It’s time to wax some more nostalgia.
Today, I’m gonna wax my nostalgia to none other than the godfather of internet ranting himself, Maddox of the Best Page in the Universe.
If you’re not familiar with Maddox or his website, first off, how the fuck did you even manage to find Rantlister? Did you just stumble into this site drunkenly or something?
Maddox is one of the earliest pioneers of internet ranting. Sure, people complained about shit online, but Maddox was one of the first people to become internet famous for doing it. He started his website in 1997 after a text document of his titled “Fifty things that piss me off” made the rounds on IRC and people loved it. Since then, he’s been slapping the internet upside its collective head with his huge nuts and social commentary.
If you were to ask any of the writers on The List who their biggest inspiration was for starting their own websites, I feel like most of them would have said Maddox (or pretended it wasn’t Maddox in an attempt to look cool). Maddox was definitely one of my biggest inspirations for getting into writing. I remember sitting in the school computer lab at lunch laughing my ass off at articles like “Twenty-six things a perfect guy would do, and other propaganda disseminated by misguided women“, “Take your X-TREME marketing and shove it“, and his review of Signs. Many years later, I even took inspiration from one his hate mail responses when I left a bottle of No More Tears baby shampoo for a rather whiny coworker (who was NOT amused, and immediately dimed me out to management).
The guy was so popular that other writers were frequently compared to him. If you had your own rant site, it was almost a given that you’d be called a “Maddox ripoff” at some point. Not that the accusation was entirely unjustified, since many of us used the same minimalist layout with light text on a dark background. The “official” Maddox knockoff site was NinjaPirate, also known as the Second Best Page in the Universe (which I’ve waxed my nostalgia on previously). The fact that Maddox’s site was the standard to which all other social commentators were compared to should tell you just how influential and important his writing was in the earlier days of the internet. The Best Page in the Universe was the golden standard by which all other rant sites were judged.
Maddox eventually found some success outside of the internet when he released his first book, The Alphabet of Manliness, in 2006. I remember being hyped as fuck when he first announced it. One of my internet friends at the time, Angelo Vildasol (known to me as Lord Raidis), even ended up being chosen to be one of the artists for the book.
The Alphabet of Manliness was pretty fucking funny, and even now when I crack it open out of boredom, I still find myself enjoying it. Since Maddox’s recent feud with Dick Masterson, the book has come under a lot of scrutiny and criticism, particularly a chapter about committing sexual assault (“C is for ‘Copping a Feel'”). I don’t care about any of that shit, I still find the book funny, and I still find that chapter funny. Call the fun police and have me cancelled.
The book was a fairly big success, and got Maddox a spot on the New York Times Best Seller List. That doesn’t sound very impressive today, but at the time was pretty fucking incredible for an internet personality. Keep in mind, this was in an age before influencer was considered a valid career path. Internet personalities rarely if ever made much money off their stuff, especially writers. Yet here was Maddox making it onto the New York Times Best Seller List. I’d be lying if I said this book didn’t give me the extra little push I needed to start AngryJerk.net.
I’ve said before that I think sites like YouTube killed text-based rant sites, or at the very least contributed to their demise. Many of us simply didn’t have the personality to be on camera, and even if we did it wasn’t like our content was advertiser-friendly. The few of us that tried to make the jump either took too long to make the jump, or just didn’t have the charisma to make our styles work as videos. I myself took the jump several times, and fell flat on my face each time.
Around 2010, Maddox eventually attempted to make his own transition to video.
I remember getting a very early preview of his YouTube show, The Best Show in the Universe, when a guy named Ramnex showed up at one of Maddox’s fan sites and leaked two episodes. Specifically, the one with the kid singing the Ninja Turtles theme, and the one with the news story about the guy having sex with his lawn furniture.
Imma be real here, it was rough to see. Here was this guy calling himself the Pirate King of Manliness, and he looked like a used car salesman and sounded like a dweeb. I’m not throwing shade or anything, and to be fair to Maddox, his writing set my expectations really high. He spent almost 15 years cultivating an image of hyper-masculinity, so I think that influenced my perception a lot. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was actually expecting Maddox to look and sound like.
I still don’t think his videos were all that great, but I will say that he does have a voice for podcasting. I’ve listened to bits and pieces of his podcasts over the years, and I think that format works better for him.
I actually had the luck to score an interview with him for Rantlister in 2011 (one of the last interviews we ever did). That interview has always been one of my biggest Rantlister regrets, because, rather than take advantage of the fact that I had the godfather of internet ranting as an interviewee, I asked him the same generic and stupid questions that we asked everyone. I was literally copying and pasting this shit from a Word file. I dropped the ball on this interview big time, and every time I reread it I feel nothing but disappointment with myself for squandering a great opportunity. It was cool of him to agree to the interview, and even cooler to link it on his website for a few days.
Maddox has been the subject of a lot of ridicule over the last ten years after his falling out with Dick Masterson. I’m not going to comment on that, since we don’t do internet drama here at Rantlister. All I’m going to say is, it sucks that everything went down the way it did, on both sides. Drama fucking sucks.
No matter what you might think of him now though, you can’t deny that Maddox and The Best Page in the Universe are an integral part of early internet history. His website harkens back to a simpler time, when the internet wasn’t corporate bullshit full of fake ass influencers and over-sensitive pussies initiating witch hunts at the drop of a hat. When The Best Page in the Universe finally goes offline, it will truly signify the end of an age.
But until then, go revisit the glory days of the internet rant scene at The Best Page in the Universe.
