Update: World of Darkness shitposter promptly returns from 100,000-hour ban, but not unchanged
“Couldn’t you just chill? Did you really have to be like that, all the time?”
Edit, July 16th, 5:28pm: Rascal edited this article to rephrase 175 words of Etherwind's statement because he threatened us with "bad PR" after we denied his request that we donate to charity in exchange for the contested fair use of a quoted portion of his creative essay. Etherwind waited 100,000 hours to shitpost. We don't want to deal with that. Rascal regrets this interaction, but we do find it rather funny.
The original article continues below:
We are living with an internet that bears its own history, weighty decades of rapid expansion, change, calcification and—most recently—rot. The modern internet is also largely geared towards empowering individuals to air some of the most petty opinions and grudges in front of God, nature, and the public square. Both of these truths collided over the weekend in the story of one person who returned after an 11-year probation from an infamous forum, seemingly bent on picking up the same argument.
I encountered the story of Etherwind thanks to a Bluesky post from user Sascha Stronach, who related an anecdote where “in 2013 I saw a man get a 100,000 hour probation on the Something Awful forums.” This is far from notable—Something Awful’s grassless patch of the internet had been full of trolls, agitators, and self-styled goons since its creation in 1999. Users and moderators sparred constantly over nearly any topic while somehow producing digital masterpieces such as Groverhaus and Slender Man, not to mention the concept of video game Let’s Plays. It arguably seeded the ground for Twitter, blogging, and meme culture—it also provided a haven for “deeply angry” individuals to indulge in the worst self-destructive behaviors.
At least, that’s how Etherwind described it after their miraculous return from a 100,000-hour probation from Something Awful’s forums. In 2013, they were slapped with the highest possible probationary period after apparently terrorizing a thread about White Wolf’s World of Darkness tabletop RPG. The offending post is only viewable behind Something Awful’s $10 registration paywall, but screenshots and comments from Bluesky users point towards Etherwind’s implying that World of Darkness author Malcolm Sheppard should kill himself over supposed politics in the then-developing Chronicles of Darkness (called New World of Darkness, or nWoD, by fans).
