing eye of normies who would never have known about his stuff because his stuff, quite frankly, wasn't the kind of stuff you would see unless you were looking for it. Post-Keem, a lot of people became aware of what the gonzo philosophies of "fiction isn't reality" and "art should be uncomfortable" had helped birth in the fertile soil of a legion of edgy Newgrounds teens, and it wasn't pretty. After Shadman, it felt like "freedom of expression" and "all art is valid" was no longer something the principled liberal artist could or would say in all seriousness, because...well, just look at freaking Shadman. The anti-freedom-of-expression people couldn't have ginned up a better coup if they'd tried.
Who knows? Even if Shad hadn't crossed the Rubicon by drawing Keem's real-life offspring, he'd still be a weapons-grade menace to polite society, and even in his best moments, he was never going to be someone the "freedom of expression" people would ever feature front and center. And yet, in some of our culture's more braindead schoolmarmish moments about how fiction needs to be censored to protect the kids, I can't help but wonder in some moments what our world's stances on freedom of expression and fantasy vs. reality would look like now if he'd just stayed that guy giving profane YouTube advice for fledgling artists and hadn't flown too close to the sun. But then again, if he'd done that, he wouldn't be Shadman in the first place, would he?
I really appreciate your insight into this matter. I'm aware that, even with as much as I tried to cover with Shadman, I was still glossing over a lot, but there's only so much room I could dedicate to my coverage of him, what with him being only partially germane to the topic at hand, but also due to my own ignorance on the topic. I was aware of him, I knew he was divisive and edgy, but it wasn't until I did the research on this article that I got the full story. As an outsider looking in on it all, and with it all being in the past, I find your first-hand experiences interacting with his content valuable. In the next part, there's going to be a lot of discussion about the nature of the "edgy" humor and the radical free speech movement (if it can be called that) from around that time that people like Filthy Frank, iDubbz, and Shadman helped define, as Tyson relied heavily on claiming that the comments and conversations he made/had were all "edgy humor" that was popular at the time. Would you mind if I quote some of your comment in the next article (credited, of course)? I feel as if you succinctly and eloquently captured part of what made some of that valuable to the culture at the time, and also why it WAS a concept, scene, cultural moment, whatever you want to call it, to begin with.
Thank you for the kind words; that means a lot coming from a writer like you. (I acknowledge it feels a little surreal to be complimented for knowing about Shadman, of all things, on Substack.) Feel free to quote whatever you'd like.
I don't blame you for not covering Shadman in greater detail; he's one of the several internet icebergs out there, much like Chris-chan, where ignorance is generally bliss. I did stay tangentially aware of him over the next couple of years inasmuch as he was an unavoidable presence in the online digital amateur art world, and as mentioned, I did find the phenomenon of his popularity grotesquely fascinating, but for obvious reasons, I never got too deep into his orbit myself.
Being a child of the nineties and who came of age in, as you say, the Newgrounds internet, I can speak to the appeal of the ultra-edgy dead-baby scat-and-blood jackass aesthetic that defined a lot of internet humor at the time. It could be that every generation's teens finds their society fundamentally staid and uncool and rebels by seeking out what they find most transgressive, and for me and my mates, that was handmade amateur Flash animations of beloved TV cartoon/video game characters cursing at each other in between blowing each other up with guns and gore. But there's an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle quality of the young internet in the late aughts and early teens that took this edgy aesthetic to its limit, and Shadman, for better or worse, was probably its peak.
Yes, I think "radical free speech movement" is probably an accurate way to describe it, even if very little of that aesthetic was dedicated to anything resembling political advocacy and more just an excuse for lonely, cynical teens to bond over the most depraved shit they could find. Let me admit something else uncomplimentary about myself: I think a lot of angsty stupid hormonal boys back then could relate to the sense of being swept up in a rapidly stratifying society, great technological and social changes, 9/11 and the wars in the Middle East, the Great Recession, getting the sense that we might be the first generation worse off than our parents, and more or less a sense that the adults in the room were trying to tell us everything was all right and we should just be good when we knew that wasn't the case. And I suppose there is a little dark part of me that understands why Shad wanted to metaphorically pour gasoline over all the polite, phony parts of society and civility and light a match. The people like Filthy Frank and iDubbz that were willing to be offensive assholes to entertain us seemed more authentic, more real, than anything else in a phony world. True, I'm sure a lot of Shad's fans were unironic deplorables who genuinely got off to that stuff, but I can also imagine that in some kids' minds somehow, his willingness to violate basic decency and laugh at the marmish naysayers while doing it was proof that he was offering people a line to something inside their shadow selves that was inherently more true, more real, than the rest of the fake-ass world, and that (combined with his frankly masterful take-no-prisoners trolling persona plus his ability to pick fights with unlikable social justice warriors) made him seem a far more compelling figure than someone just drawing incredibly gross porn.
While I never dealt with my teenage angsty moods by drawing child porn, I'll nevertheless admit that there were times when it felt like laughing at depraved flash animations was the only way I could feel a sense of authenticity in a world that seemed intent on being politically correct and buttoned up and telling us that as long as we just stayed in school and got good grades everything would be fine. We fed the parts of our soul that probably should have been fed less because the nervous laughter you got from a dead baby joke or a flash animation making fun of Columbine felt a thousand times more authentic, more real, more emotional and vulnerable, even, than the kind of laughter you got from your 60 year old biology teacher making a dad joke about mitochondria in a class you always wished was over before it even began. The obscenity and crassness was the point, and I guess Jackass and South Park and Family Guy and etc. knew that just as well as any foul-mouthed teen on Newgrounds, because at a certain point, discomfort and being offensive was its own authenticity in a way. This doesn't mean that I'm willing to defend Shadman's borderline suicidal choice of topics through which to express his creative impulses, but I am willing to give some credence to the theory that his art wasn't directly about glorifying child abuse so much as it was just wanting to be offensive to society. The loli stuff simply became his calling card because for obvious reasons it seemed to have the highest success rate at pissing people off. If we lived in a society where the most offensive thing you could do was have imagery of a potato and a carrot next to each other, part of me has no trouble believing Shadman would have jettisoned all the kids and bestiality stuff in an instant to draw entire jenga towers of potatoes and carrots 24/7.
Of course, what most of us eventually grew up and learned is that simply being offensive doesn't inherently make you brave, a truth teller, or the Ultimate Guardian of True Free Speech. It just means you're being offensive. You can get away with a lot of offensive things if you're clever, if you frame them the right way, if you make a valid point under all the dead babies. But as Scott Alexander famously pointed out, free speech is not an inexhaustible resource. There's a difference in defending free speech through Harry Potter, and defending free speech through Piss Christ, and defending free speech through some half-Swiss dude's drawings of a youtuber's kid daughter doing incredibly illegal things. And I suppose some of us learned that harder than others.
Sorry for the long responses; I frankly hadn't thought of Shadman and his contributions to internet infamy in a long while until this article brought it all up. Love him or hate him, it's difficult to encounter him and not have an opinion.
After that unceasing litany of depravity that takes up the first two thirds of the article, there was simply no way in hell I was looking at that fucking picture. I blocked it with my hand and scrolled on past.
It's striking to me that it's not just one person - you've been documenting an entire ecosystem of Antediluvian perversion. Before the internet, these assholes would have had to live in seedy motels on the other side of the tracks. Now, they seem to be getting empowered.
Also, I view eating Kraft macaroni with ketchup as a war crime that should be tried in the Hague, and in any normal article this would be the most disturbing part.
I'm glad someone else agrees about the macaroni and ketchup part. It's absolutely foul. I have another friend who mixes his mac and cheese (of any kind) with baked beans which comes very, very close to skirting that line.
> you would never guess someone so clearly unfit for the camera would ever become the face of YouTube
I never heard of MrBeast until a few months ago and didn't know what he looked like until the past few days when this horribly uncomfortable picture of a guy with a fake smile and scared eyes kept getting few days. Shocked to learn that was MrBeast.
I assume Tyson's getting away with it because he's trans and we don't talk about trans sex abuse and porn use.
I constantly go on these “internet happenings” dives, but I cannot find reliable information about them. Until you. Keep making this stuff, it’s great!
Thank you, I appreciate the feedback. I really do try to take these complicated messes and distill them down to their salient points for that exact reason.
I thank my lucky stars I started my internet life on 4chan, that I was so mired in the filth that I rose like a pristine lotus in comparison to that time and place.
Some, like these, became rancid pond scum. God bless /pol/ for setting me on the straight and narrow.
Haha, it's all good, I just wanted to make sure I understood. That being said, I wasn't aware Shadman was making waves during GamerGate, but given his disposition and the time period he was at his peak, it makes total sense.
Unfortunately, I think that one of the reasons (other than that he is trans) for him not being canceled as hard is that his perversions are fairly common on the internet, especially on reddit and more so on discord, where every server will have a NSFW channel filled with much of the same filth. It is just a known, unmentioned, fact that many minors use these channels. The image on his poster is also pretty harmless compared to what many terminally online are used to, she hardly looks younger than any woman in hentai.
Thank you for doing this research and wading through the sewer so we don’t have to. THIS is journalism. I knew you were a good writer, but you’re reaching new levels of excellence here man. Keep it up. The is is weird internet lore full of weird people, but as the Jimmy Donaldson phenomenon shows, these weirdos wield disproportionate influence over children.
Holy crap. I was only dimly aware of Mr Beast before this, let alone any of his crew. I knew vaguely he raised money for stuff via youtube whatever. But this rabbit hole? Yikes. It's disturbing how total randos have managed to achieve such influence these days.
As a relatively long-time denizen of some of the internet's more seedier corners, I must admit I did not expect to see the name of Shadman grace the hallowed halls of Substack. While I'm only passingly familiar with the MrBeast Kris Tyson imbroglio (I realized following internet drama online was, surprisingly, bad for my mental health), reliving all the stuff about our friend Shadman was certainly a trip down memory lane.
At the risk of inviting blowback to my own internet reputation: in an earlier phase of life, back when I had some fledgling artistic ambitions of my own and was into it deep learning gesture drawing and basic shapes and lighting online from youtube tutorials, I remembered seeing some of Shadman's YouTube videos on art being in my recommended feed: i.e., Shadman recording monologues of his own artistic journey over a timelapse of a (relatively tame, which by Shadman standards isn't saying much) painting. These would be meditations on how to pursue your art dreams, how to get an audience, how to deal with haters, etc.
When taken out of context, these videos had an undeniable charm and wisdom to my youthful mind: if nothing else, you couldn't say Shadman wasn't experienced in the field of taking public blowback and continuing to pursue your dreams regardless of what the naysayers in your life said. And make no mistake, for all of his other flaws, he was very good at the kind of profane, take-no-prisoners monologue that young teens interested in seedier artistic pursuits might enjoy.
Of course, I soon discovered that Shadman was known for a lot more than just releasing inspirational art videos about following your dreams, and it became somewhat difficult to hold him in high regard thereafter. But I remained fascinated by the seemingly enduring popularity of his fanbase (which, for a brief time, involved real artists and not just edgy 14-year-olds on newgrounds), and on certain days, if I closed my eyes and tried really hard not to think about it, Shadman's voice telling me to pursue my dreams and not care about what society thinks almost sounded inspirational in the right context.
To be up front, Shadman's proclivity for drawing things intended to arouse disgust in the general population wasn't limited to the Humbert Humbert genre; if I recall correctly, he also dabbled in bestiality, organs and gore, necrophilia, coprophilia, gay butt stuff, and everything else under the sun. (I may be misremembering, and for obvious reasons I don't have a burning desire to google this to fact check, but I remember Shadman once saying that he lost more followers when he drew simple gay homoerotica than anything involving extreme gore or lolis- which, if true, tells you something about his fanbase.)
I suppose a lot of his fans found his obvious moral provocations easy to forgive because at least he seemed to be the kind of guy who genuinely believed in the ideal that art should terrorize the comfortable and who was willing to go to any fucked-up lengths to commit to the bit, rather than someone who seemed likely to actually drive a van around offering free candy to kids in real life. In one of his YouTube videos, I remember Shad pretty emphatically saying that thinking about real-life bestiality or real-life kids having sex made him want to vomit, but that he believed in freedom of expression, or something. Now clearly, there are obvious reasons to question Shad's truthfulness as a reliable narrator in this regard, and I'm not going to make the claim that just saying "artistic freedom of expression" means normies should find cartoon pictures of kids and animals doing certain activities hunky-dory. In retrospect, it was kind of obvious that someone who would draw "Hilloli Clinton" with a straight face wasn't exactly going to have a great character arc. (Also, it takes a special kind of person to make someone feel sympathy for Keemstar.)
But if we want to explain how someone so patently offensive could rise up to a measure of genuine fame before crashing down in horrific fashion, I think there's something to be said that for a certain moment in internet time, Shadman was an emblem of the belief that we lived in a society that deserved to have its boundaries pushed in the service of finding one's own truth, and that no provocation, not even descending to fictional cheese pizza, was too far in support of that. Looking back, I'd also admit that Shadman was a canary in the coal mine as far as the notion that "fiction is separate from reality" was ever a thing- that gratuitous violence and horrific sex in pictures on the internet, as disturbing as they were, were still separate from their real-life counterparts. I suspect Shadman himself became painfully aware that he'd destroyed this party for everyone when he decided to drag Keem's daughter into his world; at that point, whatever scraps of high-minded artistic value he might have claimed to defend by drawing fictional little girls evaporated the moment he'd decided to focus on a real one for internet lols.
Also, up until that point, Shadman was well known and loved/hated in the relatively niche R-18 art world, but he'd escaped the civilizing eye of normies who would never have known about his stuff because his stuff, quite frankly, wasn't the kind of stuff you would see unless you were looking for it. Post-Keem, a lot of people became aware of what the gonzo philosophies of "fiction isn't reality" and "art should be uncomfortable" had helped birth in the fertile soil of a legion of edgy Newgrounds teens, and it wasn't pretty. After Shadman, it felt like "freedom of expression" and "all art is valid" was no longer something the principled liberal artist could or would say in all seriousness, because...well, just look at freaking Shadman. The anti-freedom-of-expression people couldn't have ginned up a better coup if they'd tried.
Who knows? Even if Shad hadn't crossed the Rubicon by drawing Keem's real-life offspring, he'd still be a weapons-grade menace to polite society, and even in his best moments, he was never going to be someone the "freedom of expression" people would ever feature front and center. And yet, in some of our culture's more braindead schoolmarmish moments about how fiction needs to be censored to protect the kids, I can't help but wonder in some moments what our world's stances on freedom of expression and fantasy vs. reality would look like now if he'd just stayed that guy giving profane YouTube advice for fledgling artists and hadn't flown too close to the sun. But then again, if he'd done that, he wouldn't be Shadman in the first place, would he?
I really appreciate your insight into this matter. I'm aware that, even with as much as I tried to cover with Shadman, I was still glossing over a lot, but there's only so much room I could dedicate to my coverage of him, what with him being only partially germane to the topic at hand, but also due to my own ignorance on the topic. I was aware of him, I knew he was divisive and edgy, but it wasn't until I did the research on this article that I got the full story. As an outsider looking in on it all, and with it all being in the past, I find your first-hand experiences interacting with his content valuable. In the next part, there's going to be a lot of discussion about the nature of the "edgy" humor and the radical free speech movement (if it can be called that) from around that time that people like Filthy Frank, iDubbz, and Shadman helped define, as Tyson relied heavily on claiming that the comments and conversations he made/had were all "edgy humor" that was popular at the time. Would you mind if I quote some of your comment in the next article (credited, of course)? I feel as if you succinctly and eloquently captured part of what made some of that valuable to the culture at the time, and also why it WAS a concept, scene, cultural moment, whatever you want to call it, to begin with.
Thank you for the kind words; that means a lot coming from a writer like you. (I acknowledge it feels a little surreal to be complimented for knowing about Shadman, of all things, on Substack.) Feel free to quote whatever you'd like.
I don't blame you for not covering Shadman in greater detail; he's one of the several internet icebergs out there, much like Chris-chan, where ignorance is generally bliss. I did stay tangentially aware of him over the next couple of years inasmuch as he was an unavoidable presence in the online digital amateur art world, and as mentioned, I did find the phenomenon of his popularity grotesquely fascinating, but for obvious reasons, I never got too deep into his orbit myself.
Being a child of the nineties and who came of age in, as you say, the Newgrounds internet, I can speak to the appeal of the ultra-edgy dead-baby scat-and-blood jackass aesthetic that defined a lot of internet humor at the time. It could be that every generation's teens finds their society fundamentally staid and uncool and rebels by seeking out what they find most transgressive, and for me and my mates, that was handmade amateur Flash animations of beloved TV cartoon/video game characters cursing at each other in between blowing each other up with guns and gore. But there's an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle quality of the young internet in the late aughts and early teens that took this edgy aesthetic to its limit, and Shadman, for better or worse, was probably its peak.
Yes, I think "radical free speech movement" is probably an accurate way to describe it, even if very little of that aesthetic was dedicated to anything resembling political advocacy and more just an excuse for lonely, cynical teens to bond over the most depraved shit they could find. Let me admit something else uncomplimentary about myself: I think a lot of angsty stupid hormonal boys back then could relate to the sense of being swept up in a rapidly stratifying society, great technological and social changes, 9/11 and the wars in the Middle East, the Great Recession, getting the sense that we might be the first generation worse off than our parents, and more or less a sense that the adults in the room were trying to tell us everything was all right and we should just be good when we knew that wasn't the case. And I suppose there is a little dark part of me that understands why Shad wanted to metaphorically pour gasoline over all the polite, phony parts of society and civility and light a match. The people like Filthy Frank and iDubbz that were willing to be offensive assholes to entertain us seemed more authentic, more real, than anything else in a phony world. True, I'm sure a lot of Shad's fans were unironic deplorables who genuinely got off to that stuff, but I can also imagine that in some kids' minds somehow, his willingness to violate basic decency and laugh at the marmish naysayers while doing it was proof that he was offering people a line to something inside their shadow selves that was inherently more true, more real, than the rest of the fake-ass world, and that (combined with his frankly masterful take-no-prisoners trolling persona plus his ability to pick fights with unlikable social justice warriors) made him seem a far more compelling figure than someone just drawing incredibly gross porn.
While I never dealt with my teenage angsty moods by drawing child porn, I'll nevertheless admit that there were times when it felt like laughing at depraved flash animations was the only way I could feel a sense of authenticity in a world that seemed intent on being politically correct and buttoned up and telling us that as long as we just stayed in school and got good grades everything would be fine. We fed the parts of our soul that probably should have been fed less because the nervous laughter you got from a dead baby joke or a flash animation making fun of Columbine felt a thousand times more authentic, more real, more emotional and vulnerable, even, than the kind of laughter you got from your 60 year old biology teacher making a dad joke about mitochondria in a class you always wished was over before it even began. The obscenity and crassness was the point, and I guess Jackass and South Park and Family Guy and etc. knew that just as well as any foul-mouthed teen on Newgrounds, because at a certain point, discomfort and being offensive was its own authenticity in a way. This doesn't mean that I'm willing to defend Shadman's borderline suicidal choice of topics through which to express his creative impulses, but I am willing to give some credence to the theory that his art wasn't directly about glorifying child abuse so much as it was just wanting to be offensive to society. The loli stuff simply became his calling card because for obvious reasons it seemed to have the highest success rate at pissing people off. If we lived in a society where the most offensive thing you could do was have imagery of a potato and a carrot next to each other, part of me has no trouble believing Shadman would have jettisoned all the kids and bestiality stuff in an instant to draw entire jenga towers of potatoes and carrots 24/7.
Of course, what most of us eventually grew up and learned is that simply being offensive doesn't inherently make you brave, a truth teller, or the Ultimate Guardian of True Free Speech. It just means you're being offensive. You can get away with a lot of offensive things if you're clever, if you frame them the right way, if you make a valid point under all the dead babies. But as Scott Alexander famously pointed out, free speech is not an inexhaustible resource. There's a difference in defending free speech through Harry Potter, and defending free speech through Piss Christ, and defending free speech through some half-Swiss dude's drawings of a youtuber's kid daughter doing incredibly illegal things. And I suppose some of us learned that harder than others.
Sorry for the long responses; I frankly hadn't thought of Shadman and his contributions to internet infamy in a long while until this article brought it all up. Love him or hate him, it's difficult to encounter him and not have an opinion.
After that unceasing litany of depravity that takes up the first two thirds of the article, there was simply no way in hell I was looking at that fucking picture. I blocked it with my hand and scrolled on past.
It's striking to me that it's not just one person - you've been documenting an entire ecosystem of Antediluvian perversion. Before the internet, these assholes would have had to live in seedy motels on the other side of the tracks. Now, they seem to be getting empowered.
Also, I view eating Kraft macaroni with ketchup as a war crime that should be tried in the Hague, and in any normal article this would be the most disturbing part.
And as always, the Internet must be destroyed.
I'm glad someone else agrees about the macaroni and ketchup part. It's absolutely foul. I have another friend who mixes his mac and cheese (of any kind) with baked beans which comes very, very close to skirting that line.
Also, internet delenda est, indeed.
> you would never guess someone so clearly unfit for the camera would ever become the face of YouTube
I never heard of MrBeast until a few months ago and didn't know what he looked like until the past few days when this horribly uncomfortable picture of a guy with a fake smile and scared eyes kept getting few days. Shocked to learn that was MrBeast.
I assume Tyson's getting away with it because he's trans and we don't talk about trans sex abuse and porn use.
That's definitely part of it, I think. It's something that's going to be explored in the next installment.
I constantly go on these “internet happenings” dives, but I cannot find reliable information about them. Until you. Keep making this stuff, it’s great!
Thank you, I appreciate the feedback. I really do try to take these complicated messes and distill them down to their salient points for that exact reason.
I thank my lucky stars I started my internet life on 4chan, that I was so mired in the filth that I rose like a pristine lotus in comparison to that time and place.
Some, like these, became rancid pond scum. God bless /pol/ for setting me on the straight and narrow.
I feel the same way, but I was more of an /x/ and /a/ person myself... as much as I'm loathe to admit it.
If heard of him but never given much thought as I’m not online that much and I heard it during GamerGate years ago.
Now with the MrBeast scandal his name is popping up again.
Which one are you talking about? Kris Tyson? I was unaware he was involved in GamerGate, if that's the case.
Sorry I should have been cleared. Shadman’s name has popped up.
Haha, it's all good, I just wanted to make sure I understood. That being said, I wasn't aware Shadman was making waves during GamerGate, but given his disposition and the time period he was at his peak, it makes total sense.
Unfortunately, I think that one of the reasons (other than that he is trans) for him not being canceled as hard is that his perversions are fairly common on the internet, especially on reddit and more so on discord, where every server will have a NSFW channel filled with much of the same filth. It is just a known, unmentioned, fact that many minors use these channels. The image on his poster is also pretty harmless compared to what many terminally online are used to, she hardly looks younger than any woman in hentai.
Thank you for doing this research and wading through the sewer so we don’t have to. THIS is journalism. I knew you were a good writer, but you’re reaching new levels of excellence here man. Keep it up. The is is weird internet lore full of weird people, but as the Jimmy Donaldson phenomenon shows, these weirdos wield disproportionate influence over children.
I happy to have never heard of Shadman until now.
Thanks Alexander, I appreciate the kind words and I'm glad you've enjoyed this deep-dive. I regret that I had to be the one to tell you.
Just when I think you can't make me feel more out of touch!
This is one of those things I think it's best to be out of touch about, to be honest.
Holy crap. I was only dimly aware of Mr Beast before this, let alone any of his crew. I knew vaguely he raised money for stuff via youtube whatever. But this rabbit hole? Yikes. It's disturbing how total randos have managed to achieve such influence these days.
Sorry, I’ve tried to read this twice but you need an editor, man. I give up.