Tag: the advice asshole

You don’t need to read part one and two of the saga, but what’s a downfall without a build-up?

My site was popular with celebrity fans, amateur picture seekers, and people that liked out of this world random content. A lot of my WTF? Gallery was distasteful. I’d post pictures of crime scenes and car wrecks with varying degrees of gore, and I wound up with about five or six members that really liked that type of content.

One of them started talking to me through an instant messenger, and I figured that if I made him the head honcho of an entire section of that kind of content, he would regulate it and I’d be tapping into another subculture of internet users. More users, more popularity. More popularity, more income from ads. The great part of the arrangement was that I could focus on the content I wanted to deliver, and he could focus on the other stuff that I was growing tired of. We’d be working independently under one hat to drive up traffic and our own notoriety.

Thus was born the Sanity Fades section of TheAdviceAsshole.net. The leader of the section started branching out and making new connections with web sites, and driving up memberships and visitors over the next few months. I continued on with the syndication of  random pictures and videos. You know how the popular kid in school always gets in trouble for doing something stupid at some point? When you’re weak you make really unwise decisions when you get into a position of “power” and popularity.

I was posting thousands of dollars worth of copyrighted content for public consumption daily, without any sort of buffer between my site and the rest of the world. MSN and Google started ranking me very high on a wide variety of search requests. At one point, typing “Met-Art” into google would link you to threads on my site, containing premium picture sets, ahead of the links to the same pay-only content on Met-Art itself. You can imagine how annoyed they were when they saw sites higher, especially when those sites were distributing their content for free.

I started fielding takedown notices weekly. They started slow, requesting a post in a thread be removed here, an entire topic there. I always responded to the requests and removed the content, and eventually resorted to a disclaimer that linked to a specific form for details on which pages you wanted me to take down. This sated the lawyers for the copyright holders for a while, but it wasn’t enough. The culmination of this battle was a request to remove 127 individual threads that contained proprietary content at once. They were gracious enough to give me 24 hours to remove the content, and if I did not comply within the allotted time, they were going to formerly press charges.

I remember delegating the deletions amongst my staff, and it took the four of us about two hours to go through and remove everything. I decided it was high time to lock the site down, and only allow members to view the content we were posting. I was naive and thought that it would stop the requests, and that we’d be left alone to continue on as we always had.

I restricted access to the existing posts, but they were still indexed in search engines from before the lockdown. My host started to get takedowns, and they were not happy. They’d just lock my site down for hours at a time, since they were afraid for their own well being. They’d wait until I was on the phone with them to open the site up to my IP so I could remove the problem content before they put the site back up for everyone.

After this happened six or seven times over the span of a few weeks,  things became contentious between the two factions of my site. I was being forced to censor my part of the site, but it was adversely affecting Sanity Fades, a no-holds-barred harem of debauchery. I really don’t want to go into what was being shared, as I’ll have to pull out some of the horrid imagery buried in the deep recesses of my brain, but I assure you it was egregious.

What started off as a spot for some gory pictures had now devolved into the most wretched hive of scum and villainy. When I came to my senses I was disgraced by my ignorance, and I wanted to shut down the section altogether.  My half of the site was on its last legs, and I wanted to consolidate the ‘normal’ members and have a ‘normal’ forum. I killed the porn and Sanity Fades sections, and the SF people got incredibly pissed.

They started to post their content all over my site, so I started deleting the threads. They started to post more and more, so I started banning them. They’d sign up with shill accounts and spread more of the shit around, so I started to ban their IPs. They got together and hit my site with denial of service attacks daily for two weeks.

My host decided to dump me once and for all, and I threw in the towel on the whole Advice Asshole web site. I have suspicions that my one-time friend was helping facilitate the attacks. The instant I shut down my site, SanityFades.com opened up with all the same users that I was removing from mine.

I was going to go all out and slam the guy in this post, but I’m better than that. It’s not my place to speculate about the demons he was facing, or in what state of mind he may have been (if his Sanity hadn’t completely Faded, har har har). It was a cantankerous end to a friendship, and we’ve moved on in the years since. There’s no point in bringing it up to the surface and dealing with all those emotions again.

For three years, I ran a very successful site and had a great time doing it. There were a lot of laughs shared, and I made some really great friendships. Let’s leave it at the good times. A slight validation of my success was that once my domain expired after closing down, the registrar left it as an ad page for three additional years. I know because I was nostalgic and wanted to try again. I went to claim the name and they wanted almost  $3,000 for it. It wasn’t worth it then, and it’s not worth the $10 now. The outlet of an angry teenager with emotions he didn’t understand was pivotal, but I don’t need to live in the past.

It’s time to say goodbye to The Advice Asshole one last time, and what better way to do it than by letting everyone in on who shot JR?

So we’ve covered how I started out, as a monthly column posted on orsm.net. Let’s get into my time as a very successfully porn distributor.

My Advice Asshole site started small, hosted on geocities. I paid the ridiculous price of $20 a month to have theadviceasshole.com mapped to my geoshitties subdomain. As I grew through the fall of 2003, Yahoo! got mad about my bandwidth consumption and content, subsequently banning me from their server. Worst parts were losing the data, including somewhere around 50-60 questions/answers that where not posted to Orsm, and the loss of my domain name, which was gathering a lot of steam.

I remember battling with Yahoo! to release the domain so I could register it, but they said that they were the sole owners. After I was banned, they turned it into one of those ad placement pages, so they kept making money off my damned name. Still irks me to this day.

I forged ahead, setting up theadviceasshole.net (early 2004). I continued my advice column, started my own forum, and made my own version of Orsm’s Random Shite, called the WTF Gallery. Where Orsm tried to stay “clean” with his images, largely limiting postings to ‘R’ ratings, I thought I’d be gritty and post anything and everything I stumbled upon, regardless of how tasteless it was. I got grossed out pretty early on, and a contributing member took over the nasty stuff, creating a subsection on my site called Sanity Fades. This turns into a really weird story, which is covered in part three of the saga. You do not want to miss it.

I’ll tell you this much, I very rarely entered that section of my site. It was indeed a drain on your sanity seeing the gross shit that was being posted, so I wanted to avoid it. I focused on pictures of women instead, starting with a weekly Who Would You Do? (WWYD) feature that pitted two hot celebrities against each other in a cutthroat poll. The winner returned the following week, and took on a new challenger. We wound up with a fairly popular celebrity section on the forum, but I wanted to see and share much more.

A few of the founding members of my site and I found ways to procure the full sets of images from pay-only sites. We’d painstakingly upload them to galleries on my site, and  we forced people to sign up to download the archives of the sets. It was a great ploy to get members, and we hit a high of 30-40 people online at a time, all browsing and contributing different things.

We already had a great connection with Orsm (and their forums), and after a few spats with rival sites, we actually became friends with people at BakerMedia, Phun and Microdoted. We formed some sort of an ultimate alliance where members comingled and enhanced all of the sites, without any jealousy or anger about where everyone was most loyal. Each forum had its niche: BakerMedia was tech, bullshitting, joking around, Phun  had the best collection of celebrity and internet model pictures, Microdoted members were ruthless with insults and mostly focused on current events, while Orsmforums became an aggregate of all the types of content..

TAA.net really hit a groove with amateur pics, though. Whether the girls had willingly allowed their boyfriends to post pictures of them fooling around, or if they came out after nasty breakups was inconsequential. We became a museum for these pictures. Around the same time as we were picking up loyal members and decent hits, Maxim became the magazine of the millennium, and girls were going around posting pictures of themselves to get some of that girl-next-door fame.

We fell in love with a big-assed Latina, Keyra Augustina, and it soon became our primary drive to find and syndicate every picture she slipped out to the public. It was so hot from the combination of her body being amazing and that she never showed her face. As you can clearly see, from the google results, she turned out to be a butterface. It’s alright, though, we were thoroughly enthralled with her.

I hit the jackpot one winter afternoon, finding a video of Keyra doing a little striptease. At the time, videos weren’t really big yet because you’d have to set your computer up to download long clips over night, or you’d download 45 second clips over an hour and be disappointed by the quality and content. I didn’t care that the video was five megabytes and that it was going to take four hours to upload. I knew I had to get it posted as soon as possible to capitalize on the opportunity.

I got the video published around 9:00 pm and my site crashed around 11:30. I accrued over a 100,000 hits over the two hours and melted my shared server with more than 2,500 people at a time requesting the file each second. I was shut down that night, learning that ‘unlimited bandwidth’ was most certainly not unlimited, and had to upgrade to a dedicated server before dawn the following day. The popularity of my site skyrocketed over that weekend, and I started to average 20,000 views per day. Over the next six months, my site broke into the top 50,000 on Alexa’s rankings, the highest ranking of 46,000 coming over the summer of 2005. I’ve got screenshots of it on a DVD somewhere, but I was unable to find them for this post.

Through trying to verify dates and timelines to the best of my ability, I was reacquainted with the Wayback Machine, and my ranking was good enough that my site was archived with some regularity. The peak of my site from 2005 into 2006 is fairly well maintained. It’s pretty nostalgic for me browsing this old stuff. Pictures aren’t stored, so you’re stuck with only the text content, and apparently the CSS isn’t stored reliably, so some pages look like shit.

What’s cool, though, is that my advice section is mostly intact. If you read any of my answers in yesterday’s posts, you’ll notice the refinement in my style after doing it for a few years. Sure, there’s still some that are flat out mean, but mostly they’re well-rounded satire. I touched upon social issues, made wild conjecture, shared second-hand medical advice, quoted Confucious, name-dropped my famous firends, and my wife even makes an appearance. Awesome stuff.

I was popular enough to have merchandise too! I made a few bucks off this stuff, and that money was rolled right back into hosting the site. I wonder if any of the people out there that bought a shirt or a hoodie still have them. I loved my hoodie, but it was thrown out long ago after ripping. Such is life.

My site was huge, I was having a ton of fun being an asshole, and arguably there was a time where I was internet’s most well-known asshole. Sure you can throw Maddox at me if you want to, but I never bought into him. He’s really overrated, and I don’t think he’s ever been as socially engaged as I was. He certainly didn’t have a solid network of contributors around him, or the support of what should have been rivals and competitors, but I digress.

As we all know, aside from those that think dionsaurs and humans co-existed,  what goes up must come down. The fun came to a crashing halt in 2006, and there’s a lot of drama to unfurl and dissect. Let’s see if I can get it all together before tomorrow, when I unleash the exciting conclusion of The Advice Asshole Saga.

As an added bonus, I’ll drop the bombshell of who shot J.R. You don’t want to miss it, especially if you’ve been living under a rock for the last 31 years!

When I read Tim Allen’s autobiography years ago, one of the first passages has always stuck with me.

I’m a Dick. Yes. I am a Dick. My closest friends know I’m a Dick. In fact, my brothers are Dicks, my cousins are Dicks, and my sister—before she was married—a Dick. My dad? One incredible Dick, and the Dick responsible for me being a Dick. Timothy Alan Dick. Some of us are just born lucky.

I’m proud to be an asshole, and I’ve learned from the best. My parents and aunt have always been blunt with their opinions, and they never shy away from saying what’s on their mind. Their wit had a huge effect on me, making me quick on the draw with sarcastic comments. I’ve had a lifetime of observation, and I’ve never shied away from  blurting out what’s on my mind.

The great thing about sarcasm is that the people that get it, get it. Those that don’t, really don’t. There’s no gray area with sarcasm, and the people that don’t get it commonly react by calling you an asshole. They think that you’re trying to be better than them on some level, so they resort to ad hominem attacks when they realize that it’s impossible to outwit you. I used to be offended by this phenomena, and kept my comments to myself. I had enough of keeping it bottled up, and the transition from a closeted to a proud asshole began in my final year of high school.

In 2001, the internet was still mostly in its infancy. The connectivity was still limited, and the software that regulated networks and access to things was rather ineffectual. Troy High’s firewall had a huge exploit of allowing any subdomained url through, so I was a hero when I showed people how to use proxies to load porn sites.

I became a frequent browser of orsm.ii.net (now orsm.net), a personal blog where an Australian guy was posting picture sets and random images weekly. I started going there for the nude girls in high school, but I genuinely enjoyed reading about Orsm’s exploits after I graduated. In 2002, Orsm put out a request for some new ideas. He said the site was becoming mundane, and he wanted things to spice it up. There’s only so many random images and porn sets to publish, so it was high time he reached out for reader contributions.

I came up with an idea where I’d be a dirty Ann Landers, fielding emails from people and  spitting out ruthless advice in a way only an asshole could. Feel free to browse the columns published for Orsm, as they still exist in their original form. I must warn you, these are the ramblings of an unrefined 19 year old asshole. They’re really hit or miss, and honestly they’re mostly miss. Also, don’t open these while you’re at work. Orsm is still a porn site at heart, so there’s lots of naked women in the advertisements.

• The Advice Asshole Part 01
• The Advice Asshole Part 02
• The Advice Asshole Part 03
• The Advice Asshole Part 04
• The Advice Asshole Part 05
• The Advice Asshole Part 06
• The Advice Asshole Part 07

The Advice Asshole came out of an angry teenager trying to spice up one of his favorite web sites. I didn’t truly understand how to construct funny stories, or how to take my funny thoughts and make them anything other than flat out angry. Still, during the seven months that I did my columns, I amassed a cult following on the orsmforums (forums, remember when they were popular?), and I decided to spin off and create my own site in early 2002.

Basically, I was the Joanie Loves Chachi to Orsm’s Happy Days, except in this analogy, I didn’t fucking blow chunks, and I lasted for more than one season. People understood that I had a raw talent, and they were interested in seeing if I could cultivate my humor into something consistently worth reading. Come back tomorrow, same Asshole Time, same Asshole Channel for part two of The Advice Asshole Saga: The Advice Asshole Rises.

Yes, I’m aware that the Nolan Batman trilogy is Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises. I didn’t think through my parody images before I created them, wanna fight about it? Didn’t think so.