@Tomboy_Supremacist dredged up some core memories and I suddenly remember reading a lot of MegaTokyo when I was a young weeb.
For anyone unfamiliar it was a webcomic started in 2000, and like most webcomics of the time it was for nerds and about g*mers. This is the first panel:
They got off the ground when penny arcade threw them a link, and soon amassed an army of young weebs. Most of us thought Fred aka Pyro was in or freshly out of college, but it turns out he was 35 god darn years old when he drew that first comic.
The story was endearing at first, but after a few years the writer left and gave Fred full creative control. The themes veered away from gaming and went full tilt into proto moe.
Fred, who would have certainly 
ed out, was a mega weeb. He learned japanese to play dating sims before these were ported regularly. His influences were girly anime by CLAMP, specifically Chobits.
Nothing happened in the story since 2006. The plot synopsis is here:https://megatokyo.com/story and it's incredible light on any kind of story.
He makes $2500/month on patreon and has been delivering an average of 5 comics a year, backgrounds not included:
The story was supposed to be about 2 guys stuck in Japan, which turned into a wish fulfillment underage dating comic for Fred. In about 17 years maybe a month of in-comic time appears to have passed, and his art seems to have regressed after peaking in 2005 or so.
What 20 years if experience looks like: 
I was hoping there would be forums and subsequent drama but the forums are hella dead. Anyone else read this trash??
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Good post. I love internet archaeology.
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Thanks! Frickin same, it's such a trip. Who's your fav old internet figure?
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I've been meaning to do an effortpost on Robert Stanek. He was a 2000s-early 2010s literary lolcow who self-published a terrible fantasy series that no one actually read, and then attempted to present himself as a world-famous bestselling novelist using an army of sockpuppets, fake fansites, thousands of fake Amazon reviews, photoshopping himself into pictures with other authors, and an entire fake forum where he circlejerked with himself about his own books. He constantly Googled himself, got into fights, and claimed that all of the negative info about him was a vast conspiracy created by jealous George R. R. Martin fans.
He's still around but he gave up on the fake forum, Amazon deleted all his fake reviews, and he switched to churning out hundreds of interchangeable children's picture books. Most people don't really pay attention anymore. He created a blog to represent a bunch of (conspicuously picture-less) indie authors that were part of his "publishing house." At one point he wrote his own obituary from one of their perspectives, before resurfacing days later and acting like nothing happened. One of his online personas also pretended to be Isaac Asimov's granddaughter.
Most of the info about him is on old forums and defunct sites. He was best known to the online GRRM fanbase and to people who were into the "sporking" subculture (livejournal litcrit for insecure teenage neurodivergents (and how I got interested in writing)).
https://web.archive.org/web/20210511000917/http://conjugalfelicity.com/robert-stanek
https://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php /topic/42588-robert-stanek-shat-directly-into-my-soul/
https://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php /topic/19941-roberts-newcomb-and-stanek/
(these links don't work in the published comment for some reason, just delete the space)
https://robertstanek.com
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I love litcows beyond words. Did you ever follow Maradonia? Especially the parts where her father bankrolled a book launch trailer, a movie and fake ISBN numbers and she would go around putting the book on displays at bookstores and libraries, pretending it was popular?
SA had a couple pet litcows. One who's name escapes me wrote a book titled Wild Animus and it was something about animal shapeshifter romance or smth. He self pubbed and printed THOUSANDS of copies which he could not sell anywhere. So he drove around various colleges and left boxes of the books around campus with FREE signs, hoping to cultivate an audience and propel himself into fame.
The second, and one nearer my heart, was a man from Quebec by the name of Jean François Bibeau. JF Bibeau had a profound midlife crisis and at the tender age of 36 left his wife and child to become a young crossdressing twink, anime fan, author, playwrite and cosplayer. He would try and lure preteen girls with his book, Felsic Current which was advertised as being an all male harem anime inspired novel aimed at fujos.
It centered around magical dancing and was written in impenetrable jargon. He would sell the book at cons dressed as the protagonist, Thendy Bravura, and would include a massive printer paper retcon jammed in between some of the chapters. He would routinely crossplay as male lolis, stopped wearing glasses (without getting contacts), lost all his friends trying to put together a play about his own psyche and subsisted on medium rare chicken breast, which made him fart relentlessly.
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I love Maradonia. Recently tracked down the unlisted YouTube upload again, and watched the movie with a couple buddies and some alcohol. It had everybody rolling. I really wish they'd adapted the whole original book, because the thing has no ending whatsoever (other than a bald guy deepthroating a live snake).
I've never heard of the other two but they sound like a lot of fun. I'll have to check them out.
I don't think this author ever achieved true 'cow status, but the absolute worst thing I ever saw sporked was "Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate," a very smart science fantasy novel about anthro dragons written by an Asian supremacist psued.
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That prose tho
You have that youtube link??
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https://archive.org/details/maradoniaandthegreenscreenofshame
Guard it with your life
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lmao i thought i saw Maradona at first
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bruh do you read the entire forum start to finish?
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no man
@box posted it: https://rdrama.net/h/lit/post/246199/pibbles-effortposts-about-lolcow-writers-marseynotes
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Lmao HECK YEAH I'm getting signal boosted
It's funnier to think you datamine rdrama and find shit you havent read tho
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Oh my, a lolcow from my own backyard I've never heard of, thanks for the recommendation
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If you find any good info can you make a thread in /h/lit?? The megapost about him is paywalled on SA and I have no idea how to even find it, but it was fantastic
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I can try to dig for info in
, maybe some locals have noticed him. Not much I could find so far
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That was a mistake. You're about to find out the hard way why.
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I don't have enough spoons to read this shit
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Bruh you frickin buried the lede
This is gold
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