🎨 Artcow Terry Reitz / JDR / Jennifer Diane Reitz / Chatoyance - The Original Crazy Tranny; Creator of The Conversion Bureau

Destacado
Coolio55 dijo:
As far as I'm aware it's completely gone. It went ages ago too, like 2009 or so.
IIRC one of the Portal writers was involved with it and probably doesn't want it resurfacing.
Presiona para expandir...
Egad, I didn't know it was completely gone. That's the Library of Alexandria for the Old Internet.
 
Anti Drug Cuban War Hero dijo:
There is a lot of discussion of POE here, but I honestly can't find much info about that website outside of this thread and a few other threads on different forums. Someone with more experience should really make a thread about it, as there is probably many lolcows connected to it.
Presiona para expandir...
Agree 100% as I completely missed out on the PoE stuff having discovered JDR long after the portal was gone, and while many sites ran links to PoE in their JDR articles they were all dead and very few references to PoE or archives of their stuff remain. It's a shame and I'd really like to have known more about it.

Some kind of article in the "Lolcows of History" forum written by someone(s) who actually used the site back in the day would be greatly appreciated and useful for long term preservation of the lulz.
 
Portal of Evil was more or less a spin-off of Old Man Murray, an early gaming site affiliated with seanbaby. Old Man Murray was created by Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, who would go on to write Portal and others. Chet distanced himself from the running of PoE pretty early, leaving it in the hands of various users. (Pretty sure a lot of the tech side was handled by someone called Codehappy.) Despite the seeming disinterest of its creator, the site had thriving forums that were basically Kiwifarms of the dial-up era, with similar "no cowtipping" rules (referred to then as "don't break the Prime Directive") and some of the most wonderfully obscene and tasteless humor on the web. The site Fat Chicks In Party Hats (which I believe was a seanbaby project) was considered the peak of comedy by the typical PoE user. And much like here, lolcows (called "exhibits" on PoE) would show up and argue on the forums from time to time. Jenny was INCREDIBLY active there, posting immediate answers to petty spats over hundreds of posts. A lot of incredible early cows, like David Gonterman the proto Chris-chan, Ben Shuman the fire alarm fetishist, WinterRose the retarded Disney princess wannabe, Wintermist the retarded husky breeder, etc were all documented contemporaneously on PoE. Ulililia was also occasionally active there, and though he disliked PoE posters use of foul language, he was warmly received and shared many fascinating Uli insights. Now it's all tears in the rain.

Eventually Portal of Evil was spun off to the now also defunct PoE-News (originally poenews.com but somehow the domain was lost and so the site gained a hyphen) which had similar forums but centered around news articles instead of internet freaks. There was also PoETV for YouTube videos and its strange attempt at a music video aggregator, 73Q. (PoEtv is where I first encounted Invisible Crane.) I'm honestly not sure who was behind those. Poetv.com was still up as a barely functioning shell until very recently, but appears to be gone now too.

I should really attempt more thorough write-ups of both JDR and PoE sometime, but I'm a lazy sped working off of memories that are a quarter century old.

Edit to add some more off the cuff memories:

Despite the "Evil" in the name, the prevailing culture of PoE was much more "hipsters who adored John Waters and Ed Wood" sharing links to the genuinely bizarre on the early web than anything meant to condemn the exhibits. I got the impression that the site name had been chosen off the cuff in a campy MST3k kind of spirit, but many webmasters of the era took themselves extremely seriously and would get affronted at being listed in a directory of "evil" websites. However, furries correctly recognized that PoE posters were documenting their degeneracy and despised the site for that reason.

As one might expect for a hipster dominated site, there was a politically leftward trend and as the years went on the humor became less mean, it was no longer cool to call each other fags, etc. It never reached SomethingAwful cat lady levels, but by the era of PoEtv people were getting butthurt over things they used to laugh at.

One of the members of the band The Dead Milkmen was a fan of PoE. One year a furry convention was being held in Philadelphia and he posted a handful of signs reading something like "Portal of Evil extends a warm welcome to attendees of FurryCon" near the convention center. This infuriated both PoE posters and furries.

Lolcows such as 2 the Ranting Griffon, the cartoonist behind Faithmouse, Usagi Kou, AlyssaKiss, and Imari Stephenson all had feuds with Portal of Evil. The Faithmouse guy eventually became a regular poster. I will probably think of several more immediately after hitting post.

Edit edit: Pretty sure the Bob's Game guy was the last major "lolcow vs Poe" incident.

I vaguely recall the Wintermist husky lady, Kimberleigh Ann Keister, leading to some kind of moral panic on the site, but my memory is shit. A lot of PoEsters got waaay too excited about a retarded furry, I think because she was making grandiose claims of being a dog breeder and there was a PoE poster who was part of the dog show world who debunked her bullshit. But people got obsessed, not unlike how people got obsessed with Chris in the early days, and I think it started to spiral into trolling attempts against the spirit of the site, or at the very least people felt there was some kind of line being crossed as far as deliberating posting shit intended to send a genuinely retarded woman into a rage spiral for lols. There was a cartoonist who had been a forum regular for years who had drawn some pretty funny art of Kim Keister and then had a total breakdown over it and was never heard from again, iirc. Shortly after the forums were taken offline for maintenance and were put back up kind of broken and posting started to move to PoE-News.

PoE people really really loved Achewood. Bad webcomics were a favorite target, but Achewood was beloved. This may or may not be a meaningful insight into the culture.

Final edit: One PoE catchphrase that will live on in my brain forever is "Why in the ass? Why more than ten times?" This was referenced and parodied quite a bit. The inspiration was a Geocities page featuring unfortunately terrible poems from a woman who'd gotten out of an abusive relationship. The poems were formatted in garish colors with midis of songs like Dragula looping in the background. The dissonance between the subject matter, the clumsiness of the poems (one of which asked repeatedly "Why in the ass? Why in the ass instead of the vagina? Why in the ass? Why more than ten times?"), the very web 1.0 presentation, and the shitty heavy metal midis was something to behold. Nobody really knew how to use the internet yet.

Archive of post from Chet announcing the closure of the original forums, aka PoE-Red. I wish I had any insight into the legal issues he references, but I don't. The "Thor" mentioned is cartoonist K. Thor Jensen, who did a lot of the running of the site.

Article from Thor about the site.
 
Última edición:
Mellorine dijo:
I vaguely recall the Wintermist husky lady, Kimberleigh Ann Keister
Presiona para expandir...

The only remaining artefact from the Kimmaugh saga I have is this cropped image of some dog fucking cartoon she made; it's very precious to me:
dogsexface.jpg
 
God I wish I had an old hard drive of mine that held a lot of screencaps from that era, I don't even remember why I had them but I think it was to make fun of them on SomethingAwful where I used to post a lot back in the day

Damn we're old y'all :(
 
Onideus Mad Hatter used to spam tf out of PoE, to the point that it may have briefly broken the site. I think half the user base enjoyed egging him on while the rest wanted him to fuck off and die. He bragged about owning a hat that was worth some absurd amount, like $8,000, while working at a DQ Grill and Chill. I don't think he ever specified what kind of hat it was.

Jenny had her own self-hosted Unicorn Jelly forum that is unfortunately also lost. (Pretty sure it's still linked on the comic's site but it's long gone.) I don't entirely remember how this particular exchange came about: Jenny's always been prone to scatological oversharing and oddly placed gross-out humor, so she may have just told another explosive diarrhea story, but at one point someone on PoE said something about how Jenny should go wash her ass with soap and water. In response to this, a thread was made on the Unicorn Jelly forums in which Jenny claimed that washing one's butt crack and anus with soap was actually very bad for you and would lead to one's natural bodily flora being put out of whack, which would cause an incurably itchy ass. She then claimed that the reason the cruel bullies of Portal of Evil were so mean was because they all had itchy, itchy buttholes. This theory was celebrated by her forum posters, at least one of whom openly enjoyed shitting in diapers.
 
Última edición:
I remember Mad Hatter. I got him confused with Dragonguyver(another detested LOL cow featured on Portal of Evil). He made working at the DQ Grill and Chill a big deal. I wonder who else I’ll remember.
 
The thing I remember most vividly from PoE with regard to JDR is poesters getting mad that he managed to successfully e-beg a new PC + not disabling his paypal begging address after finishing building it. It was one of those moments where the smug, detached mask some people there tried to hide their internet obsessions behind slipped.


Also, I think one of the reasons why JDZ didn't become more well-known as a lolcow at that time is the giant walls of text he always wrote. That made the ratio between laughing at all the crazy things he expounds to time spent reading very, very low.
 
I totally forgot about PoE's insane rage at Jenny fundraising for a new PC. By modern standards it was one of the most benign e-begs ever: a webcomic artist who was uploading near daily setting out a tip jar with the stated goal of affording a new PC that would make producing the comic easier. Kofi/Patreon/GoFundMe didn't exist yet and the idea that an internet content creator was hoping to see a return on their work outside of banner ads and tshirt sales was seemingly unthinkable to the PoEsters. At least if it was JDR doing it.

I won't deny that my memories of the site are through the rosiest of lenses. It was an awesome resource for early web weirdness and the forums could be witty as fuck. But the A-logging was rampant and intense. And while the Prime Directive/no poop touching rule was supposed to be sacrosanct, there was a lot more direct provoking of exhibits than anyone was willing to admit. (Also the regulars often got into the stupidest dramas with each other, often over girls. I mostly checked out of that part though.) It really was a lot like this place. Instead of a Prospering Grounds, potential sites were submitted for voting, and enough upvotes got it added to the front page and directory. And the forums were threaded Reddit style, not flat like here. And it was supposed to be about the websites, not the lolcows, but it was very much about the lolcows.

"Alogging" as forum slang always reminds me of the PoE term for logging in under the wrong name and fucking up your sock puppet posting. That was referred to "ATOR-ing", after a poster going by Ator The Barbarian fucked up his sock puppets. Completely pointless bit of lore.

Red Mask dijo:
I got him confused with Dragonguyver(another detested LOL cow featured on Portal of Evil).
Presiona para expandir...

I forget what Dragonguyver's main deal was, but I remember him being a fat virgin with rage who had written a proposal for a concept album about his life. It had lyrics and descriptions of what the music should sound like, but with no actual attempt at recording the songs because he had zero musical ability. He was just hoping someone would make it for him, I guess. PoE was happy to oblige, creating a pretty cool (if in parts deliberately awful) collaborative project to bring Dragonguyver's vision to life. I think he took it pretty poorly, but the details escape me.

plattschwanz dijo:
Also, I think one of the reasons why JDZ didn't become more well-known as a lolcow at that time is the giant walls of text he always wrote. That made the ratio between laughing at all the crazy things he expounds to time spent reading very, very low.
Presiona para expandir...
A lot of vintage cows share this quirk. In a more text-oriented internet desperate for content, people whose autistic or schizo tendencies made them capable of vomiting forth walls and walls of text had an edge in being seen and building a following, which encouraged still more posting.

Even Unicorn Jelly, which is JDR's most accessible work, is really really fucking long and ugly and dense as a brick with bizarro lore. For a comic strip, it takes a miserable amount of effort to read. And JDR's other shit is all worse than that. If you're a fast reader and good at skimming for batshittery, there's some real gold to pan through shit for. But by far JDR's best bits are the rare short form ones. Such as the classic Kokoro Wish strip or the "What is Unicorn Jelly if you're thinking on MELON LEVEL?" Which is actually a text wall, but a restrained one by Jenny standards.
So what is Unicorn Jelly all about?
Unicorn Jelly is rather an unusual comic. This can confuse some folks, to say the least. In order to really understand Unicorn Jelly, you need to know that the story can be seen in many different ways, all of which are equally real...just different. These ways of seeing Unicorn Jelly are called 'Layers', or 'Levels'. Unicorn Jelly is a many-layered story. The key is to pick one, or more, or even all the layers that you want to enjoy. Unicorn Jelly is special in that it can be as deep and complicated as you want it to be, or as simple, too. Let's take a look at some of the layers, or levels of depth, of Unicorn Jelly!

RAISIN LEVEL
Unicorn Jelly is a sci-fi story! It's about how a bunch of weird people do some stuff, run from some bad people, and eventually save everyone! It has really weird creatures, jelly-blob people, and a girl with pointy crystals sticking out of her head! They even get thrown off the edge of the world and eat poison and all kinds of things! Oh, there is this weird blob thing with a horn and a tail, and it thinks it is a unicorn or something. They run around with swords, but they have these flying machines too! People are dying all over the place, and then it gets all sappy for awhile, but then more cool things happen! It's really weird and stuff!

STRAWBERRY LEVEL
At the most basic level, Unicorn Jelly is a suspenseful, and sometimes exciting science fiction story. Unicorn Jelly is about what would happen if humans somehow became stranded for millennia in an alien universe...an entire cosmos other than our own, with physical laws, life forms, and rules that were totally alien to anything in our own universe. A place with big triangular plates instead of planets, and air everywhere instead of the vacuum of space. A universe where gravity is different, and even light isn't quite the same. In such a place, life would be a struggle for survival for humans. Unicorn Jelly is the story of how the humans found a way to live, and how that way was eventually changed forever, to something better, by a handful of people.

PLUM LEVEL
At the simple level, Unicorn Jelly is the story of how a very few outcast, insignificant people... including two young girls, a native Jelly person, and a mutant slime that believes it is a unicorn, manage to save their entire universe simply by having lived. The main characters of Unicorn Jelly are all eccentrics..they don't fit in, they are different, they do not conform...and this fact causes a chain of events that ultimately transform the entire way of life in the cosmos they live in. Unicorn Jelly is the story of how simply being yourself, being an individual, can change the world...even if you do nothing else to try to change things.

APPLE LEVEL
At this level, Unicorn Jelly is the story of how a rigid and corrupt society can be changed by the unbalancing presence of nonconformists, and is also a tale of responsibility. The stranded humans of the alien Tryslmaistan universe long ago made a terrible mistake, which is leading, inevitably, to the ecological devastation, the very destruction of the entire universe they now inhabit. Running from their terrible act, the humans have constructed a terribly controlled, totalitarian society, designed for only one purpose: the survival of the human species. This goal is pursued without any concern for anything beyond it, and in the end, the plan will fail. The heroes of Unicorn Jelly are all mutants, eccentrics, outcasts and individualists. Uni, the mutant native slime that starts the whole saga, is driven by an impossible ideal of perfect love, as embodied in the symbol of a unicorn. This ideal inspires a restless and disenfranchised young girl, Lupiko, to adopt a freakishly hybridized little girl, Chou, as her daughter. Chou, changed forever by being infected and altered by alien material, turns out to be superintelligent and almost devoid of emotion. Lacking feelings, Chou could be the greatest danger, or the greatest benefit, ever known to the humans of Tryslmaistan. Because she is raised by Lupiko, and taught the value of love and compassion, her abilities are directed towards a positive direction. In the act of simply trying to survive in a rigid and narrow culture, the little family inadvertently ends up disrupting that society, which in turn leads to a chain of events that will lead to saving the universe as a whole. Unicorn Jelly can be said to be about how even the most insignificant people can sometimes change the world, and how every life is important in the scheme of things. Above all, Unicorn Jelly suggests that we are responsible for our actions in the world, and for the world we help to create.

GRAPEFRUIT LEVEL
An advanced appreciation of Unicorn Jelly takes all the other levels into consideration, and adds to it an understanding that the story also explores the nature of how humans understand the world. Unicorn Jelly uses a metaphor-laced saga of adventure to explore how people construct reality...either as a collection of facts, or as a body of arbitrary beliefs, and how each way of seeing the world has specific uses and failings. Unicorn Jelly is a subversive work, in that it suggests that in order to avert catastrophe, the individual must define themselves independently, developing a unique and constantly growing identity and morality, flexible enough to adapt to change, but steadfast enough to make for reliable and trustworthy social interaction. Unicorn Jelly denounces the commonality of the rote-learning method of ethical development, as well as any act of accepting any one worldview as Absolute. Against the backdrop of a dying universe, a rigid and self-serving society, and the plight of the death of all living things, a handful of individualists and nonconformists succeed in becoming the salvation of the cosmos; Not because they intend to do so, or even imagine that they know how to do so, but instead essentially by merely existing. Unicorn Jelly promotes the importance of embracing diversity by demonstrating how the mere presence of eccentricity or difference can act as a positive, healing, and constructive element in the world.

MELON LEVEL
Unicorn Jelly is a philosophical science fiction manga strip which tells a metaphoric and purposeful story with a definitive beginning and ending. It is published every weekday at Midnight.
At this level, you already 'get' Unicorn Jelly and do not need any help. Indeed, you are deliberately adding your own layers and levels of meaning of your own creation, choosing to use Unicorn Jelly as a toy for the exploration of your own understandings and feelings.
You may have already invented ten different ways that I could probably do things better, if only I weren't so pigheaded, and would bother to listen.
And you would be right.​
Presiona para expandir...
 
the jelly dies in unicorn jelly

in a horrific way

jdr's standin kills him horribly by ripping him apart and injecting parts of him into jellies on the worldplate the evil smelly humans show up on

(read this like 20 years ago idk if jdr's webcomic about the pedo sex doll that gains sentience retcons this in any way)
 
Coolio55 dijo:
I keep forgetting that that comic's about a child sex doll XD
Presiona para expandir...
let's be EDGY in the early to mid 2000s

make a webcomic about how much those evil Xtians oppress everyone, from the perspective of a loli sex doll

IT'S NOT PEDOPHILIA IF SHE WAS MANUFACTURED AND HAD A DILDO FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION STUCK UP ITS ASSHOLE TO MAKE IT COME ALIVE, DAD
 
Specifically an anime style loli child sex doll that a mad scientist buys because it was on clearance. Because magical girl shows are so merchandise deficient that there was no other way to contrive an "oversized doll of an anime girl comes to life" character. And the art is so bad you can barely tell she's meant to be a cartoon character in a flesh and blood world.

Unicorn Jelly wasn't good (and also had a lot of unnecessary gross shit) but it was interesting and impressive in an outsider art kind of way. The stuff that came after it is just dire. To Save Her stars a gag character from Unicorn Jelly named Kay-Wai Jelly.
 
Mellorine dijo:
Such as the classic Kokoro Wish strip or the "What is Unicorn Jelly if you're thinking on MELON LEVEL?" Which is actually a text wall, but a restrained one by Jenny standards.
Presiona para expandir...
If I thought JDR wasn't such a pretentious prick already I would after having read that.

This faggot actually sees himself as some literary genius being able to weave tales with multiple layers and levels of interpretation. Meanwhile all I see is heavy handed allegory and somebody thinks they're a lot more clever than they really are.
 
There's one thing that hasn't really been brought up in this thread. JDR sometimes made posts about purely political topics on his forum, usually after some other member of the forum mentioned it first. JDR would then usually write paragraphs upon paragraphs upon paragraphs, especially if the addressed topic upset him. And all those walls of text would boil down to "everyone's stupid except for me".

His incessant self-adulation really came to light in those massive texts without any fantasy, animu, and pony autism to distract from. But those were easily the most dull and exhausting JDR products, so no one really bothered reading them in the first place.
 
Destacado
Debes iniciar sesión o registrarte para responder aquí.
Atrás
Top Abajo