When I first got serious about reviving Rantlister back in March, the original plan was for it to be just an archive dedicated to the 2000’s internet ranting scene.
As we continued to develop the site and I began reuploading the old iRants, I decided it might be a cool idea to turn it into a sort of hybrid, with both archival content and new iRants. I’m happy with this idea, since not only does it give a voice to anyone who might want to write a rant but doesn’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a website, it also allows me to publish stuff that’s a little rawer and more off-the-cuff than what I write for The Angry Jerk column over at AJnet Magazine.
Unfortunately, I got so caught up in writing iRants that I neglected the archival side of the site. You know, the original reason I brought this shit back in the first place.
I caught myself on this a few weeks ago, and wrote a short piece about one of my favorite older articles from Golden Literature, “The Dark Knight: Starring Norm MacDonald”. I mentioned that I’d be doing more posts like this in the future.
The future is now, motherfucker.
This recurring segment shall henceforth be known as “Waxing Nostalgia”.
Today, I’ll be talking about what’s probably my favorite site of all time, NinjaPirate. I’m going to wax my nostalgia all over Thilo’s face (no homo- okay, maybe a little).
There were three websites that inspired me to start writing stuff online. There was the legendary Maddox from The Best Page in the Universe, there was an angry spelling and grammar obsessed advice columnist called Ask Peeves, and then there was Thilo of NinjaPirate.
While Maddox was strictly rants and Peeves was just an angry advice columnist who’d threaten to kick you with steel-toed boots if your spelling and grammar were subpar, Thilo’s site was more lighthearted. He called his site The Second Best Page in the Universe, and he was often considered the official Maddox knockoff, but he wasn’t really a ranter in the traditional sense. A lot of his articles were him being silly. Things like Jesus being a Super Saiyan or starting a rumor that the actor who played Napoleon Dynamite died in a car wreck (an article which caught so much traction that Jon Heder actually addressed the rumor on Late Night With Conan O’Brien) were classics.
That’s not to say Thilo didn’t write rants. He had articles like “You are not ‘random.’ shut the hell up.” and “No way, a teenage girl did not just cry!“, among others. I remember “You are not random” hitting pretty hard for me, because I knew several people who were like the people he described in that article. Yes, the word “monkey” was almost always included for some reason. No, I never figured out why.
Anyway, Thilo was kind of like a hero to me during high school. I remember reading “Abortion doesn’t kill people, unaborted babies kill people” in my senior year of high school and writing those words on my bookbag. I ended up getting into an argument with a born-again Christian named Colleen, whose entire argument was “Well what about the unaborted babies who grow up to do good things?” A valid point, but if I may present a rebuttal: Go fuck yourself, you Thilo-hating bitch. I was also the only person in my school to use the word “scrogg” when referring to sex. To this day, I’m still the only person I’ve ever heard use the word “scrogg” when referring to sex.
The stuff I read on NinjaPirate definitely had an influence on my early writing style, though I was nowhere near as funny as Thilo. There’s just no way I was going to top the guy who wrote “Weapons on airplanes should be mandatory” or “Finally, a game that actually does cause school shootings“.
Those goofy little Photoshopped pictures that Thilo often put into his articles were like the icing on the cake, and made the articles like 10 times funnier. While Maddox put more thought and effort into his articles and the images he used in them, Thilo was basically just having fun with it. A classic staple of NinjaPirate articles that always stood out to me were his drawings. Maddox would do some pretty good drawings in MS Paint, but the ones that Thilo made had a sort of shitty charm to them that made them great. I think my favorite example is the one found in “Aliens are trying to communicate with me“. It’s just an alien sitting in an office cubicle complaining about human radio signals jamming his printer, but even 21 years later I’m still laughing my ass off at it.
I could probably write a thousand more words about my favorite NinjaPirate articles, but it’s better if you just go read his archived site for yourself. Prepare to spend the next two or three hours reading everything, because it’s all fucking gold.
Thilo, if you’re reading this, thanks for all the years of laughs. Also, I still want to know how the hell you got Sarah Silverman to list you as her #1 on Myspace.
