Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Whine and Bitch about people long after they become interesting to talk about
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drisko
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Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by drisko » Fri Jan 11, 2019 10:18 pm

Liar Revealed wrote:
Fri Jan 11, 2019 9:41 pm
3) I don't know what the fuck a Gonzo is and I don't care. Probably another autistic retard that deserved whatever happened to him/her/xir.
Gonzo was the dude who tried to make a Jewario memorial video and when he asked the top guys about it, they told him his numbers were too low and that Doge was going to do something.

I'm pretty sure the real reason is this dude wasn't one of JW's friends like the others were and it was seen as a desperate cash grab on the part of a no-name who didn't know the guy, just wanted to make some money off of his corpse.

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da PAC Nigguh
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Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by da PAC Nigguh » Fri Jan 11, 2019 10:19 pm

You can really tell the people who never worked a real job in their life by the way they try to say playing make believe at TGWTG was a horrific work experience.
Is Spoony dead yet?

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Guest

Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by Guest » Fri Jan 11, 2019 10:54 pm

● Preamble
My part of the CA drama is probably a bit longer running than most. It wasn't
limited to one single incident, nor even a group of smaller ones. It was one, long,
continuous torture session perpetrated by a man who I am convinced has no soul,
no conscience, and I'd be very surprised indeed to find out he had a heart. It's also
not one you heard a lot about while it was happening. This was the result of a
social isolation imposed on me (if rumor is to be believed) by design, first by a
fellow contributor, and then by the aforementioned soulless wretch.

● Like any good story, mine starts at the beginning. The literal beginning. If Channel
Awesome had a “Book of Genesis” I was there to see it written. I was one of the
first contributor's brought on to the site, based on my Gaming Hall of Fame blogs. I
was offered the position of article writer by Mike Michaud and I accepted. Also
present for this “job offer” was one Daniel “ThatAussieGuy” Rizzo, or “Aussie” as
we referred to him casually. Also brought onto the team as article writer was my
friend Christine “Cat” Thompson, who started writing blogs there at my urging. For
the first few months, things were great. Every evening, a massive skype call would
be conducted by Chris “RolloT” Larios and Sean “HopeWithinChaos” Fausz, and
we all would join in. I became friends with Chris and Sean, as well as with Linkara,
Krissy “Goggles” Diggs, Kaylyn “MarzGurl” Saucedo, Benjamin “Benzaie” Daniel,
Patrick “ColdGuy” Burnden and most of the crew from the first year. There were
those I clashed with: Spoony and I never saw eye to eye, and Angry Joe and I
never got on, but that was because of personality differences with the former and
the latter was due to events which will be relayed here. Beyond those two, I got
along with most everyone on the team, and we all came to be, I THOUGHT really
good friends. This didn't last.
● Seven Years of Hell
Shortly after the establishment of Blistered Thumbs is when things went to hell for
me. I began to notice that members of the community who I had been friends with
before were less and less likely to answer my messages, whether if they were to
offer them guest spots on the podcast or just to have a friendly chat. Eventually,
nobody would return my messages. Eventually the only reliable contact I had within
CA was with Mike “Birdman” Dodd, who had a line to CA management as well as
regular contact with members of the producer community. He relayed to me a
rumor that Michaud had told other producers on the site that I was “trouble” and
that they were to keep contact with me to a minimum. I cannot verify the truth of
this rumor, and even Dodd himself admitted that he couldn't say for sure if the
rumor was true. If it was true, however, then it was a deliberate abuse tactic on
Michaud's part to isolate me from the rest of the CA community, and it is this
isolation that I think led in large part to what would follow in my time with Channel
Awesome.
● We continued to produce Nerd to the Third Power (hereafter referred to as N3),
and brought in additional team members. We would produce a “video” version of
the podcast to go on the site, as well as an MP3 download on the company FTP
server for people to download and listen to. At the start, we had access to our
viewership numbers via counters on the website, but these were eventually
removed. When I asked Michaud for our subsequent numbers after the
disappearance to gauge performance, I was consistently ignored until one time
when I got a reply to the effect of “stop asking for your numbers. They suck
anyway, because nobody comes here to listen to you.”

This would become the lion's share of how any contact between me and CA
management. Michaud would randomly message me and tell me something to the
effect of “Your numbers are low. Get them up, or you'll be booted from the site.”
Yet he would not tell me what our numbers were or what total we needed to get. In
addition, my show and all the other podcasts were buried at the bottom of the then
exceptionally overcrowded front page where nobody could find us unless they
scrolled all the way to the bottom. We would always be last on the “New content”
slider on the front page, and would only remain on said slider for one day, as it
would be removed the next day, meanwhile, everything else that came out the
same day we did was still there. The side panel slider was for many months one
slot short of the number of shows meant to premier on any given day, so unless the
schedule for that day wasn't completely full, (which it seldom WASN'T completely
full) we wouldn't appear on that side panel at all.
● We would schedule our shows MONTHS in advance. On NUMEROUS occasions
we would schedule an episode, and then the day it was supposed to go out, we
would find that our show had been replaced with something else. Typically this was
a Linkara, Joe or Spoony vid, or a special vid put out by the site management. At
no point would we receive any warning the show was being replaced, and we
would have to reschedule the episode ourselves. And because at this point the
schedule was full up months in advance, that meant it would have to be scheduled
3 or 4 months down the line. The worst this got was in one year, it happened 3
times, so every episode that came out that year would actually be three or four
weeks old, because we'd been preempted so much. This happened mainly when
Michaud was doing the site updates, but it also happened on two occasions when
Holly Brown was doing the site updates, although when she preempted us, she
would put our show up on the next day's rotation with proper placing on the new
content slider and side panel.
There were also a number of occasions when I would find that our entire rotation
of episodes on the backend site were deleted off of the calendar.
● On numerous occasions the show would be published, but would not be placed on
the front page or the new content slider, it would simply have its own episode page
put up and that was it. And when I went to Michaud about this, he would tell me
“why do you care, nobody listens to you anyway, your numbers suck, it doesn't
matter if you go on the front page.” This is if he even responded AT ALL. And
when he did respond, it would be hours or even DAYS after the fact. Many have
spoken about Michaud's legendary evasiveness, well, I got it too.

● He would also randomly message me to offer “feedback” on the show. Invariably it
was negative and mostly abusive. “Your background music sucks. You need to lose
the british girl (Skyblaze, our Convention/Tabletop correspondent is from the UK),
she's boring. Why do you do so many movie reviews, we got Doge for that.”
After several YEARS of not having any problem with how we handled our MP3
downloads, we were told randomly that all MP3 files had to be less than 20
megabytes in size. This was for a show that at the time had recorded audio from
six people, plus background music, and ran for 2 hours. I had to purchase web
hosting and host the files myself and send Michaud a download link, which half the
time he wouldn't post, and I'd have to chase him down and make noise that he put
it up to get me to quiet down.
● This continuous treatment from the management sent me into a deep and at times
very nearly suicidal depression. Given the events surrounding what I am about to
relate, I will spare you the details of my emotional traumas.
● The Justin Carmical Tribute and The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back
In January of 2014, Justin “JewWario” Carmical died by self-inflicted gunshot.
Carmical was a much loved and respected member of the community. I personally
didn't know him very well, again, because nobody was willing to talk to me, but I
thought that it would be a nice thing to do a kind of online wake, where we would
bring everyone together who wanted to be there to say a few words about Justin. I
didn't see anyone else talking about the idea, so I approached Michaud with the
idea. In a rather (in hindsight) out of character moment, he got back to me
immediately. And I presented him with the idea, and he said “Well, you're not
gonna have to worry about that, Gonzo.”
● So my first thought is he's already got something planned. But then he follows that
up with “Nobody know who you are. They won't care about anything you're gonna
put together. We're gonna have Doge or Lewis or someone put something
together. Someone people actually come here to see.”

● And I sat there, stupefied. I couldn't believe that he had said that. Not just that he'd
flat out said that to ME, but that he'd said that about a plan to let people mourn a
loss. And I realized that Mike Michaud never cared about anyone beyond what use
he could get out of them. Oh, he would put together a Justin Carmical tribute, but it
wouldn't be about the loss, it wouldn't be about letting people grieve, to him it was
just another piece of content, something he could make money off if, even if only
indirectly. I could even see his thought process: What's the only thing that sells
better than sex? Death. He was thinking someone who never heard of CA finding
this tribute and going “Oh, someone on this site killed themselves? What's that
about? And what's this website he worked on?” It was never about the loss, it was
about PROMOTING THE BRAND.
● That was the moment I realized Michaud was not, and never was, a man to be
trusted. And that was the moment I knew my days with CA were numbered.
● The Transition from TGWTG to CA, and My Final Exit
Around the time the company moved from the TGWTG website to the current
Channel Awesome domain, I suffered a laptop crash and lost my login credentials
to the site backend. I want to say it was just after the transition, as I have vague
memories of at least one episode of N^3 going up on the new site. I sent numerous
messages to Michaud asking for him to send me my credentials so I could log in
and schedule shows, but I never received any reply. Finally, after a few months of
this, I got a message from one of my team members on the show over facebook:
“Did you pull the show from CA?” And I didn't know what he meant, and he said
“Our show page on the CA website is gone. All of our episodes we have there are
gone.” And I looked on the website, and sure enough, our show listing was gone,
as were any links on the front page for us. And when I logged into my CA email
address, (I was provided the email billysmith@channelawesome.com, fat load of
good that did me), I found that it had been shut down. So all my emails, all my
messages, POOF! Not there anymore. And that's how I found out we'd been cut
from Channel Awesome. No notice, no warning, no nice “we wish Dr. Gonzo the
best of luck!” on the website, just cut away like a stray lock of hair.

● One Final Note
I'm sure you will hear from many former CA contributor's about the awesome
producer community, how it was a tight-knit group of friends, who stood up for and
helped each other, and got along oh so well. Let me tell you, after Aussiegate, I
don't remember ANY of that. The reason I believe that my abuse at Michaud's
hands went unnoticed and unknown until now is because I was so isolated from
the wider producer community. People that I had called friends just stopped talking
to me, or having anything to do with me. And people who say they're my friends
NOW, who were back then in positions to know what was going on and could have
helped me stood idly by and did nothing. If I wanted to get anyone to come on the
show, it just didn't happen, cause nobody would return my messages, so after a
while, why bother trying? I never got any friendly “hey, you seem like you're having
a rough time” or “hey, haven't heard from you in a while, how you doing?”. Nobody
said anything in my defense throughout the entire time I was Michaud's whipping
boy.
● I don't know if Mike Dodd's rumor about Michaud “blackballing” me to other
producers is true or not, but it would not surprise me at all. Isolating a victim from
their support network is a textbook abuse tactic and I was basically locked alone in
a dark room with Michaud for all the support I was able to get from the community.
So the only conclusions I can draw is that either Michaud told them to stay away, or
none of them really cared enough to ask after me and find out what was
happening.
● I don't remember the community because, frankly, I wasn't a part of it.
But let me be clear: the, soul-less, money grubbing piece of dogshit had us all
fooled. If you can take one lesson from my story, let it be this: Channel Awesome is
a meat grinder, and it's owners and managers are fat swine, feeding off the blood,
sweat and tears of good people. Them and their like care nothing for you, your
well-being or your ambitions. And they WILL tear you open and suckle on your
innards if you give them the chance.
● Maybe that's not the happy ending people want to read. But if all this other drama
should teach us anything, it's that nothing involving Mike Michaud HAS a happy ending.

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VoiceOfReasonPast
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Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by VoiceOfReasonPast » Fri Jan 11, 2019 11:10 pm

Let me provide some fitting OST choices for whoever wants to read that
SpoilerShow


Autism attracts more autism. Sooner or later, an internet nobody will attract the exact kind of fans - and detractors - he deserves.
-Yours Truly

4 wikia: static -> vignette

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pibbs
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Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by pibbs » Fri Jan 11, 2019 11:12 pm

1) too long, just scanned
2) this is the same old crap we've read before. This very story was in the CA document.
3) I'm suspicious of any POV that has a "management hated me for no reason". There was a reason. You're not telling the whole story. Probably, because you're the same ilk as the others, especially Lupa. Victim mentality, with the inability to self critique and improve. Aka a millennial snowflake.
4) Your numbers were constantly in the toilet, yet they let you stay on to give you a chance to improve.
5) Management of any business isn't your over doting mommy. Whether in sales or entertainment, if you ain't got the numbers either bring them up, or GTFO
6) You sound like a whiny bitch. Most likely you saturated management with constant non issues and complaints.
7) I've got a date to go on. Someone else deal with this nobody.
Image

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Guest

Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by Guest » Fri Jan 11, 2019 11:50 pm

>bragging about dates online

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da PAC Nigguh
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Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by da PAC Nigguh » Sat Jan 12, 2019 12:38 am

Why didn't Holly Shitbag call the police herself? These children really did expect Mike and the Walkers to wipe their asses for them, didn't they?
Is Spoony dead yet?

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Guest

Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by Guest » Sat Jan 12, 2019 1:04 am

da PAC Nigguh wrote:
Sat Jan 12, 2019 12:38 am
Why didn't Holly Shitbag call the police herself? These children really did expect Mike and the Walkers to wipe their asses for them, didn't they?
The one thing Holly doesn't need is somebody to wipe her ass.

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RedLine
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Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by RedLine » Sat Jan 12, 2019 1:09 am

Guest wrote:
Fri Jan 11, 2019 9:04 pm
I don't think retail or customer service would tell you "your numbers suck, stop asking" and then not tell you how to improve (Gonzo).
Holy shit. Are you 12 years old? This sentence is basically life.

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Le Redditeur
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Re: Doge Walker and Channel Awesome

Post by Le Redditeur » Sat Jan 12, 2019 1:35 am

RedLine wrote:
Sat Jan 12, 2019 1:09 am
Guest wrote:
Fri Jan 11, 2019 9:04 pm
I don't think retail or customer service would tell you "your numbers suck, stop asking" and then not tell you how to improve (Gonzo).
Holy shit. Are you 12 years old? This sentence is basically life.
Dude, that practice is so old and tired, there's a short Chevrolet did in the 40s to highlight the practice. You remember it from MST3K, don't you?


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