Born Too Soon : #5 - Lewis Carroll

Today we feature the creepiest uncle of them all - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known to posterity as Lewis Carroll.

Picture a shy, third rate academic filling the long, lonely hours between lectures sitting in his cramped, windowless office surfing /b/. Occasionally he makes a sparklingly witty post or clever pun which is instantly buried under the deluge of stale copypasta. But the threads that really bring him to life, the ones that keep bringing him back to the site are those that involve "loli" - Japanese "Lolita complex" cartoons of young girls in provocative poses.

Thankfully, the internet wasn't around in the 1850s and Dodgson spent his time far more productively writing Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. Not so creditably, he also spent his time experimenting with the new medium of photography; taking photographs of very young girls that make modern viewers cringe.

A photo of Alice Liddell taken by Dodgson in 1858

An older, wiser Alice.

If our more cynical readers would like a good laugh, we recommend that they visit Jimmy Wales' blog and read the section on the 'Carroll Myth' where Dodgson's apologists try to argue that his tastes were "a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time."

...And Bush wasn't really stupid and Obama isn't really incompetent.

Born Too Soon : #4 - Friedrich Nietzsche

Today we feature the philosophical father of /b/, Friedrich Nietzsche. Born in 1844, he exhibited all the precociousness (professor at 24), syphilis, insanity and early death that we've come to expect in this series.

Nietzsche was the master of the aphorism: short, punchy, provocative statements that  "philosophize with a hammer". Nietzsche's works are like motivationals, the philosoraptor meme and troll posts all rolled into one.

"...my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book

-- what everyone else does not say in a book."

Nietzsche espoused a Dionysian morality: the irrational, life-affirming, yes-saying morality of Homeric heroes. He opposed the Apollonian, rational, life-denying, no-saying, slave-morality of Plato and Christianity.

As befits a "random" board, /b/ is firmly Dionysian: wealth, strength, health and power are "good", the poor, weak, sick and pathetic are "evil". The gravest sin on /b/ is to act as a moralfag. Recurring obsessions with Nazis, blacks, women and cp all fit the Dionysian pattern.

TL;DR: here's a random selection from Nietzche's troll posts:

• Women are considered profound. Why? Because we never fathom their depths. But women aren't even shallow.
• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
• The last Christian died on the cross.
• "Faith" means not wanting to know what is true.
• The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.
• Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
• He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
• Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
• What does not destroy me, makes me stronger. 

We end with a rebuttal from Nietzsche's most implacable foe:

Born Too Soon : #3 - Gaius Caligula

The next in our series of "Great /b/tards From History" is Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as the Emperor Caligula.

 Sup /b/?

Born in 12 AD, the son of the great general Germanicus, the little blond poppet Gaius was the darling of the legions - who gave him the nickname Caligula or "little boot". There was widespread rejoicing in Rome when, in 37 AD, Caligula succeeded his unpopular uncle, the Emperor Tiberius. Then things started to go wrong as one by one, Caligula pioneered the most popular themes of <a certain image board>.

Wincest! (With all three of his sisters.)

Furry thread : Consulting with Senator (& lover?!) Incitatus

It's a trap! (Rate me /b/)

You laff, you lose - God mode.

His behavior grew increasingly erratic: on one occasion, when presiding at the Games, he grew bored and had an entire section of the crowd thrown to the lions during the intermission. Then, in 40 AD, Caligula declared himself a god - somewhat limiting the scope of atheism threads.

One of the Emperor's ceremonial roles was to set the daily watchword for the Praetorian guards stationed in and around Rome. With hindsight, this wasn't a suitable job for a /b/tard. The army took offense at being obliged to greet each other with words like "cock", "whore" and "big boy" and, in 41 AD, they killed Caligula, his wife and daughter.

The above pictures are from the brilliant BBC dramatization of Robert Graves' books I,Claudius and Claudius the God - probably the greatest miniseries ever made. A word of warning though, the series was made in 1976 and may be a little stagey for modern tastes. (You might prefer Rome or Spartacus.)

Finally, if you're at all interested in reading history, you'll enjoy The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. It's a chatty, gossipy biography of the first twelve Roman emperors, written by a palace insider around 119 AD.

Born Too Soon : #2 - John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

Poetry is Life  is having a Suggest Poetry Day. This fits quite nicely with the second in our series of  "Great /b/tards from History", the notorious poet and rake, John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester.

Régime de Vivre

I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven; and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap.
Then we quarrel and scold, 'till I fall fast asleep,
When the bitch, growing bold, to my pocket does creep;
Then slyly she leaves me, and, to revenge the affront,
At once she bereaves me of money and c**t.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,
What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk!
I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage,
And missing my whore, I bugger my page.
Then, crop-sick all morning, I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning 'till eleven again.

Rochester is the very model of the hard-drinking, sexually degenerate libertine. Born in 1647, he graduated from Oxford University at the age of 14 (his uncle was Chancellor). His courage in a sea battle against the Dutch in 1665 made the 18 year old Rochester a hero at the Restoration Court.

The next 15 years were spent in what Dr Johnson described as : "a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness".

This career of drunken debauchery included incidents such as the abduction of an heiress to be his wife, murderous scuffles with the night watch, and posing as a gynæcologist and (quite successful) "fertility specialist".

He died at the age of 33 of  a variety of "social diseases", leaving behind (like Beardsley) a famous death-bed conversion and a request that his work should be burned.

Unlike Beardsley, it's hard to see that Rochester would have gained much from the internet age. Living in his mother's basement fapping to loli on <a certain image board> would be unlikely to satisfy him.

He might benefit from advances in modern medicine - particularly Penicilin - but would probably keep pushing the epidemiological envelope until he managed to contract something untreatable. 

To learn more, you could do worse than to read Jeremy Lamb's biography, or watch "The Libertine" with Johnny Depp in the title rôle.


A selection of his more colorful verses can be found here.

Born Too Soon : #1 - Aubrey Beardsley

Today the start of a new series (maybe) of posts about people who should have been born in the internet age. More specifically, "Great /b/tards From History": people who would have shone as creators of original content, contributors of fresh ideas, or as consummate trolls, on <a certain image board>.

We've been ripping off his work for the past week, so it's only fitting that we start with Aubrey Beardsley.

Which board shall I raid next?

Beardsley was born in 1872 in the English sea-side town of Brighton (or Soddom-on-Sea). Though he was only 25 when he died (of tuberculosis), his work had a lasting impact on the Art Nouveau movement and on graphic art to this day. Jimmy Wales describes his work as "influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasizing the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic." which is about as good a description of <a certain image board> as you could hope to coin.

The Toilet of Lampito - now we've used all his Lysistrata prints. C-C-C-COMBO.

The great tragedy of Beardsley's life wasn't his early death. Neither was it his persecution for his personal life (he was in Oscar Wilde's circle and no doubt vice versa). It wasn't even the fact that he died 100 years before the internet. The real tragedy is that he didn't have access to Photoshop (or GIMP).

We can only imagine what he might have accomplished if he could knock out a meme template in ten minutes rather than scratching away with pen and ink for days.



If you want to know what Beardsley may have sounded like, click on the link and listen to "If You're Anxious To Shine" from Patience by Gilbert and Sullivan. In an choice example of life imitating art, Wilde modeled his public persona on the character "Bunthorne" - a high-camp member of the Aesthetic movement.



P.S. If you're over 18 and confident in your sexuality, you can see the originals of Beardsley's illustrations for Aristophanes' play "Lysistrata"  here.