Chapter XI: The "Comedy" Website
(March 2005 - July 2005)
"Its never a good sign when your 'webmaster' thinks your ads are more interesting than the actual website content."
-Sega Slayer
Its was long in its coming and was much feared but on March 10th 2005 the dreaded "comedy website" arrived.
As was expected, Jackson's shitty excuse for a website was taken down and in march the website you see above went online, apparently having been "created" by Andre/Lucas. If you examine the bottom of that screenshot closely you will see that the site is actually just free software that could have been downloaded and used to create a website by ANYONE. An erie echo from the old guild times when Andre/Lucas used free software to create the shitty website and forums that they never worked all the bugs out of.
The first "comedy article" slated to be posted on the website was a badly edited, poorly written, factually inaccurate and absurdly short history of the Golden Shields. This faulty history was written by Zion and tried to hype the guild up to be great while still poking fun at it. Before actually posting it to the website he sent me a draft of it and asked me to look it over. I was pissed. He had made an absurd number of errors. A lot of the things he was bragging about in the document to hype up the guild were outright lies. Meanwhile things that we actually DID and COULD have bragged about (such as the hacking of the Lok-ri IRC chat) weren't mentioned at all! He also made several factual errors, such as claiming that Ubisoft was the publisher of Dungeon Siege, which wasn't correct at all. I made notes all over the document about the changes that needed to be made and sent it back to Zion.
After a few days with no reply from Zion I called him up on the phone and to ask if he had fixed the document yet. When he anwsered I could hear his psycho, no longer ex-girlfriend but now restored to full girlfriend status, girlfriend Ari shouting at him in the background. I tried to ask about the document but the conversation wasn't making any progress because every time I would say something Ari would demand to know what I had said and Zion would have to stop to tell her. Then Zion would repeat what I had said incorrectly, I would have to correct him and Ari would demand to know what I had said again. Then the whole stupid circle would start all over again. Zion was babbling something about trying to make dinner while he was talking and when I tried to suggest that he let Ari make dinner while WE talked about the website without her constant interuptions, Ari dashed across the room and snached the phone out of Zion's hand!
And then came the words that scarred me for life:
"Terence can't talk now, hes busy beating his meat!"
I sat in shocked silence for a few seconds then slammed the phone down.
For those of you who don't know what those words mean, consider yourself lucky. Suffice to say that it is a sexual innuendo which suggests an activity which you would be highly offended to discover that your best friend was engaged in while speaking to you on the phone. At the time Ari said those words I DID know what they meant although I was not the least bit prepared to hear them. Now, I'll leave it up to the reader to decide what they think was going on in that apartment when I called. But in retrospect I have to admit I can't be entirely sure of what exactly happened there.
For a few days after that I made no attempt to contact Zion again. During that time span his retarded history document was posted to the "comedy" website. A few of the factual errors were fixed (like the Ubisoft confusion) but for the most part it was still just as bad as before. I was pissed off again, so I call Zion up one last time to ask what the hell he was thinking these days. He explained first of all that what Ari had suggested on the phone the other day wasn't true. His story was that he really was making dinner at the time which involved the "meat" that she spoke of. He didn't think she understood what she had been hinting at with her comment and he thought that if she did understand what the phrase meant then she probably was only joking around. Although I was willing to accept the possibility that may have been the case, that didn't make her actions acceptable. If anyone else in the world had walked into Zion's apartment at that moment and tried to take the phone away from him then he would have atleast made an effort to stop them, rather than letting them harass one of his friends. So I couldn't see any logical reason why he should allow his girlfirend to do it just because she was sluttly and Zion was horny. So I demanded that Zion clean up his act and reign in his psychotic girlfriend. Zion flipped out and acted like it was some kind of gender thing, that she was allowed to do whatever she wanted and he was powerless to stop her just because she was a girl. I of course considered that to be total non-sense.
My patience for Zion's sudden rampage of irrational behavior was at an end. I knew of only one other way of getting him to knock this sort of thing off. Back in the old guild when he would make a stupid decision I didn't agree with and wouldn't listen to reason, I would simply threaten to do something annoying until he gave in. At this point Zion had screwed his life up to the point where I doubted I could do very much to annoy him other than leave him alone with his iditoic behavior until it came crashing down on him. Meanwhile, as far as he was concerned, I would be a ghost. I was moving to a new apartment myself and I wasn't going to tell him where it was. Online I would use fake names and pretend to be other people, making up wild stories if he attempted to talk to me. I wasn't going to call him on the phone or agree to see him in person until he agreed to stop being such a fool. I kept my same phone number so if he wanted to call me and apologize he would be able to but if he called and wanted to talk about anything else I would hang up on him. When I explained my plan to Zion I called it an "Embargo of Information" because Zion wouldn't know anything about where I was or what I was up to for as long as the embargo was on. Although Zion feigned a bit of concern about this at first he quickly changed his tune when only a few days later he posted a second article on the "comedy" website which mocked embargos. I considered this to be an obvious attempt to insult me so I broke off all contact with Zion at that point.
Without me Zion had a rather limited pool of talent to work with to get the "comedy" website off the ground.
First there was Zion's psycho girlfriend Ari who only ever created one article for the site which wasn't funny in any way, shape or form. In fact the only funny thing she ever did on the site was when she posted a message on the forum talking about how nobody eats doughnuts anymore. This was only funny for people who have had the misfortune of meeting her in person and would know that she looks like an anorexia poster child. If she ever actually ate an entire doughnut she would probably have a huge lump sticking out of her stomach, like a snake that just swallowed a mouse.
Then there was Luke, who summed up the entire website very well with this post:
Then of course there was Andre/Lucas who once again proved both their incompetence and their lack of interest in the project at hand by showing more interest in the shitty google ads than they showed in the actual content of the site:
And even The Notorious Jackson appeared on the forums for a short time. He mostly behaved like an ass and started huge flame wars with everyone else. It seemed he was trying to set himself up as a Troll but only ended up becoming a LoL Cow. In an ironic twist he was actually the most entertaining feature of the entire "comedy" website.