I’m a long time lurker and a first time poster who’s finally taken the opportunity to post about somebody I’ve considered discussing here for quite a while. Two somebodies, in fact: Anthony and Steve, which (fortunately or unfortunately) create quite a long tale. I may omit some information purely by accident, so if something doesn’t quite make sense, I’d be happy to re-explain.
While the focus of this is almost certainly Anthony, therein lies another side to this coin by the aforementioned name of Steve that’ll come up now and then who is best described as the twenty-car-pileup compliment to Anthony’s masterful trainwreck. Steve himself has many a few lolcow qualities but none as pure and concentrated as Anthony, shown here.
(Yes those are neetbux. Also yes he did actively mock others for having jobs, including a studying entomologist and an actual police officer.)
I feel giving a voice to this face allows some well-deserved context for the sheer level of patience needed to actively listen to him speak and tolerate his antics. In order to give you an idea for how Anthony sounded; for the longest time we were utterly convinced that Anthony was the NORMIES REE guy in this video (which is loud in case you somehow haven’t seen it before):
We were later proven otherwise, but you can still imagine this guy’s voice essentially being Anthony’s default style of speaking, including not just when he’s screaming (which in itself was a rarity for Anthony).
I wasn’t first blessed with Anthony’s presence through the angelic choir that is his voice, however. Ground zero was through Steve, who himself I met by helping him design a custom shooter map from the kindness of my currently-hemorrhaging heart. During this time, Steve was pretty low-key and well-adjusted (as far as we could tell) but he would slowly start to reveal just how bizarre and unusual his home life was through a combination of time and continued exposure to Anthony.
After we had first met, we had played first person shooters pretty frequently with mutual friends, but we began to notice that Anthony would take us killing him in a video game incredibly personally. If you killed him from the other team and did so much as jump in celebration, he would assume you were angry at him or had suddenly developed an inexplicable vendetta. Naturally this made him a common target for us, especially given that for some unholy reason he would play first person shooters with a literal
trackball which he of course flaunted against laser-mouse using subhumans. For those not really into computer gaming, the best analogy I can think of is that using a trackball for a first person shooter is like trying to mow your lawn with a chainsaw.
I won’t focus much on his gaming habits, of course; these are merely quirks and intricacies of Anthony’s psyche as a gamer which merely set up the framework for his many bizarre traits and incidents. One of such incidents was a day when Anthony was acting particularly angrier at video games than usual. In return, we had decided that the best course of action was our common approach: to be sure to always be on the opposite team as him and to target him specifically. This in turn resulted in what was above and beyond the intended effect, with each death leading to Anthony omitting a noise akin to a
howler monkey on helium. These kinds of over-the-top reactions to losing wasn't unheard of for Anthony. One instance was when a mutual friend was high one day and kept winning against Anthony, reducing Anthony to what borderline sounded like the verge of tears.
However, we have never heard search sheer anger from Anthony until now. I should bring up that he keeps his mic on open instead of, say, to activate with a button or based on audio levels, and so it was very common to hear his mother (I’m not sure if he was raised in a single parent household but I wouldn’t be surprised) doing dishes or talking on the phone. During this particular episode however, she came in begging him to stop yelling (eerily similar to the video I had posted earlier) which he dismissed eagerly. This continued late into the night until his mother, completely beside herself, threw Anthony out of the house for the evening.
Thus began Anthony’s transformation into a creature of the night. Taking his deathtrap of a jeep to terrorize the townsfolk, he initially attempted to communicate with us through display models in a local Apple store (I believe) until he was thrown out. Undiscouraged, he continued his conquest of Mac-based display models at a local Best Buy, proving the superiority of man over display machine by taking a screenshot of himself installing Steam (a gaming platform for PC) on a display Mac and changing the background to a hilarious meme he was trying to force during that time (an endearing trait which fortunately has little relevancy).
Satisfied with his prowess in forced comedy and utilizing his newly modified display Mac to communicate, he discussed his master plan to survive the next grueling eight hours in the inhospitable room-temperature night of Alabama. Noticing that the Best Buy was relatively deserted, he had formulated a scheme to sleep underneath an overturned display bathtub; a plan of which was only foiled by some light dissuasion from me with my foolhardy logic such as “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal” and “they probably have cameras on you, you know.” Eventually he was thrown out by the staff for staying after-hours, to the relief of all parties involved saved for Anthony.
Admitting defeat, Anthony decided the best course of action was to sneak back into his mother’s house when he believed she had fallen asleep. Surprisingly, this proved successful when we discovered Anthony had suddenly returned on his home computer. He managed to infiltrate his own home undetected and remained a low profile deep into the night. At least, he would if he wasn’t still sour about the gaming session which caused the whole ordeal, and he quickly hopped back in-game and began making a (not as loud) fuss again, which almost certainly gave away his presence. I’m still not sure to this day if he actually believed his mother didn’t notice his return even after he began yelling again.
As a side note and in comparison of Anthony to LITERALLY HITLER, for god knows what reason Anthony only had one nad--an apparent birth defect given the lack of visible scar tissue. Yes, he found it necessary to show everyone on Tinychat to prove it, and yes he also found this worth bragging about over his di-testicled peers. As should be apparent at this point, Anthony seems to believe that he can easily turn his many shortcomings into points of superiority that he holds over others.
I want to believe that this unusual physical deformity had led to Anthony’s equally unusual sexual practices which I’ll come back to once I’ve gone through the main arc in the Epic of Anthony. Ultimately, however, that would only amount to mere speculation on my part. Regardless, after this wonderful escapade, our old friend Steve decided to weigh in on something almost tangentially related.
Steve said:
You never cease to amaze me. I thought I'd seen the top of fucking dumbass mountain when you thought that guy with a bowtie was me. But then here you are. Asking to be friends again. After a third of a year of regularly insulting me and the people I'm friends with. Well, congrats. You've outdone yourself this time. I didn't think it was possible.
I know this is a rant, I don't know how to describe my feelings right now. It's like, I'm dissappointed in myself that I was friends with you for so long, angry that this has gone on as long as it has and that [Anthony] still involves himself the way he does, but getting this off my chest is actually kinda nice. I'm sure we had our times but now it's shit. And, well, you're shit. To me, you are a shitty human being. When I wipe my ass I'm gonna fuckin' be like "wow it sure is nice to get these gay chatlogs out of my system".
Now, you'll want to take off your shades and read this next part closely. Feel free to post in that dead group, take pictures of random people with mario shirts and jew noses that I'll never meet from facebook, hell even retype this rant and replace random words with other words, whatever floats your boat. Just stay away from me. Our best times are behind us, we're done. Let the credits roll, etc.
Kill yourself, and if there's a hell go write a gay chatlog with satan.
An explanation is obviously in order. For quite a while, Steve was in the process of being trolled by a, well, troll in the group with who had created gay chatlogs as Steve mentions in his manifesto above. Unlike Anthony, who could contrive any possible trait as a point of superiority over another person, Steve had used the existence of these chatlogs--which were admittedly ridiculous and a source of mockery for most everyone involved--as the only talking point he could hold over the troll. As for the other unusual things mentioned in the post--the man in the Mario shirt or guy in the bowtie--were pictures the troll posted while they were attempting to dox Steve (one of which was actually Steve but he continued to deny it until later).
But what caused this fierce enmity for these two, becoming the focus of being trolled? An inciting incident, of course. One of which I vowed to remain a passive, observing party as the entirety of the debacle collapsed within itself. With this inciting incident, Steve and Anthony demanded for others to take sides where no such need even existed which would lead to their eventual downfall. An enema fetish.
Starting with the “how” instead of “what” or “why,” Anthony had two friends (which had never contacted our gaming group before) with equally unusual but not quite as pathetic qualities as Anthony himself. They won’t come up again but the three had visited each other in person before upon noticing that Anthony's house and one of the two unnamed friends of Anthony's residence were relatively close to each other. When at the unnamed friend's house, the two unnamed friends of Anthony decided to celebrate their gathering by just sitting naked in a bed together. And doing nothing. Just literally lying naked together. And then one of the two unnamed associates’ grandmother walked in and supposedly didn’t notice something fishy since they were lying under the covers and offered to make cookies.
There’s a couple good reasons to share this information. The first is to demonstrate the kind of surreal world I slowly began to unravel with this people. But the second and most important reason is to demonstrate how poor with keeping information undisclosed Anthony’s two unnamed friends were. This lack of an information filter led to Anthony’s enema fetish being leaked, if you’ll excuse the terminology. Both unnamed friends were more than willing (for some reason) to share both tidbits of information (one a bit more reluctant but who caved in when the other, who was apparently on hard drugs at the time, decided to share).
And share they did. Quite a lot of information, unfortunately. The enema kit, apparently stained with excessive use, was discovered by one of the unnamed pair as it was proudly displayed out in the middle of the bathtub floor while the three were gathering at Anthony's house afterwards. When prodded (again, my apologies for the terminology), Anthony explained how he would use it to feel clean; unusual given his propensity to not actually bathe. When he felt particularly “dirty,” he would use stronger and saltier saline solutions or even use it multiple times until his bowels felt raw with cleanliness.
I found the admission dubious (and revolting but that’s beside the point) given the unusual circumstances surrounding the information’s reveal. Even with the other unnamed individual’s support, the one disclosing the information was tripping pretty hard at the time. Especially dubious was their description of the supposed fetish and the willingness of Anthony to reveal such secrets. Whether this recounted tale is true or not, Anthony confirmed his enema fetish himself to his other closer and once-personal friends in private when his trolling began (although he denied it publicly to the trolls).
Unwilling (or unable) to turn his enema fascination into a point of superiority, Anthony soon fell victim to a torment of constant trolling as he struggled to deny these allegations. Throughout time, the trolling would often shift focus or split between a few quirks in Anthony’s psyche, but would eventually wind back to his enema fascination. In the beginning, Steve and Anthony decided to band together and “fight back” against the group of mutual friends we had formed who mocked Anthony for his fetish. Myself, still remaining a passive observer, was grouped into the “enemy” by the two for my apathy towards the whole ordeal--even when I outright told them I didn’t believe the enema fascination. The fact that I continued to associate with their friends-turned-trolls was enough to earn their scorn, but not to such a degree as they had given others. For being merely neutral, I was gracefully allowed continued communication with them--and remember that from my perspective these were all just people I played video games with online when I had free time.
I do want to clarify that I am using very flowery wording to describe these details. While I may state the enema debacle was a “conflict” and that Steve and Anthony “made sides,” it was all merely people arguing and silently unfriending each other. The essential points however--Steve and Anthony forming their own side, becoming angry at my passivity, and so on--still stand. However, things now began to escalate to almost ridiculous proportions actually fitting of such dramatic wording, all beginning with Steve’s manifesto which I posted before.
Now that we are at the point after Steve posted his illustrious wall of text and the schism was formed, the trolls found this as free reign to delve into every intimate detail of Steve and Anthony’s personal lives (the latter being more openly available). We’ll begin with the shocking revelation I’m sure is a surprise to all--Anthony regularly browsed 4chan.
I know, it’s horrifying! All joking aside, the incredibly underwhelming reveal of Anthony’s browsing habits isn’t the point in the slightest. It’s that 4chan was essentially Anthony’s source of formative information and role model for how to behave in social settings. Any opinion that Anthony held was almost invariably a popular thought common to some board of 4chan. This is relevant because I very strongly believe that Anthony’s more passionate reactions to dissenting opinion is the result of immersing himself in whatever board he browsed’s current groupthink. To him, the over-the-top reactions he emulated verbally present in 4chan posts were most likely seen as the proper response to conflicting thought.
The first exhibit of this is the My Little Pony craze. Are you even surprised Anthony became obsessed with the show? As usual, however, mere obsession isn’t the logical stopping point for Anthony, outright supremacy was. Hence he would regularly play in My Little Pony gaming servers and react with indignation when the group complained about their expected poor quality. He mocked me for not knowing the names of the horses on the show I’ve never even watched. When he changed his in-game avatar to a character from the show and then back to normal weeks later and somebody commented saying that it was a relief since it was cringey seeing Anthony’s My Little Pony avatar pop up on his friends list, Anthony told him to just block him if he can’t handle it since he couldn’t promise he wouldn’t do it again in the future.
As that last example between Anthony and the unnamed mutual friend demonstrates, many people were tiring of Anthony’s antics very quickly and were more than willing to disclose or share rather unfortunate information behind his back (including a rumor of a crossdressing fascination I was never quite able to confirm). Many of these tales never wrapped around to reach Anthony’s ears...except one. When attempting to solve some computer issues, a mutual friend worked with Anthony using Team Viewer, a program that lets you remotely control another person’s computer. The issue was resolved rather quickly, but in curiosity the mutual friend began searching through Anthony’s hidden files while Anthony was away for a moment. Working quickly, he screenshotted as evidence Anthony’s most hidden folder...
...Rife with My Little Pony diaper porn. This screenshot (and multiple others proving its legitimacy) circulated quickly in our circle of friends. When word of mouth reached Anthony, he quickly went into damage control, stating that the images were merely for trolling his fellow bronies since he suddenly also found them obnoxious as well. One doesn’t have to be terribly observant to notice this conflicts with his previous behavior on top of the fact that the images not only didn’t have to be stashed away behind four hidden folders, but that they also didn’t have to be hosted on his computer to begin with, or even saved at all if he was going for sheer shock value.
Still, we all smiled and nodded, non-trolls feigning belief in Anthony’s excuse. It was all mostly harmless, after all. Despite being a laughingstock, he wasn’t actively hurting anybody and if anything the events of this caused him to tone down his excessive outward obsession in the show. Naturally Anthony decided to compensate for this by beginning to act completely annoying to everyone immediately afterwards.
To do this, Anthony decided to become a mouthpiece for what I have every reason to believe was another common groupthink topic from the boards he frequented, namely that Firefox is a superior browser to Chrome. I cannot understate how absolutely furious Anthony became when another person informed him of personal choice in Chrome or dislike in Firefox. He wouldn’t immediately go off, just casually insult them for daring to have a conflicting opinion. It was only when the opposing party continued to test Anthony that he would began yelling, cursing, and generally making an ear-destroying fuss.
These ear-destroying fusses became subjects of fascination with many people within the group. Anthony would make videos on Youtube, image edits, and groups specifically dedicated to Firefox’s superiority. Even Steve mocked Anthony for this obsession, editing his Youtube videos to make them vouch in support of Google Chrome instead. While I struggled to once again remain passive, I had informed Anthony that even as a user of Firefox, I was very tempted to proclaim its supposed awfulness if only for Anthony’s legendary reactions to it.
Perhaps it was my wavering yet continued neutrality that spared me from being purged with the rest of Anthony’s friends list. Removing quite literally every single person within the gaming group and isolating himself from everyone but myself (and his two unnamed friends from before), he began to confide in me. Not immediately, mind you, but as his pool of conversational partners began to shrink and my own pool of patience was apparently infinitely vast, he would share his outlook on his own life and future with me.
If this seems like too personal a conversation with a guy you just play games with on the internet, that’s probably because you’re not an idiot. But because Anthony was homeschooled, unemployed, and does nothing but play video games all day and whose only other hobby was watching My Little Pony (that’s not an exaggeration by the way, it’s literally all he did besides video games), he naturally had little topics to discuss other than about himself and than the frequency of his masturbation habits (which involved watching himself in the mirror), which I promptly told him to stop sharing.
That didn’t stop him from acting in his usual way of smug superiority, obviously. Over the course of a year, he would tell me about his homosexuality and mock me for not noticing beforehand (which he would renege and say he was never gay and insulting me for apparently confusing him for somebody else, then coming back saying he was gay and acting like he never reneged, leading to him mocking me for not “figuring it out” again), his homeschooling for the entirety of his highschool career, how he built an $800 computer from parts to play one game (and l do mean one game, he had absolutely zero hours in any other video game and literal thousands in the one game he played), but these all pale in comparison to his life plan.
His life plan, if you can even call it that, is just as pathetic, bizarre, and childish as you’d honestly come to expect from Anthony by now. Anthony, whenever he was done with his homeschooling, hoped to someday go into computer repair for money. A reasonable line of work, assuming he would ever bother getting job experience or making the connections needed to begin with. If his career choice didn’t pan out the way he wanted, he would fall back on becoming a pro gamer. I silently lowered my face into my hand and attempted to explain that pro gaming isn’t a realistic career choice and then asked him if he had a third, realistic, and much safer fallback plan.
His third, realistic, and much safer fallback plan, as it turns out, wasn’t safer, or realistic, but I suppose it was most certainly the third one. He wanted to move in with me until he found a job. When I explained to him why that wasn’t happening, he calmly and plain-as-day stated that if all else failed he would just kill himself. Taking absolutely no humor in the situation, I told him to state as clearly as possible if he was joking or not. When he matter-of-factly stated that he indeed planned to kill himself via plastic bag/asphyxiation if all else failed to work out, I tried saying whatever I could to convince him otherwise over what felt like hours. By the end of our talk, he stated with a childish “alright, fine, GEEZ” eye-rolling attitude that offing himself also wasn’t a feasible option.
From this exchange, I felt it was worth attempting to repair relationships between Anthony and our once-mutual friends. Most were willing to agree, some begrudgingly, but Anthony felt a specific hatred towards the more trollish of the group. Around this time Team Fortress 2, a popular first person shooter game and the only literal game Anthony played, introduced trading in-game items for real money. Seizing this opportunity, Anthony stated that he would only “forgive” the trolls if said trolls gave him items equating to roughly 20 dollars or so in-game.
The trolls reacted about as well as one would expect; laughing at Anthony and stating they would only do the same if Anthony supplied them 20 dollars worth of hamburgers or other nonsense items before proclaiming “Firefox sucks” and bringing up his enema fetish. Without missing a beat, Anthony increased the price of his demands systematically until it totaled about 80 dollars worth of in-game items in total for the trolls.
So the trolls caved and paid into Anthony’s demands. I was just as surprised as you are. The reason for this a bit more complex, of course. A fairly notorious hacker within Team Fortress 2 actually was friends with one of the trolls, and had effectively stolen the items and transferred them into the trolls’ possession. Just in case you didn’t already think this whole thing seemed surreal.
Anthony, deciding to bring things back down to reality, accepted the troll’s payment for forgiveness, but he decided to keep the items while having the trolls remain blocked. This fittingly upset the trolls but they were smart enough to realize that the items were essentially already stolen, so complaining to the game’s admins most likely wouldn’t have been in their best interests.
The hacker, however, became aware of this and did effectively earn the money back down the road. Note that this was shared to me by the hacker himself who I know tends to exaggerate their success stories. A long time after Anthony stole these items, his trolling became very severe as a few trolls used hacks made by the hacker himself to join Anthony’s games and render them unplayable. Anthony, still believing himself to be in good standing with the hacker, asked for hacks to retaliate. The hacker sold him dud hacks for $100 which Anthony accepted without a second thought, effectively making Anthony fork over a hundred dollars for free.
Besides a fool and his money being quickly parted, things went mostly quiet as Anthony wisely began to let himself fade into obscurity. Suddenly, Steve decided to act particularly hostile towards me. I curiously asked him for answers and out of nowhere he decided to explain a few oddities within his own personal life that I knew of. Beforehand, I understood that Steve would complain about his unusual high school classes such as “music appreciation.” I was disappointed once because when he said his senior prom was coming up that even if he didn’t have a date, I told him he should go but he chose not to. For a year after his senior prom, I would casually encourage him to find a job after high school which he would constantly and immediately reject. When I noticed he would often disappear for about half the day, I asked and he explained he was be sleeping in.
Only then had Steve decided to reveal the truth. Steve, apropos of nothing, revealed he had actually flunked his senior year of highschool two times and was on his third go, on top of flunking an year of schooling much earlier in this life. When he was taking weird classes, it was to fill units since the school was running out of classes for him to take. When he refused to go to his senior prom, it was actually the second senior prom he missed and was embarrassed for being visibly older. A year after I thought he graduated and he was supposedly sleeping half of the day, he was actually attending his classes.
But why the sudden hostility? Because Steve had blamed his repeated failures of highschool on me. It was, after all, myself who had introduced Steve to our little gaming group. Because he was playing video games, he ignored his schoolwork which caused him to repeatedly fail his course. Whenever I would ask to play, Steve was more than willing to drop what he was doing to join instead of stating he was busy, apparently unaware that my response (like most people’s) would’ve been to just ask somebody else or wait until later. Interestingly enough, I knew he struggled with mathematics while I was aware he was still in highschool and offered to help him before, but he would always reject my help.
So Steve decided to have a falling out with me and the rest of the group. Anthony, meanwhile, slowly began alienating more and more of his friends until Steve and Anthony had nobody but each other. The most egregious example of Anthony severing ties was deciding to mock one of his own friends because his mother died recently (apparently commenting along the lines of “her skin is probably rotting really good now” to give you an idea of the levels of edge he devolved to), but has also managed to threaten to hire assassins over the tor network to kill more particular individuals (which was promptly mocked when it became a small in-joke among us to threaten to send “tor assassins” for minor disagreements such as how often to brush your teeth). A while afterwards I decided to re-add Steve to see if he was still sour, which he was, but my intention was only to let him back in for some games now and then which I made clear. Paranoid, Steve removed me and is suspecting some complex mastermind scheme on my part and removed more and more of his own friends (some of which I never had even spoken to before) in case of them being some sort of spy on my behalf...as far as I understand from secondhand accounts of said friends he removed.
And now here we are. Everyone else’s life has remained unaffected, but Anthony and Steve have reduced their pool of friends, both online and in real life (since they sadly had no real friends), to nothing more than each other. Our own futures remain hopeful as while we still have time for gaming, we’ve found new hobbies and passions within our lines of work. As for Anthony and Steve, they continue to struggle with life’s hardships. Anthony recently sideswiped another car while driving and decided to speed off instead of exchanging insurance, leading to the loss of his driver’s license. Steve has taken upon studying lexicology at a local college and went through the hazing rites of apparently being violently spanked by each member of a frat house, although he admits that it was mostly in the interest of getting his weenie waxed at some point instead of gaining college experience. Perhaps I’m not the ideal person to speculate their future, so it may be best to stand aside and let Anthony close out this tale for me.
Anthony said:
Goodbye, 2016! A whole 6 months without my own car or affordable means of local travel, just that gigantic "fuck you, shitlord" life was holding back until the very moment I was ready to get some cogs turning to hopefully, EVENTUALLY get the hell out of Alabama.
[...]
I keep wondering what in the hell my dad was thinking when he stuck it in my mom and decided to subject me to this backwards place. We share similar disgusted opinions towards Tuscaloosa, I've always expressed wanting to leave and he's always supported that idea, he's even made it happen for himself when he moved to Texas when I was 14-15. Yet he thought I'd appreciate forcefully having my entire childhood and adolescence spent here??? Did he think the South would progress during my upbringing or something? That is wishful thinking at best. I have never liked this place and never will, my mom and most of her side of the family seem content with this garbage dump, but I'm my father's son and he should have known better. He really fucked up and I'll always resent him a little for that. I'm a fucking loser FREAK but I'm stuck here until some nice turn of events like the world exploding or some home invader pops a cap in my skull since I'm too bitch to end it on my own terms. Suicide is morally wrong anyway, right? So fucking selfish to everyone that loves you, right?? Yeah you can shut right the fuck up, I don't give a damn what you think. I've never had much emotional support and I'm not about to start handing any out for people who want to end it all. Props to them for having the nuts to do it, I can't blame them. My nearly 23 year long realization of how much my life fucking blows has left me cold. I get my kicks by laughing at twisted shit and I keep my sanity by talking to hardened individuals who don't even know what it's like to be a pussy like me. As long as I live here, none of that will ever change.
[...]
I can't believe I've had to wait my whole god damn life until a relative dropped dead for me to go after my dreams with the money from their will, but I'm gonna try my hardest to make it worth it. If I can keep my sanity until December, I will make 2017 work for ME. I just need life to give me one more miracle and then, with enough luck, maybe I'll finally be happy.
One can only hope…
