The Onion
From Encyclopedia Dramatica
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The Onion is a satirical newspaper with a presence both IRL and OTI. It is what all EDiots would one day dream to work at if they can escape the basement.
As with old media comedy show Saturday Night Live, everyone likes to reminisce about a time "back when The Onion was funny." The Onion was funny five years ago, or when you were a junior in high school, whichever was longer ago.
While The Onion can be entertaining, essentially it's the product of frat boys from Madison, Wisconsin who are somewhat aware of the world around them, but who are still fucks who'd never make it in New York if they hadn't started their own newspaper. Within its chosen sphere, The Onion succeeds, but when folks there want to get beyond that range, it Fails. See the scene in The Aristocrats where the folks at The Onion get a chance at writing their own version of the epic joke for documentation of these incontrovertible facts. See Madison, Wisconsin to see how basement dwelling they actually are. You have to be pretty pathetic to go from frat boy to basement dweller.
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Internets use
Even though The Onion is desperately old meme, there are still people on the internets who don't know that it's not a real newspaper. These people can be effectively trolled by sending them Onion articles. For slightly smarter people, copy-pasting an Onion article into an email or blog post while leaving out identifying information works well. Fortunately, there are people out there just dumb enough to not realize that The Onion is indeed satirical, often ending in epic lulz for those who know the joke.
The canonical example of Onion-trolling occurred when Christian pro-life blogger "Pete", of March Together for Life, ran across an article called "I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion!" and mistook it for reality. He wrote a ridiculous post about how awful young women are these days and how abortion has created a culture of murder in our country and other serious business.
When people called him on it, he got butthurt and claimed that women really do think that way, and then he tried to claim he did it for the lulz, but eventually he gave up and went back to harassing people about baby-killing.
AV Club
The Onion's lesbian sister site, which contains todally seriouse reviews of music, television, movies, and books, where sad, depressed wannabe hipsters and fan boys lurk below in the putrid sewers of the comment sections. It's basically Pitchfork except no one evar gets laid, evar (some of them may have wives, but the point still stands). At least half of the comments contain lucid, thoughtful cultural discourse, and drama is minimal (except one user's trolling of several other users with puppets, and the composition this article). Trolling is easy, and often appears in the form of:
- Saying the British Office is better than the American Office
- Mentioning Animal Collective or any other successful band
- Nitpicking the letter grade in a review
- Examining an interviewee's smugness (if it's a guy) or fuckableness (if it's a laday)
- and making a statement about it
- A Falcon
- Also, they still use "For the Win" and firsties and all that other gay faggot crap
There are four notable types of users on the boards:
- The Condescender: a fat gay registered user who posts dissertations on shit no one cares about, like why the upcoming Hollywood remake of Bravestar is going to be terrible. His bachelor's in English/Creative Writing gives him the right to compare everything to what he was forced to read, but didn't finish, in his British Literature to 1800 class. He may claim to have a [internet_girlfriend|girlfriend]] or wife. He is probably you.
- The Ill-of-the-Dead Speaker: a ravenous troll who posts tasteless jokes in RIP blog postings under an unregistered name, usually it's the captcha code or a clever pun, because he's an anonymous pussy.
- Diarrhea of the Fingers: a sad, sad member who must make 100 posts in every article he reads, pushing his total post count to over 9000, literally. He suffers from either severe ronery or profound mental retardation, I can't figure out which. But seriously, this guy needs help.
- Chicks: there are also some guys who post as chicks under various user names, none of them clever.
Forced Memes
A number of enterprising users make use of the anonymity of the internet to force their own memes via puppet accounts. All memes on AV Club are unwelcomed, and thus forced, and include the following:
- Caruso: someone posts something with a clever pun or something under the name "David Caruso". "[puts on sunglasses]" is in the middle somewhere and a way, waaaay forced "YYYEEEAAAAAHHHHH!!!!" is at the end. Other users post as international versions of David Caruso, with foreign equivalents of said "YYYEEEAAHHH!!!!"
- Canceraids: when someone posts a "firsties", other users wish him death by cancer, aids, cancer/aids, canceraids, aidscancer, acid rain, leukemia, or SIDS.
- Celebrities: users often register names of obscure or nostalgic celebrities, and sometimes post in character (David Caruso, Hulk Hogan, Bill Cosby).
- Corky: a retard.
- Black Bolt: "..."
- Pretty Pretty Princess girl: based on an oft-appearing ad from the Onion Personals, wherein some slut professes to be "a nerd, a girl nerd" who likes guys that "can make me laugh and call me a pretty, pretty princess."
- Ratatouille: we pretend to like this children's cartoon on AV Club. Yep. We pretend it was good.
