2011 was a pretty big year for GatorAIDS. First and foremost the site was forced to re-open on June 1 after I was laid off from my job with Miniclip SA. Not long thereafter we were able to bloom into a community that I am pleased to say is still more alive than ever today in this, the final year of the world as we know it. Immediately following the layoff GatorAIDS was needlessly attacked by a handful of retards from Miniclip’s community which caused us to become ineligible to use Google AdSense as well as having false DMCA violation reports to be filed to Jelsoft, who provides our forum software, resulting in our site globally being down for a few days pending an explanation of the misunderstanding.
"From Miniclip with love."
And through all of this we are still alive today as a testament to just how resilient a group of old friends can be when banded together. We came forward and put on a live performance (CFMM: In 3D). We released a book (Nintendon’t). We were featured on industry-leading gaming blogs (Bitmob). I would like to extend a personal “fuck you” to each and every person who attempted to put us down and assume that we would stay there like beaten dogs. We are more than that, and despite adverse launch conditions we laughed with one another and produced dozens of memorable articles to share with the world. We are GatorAIDS, and we are here to stay.
We’re looking forward to 2012 with open minds and eager hearts. We’ve had six months to get our things together and we’re ready to go balls-out this year. In the meantime, here’s the best of what we produced in 2011. If you’re new to GatorAIDS or looking to share our site with your friends & family this update is the place to start!
This week we have a special treat for GMO2 fans: our very first PRERELEASE episode! We obtained our copy of Monster Jam: Path of Destruction four days early (legitimately, mind you) and set forth to create a “special edition” of the show to celebrate. Originally we had no intentions to shoot this episode, but since the light shined in our favor we decided not to pass the opportunity.
Ironically, this is also our most offensive episode of GMO2 to date. About three minutes into the episode we make a remark in regards to a certain accident at a Monster Jam show in Tacoma, Washington. Monster Jam fans lost their shit over it… but as it turns out they’re all Canadian. What the hell?
I read a lot of books on a lot of different subjects. If you asked me what my favorite kinds of books are, generally I’d tell you that I enjoy reading literature on reptilian biology, media criticism, and the occasional humor compilation. That’s what my bookshelves consist of: one for sarcastic quips on everything, one for critical (and sometimes satirical) analysis of media, and one for an assload of books on dinosaurs, dragons, reptiles, and anything else that would make you believe my nickname “Dracophile” was earned and not self-appointed. It goes without saying one of my favorite stores to shop at is Half Price Books, a chain of second-hand retail stores that sends out coupons every so often and whenever I get them my inner Jew comes out and I go out and buy a fifty pound stack of books that I won’t finish off until, well, the next time they send me coupons I guess. If all I ever buy are installments of Roger Ebert’s Your Movie Sucks Shit Through A Straw and crusty old copies of PlayDragon then nothing can really explain what the hell I was doing in the cat section where I inevitably found the subject of today’s article.
It would be less insane if it were in 128 languages.
Maybe during my mindless meandering throughout the store I was subconsciously looking for a copy of I Can Has Cheezburger to use as emergency toilet paper, but I cannot be certain. Regardless my search landed me upon a copy of 128 Ways To Say “I Love You” To Your Cat, an advice book that is about as retarded as it sounds. Every single page of this book is full of life ruining “advice” so mindlessly bizarre and insane that the ONLY person capable of writing this is what you would literally define as “crazy cat lady” and to be honest that same archetype is the only demographic this book could possibly be marketed to. Well, crazy cat people and Internet humorists, I guess. This book does not contain 128 ways to show affection for your cat (which according to the scientists at Cracked do not love you back at all whatsoever), it instead showcases 128 different ways for you to become socially retarded (even more than you already are), irreparably damage relationships, or die alone and surrounded by fifty cats that will most likely try to eat your rotting carcass because, as you know, that’s what true love is (and every voraphile’s wet dream come true). Apparently the author has fooled one too many people with this advice, because the copy I purchased was clearanced out at one dollar which means people were obviously getting tired of this furry fortune cookie; this book was written for me, I was meant to find it in that Half Price Books.
WARNING: Images in this article HAVE been censored but the content may still be considered NSFW if you’re reading this in an open environment. You have been warned.
I’ve been on the Internet a long time. I remember back when every website displayed in Times New Roman and when GeoCities websites turned up in the first pages of Google searches. The Internet was a different place back then, full of buzzing modems and ugly typewriter-looking fonts (excluding the GeoCities-made fanpage staple Comic Sans). Previously disenfranchised people such as white supremacists were able to connect with each other and talk about hating black people, hating Jews, and doubly hating Jewish black people. Social groups that were otherwise unattached with one another were given a chance to reach out and band together and one of the very first groups to do so and gain momentum was the furry fandom.
Furries claim that their fandom has been around since the eighties and even have “experts” in the fandom that agree. If “Expert of the Furry Fandom” isn’t a self-appointed title I don’t know what is, but I will say that while the tiger chick from Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf” music video was indeed hot I find it a far stretch to say that people are dressing up like Care Bears and having sex with each other because of it. That’s like saying Richard Nixon fucked up the economy of the United States by taking us off of the gold standard in the 1960′s. It certainly wasn’t a step in the right direction but Tricky Dick isn’t responsible for toppling the economy. Dubya, his cronies, and the combined efforts of their Visas and MasterCards are. Likewise a European pop band isn’t responsible for the word “yiff”; a bunch of Asperger’s with incredibly deviant sexual desires and access to an AOL free trial CD in the early nineties were.
I don’t hate furries, really. Dracophile is a friend of mine, and I suppose Payton is as well by proxy now that we write for the same site, and both of them are moderately sane and decent people if not a little eccentric at times. The only thing I have a problem with, honestly, is all of the people from the furry fandom who are so disconnected with the world and oblivious to how fucking retarded they are that they unknowingly put on a show for the masses as they haul their Baconator-loving masses around inside of an otter fursuit in the middle of an upscale hotel. For some furries their interests are mundane and they’re only in it to draw a few pictures and make some friends and I commend them for that, even if you have to stoop as low as to draw porn of Street Sharks at least you’re making an effort to make friends. Then there are those who live and breathe furrydom like an obsession and claim that their “fursona” is a representation of who they are on the inside (“halp imma aminal trapped in a hyooman bodyyy!!!”). This article is meant to take a look at the most popular fursonas in the fandom, what their subscribers think it means, and what it actually means.
I’m on a roll with these “10 Years After” columns, really. I’ve done Pokemon, Ace of Base, and the actual 00′s decade itself. In the aforementioned article about the decade in review I had a section about how far Nickelodeon Studios has fallen from grace and a phrase from what I wrote got me thinking; the phrase in question being “somewhere around the Nickellennium the train derailed and crashed through the side of the Fail Station”. The “Nickellennium” as it was called was part of a whole Y2K marketing thing that Nickelodeon started to ring in the new millennium, and while the previously mentioned quote was only part of a larger joke it actually reminded me of said marketing campaign. I started thinking about Nickellennium.
For those of you who are too young or just don’t remember, Nickellennium was actually a six-hour long movie (no commercial breaks either) that cataloged the thoughts, dreams, ideas, and hopes of kids from around the world as to what they thought about the future. It really was a monumental undertaking, and likely the last good thing Nickelodeon has ever produced, but I mean… seriously, putting an 11-year-old in front of the camera and asking him about the future is only going to end in him saying something he’ll regret when he’s in his 20′s. I thought about it and wondered what it would be like to revisit that production a decade later to gauge either how close or how far we are from everything that was said in the film because I’m expecting it to be hilariously skewed towards “THIS MILLENNIUM SUCKS SO FAR”, but mostly just because I’d like to make sure Frank (9, Georgia) cringes when he is reminded “in the future maybe we can talk to dolphins”.
No, I’m not about to rip into the (many) problems with the modern-day era of Pokemon. As much as I’d like to do that I don’t even know enough about Gold/Silver/Crystal to even begin to fabricate an argument higher in thought than “it sucks pretty bad”. This article is about a peculiar video of the same name, specifically the November 30th, 1999 episode of the show In Focus, a religiously charged broadcast that airs on WVCY TV30 in Wisconsin. This shoddy public access tape traveled all the way from Wisconsin down to the bowels of South Texas to meet me, like a stroke of destiny, in a Goodwill store. I always lurk the VHS section of any second-hand store because I have a knack for the awkwardly cringeworthy and that’s simply the place for the best pickins. Nestled in between a copy of The Land Before Time 45,713 and Popeye cartoons in Spanish lied this VHS – a simple black tape with a homemade type-written label reading “THE PROBLEM WITH POKEMON”. I bought it with a smile on my face knowing this would be superb, and it was.
Being a part of a band comes with a lot of choices and decisions. First and foremost there’s a name that you have to agree upon followed of course by the kind of music you will be performing and recording. If you can manage to get through all of that without killing each other then the last hurdle to leap over is the name of your album and what to put on its cover. There are literally thousands of terrible band names and equally as many if not more terrible album covers. This article is a showcase of those covers.
vaporware (vay – poor – where) n. A term used to describe massively hyped or advertised software that is excessively delayed and ultimately never released.
Game not included.
Yes this is an article about a dragon-related computer game, and yes I am actually satirizing it. Just because my name is “Dracophile” doesn’t mean that anything with dragons in it instantly gets five gold stars and a Dracophile Seal of Approval. Quite the contrary, actually; I have taste in what I like. Simply dropping a bunch of random dragons in front of me actually won’t keep me occupied unless you managed to find what I like. DragonPlay, a game that can best be described as “a complete Club Penguin rip-off with dragons” and worst described as “Yahtzee with letters on all the dice”, does not fall into the category of things that I find pleasing.
I was going to originally wait until next month to publish this article, but once the true weight of this piece made its presence clear in my head and wouldn’t LEAVE I decided it would be best to go ahead and write it. On Friday November 12th, 1999 a very peculiar event took place. A movie came out, actually – and no – I’m sorry Kevin Smith, this article is not about your movie Dogma even though it is quite hilarious; this article is about none other than Pokemon: The First Movie.
If you follow me around often enough you may have come across me trying to hawk out invites to this exemplary piece of viral marketing gone awry. I’m willing to look past Lockerz’s reputation of spamming up a boatload of websites in the name of “viral marketing” because frankly, it worked. People got angry (and people still are, just ask /i/nsurgency) but other folks wanted to know more about this company that was making an attempt to fit in on 4chan (and failed miserably, I bet they were using Tripcodes on /b/)… because HEY free video games and other trendy nonsense!
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