HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Who remembers the World of Warcraft oriented Thottbot web site, and how it pivoted to farming and selling gold, and who was involved, and what they're doing now? It's a fascinating, lurid, and twisted story, worthy of its own Connections episode by James Burke.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Thottbot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thottbot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documenta...

WOW is extensible in Lua, and there are lots of cool, even sophisticated extensions, including Auctioneer, which analyzed and remembered histories of items and prices on the auction house, and helped you make lots of money selling items in the game.

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/auctioneer

The Thottbot web site was an enormously useful catalog of ALL WoW items (and monster drops, weapon stats, monster spawn locations, and character profile data), which was gathered by the Thottbot WoW plugin written in Lua, that monitored network messages and kept a journal of every object a player encountered, then uploaded them to the Thottbot web site.

Thottbot was originally created by Bill "Aftathott" Dyess and run by Wowhead, but then was bought by a company named ZAM (for Alakazam).

https://www.wow-pro.com/wowhead-sells-to-zam-ige-for-over-1-...

Then ZAM was bought be a slimy gold farming company called IGE, whose parent company was RPG Holdings, and they incorporated it into their gold farming and selling empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGE

Through a dramatic saga of infighting and scams and scandals and lawsuits, ex-child-actor-who-turned-into-a-banana then underage-sexual-abuse-scandal-triggered-dot-com-scam-video-streaming-company-ipo-meltdown-involved and now Trump-boot-licking-crypto-bro-new-age-burning-man-whack-job and failed-presidential-candidate Brock Pierce spun the company out into Affinity Media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce

Brock Pierce worked with none other than Steve Bannon at Affinity Media, farming and selling virtual gold online. That was where Steve Bannon discovered and started fanning the toxic hateful easily manipulated sexually frustrated incel culture that he exploited and replicated to launch GamerGate and the Alt Right MAGA whack-jobs, which led to electing Trump, which led to the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Entertainment_and...

https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1354727245449990145

>1/ Hey guys, remember that time Steve Bannon ran an army of game virtual currency miners in Asia, for sale to westerners at discount prices, arbitraging attention for profit? That was awesome...

John Oliver did a hilarious story about Bitcoin featuring Brock Pierce:

Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg

Here's Brock Pierce spouting cryptocurrency bullshit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=1182s

And here is Brock Pierce as a child turning into a banana:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=1220s

John Oliver recommended "Just google Brock Pierce Scandal, that's all I'm saying there."

https://www.google.com/search?q=brock+pierce+scandal

Brock Pierce was deeply and notoriously involved with the DEN sexual abuse scandal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network

Before he worked with Steve Bannon, now-convicted sex offender Marc Collins-Rector was Brock Pierce's original partner in crime at DEN (which been called "the poster child for dot-com excesses"), and when DEN's IPO collapsed when the child enticement indictments were leveled, they both fled their LA party mansion and went on the lam together, then got arrested by Interpol in their party mansion in Marbella, Spain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Collins-Rector

Fucked Company made a hilarious documentary all about DEN in the format of a South Park style swf file, which was eventually uploaded to youtube, but has since been taken down. But I saved a copy of the swf file, although I don't know how to view it now. (Anybody know how to convert it? VLC is supposed to play it, but it's not working for me, just playing audio...):

https://donhopkins.com/home/movies/FuckedCompany_DigitalEnte...

>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network

>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Here are some stories about Steve Bannon's involvement with Brock Pierce and virtual gold farming:

Trump Campaign CEO Once Worked for a World of Warcraft Marketplace

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/stephen-bannon-...

>Stephen Bannon brought quite the varied résumé to his new gig as CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At various points, Bannon has worked as an investment banker, earned money off Seinfeld royalties, overseen a biosphere, directed films, and run an alt-right news site. But one of the stranger blips on his career path came in the mid-aughts, when Bannon joined and eventually ran a company that made its name and fortune as an online marketplace to sell virtual gold to World of Warcraft players and other online gamers.

Trump's Campaign CEO's Little Known World of Warcraft Career

https://www.wired.com/2016/09/trumps-campaign-ceos-little-kn...

>BEFORE HE BECAME CEO of the Donald Trump campaign, and before he took over the alt-right media outlet Breitbart, Steve Bannon made his living selling virtual gold on the Internet.

The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire

https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/

Brock Pierce was appointed as a board member to the Bitcoin Foundation, and several people resigned over his links to sex abuse:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/some-...

And here is a photo of Brock Pierce at Trump's inauguration proudly wearing a red "Make Bitcoin Great Again" cap.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155736654012782&se...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/13/crypto-...

>‘Crypto colonizers’ in Puerto Rico try to sell locals on the dream. A new wave of wealthy investors is moving to the island. Locals are greeting them with excitement — and suspicion.

There is a documentary called "An Open Secret" all about all the underage sexual abuse, cocaine, guns, threats, extortion, and all kinds of other shit that went down at DEN, which showed interviews with the people involved, including lots of evidence like videos and photos and printouts of emails from Brock Pierce and others proving what happened, but apparently Brock Pierce or other alleged Hollywood child abusers who didn't like what the documentary said sued to take it down and suppress it, so it's not on youtube any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Secret

SAG-AFTRA Threatened To Sue Director Amy Berg Over ‘An Open Secret’

https://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-op...

I found the PG-13 version here:

AN OPEN SECRET. Official PG-13 version. Copyright Esponda Productions LLC #AnOpenSecret

https://vimeo.com/142444429

>In light of the long awaited revelations of sexual abuse in Hollywood finally being reported ESPONDA PRODUCTIONS presents AN OPEN SECRET for free for a limited time . A film about the sexual abuse of children in the entertainment industry in Hollywood. Please support our efforts of raising awareness by sharing with your friends and colleagues. #AnOpenSecret #BeCourageous #ReportIt #LifeGetsBetter. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook @AnOpenSecret.

No, this isn't just a bunch of Q-Anon Pizzagate bullshit. It it all went down and was well documented a long long time before Q-Anon. Although it may have inspired some of those conspiracy theories via psychological projection.

But Brock Pierce's deep involvement with the Alt-Right, MAGA whack jobs like Steve Bannon, and Bitcoin bros, as well as his latest hypocritical presidential campaign to end human trafficking (and the fact that he also attended the Mindshift conference that Jeffrey Epstein supported, after he had already been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor), just goes to show how much that Q-Anon Alt-Right MAGA bullshit is all just about psychological projection and hypocrisy.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-brock-pierce-the-presiden...

>Meet Brock Pierce, the Presidential Candidate With Ties to Pedophiles Who Wants to End Human Trafficking

>In the trailer for First Kid, the forgettable 1996 comedy about a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the president’s son, the title character, played by a teenage Brock Pierce, describes himself as “definitely the most powerful kid in the universe.” Now, the former child star is running to be the most powerful man in the world, as an Independent candidate for President of the United States.

>Before First Kid, the Minnesota-born actor secured roles in a series of PG-rated comedies, playing a young Emilio Estevez in The Mighty Ducks, before graduating to smaller parts in movies like Problem Child 3: Junior in Love. When his screen time shrunk, Pierce retired from acting for a real executive role: co-founding the video production start-up Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) alongside businessman Marc Collins-Rector. At age 17, Pierce served as its vice president, taking in a base salary of $250,000.

>DEN became “the poster child for dot-com excesses,” raising more than $60 million in seed investments and plotting a $75 million IPO. But it turned into a shorthand for something else when, in October of 1999, the three co-founders suddenly resigned. That month, a New Jersey man filed a lawsuit alleging Collins-Rector had molested him for three years beginning when he was 13 years old. The following summer, three former DEN employees filed a sexual-abuse lawsuit against Pierce, Collins-Rector, and their third co-founder, Chad Shackley. The plaintiffs later dropped their case against Pierce (he made a payment of $21,600 to one of their lawyers) and Shackley. But after a federal grand jury indicted Collins-Rector on criminal charges in 2000, the DEN founders left the country. When Interpol arrested them in 2002, they said they had confiscated “guns, machetes, and child pornography” from the trio’s beach villa in Spain.

>While abroad, Pierce had pivoted to a new venture: Internet Gaming Entertainment, which sold virtual accessories in multiplayer online role-playing games to those desperate to pay, as one Wired reporter put it, “as much as $1,800 for an eight-piece suit of Skyshatter chain mail” rather than earn it in the games themselves. In 2005, a 25-year-old Pierce hired then-Goldman Sachs banker Steve Bannon—just before he would co-found Breitbart News. Two years later, after a World of Warcraft player sued the company for “diminishing” the fun of the game, Steve Bannon replaced Pierce as CEO.

The lesson: Be careful who you buy virtual gold and Bitcoin from, and never trust MAGA Bitcoin Bros!

⬐ bombcar

How to play SWF: https://nosamu.medium.com/flash-player-emulators-how-to-play...

Ruffle is your best bet likely.

Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.

(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaRTZpJgPA

>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network

>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network

>I rescued this from Web Archive, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.

Yes, THAT guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s

>Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:

https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/

>Sorry.

>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

Alternative archive of the front page, at least:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20060603194832/http://www...

Then they went from sorta fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...

To fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...

John Oliver has a well done bit on cryptocurrency markets as pyramid schemes: https://youtu.be/g6iDZspbRMg

About time. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg

⬐ mrhappyunhappy

Another talking parrot head.

⬐ trengrj

This is geoblocked in Australia. Does anyone have an alternative source?

⬐ doomrobo

Replace youtube in the URL with hooktube

⬐ jwilk

I usually evade geo-blocking with Tor.

Install tor, torsocks, youtube-dl. Then do:

  $ torsocks -i youtube-dl g6iDZspbRMg

HTH

⬐ dalfonso

It was cool to see him use a few concepts that I've used when trying to explain cryptocurrencies to friends: Chuck E Cheese tokens and Beanie Babies. (The other is Easter Egg hunts). Overall, I'm glad that John Oliver's done a piece on this because he's previously been successful at bringing once niche topics to popular culture (net neutrality and sport stadium financing).

I think blockchain (and to a lesser extent ICOs) does have long-term utility. However, the current lack of oversight combined with hype/FOMO for cryptocurrencies and ICOs is the perfect recipe for those "in the know" to rip off the less knowledgeable.