When you face harassment in real life and online, where can you turn? If you are redditor TheNippleComplex, the answer is simple: r/cringepics.

More than 230,000 subscribers flock to r/cringepics (and the video-focused r/cringe) to view photographs and screenshots of people you’d never want to know in real life. TheNippleComplex, on the other hand, had a different reason for soliciting the attention of the subreddit.

"This guy stalked me for the better part of high school, then posted my number all over 4chan when I didn't want to date him. Enjoy," she wrote in her July 22 post. 

The post was coupled with 10 images of the bully in question, culled from his personal Facebook page. Here’s one:

Photo via TheNippleComplex/Imgur

TheNippleComplex said the unidentified culprit is anywhere from 18 to 20 years old in the photographs. He is also a recent Marines recruit.

“He made 5 sneaky Facebook accounts to try to add me, mostly under girls and I later found out," she explained. "He followed me around school and I had to get a school restraining order because after rejecting him, he followed behind my back yelling "Whore! Slut!" etc. wherever I went. Found me on every social media site. Posted pictures of me everywhere. More things I can't/don't want to remember. Also, the last time he did it and my dad had to talk him down, I was in Wal-Mart and he kept at the end of every aisle I went to, staring at me.”

She explained how things intensified once her phone number made it to 4chan.

I basically got a lot of calls and texts for a good two weeks. When I answered, the few times I did, there was usually just breathing. I got mostly voicemails and texts of rapey/creepy things and even a few cringey statements of, "YOU'VE BEEN TROLLED BY ANONYMOUS". Yes, really.

Her post to r/cringepics was allegedly her first—and only—form of online retribution.

"Posting this was probably the bitchiest thing I've done," she revealed. "But I can assure you, he was pretty awful. I actually had to get a schoolwide restraining order, because there was only one school in our town and filing an actual one would mean he'd have to go to a different school, and I felt bad if I had to do that to his family."

Redditors reactions to TheNippleComplex's tale were mixed. Many expressed their support for her and their displeasure with the perp—and his choice of what makes for a good photographic representation of himself.

"I can imagine him on the news. I can pretty much imagine exactly what he'd be like in person. No one should judge by looks, but sometimes your gut's judgement is the most accurate and trustworthy," responded redditor SteveEsquire.

"I know your pain!" redditor BrokeArtMajor said. "A few months ago someone took my profile picture, full name, and phone number and posted it on 4chan. :(

"Luckily a white knight told me where he found the info and saved me from trying to figure out why I kept getting awful calls. I dealt with being harassed, threatened, and dick pics for a good month before they gave up when I stopped replying. It was awful. That guy who did that to you is a dick that looks like he took a tire iron to the face." 

Others, however, think that TheNippleComplex herself became the bully in the scenario.

"What this guy did is wrong (assuming you're telling the truth) but trashing him on Reddit is just as bad," Gustomaximus said. "On the other hand, he might have not done any of this and your just getting people to trash him on Reddit for fun. Either way I don't agree with the behaviour and that is why I down-voted this post."

TheNippleComplex insisted that it was never her intent to invite further bullying.

"I honestly didn't think that people would break the rules and actually have really, REALLY mean bullying comments. Bullying isn't tolerated and I expected more typical CringePics comments laughing about fedoras and Annoying Orange, not full on hostile comments wanting to kill this kid. THAT'S really out of line."

Photo via TheNippleComplex/Imgur

When 4chan pranksters started bombarding my inbox with spam emails for women’s lingerie, I laughed. They were easy enough to ignore, and it made for interesting small talk.

When they ordered two large pizzas and more than three different magazines to my parent's home, I got little more annoyed. The jokes were jumping offline and landing on my doorstep.  

Then they finally tracked down my cellphone number Monday and left me this voicemail.

Transcript: "Umm yeah, hello, this is Mohammed. I'm here to return your call. I don't know who the f**k you think you are but Charles is going to f**k you up."

This is what comes with reporting on the 4chan's most notorious community /b/, a pornographic pit of obscenities, controversial pranks, and violent photos. It’s nothing new. As Cole Stryker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, told me last year, he “received pizzas and death threats, the usual.”

My stories on a seemingly random 39-year-old named Charles, however, pissed /b/ off like never before.

Charles’s saga started on the night of July 15. The prank began like most others, with a call to action: to help Charles crush the dreams of "teeny boppers" by manipulating a Kiss 108FM contest to meet Taylor Swift.

In less than 24 hours, Charles had captured the top spot. In celebration, one /b/ user created the following tribute video, which has since collected more than 13,000 views.

While /b/ enjoyed its success, I received the following emails from 4chan users supposedly named Alex Kapelanski, Anthony Bacher, and Joe Ratajzcak, accusing me of having sexual fantasies about Taylor Swift, of being a "fucking f****t," and of having no fun in high school. Most of them warned me about an imminent "shitstorm."

As has been the case with nearly all of /b/'s most recent pranks, Charles's failed. By the weekend, Boston's Kiss 108FM had caught on to /b/'s ways and shut the contest down. The forum launched a Twitter hashtag #justice4charles, while a Facebook page under the same name collected 1,240 likes, And a Change.org petition garnered 196 votes from people calling for Kiss 108FM to reverse its decision.

On Sunday, my father text-messaged me the latest magazine he had just "accidentally" received in the mail.

Obviously, /b/ wasn't finished. On Monday the community rallied behind Charles once again to help him win a chance to meet singer Selena Gomez. The contest was being hosted by Kiss 108FM's sister station Z100. A few hours after publishing our story that morning, Z100 closed the contest early—with Charles sitting in sixth place.

Then the phone calls started pouring in.

They came from area codes in Alabama, California, and New York. None of the callers left a voicemail except for the one above, which was made using a Pennsylvania number. One member of /b/ also started a Twitter account @rueryuzaki11 (which has since been suspended) and began spamming the Daily Dot with horrific images and violent threats.

Looking back now on all the various forms of backlash my 4chan stories have created, there's one thing that separates the Charles saga from the rest: the human connection. Since September, /b/ has set its sights on corporations and celebrities—all of which the community has little to no personal connection to. Charles is different. He’s real.

Since /b/ began its crusade to have Charles meet Gomez, Swift, and the Jonas Brothers, he has been tweeting away, going along with the fun.

We are winning this battle. We are winning this war. We are winning this REVOLUTION. #Charles2013

— Charles Z. (@cgz79) July 18, 2013

Chances are, Charles, or whoever hides behind his avatar, will never escape his presumed life of mediocrity or make A-list friends. But that doesn't matter. For almost two weeks, Charles was the most talked-about man on one of the top 900 most-visited sites online. And they've given him the best sort of friends a person can have—the kind willing to kick a hornet's nest on your behalf.

Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III

An iPad-wielding Australian man has been banned from his local gym after he covertly captured photos of patrons working out and posted them to Facebook to mock them.

The unidentified jerk from Queensland, the second-largest state in Australia, was kicked out after 4chan and Reddit users posted screengrabs of the man’s Facebook activity.

"Here we see the amazing chicken man," the man wrote on Facebook. "His 2% bodyfat is admired by bodybuilders and bulimic teenage girls alike."

This post inspired Reddit's r/fitness and 4chan's /fit/ to track down his personal information so they could share his posts. Someone from either community spoke with the man's mother, who then contacted the gym owner to notify him of the photos. 

On Facebook, the photographer wrote that the gym owner got him on the phone, banned him from the premises and the rest of the chain, and called him a "piece of shit." 

"No shit, it was a massive dick move but I accepted that after the guy who owns the gym told me this sort of thing is a serious issue and not only hinders the positive development of certain people but also harms the whole industry," the man wrote on Facebook after the fall out. "At the same time, though, I have this nagging voice saying 'toughen the f**k up' because I get called being fat on a daily basis." (The man's responses are highlighted in red below.)

The vitriol spilled over into Reddit's r/justiceporn and r/rage, where redditors praised the gym owner and mother for doing the right thing.

"There are too many people in the world like this," murshaqblack commented. "Run-of-the-mill douchebags lacking self-awareness, who in the end will always play the victim because they have learned denial and skewed morals where they are always 'in the right,' rather than just taking responsibility of their actions."

Photo by jerryonlife/Flickr

Something is going to happen on Sept. 24—we’re just not sure what yet.

That’s when Pronunciation Book’s eerie 77-day countdown finally ends. The once-quirky but banal YouTube channel has turned into a creepy, startling, and cryptic mystery, and sleuths from around the Web have created an entire 77 Day Wiki devoted to information-gathering and guesswork.

For reasons too numerous to list here, we believe the countdown is leading to a reboot of Battlestar Galactica, while Geekosystem has made a compelling case for a Halo connection. But there are an endless competing theories, many from 4chan, some more plausible than others.

We’ve gathered our favorite alternate ideas from the long and growing list below.

1) The Ecuadorian Coup

One theory holds that Pronunciation Book is counting down to a governmental overthrow and a possible presidential assassination attempt. Yikes!

2) This is My Milwaukee (TIMM)

TIMM is an alternative reality game (ARG) that purports to be a tourism guide for the city of Milwaukee but is actually a fabrication of Milwaukee "places" mixed with puzzles, cryptic messages, and other mysteries. Several references during the countdown have some viewers believing it's a continuation of the game.

3) Agents for S.H.I.E.L.D.

It hasn't escaped many people's notice that Marvel's much-anticipated TV show also premieres Sept. 24. However, the bigger question is, given that Marvel already has perhaps the biggest buzz of the year around the show that brought The Avengers’ Agent Coulson back from the dead, why would they need a cryptic viral campaign buildup?

4) The speaker was brainwashed by the military

From the Wiki: "He might have been under surveillance by the military and might have possibly been under some sort of technique in which he is brainwashed by making YouTube videos in a room where he’s probably monitored. The military has probably stopped reviewing his videos recently (Thus they still are titled “How to pronounce 77”) so he’s been able to speak within the videos to his audience. Rather than what he’s been doing originally which was leaving cryptic messages."  You heard it here first, folks.

5) Battlefield 4

Redditor jablome has a theory that the countdown is to the beta release date of a video game called Battlefield 4. "Lots of the words on the wiki page like riverboat, gasman, etc can be cross referenced with that. It also seems to have a war theme like the video game. " Keen eyes, jablome! Now if we could just figure out why the countdown would be pointing to the beta release.

6) Nirvana is back

In a jaw-dropping bit of acronym-juggling, one wiki editor found that a list of names referenced in Pronunciation Book seemed to be referring back to a Nirvana album released on, wait for it, Sept. 24, 1991.  Of course, the album is the dubiously titled Nevermind, so maybe we should.

7) Imminent global extermination

The "World Population Reduction Theory" suggests that Edward Snowden was just the beginning of a vast global conspiracy that will end in mandatory population control. Wait, did we say this was one of our "favorite" theories?

8) The Jonestown Massacre

One frankly chilling theory posits that the videos have a direct connection to the few survivors of the horrifying Jonestown massacre. Could a rare survivor from the 1978 cult suicides be trying to send us a message?

9) Machete Kills

The Rodriguez/Tarantino double film feature Grindhouse featured numerous short trailers for fake movies. One of them, Machete, was so popular that it's finally led to a real movie. Could the countdown be a viral campaign for a cult film favorite? From the Wiki: "Think about it, there’s Guac, tacos, South America, a conspiracy, someone in jail...just sayin’."  Of course, the release date for Machete Kills isn't until October, but why not?

10) This is only one half of the story

What if the reason we don't know what's going on is that somewhere else in the bowels of YouTube, or perhaps lurking on the rest of the Internet, there's another countdown, filling in the unanswered questions, and, perhaps, pointing to something even larger than what we already think we know?

11) Insert video game franchise here

In addition to Battlefield 4, the list of proposed video game tie-ins surrounding the countdown seem to be endless. Mass Effect, Minecraft, Guild Wars, RuneScape, Dota, Smite, Skyrim, Starcraft, Pokemon, Destiny, and a new Tom Clancy game have all been floated as having possible connections to Pronunciation Book. And we've undoubtedly missed a few.

12) The Hunger Games

Though it seems the most unlikely, an early countdown reference to "tension between the Districts" seems to have put many theory-makers onto the trail of a Hunger Games-related viral game. It wouldn't be the first time the franchise has tried to go interactive with their marketing, but it's a longshot that they'd choose this route to do it.

13) Microsoft is joining the National Security Agency

One 4chan thread posited that the numbers linked back to something called the Business Data Catalog, a feature of Microsoft SharePoint. Could Microsoft be implicated in a larger government conspiracy?

14) The Russian Mafia is taking over New Orleans

Among the ideas floated in 4chan's enormous info-gathering document is the idea that Pronunciation Book is referring to post-Katrina Louisiana when it references things like "escape from L.A."  Current local rumor has it that the Russian Mafia has invaded the town, which could be a tie-in to Pronunciation Book's repeated references to someone named "Don." And why wouldn't fearful Louisianans make a stealthy YouTube video series warning their fellow Orleanians to be wary?

15) Worldwide economic crisis

Several theorists have speculated that the countdown could be reference to an impending bank crisis. The Pronunciation Book's reference to a "combat lien" (or bank debt) seems to be the basis for this theory—but let's hope they're wrong!

16) The Syrian rebellion

Many of the Pronunciation Book videos seem to point towards the ongoing political unrest occurring in Syria. More than a few viewers are convinced the Syrian rebels may have something big planned—though why they'd take time out of their busy insurgency to write and edit videos about it on a three-year-old YouTube channel is anyone's guess.

17) Start your airplane engines

The Aerospace Defense Supply Chain Conference takes place Sept. 24 in Massachusetts. This could mean anything, but at least one 4chan-er is speculating that it could be linked to the testing of a nuclear power plant on that same day. Um, scary?

18) Renunciation Book

A 77 days countdown blog, Into the Deep, notes that this YouTube channel made in 2011, apparently in response to Pronunciation Book, has only one video—and it's scary as hell. Could this video be telling us what's going to happen in September? Let's hope not.

19) Pronunciation Book hasn't changed

Taken from a YouTube comment: "He is just giving an example of how to use the number in a sentence. is that so hard to understand?"  Well played, Pronunciation Book. Well played.

20) Edward Snowden is Pronunciation Book

The theories about a possible NSA connection to the countdown are everywhere. Conspiracy theorists have floated everything from links to Obama legislation to military hackers and enraged Ron Paul supporters. But Into the Deep goes a step further, suggesting that Pronunciation Book could be tied to Snowden's "leak" itself:

“[B]etween 2005 and 2010 contact could have been made between Snowden and PB, information was given to PB to leak and leave clues in his videos. While Snowden broke the initial story in June 2013, PB would provide further - potentially more damaging - leaks in September. The supposedly failed ‘mission’ mentioned throughout the channel's history could well be the botched leak attempt in 2008, with Chief, Don  and the others being the aliases of others connected to Snowden.”

Could Snowden have been the key all along? Probably not, but it's fun to guess.

Photo via cbrodie/deviantART

While the search continues for the meaning behind the mysteriousYouTube channel Pronunciation Book, 4chan's paranormal community, /x/, is now trying to uncover the origin of one of the Internet's creepiest photos.

Known as Jeff the Killer, the photo shows a washed-out face and a maniacal smile. Since October 2008, the photo has acted as the unofficial cover of the Internet's creepypasta cannon—text blocks of "short horror stories and urban legends that are shared via message boards or email," describes Know Your Meme.

The legend began on YouTube on Oct. 3, 2008, when user Sesseur uploaded the 2.5-minute video "Jeff the Killer." The crudely produced clip features the fictional story of how Jeff accidentally spilled a bucket of acid on his face while trying to clean his bathtub. 

On Oct. 14, 2008, the photo of Jeff resurfaced on Newgrounds after user killerjeff began posing as the man in question. 

And with that, the cult of Jeff the Killer began. Jeff's photo became the inspiration for countless horror stories on the creepypasta wiki, WikiAnswers, and QuoteV. On YouTube, dozens of users put their own spin on Jeff's story, with some even collecting more than 618,000 views. Not to mention, a stop-motion Lego reenactment. And if Jeff's photo wasn't creepy enough already, his face has been remixed into all sorts of fanart on deviantART. One fan even created a Jeff the Killer video game.

Now, five years later, 4chan's paranormal imageboard /x/ is tired of the fiction. It wants some facts. 

On /x/ and Reddit's r/creepy forum, users have been compiling their best theories. Here are the top four being tossed around organized by the most plausible to the most outrageous. 
 

1) Viral marketing campaign for Saw V

About 10 days after Jeff's photo popped up on Newgrounds, Lionsgate released the fifth installment of the popular slasher series Saw. In the series the antagonist, Jigsaw, uses a scary looking puppet named Billy to communicate with his victims. Billy's resemblance to Jeff set /x/ off.

In June 2008 Lionsgate launched the site Disbeliefnet.com to promote its documentary Religulous. It featured tabloid-like stories on religion. Before the release of Saw V, the studio launched a website where people could plug in a phone number and have Jigsaw call and leave a startling message. This marketing campaign was ultimately shut down by the cops. 

When one /x/ member asked YouTube user Sesseur where he found Jeff's photo, he got this response:

2) Who is Katy Robinson?

In the fall of 2008, a girl named Katy Robinson allegedly posted a grainy photo of herself taken in a closet on 4chan's random imageboard, /b/. As the story goes, the girl was bullied relentlessly for her weight and later committed suicide.

Redditor ninetofivehero claimed Katy's original photo was Photoshopped to create what is now considered the Jeff the Killer photo. 

"In one less photoshopped version of the Jeff picture, a mole is clearly visible that's also visible in the picture of Katy," ninetofivehero wrote on Reddit. "It looks in a different position on the face, but that would be a result of the new mouth Photoshopped on to help create Jeff."

This is the less-Photoshopped photo ninetofivehero is referencing. 

3) Jeff the Killer is not human

Not only is Jeff not a human, his photograph is really made up of the eyes from a cadaver along with the mouth of dog, claims redditors ninetofivehero and theawfulshirt.

"[S]omeone claiming to be an oldfag [a 4chan user who has been on the site a long time] says that the mouth came from a picture of a wolf with a broken jaw," ninetofivehero added. " Doesn't sound too far-fetched at all and is worth considering."

Click to expand:

4) Jeff the Killer is your favorite girlfriend

Despite the fact that the Overly Attached Girlfriend became Internet famous in June 2012, that hasn't stopped /x/ from trying to pin this mystery on the woman behind the meme, Laina Walker. 

Illustration by Jason Reed

The amateur sleuths on 4chan's infamous /b/ forum popped some Adderall and pulled an all-nighter, laying out photos of their suspect on a virtual corkboard, Homeland-style, with red lines connecting seemingly unrelated events and supporting players. Slowly, a narrative began to emerge. 

Taylor Swift, America's heartbroken country-pop girlfriend, is a /b/tard. It sure seems like it.

Click to expand:

Here's a sample of the evidence: 

1) In November 2011, 4chan named an Anon's cat Meredith. A day later, Taylor Swift debuted her cat, Meredith. Since then, photos of Meredith have showed up on 4chan. 

2) Taylor Swift's face has also shown up on 4chan. "I'm feeling down. Please make me smile," one submitter, who does look a lot like Swift, wrote in 2009. Another submission shows the same background.

3) A /b/tard claims he once talked to a musician on videochat site Omegle. Her name was Taylor, and she was on 4chan.

4) A user asked /b/ what they'd say if they knew Taylor Swift would be reading it.

5)"One of the 50 most famous people on the planet" asking /b/ for questions.

None of these, on its own, is very compelling. It's more reasonable that a dedicated 4chan user has snatched images of Swift from her social media, done some minor Photoshopping, and slyly crafted the myth. It's all contributed to a vague kernel of an idea floating around the anarchic troll hub that übercelebrity Taylor Swift occasionally reads them, teases them with clues as to her identity, and postpones a big reveal. 4chan seems to appreciate the mystery, involving her in pranks of their own—like sending her to perform at a school for the deaf and rigging a contest so a "fat old creep" named Charles could smell her hair.

4chan's founder and overlord, Christopher Poole (a.k.a. moot), already told /b/ to shut up. He explains the photos can all be found online and that the screenshots are, in fact, Photoshopped, posted from an IP "that is definitely not her."

Click to expand:

That won't stop 4chan fans on Reddit from speculating, though. 

Photo via evarinaldiphotography/Flickr

Even in death, 14-year-old Hannah Smith can't escape her bullies. Only this time they're from 4chan's random imageboard, /b/, the forum behind some of the Internet's most depraved and sadistic pranks. 

On Friday, Smith’s 16-year-old sister found her dead in her home. For weeks, Smith had been bullied on the question-and-answer site Ask.fm—trying to defend herself against anonymous users encouraging her to kill herself and, in a morbid callback to Canadian teen Amanda Todd’s well-publicized 2012 suicide attempt, to "drink bleach."

Smith, of Lutterworth, Leicestershire, is the seventh teenager in the past six months who has committed suicide after being bullied on the Latvia-based social media site. These other teenagers include Ciara Pugsley, Erin Gallagher, Jessica Laney, Joshua Unsworth, Shannon Gallagher, and Anthony Stubbs. The parents of these teens have called for Ask.fm to be shut down.

Smith's Facebook remembrance page has collected more than 47,000 likes. It's also collected dozens of vulgar comments from fake accounts created by /b/.

The thread, which was started at 11:27am ET, instructs /b/ to "fire up fake accounts" in order to seize the "opportunity for an epic win." These were the results (click on each to enlarge).

Warning, there’s some truly obscene and disturbing language here:

Since its inception in October 2003, /b/ has been a breeding ground for the the Anonymous hacker movement and a flurry of high-profile pranks. 

Its members are responsible for rigging TIME magazine's Person of the Year poll to have North Korea's Kim Jong-un win, helping the hashtag #cutforbieber trend on Twitter, and gaming a Mountain Dew flavoring contest to have names like "Hitler did nothing wrong" rise to the top. Most recently, the community ruined actor Samuel L. Jackson's first Reddit experience and voted a 39-year-old man to the top of a contest to meet Taylor Swift. 

Following Smith's death, Ask.fm's anonymous bullies have targeted a handful of other women named Hannah Smith, telling one she is "not pretty," "pathetic," and that she should "join the other hannah in hell." Another girl named Hannah Smith has been asked more than a dozen times if she is the Smith who committed suicide.  She has also received horrible messages like, "yoooou slaagggggg drop dedddddd," "fatty," and "bitch."

"Why are you saying this to me?" Smith wrote in the response to one of the messages. "And why anon?"

Photo via Facebook

In August 2012, pranksters from 4chan's random imageboard /b/ harassed a camgirl so exhaustively that she broke down in tears. Live.

The entire episode was captured in a video posted on LiveLeak, where it was viewed more than 736,000 times. 

"God forgot I existed,” Nina Jaymes said during a 2012 show. “He didn’t provide me with anyone. Twelve years, I’ve been waiting for some man to love me. God doesn’t care. I want to die.”

Now, exactly a year later, Jaymes, 40, has gotten wise and turned two recent raids on her show into profit.

For the second time in the past two days, /b/ has tried hard to rile Jaymes to the point of breaking down. The latest attempt kicked off today at 1:40pm ET. (Warning: The screenshots contain some graphic language.)

Here are some of the messages posted in the thread; goading /b/ users to mess with Jaymes:

Guys do something. Make her mad so I've got something to fap to.

shes already hatin on men come on guys shes getting all riled up pretty quick lets get her screaming.

I want to see the make up run down her face again.

What /b/ didn't realize was that Jaymes was monitoring the thread. After finishing a private show at around 2:15pm, Jaymes broke her silence.

Jaymes continued commenting in the thread, claiming these 4chan raids have only helped line her pockets. Over the course of an hour, she did more than three private chats, collected $15 to flash her breasts and butt quickly, and received a countless number of $1 tips.

"I make plenty of money during your raids, enough to take the next day off," Jaymes claimed. "Why would i continue to cam if the money was NOT worth it. I would not. Monitoring high school kids is not that exciting for a 40 yr old DOLL!!"

Apparently disappointed by their failure, /b/ turned to cam girls like MilkNyan (NSFW) to try and make her cry. One 4chan user also questioned whether Jaymes was more than just a participant in the /b/ thread.

"Has it occurred to you all that Nina might be making these threads?" the anonymous user wrote. "She seems to 'find' them extremely fast don't you think? When a thread comes up her room gets a sudden raise in viewers from /b/ and that shows on the sites homepage. So people are gonna think this room might be worth entering and in turn she makes more money off the fuckwits that fell for it."

The /b/ thread was deleted at 2:55pm. Here's a PDF the Daily Dot created of the entire conversation (much of which is NSFW) before it was taken down. 

Photo via Nina Jaymes

The unimaginative pranksters from 4chan’s random imageboard /b/ have failed once again at helping a skeevy old dude score some alone time with Taylor Swift. And in the process they've ruined it for the rest of Swift's real fans.

The contest by San Diego's Star 94.1 FM to meet Swift and attend her concert was modified Tuesday after /b/ unsuccessfully tried to get 39-year-old Charles Z. to the top. 

The radio station, which is owned by Clear Channel, shut down the public voting system because of fraud and tampering. Charles made it as high as 10th place before Star 94.1 caught on to /b/'s scheme. In place of the contest, the station posted the following message:

"Once again the white man isn't allowed to win," Reddit user dick_bag said in a thread discussing the operation. "No justice? No peace."

4chan's obsession with Charles started on the night of July 15. The objective was to help Charles, a "fat old creep," crush the dreams of teens everywhere by manipulating a contest run by Boston’s Kiss 108 FM to meet Swift. In about 24 hours, Charles had captured the top spot, but 4chan's success was only temporary. By the weekend, the station had caught on to /b/'s scheme and shut down the contest. 

But /b/ wasn't done.

The imageboard launched a Facebookcampaign,Twitter hashtag #justice4charles, and a Change.org petition for Kiss 108 to reverse its decision.

On July 22 /b/ took up Charles's cause once again. This time it was to help him win a chance to meet singer Selena Gomez as part of a contest hosted by Kiss's sister station Z100. A few hours after publishing our story that morning, Z100 closed the contest early—with Charles sitting in sixth place.

Since then /b/ has unsuccessfully tried to help Charles win contests to meet the Jonas Brothers and One Direction. 

Charles hasn't taken the defeats very well.

DISQUALIFIED AGAIN I cracked the top ten twice in two days with two different entries. WHY IS TAYLOR SWIFT SO MEAN TO ME???

— Charles Z. (@cgz79) August 5, 2013

There are 11 dates left on Swift's Red Tour. If /b/ heeds the advice of redditor FaroutIGE, there may still be a chance of uniting Charles and Swift after all. 

"Charles very easily could have won a lot of these contests if overzealous anons wouldn't give the administrators exactly what they want in saying he's a creep that wants to sniff her hair," FaroutIGE commented. "He just as easily could be some adult with a child's mind. Why aren't we hitting that front instead?"

Photo by jazills/Flickr

It's going to take a lot more than making his Twitter profile private to save a kitten-kicking high schooler from the wrath of 4chan's random imageboard, /b/.

The teen, believed to be Walter Easley of South Carolina, has become /b/'s latest target after he tweeted a six-second Vine video that showed him kicking a cat off a porch.

The Internet reacted with shock and disgust, with hundreds of users on Reddit's r/rage and r/videos forums calling the teenager’s actions "unforgivable." 

Easley deleted the Vine Sunday afternoon, shortly after the Daily Dot published a story about it. Easley also made his Twitter profile, @SuckMy_Walt, private. But these precautions haven't stopped /b/ from tracking Easley and his family down.

Twodifferent Pastebin documents feature Easley's home address, cell phone number, and a link to his sister’s Facebook page. They also include the email address for his high school principal.

Sunday evening, two separate /b/ threads called for people to report Easley to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

A petition has been started on Care2 calling for Easley to be brought to justice. It has collected more than 380 digital signature as of noon.

"Walter Easley needs to be apprehended and prosecuted, including incarceration for what he has done," Kat Karnes wrote on Care2. "Get these people out of society~they are dangerous. List him on an animal abuse registry so those around him will know what kind of monster is in their midst. Ensure that he never goes near another animal, much less have one in his possession."

/b/ also tracked down the owner of the cat, @buck4411. On June 25 @buck4411 tweeted the following Vine video allegedly showing Easley toying with the same cat he would end up kicking (here's a GIF of the video).

It's time 🙀🙏👌 https://t.co/J6Q8XBy8e8

— $BUCK$ (@buck4411) June 26, 2013

While /b/ is best known for devious pranks like gaming TIME magazine's Person of the Year poll to have North Korea's Kim Jong-un win, getting the hashtag #cutforbieber trending on Twitter, and raiding the Facebook remembrance page of a dead teenager with horrible messages, it's also done some good. 

In 2011 /b/ helped track down a Texas family law judge who was caught on video whipping his disabled daughter. Last month, /b/ helped get an iPad-wielding Australian man banned from his gym after he secretly captured photos of patrons working out and posted them on Facebook to mock them.

At about 11:45pm ET Sunday, more than 50 4chan users piled into a Tinychat room to watch as calls were placed to Easley's home and cell. Over the next hour, /b/ had little luck reaching Easley. Then at about 1am, one /b/ user finally got someone on the phone.

"The first thing I'm gonna do is kick the shit out of you," the anonymous /b/ user said. "I got a bomb coming."

"Stop calling me," said the man on the line. "I will cut your ass."

Photo by davedehetre/Flickr

When America's brightest engineers wanted to shoot a monkey into space, they strapped the furball to rockets. 

When a 4chan user wanted to do the same with a pack of baby squirrels, he thought some cheap helium balloons would suffice.

"21 decides what I do with these 3 baby squirrels i just found," wrote one user (we'll refer to him as "spaceanon") on 4chan's random imageboard, /b/.

The thread quickly exploded in popularity, with dozens of users making hilarious suggestions as to what he should do with the squirrels:

Keep them, raise them, train them to come to you on command. Freak your friends out when you summon your squirrel minions.

>Select one to be chosen one
>raise them all, but the chosen one with extra privileges
>treat it like a fucking king
>when they are matured release them together
>see if they form a monarchical society

Raise them as your own. When they come of age, withdraw all your money and attach it to them and set them free into the wild

Then one user posted the following collage of images from a 2011 thread showing a user tying a frog to balloon in order to send it into space. Click to expand:

That was the suggestion spaceanon had been waiting for. He quickly started rounding up the squirrels and taped them together before stepping away to go and purchase some balloons:

"store opens at 9:30. its 8:36," spaceanon wrote. "I will be there waiting for the doors to open. I should be back home around 9:45 and pictures should be up at 10am EST. ill timestamp the baloons and them tied up... but not flight. kinda hard to get a piece of paper up." 

By the time spaceanon returned, /b/ was teeming with excitement. A new thread was started on /b/ to follow spaceanon. In it, spaceanon announced that he was going to tie the squirrels to the balloon live on video via Tinychat. More than 120 /b/ users packed into a chatroom, waiting for spaceanon to deliver, while /b/ began turning on him.

"[T]hey are fucked, there obviously to young to survive without there mother," one anonymous user wrote. "Animal abuse is one of the most pathetic things a person can do. Get yourself some karma points and be a man rather than a fuckwit kid and do the right thing."

"I am the one that reported the Tinychat to Tinychat moderators," another user added. "I do not condone animal abuse. Stop it."

Shortly after these messages were posted, spaceanon announced that he had failed. 

"I truly am sorry guys," spaceanon wrote:

Im all depressed now. and i keep going outside every 5 minutes in hopes that this little ball of taped up squirrels will somehow make itself back to my porch. … I honestly thought the mail man took them at first. i was extremely confused. I still am. but my dog has no blood on him anywhere. so my only guess is the mother squirrel somehow dragged them away.

Maybe spaceanon was trolling /b/ all along. Considering /b/'s long history of tomfoolery, well, that's not out of the question.

Over the past year, /b/ has been responsible for gaming TIME magazine's Person of the Year poll to have North Korea's Kim Jong-un win, getting the hashtag #cutforbieber trending on Twitter, and raiding the Facebook remembrance page of a dead teenager with horrible messages. The community has also hijacked a Mountain Dew contest to name a new flavor, getting suggestions like “Gushing Granny,” “Fapple,” and “Hitler did nothing wrong” to the top. 

Regardless of whether spaceanon was sincere in his mission, /b/ was genuinely disappointed. "[I]'m so fucking pissed off that I spent 2 and a half hours waiting for this," one user wrote.

The following is a visual breakdown of the entire squirrel episode (click to expand). We got PDFs of the two separate threads, which you can check out here and here.

Illustration by Jason Reed

One of 4chan's first and most controversial imageboards, /b/, has just collected its 500 millionth post. The winning comment: a brief, bizarre, homophobic rant about Polish prostitutes.

"GET," if you're wondering, is like a game: When every post has a number, the chances of getting the right one (in this case, 500,000,000) become smaller and smaller—hence /b/'s obsession with it. In these "500" threads, the community was overrun with "GET" posts, content posted purely with the intent of reaching the number.

Since its inception in October 2003, /b/ has been the most storied imageboard on 4chan, which began as a place to swap users’ favorite anime pictures. 4chan founder Christopher "moot" Poole intended /b/ to be a dump of completely random images and comments. But lax moderation and an anti-censorship policy gave the forum a reputation for harboring some of the more repulsive parts of the Web.

/b/ users—lovingly called /b/tards—have a reputation for pulling off pranks that flip online media on its head and, quite literally, make children cry.

In just the last year alone, /b/ has helped North Korea's Kim Jong-un win Time Magazine's Person of the Year poll, interrupt the hearing of George Zimmerman, tried to have a creepy old dude win a contest to meet Taylor Swift, and flooded a Facebook remembrance page for a dead teenager with despicable messages. Yet despite this tomfoolery, /b/ has also done some good. 

In 2011, /b/ tracked down a Texas judge caught on video whipping his disabled daughter. In July, /b/ helped get an iPad-wielding Australian man banned from his gym after snapping photos of people working out and posting them on Facebook to mock them. And just this week, /b/ made the life of a South Carolina teenager a living hell after he tweeted a Vine video of himself kicking a cat. 

The latest milestone comes just about a year after 4chan celebrated its 1 billionth post. 

"I've watched /b/ evolve from a nerdy weeaboo outpost into the most culturally potent site on the Web and spent an embarrassing portion of 2011 hanging out on /b/ while researching my book," Cole Stryker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, told us.

"I don't visit 4chan regularly anymore (It's just easier to skim the cream off the top via r/4chan), but every once in a while I'll pull up /b/ late at night and be confronted with people, conversations and creations so uniquely bizarre that I'm reminded all over why I became enchanted by the community many years ago."

Below is a PDF of the full /b/ thread featuring the 500 millionth post. As you can guess, it's pretty NSFW. 

Photo via Caveman Chuck” Coker/Flickr

Kaitlin Jackson is the Internet's preeminent troll hunter.

From her home in Aberystwyth, Wales, the 45-year-old has invested more than 6,000 hours on Facebook and Twitter reporting cyberbullies and trolls who disseminate inflammatory content. 

She has taken down 500 people to date.

But now, after two years, the hunter has become the hunted.

Since early Tuesday morning, 4chan's notorious random imageboard, /b/, has tracked down Jackson’s physical address, email address, phone number, and business address and has implored the community to give her a "taste of her own medicine." 

The following image—which also includes social media info for Jackson's son, daughter, and granddaughter—was created by a /b/ user to trick people into thinking Reddit was behind the doxing. 

"This bitch needs trolled more," one anonymous user wrote. "Call her asking if she does anal."

4chan's /b/ imageboard, which is infamous for its trolling ways and elaborate vote rigging schemes, set its sights on Jackson after the Mirror ran a story on her Sunday. In it, Jackson explains how started to treat troll hunting like a full-time job after discovering her children being relentlessly bullied on social media.

"The comments my daughter had sent to her were horrendous,” Jackson said. “I messaged these anonymous people myself and told them I had printed every message and had taken them to the police. They stopped. But there are children out there who have nowhere to turn to.”

Aside from Jackson's personal information, /b/ also tracked down the names and numbers of 11 different restaurants near her home so people could order food to her home. (This juvenile tactic is one /b/ has used countless times over the years to intimidate its victims and anyone who reports on them.) /b/ has also created an obscene Craigslist ad and dating profile using one of Jackson's photos: 

While cyberbullying has been around since the dawn of the Internet, the consequences of such actions have become catastrophic. Over the past seven months, seven teenagers have committed suicide after they were brutally cyberbullied on Ask.fm, a question and answer site. Hannah Smith, 14, was the most recent teenager to taker her life after she was tormented with messages like "every1 will be happy if u died," "drink bleach," and "go die." Following Smith's death, /b/ raided her Facebook remembrance page with equally disturbing messages. On Monday Ask.fm announced that it will make its report abuse button more visible and add a "bullying/harassment" category to the site.

Jackson is a member of a private Facebook group called Stop cyber-bullying and Trolls where member "share links to profiles and pages that are being targeted by ­bullies," the Mirror added. 

"No one is willing to be responsible for policing these sites," Jackson said. "Someone needs to find these trolls who are abusing people anonymously and lock them up."

Illustration by Jason Reed

When 4chan's random imageboard /b/ decided to flood a Reddit forum with images of a cute dog, they thought they had succeeded in pissing them off.

But the community they raided, r/Murica, not only loves that Shiba Inu meme (or “shibe”), but the subreddit exists to satirically support all forms of free speech.

Unlike a lot of 4chan raids—particularly those surrounding Taylor Swift—this one worked out well for all parties involved.

Let’s back up for a minute and explain this meme. Why all the Comic Sans? What the hell is a “doge”?

First off, "doge" is a misspelled use of "dog" popularized by a June 2005 episode of Internet cartoon series Homestar Runner. Since then, photos of Shibas have spread across Reddit and Tumblr, where Comic Sans text is added to show what the doge is thinking. (See: “Interior Monologue Captioning.”) 

The raid against r/Murica began late Sunday night and lasted through about 12:15pm ET. Nearly every shibe got a patriotic Photoshop makeover.

"4chan decided we wouldn't like this, or something," one r/Murica moderator wrote. "We totally do. FREEDOM OF SPEECH SUCKA." 

"Is this really supposed to be a /b/ raid of some sort?" cereal_k1ller added. "If so... weakest... raid... ever. Get your shit together /b/tards."

By about 12:30pm, r/Murica tired of /b/'s raid and began deleting all the posts. In their place, the following image reached the top of the subreddit.

"CLEARLY THE INFLUX OF DOGE MEMES ON THIS SUB IS THE WORK OF A VAST NETWORK OF DAMN COMMIE SPIES THAT ARE WORKING TIRELESSLY TO UNDERMINE THIS SUBREDDIT'S TRADITIONAL VALUES AND PROPOGATE PROPAGANDA AGAINST THIS BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY!!!!!" theelout commented. 

/b/'s raid come just a week after it successfully helped South Carolina police track down and arrest a teenager for vining himself kicking a kitten. 

Photo via tipper213/Reddit

"Ke$ha" flashes on the screen. Five characters. A male voice repeats the pop star’s name three times, enunciating carefully. 

This video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. It means something, and 4chan's paranormal discussion board, /x/, is going to figure out what.

For three years, a YouTube channel called Pronunciation Book built an audience with videos just like this one: minimal pieces with a repeated word or phrase, sometimes an example sentence. Most of them run for no more than 10 seconds. 

But in July, Pronunciation Book went totally off the rails. It started posting one cryptic video a day, counting down from 77 until Sept. 24, 2013. /x/ members, often called “/x/philes,” were the first to notice. /x/philes are always the first to notice. 

"Looks like an ARG [alternate reality game]... but god damn is that f***king clever, to subvert an established YouTube channel," one anonymous user wrote in an early /x/ thread about the mystery. "I'll suspend [my] disbelief and play along."

If your experience with 4chan is limited to the racism, pornography, and trolling antics of the infamous /b/ board, what happens on /x/ may come as a surprise. And it may just make you a believer.

•••

/x/ isn't the 4chan the Internet has grown to despise and gawk at. 

4chan’s best-known imageboard, /b/, is essentially the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of the Web. It’s capable of doing great things (like bringing a kitten-kicking teen to justice) and the unthinkable (like flooding a Facebook remembrance page for a dead teenager with hateful messages) all in the same month.

These shenanigans have made /b/ a regular fixture in the media over the past nine years. It’s become so ubiquitous that “4chan” is often used as a synonym for “/b/,” as if the site’s 63 other boards—focusing on topics like gay and lesbian life (/lgbt/), fitness (/fit/), or automobiles (/o/)—simply don’t exist.

But while the trolls of /b/ bask in the spotlight, /x/ has always thrived in the shadows, conducting fascinating, obsessive investigations of the paranormal with relatively little attention from the outside.

/x/ launched in January 2005 as 4chan’s general photo board. In February 2007, 4chan founder Chris ‘moot’ Poole repurposed it as a paranormal-themed board after noticing the success of the paranormal board on 7chan, a 4chan spinoff. 

/x/'s popularity spiked in May of that year, thanks to 4chan's video game community, /v/. At the time, /v/ was teeming with excitement over a rumor that the first trailer for the upcoming Grand Theft Auto IV had been leaked. Only instead of feasting their eyes on some gameplay footage, /v/ users found themselves watching the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up." 

The Rickroll was born.

"Rickrolling is a descendant of an older Internet joke called duckrolling," the New York Times reported on March 24, 2008. "A Web site or blog post would offer a link to something popular—say celebrity photos or video gaming news—that led unsuspecting viewers to a bizarre image of a duck on wheels."

The meme spread around 4chan with much success, particularly on /x/. The community's penchant for posting shocking videos made Rickrolling a perfect match for /x/philes eager to trick people into thinking they were about to see a scare video or footage of alien sighting. While Rickrolling helped bring /x/ together, the community still didn’t have a meme to call its own. 

But about four days after the Times published its article on the Rickroll, /x/ bottled up some of /v/'s meme magic and created "THEN WHO WAS PHONE?" The phrase was used in a creepypasta, a type of short horror story designed specifically to be shared online. But while most creepypasta tries to scare its readers, "THEN WHO WAS PHONE?" falls into a category of stories that Know Your Meme describes as "poorly written or unintentionally funny."

The meme was an immediate success. It earned entries on Encyclopedia Dramatica, Urban Dictionary, and Yahoo Answers.

Creepypasta plays a crucial role on /x/, where discussion threads often feel like those fireside chats we all remember from childhood, with someone sharing a seemingly mundane story that ends with a terrifying loss of life or limb. 

The difference is that on /x/, many of these tales of the supernatural (and super-creepy) could be true. And /x/philes will go to extreme lengths to get to the bottom of them. 

As longtime /x/ lurker and former administrator of the truth portal on Encyclopedia Dramatica h64 told the Daily Dot, "/x/ is one of the only sources of truth on the Internet."

"Every day, users of /x/ put their lives on the line to bring you the raw goods our masters don't want us to know," h64 told the Daily Dot. "Users of /x/ are guilty not only of thoughtcrime, but of sightcrime, the crime of bearing witness."

•••

Threads on /x/ typically break down into four different types: Inquiries regarding paranormal happenings, how-tos, historical inquiries, and "mindfuck threads," h64's favorite and the community's bread and butter. 

These "mindfuck threads" present what appears to be a very common and mundane thing. But upon deeper inspection, there's something completely out of place hiding among the obvious. An example of such a "mindfuck thread" happened one Saturday after an /x/phile posted the following photo:

What happened next was exactly what h64 described. /x/ broke the photo down, pixel by pixel, using it to uncover the names of the property owners, phone numbers, and business records for what /x/ deemed a "a cult/temple dedicated to an Egyptian goddess of war and flame in the woods of Oregon." 

This particular thread collected 53 pages worth of research and discussion. All in a day’s work for /x/. 

Another mystery that piqued /x/'s interest was that of Jeff the Killer, a five-year-old photo of an ashen face and maniacal smile that is considered to be one of the creepiest on the Internet.

Tired of all the conspiracy theories and blatant lies, /x/ engaged in a fact-finding mission earlier this month, revealing that the unsettling photo was most likely part of a viral marketing campaign to promote the fifth installment of the Saw series.

/x/ combined the raw curiosity of the "mindfuck thread" with its penchant for history when it recently dug into the story behind Luis Jimenez's "Blue Mustang," a hauntingly huge statue that rests outside the Denver International Airport. The statue was commissioned by the airport in 1992 as part of its public art initiative. Jimenez was killed while creating the statue after "the horse's massive torso swung out of control and crushed the 65-year-old artist," the Wall Street Journal reported. 

Photo by contentious/Flickr

Despite news reports making the statue’s history abundantly clear, /x/philes couldn't help but use the thread to discuss the National Security Agency (NSA) and how "Blue Mustang" is somehow connected to James Holmes, the man accused of killing 12 people at a Colorado movie theater last summer during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises.

"As a frequent airplane traveler (I have collected over 2,500 miles so far) I can tell you that there is something supernatural going on in the airport," one anonymous user wrote. "I was sitting in the stall and heard a knocking next to me, I looked under an no one was there, only the smell of sulfur. I challenge anyone to spend some time in those bathrooms and tell me they aren't haunted."

While threads such as Jeff the Killer and Blue Mustang cater to users who already have a deep understanding of the Internet's paranormal culture, /x/’s how-to threads would make any teacher proud. Take, for example, a 29-page thread on how to properly summon a demon: 

"First either draw a pentagram or make a ring of salt around the intended area of the summoning circle," the anonymous author of the thread wrote. "If you want to be extra cautious, then use both a pentagram and a salt circle. If you want to be a fa**ot, then align the top of the pentagram with true north as best you can."

And last, but surely not least, are the threads where users seek advice regarding personal paranormal occurrences. It's in these threads where /x/ really separates itself from /b/. While it would be easy to troll a user for asking for advice on voices he or she is hearing, /x/ takes the high road. 

"If you're serious, seek help," another user suggested. "Schizophrenia isn't a joking matter."

The kind of detective work that happens on /x/ may sound obsessive, or even insane. And maybe it is. But often, it’s also accurate. And in a month, the /x/philes’ rigorous attention to detail may finally pay off.

•••

The Pronunciation Book will either go down as one of the greatest Internet mysteries of all time or one of the biggest busts. Either way, something is going to happen in 28 days.

Before it took its strange and sudden turn, the channel had posted 700 short videos, each featuring a flat, male voice explaining how to pronounce words and phrases like "The XX," "jean," and "Beyonce.” 

But on July 9, 2013, the channel broke its pattern, and began posting one mysterious video a day. These messages included the following:

77: “Something is going to happen in 77 days.”

76: “I’ve been trying to tell you something for 1,183 days.”

75: “I’m awake now. Things are clearing up. I’m not saying the words anymore.”

The voice—which now seemed somehow more ominous—ended each of these messages the same way: “Something is going to happen,” it said, and then gave the number of days remaining.

/x/philes were immediately hooked.

The community compiled the “77 Days Research Document,” a 111-page Google document pooling any info they could find on the Pronunciation Book. After analyzing all 700 of the channel’s messages, tracing domain name registrations, and even running a spectrograph analysis of the silence at the end of each video, they came to the conclusion that Pronunciation Book is a viral marketing scheme, or some kind of Alternate Reality Game (ARG).

/x/ also tried to pinpoint the location of the speaker in the videos. They narrowed it down to the U.S. based on police sirens heard in the background of some of the videos, and then further zoomed in on New York City based on a thunderstorm that could be heard in the video “Radio.”

Working from /x/’s findings, the Daily Dot conducted its own investigation into Pronunciation Book, and what we found was one of the most elaborate marketing projects ever constructed for a major media property. We can’t yet reveal everything we know, but we’ve put our own theory on the record: The countdown will end with the revelation of a Battlestar Galactica reboot.

Since /x/ first began working on the mystery behind the Pronunciation Book, the YouTube channel has achieved an almost cult-like atmosphere on the Internet. Besides the Battlestar Galactica theory, Geekosystem has provided a strong case for the upcoming installment of the Halo series Destiny. One Reddit user has even broken down the numbers of words, syllables, and characters used in each message. And an entire Wiki has also been created to crowdsource any new information.

The one thing we know for certain is that when time runs out, the result won't even matter.

Because nothing can match the thrill of the search. This is, in a nutshell, what makes /x/ great. The alien will never be as menacing as you think, and Bigfoot is just overly conscious about sun exposure. But with enough evidence and a convincing argument, /x/ can inspire the most headstrong skeptics to suspend disbelief. 

"I love turning the lights low and curling up with some good creepypasta, but the sensation of discovery is something everyone can enjoy," h64 said. "The sensation of discovery promotes truthseeking, and should not be allowed to be buried by the noise of carnal tricks constantly bombarding us, attempting to make us enslave ourselves to them."

Photo via Wikimedia | Illustration by Max Fleishman

A high school student from Maryland has become 4chan's latest target after he Instagrammed a photo of himself holding what looks like a fake gun to his dog’s head.

Kevin, a senior at Maryland's Tuscarora High School, uploaded the pic Tuesday afternoon.

The photo collected more than 36 likes before Kevin deleted it and the rest of his Instagram photos. But it was too late. 4chan's random imageboard /b/, one of the most controversial corners of the Internet, was already on his case.

"[T]his bitch needs a good raiding," one anonymous user wrote in a thread that has now been deleted. 

"[L]et’s make him think somebody found out where he lives and this girl is [gonna] say he sexually assaulted her, that’d scare the fuck out of him," added another.

/B/ tracked down Kevin’s account on Ask.fm, an anonymous Q&A forum that faced criticism after on-site cyberbullying was connected to a string of suicides. 4chan users harassed Kevin with messages like "I hope you are your mom die" and "u kno ed is gunna fux u up right fuu? u fucxed up real bad foo. get rdy."

/B/ also claimed to have sent the photo to Kevin's school and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

"I just sent a tip to the FBI with a link to the pics saying that he may be a threat to society," another anonymous user wrote.

The raid against Kevin comes about a month after /b/ hunted down a South Carolina teenager for kicking a kitten on Vine. The community made life a living hell for 17-year-old Walter Easley by dumping his personal information online, contacting his school and local newspaper, and prank-calling his home late at night. /B/'s tactics ultimately paid off. On Aug. 19, Easley was arrested and charged with cruelty to animals. 

Photo via Instagram

For 4chan, trolling doesn’t end at the grave.

Users of the notorious imageboard have taken over the Google+ profile of a dead teen who was a bullying victim, covering it with insults and profanity.

The profile page belonged to 15-year-old Bartlomiej "Bart" Palosz, who fatally shot himself with his family's shotgun on Aug. 27. According to the Stamford Advocate, Palosz was bullied on Facebook, had his Android phone smashed on the floor, was pushed down some stairs at Connecticut's Greenwich High School, and regularly insulted for his Polish accent.

Palosz's sister Beata believed her leaving for college affected him negatively. The two often ate lunch together at school.

"To be honest, I think he was a little afraid that he was not going to have me there anymore," Beata told the Advocate.  "We were pretty close, but either way he never told me much."

Palosz was very involved on Google+. He discussed anime, posted personal photos, and shared his own struggles. In hindsight, it’s painful to read.

"Hey if I were to stab my eye out due to school caused insanity, who would miss me?," he wrote on July 3.

"[D]oes anyone know if you can light a 12 gauge shotgun shell(slug not pellets) with a lighter?" he asked on July 10.

Palosz's suicide was the subject of a 66-page long thread on /b/, 4chan’s home to all things random, obscene, and horrible, on Tuesday night.

"Anyone who commits suicide deserved to be bullied," one user wrote. "Never have i came across anyone who was being bullied for 'no reason.' Honestly if you can't man the fuck up to being made fun of for decisions that YOU made then you shouldn't continue on in life."

This hatred spilled over to Palosz's Google+ profile, where /b/ raided his posts with the following messages. (Warning:  The posts contain obscene language and are likely not safe for work.)

Palosz's death comes just a month after 14-year-old Hannah Smith was found dead in her home. For weeks, the teen had been bullied on the question-and-answer site Ask.fm. She tried defending herself against the anonymous users encouraging her to kill herself and, in a morbid reference to Amanda Todd’s well-publicized 2012 suicide attempt, to "drink bleach."

Following Smith's death, /b/ flooded her Facebook remembrance page with comments calling her a "whore" and "bitch."

Palosz's Google+ page is still up. A friend of his named Tash D. has begun reporting /b/'s comments and responding to the trolls directly.

"Leave this kid alone,” Tash wrote, in part, in one emotional post. “HAVE SOME RESPECT."

Photo via Google+

"4chan got me super famous / had my shit on autoplay on /b/ / And it is time for me / to switch it up and change the game."

If you visited 4chan's random imageboard, /b/, on the afternoon of Aug. 21, these are the lyrics you would have heard coming from your computer. In between /b/’s usual porn posts and casual racism was a thread autoplaying the music video of Josip on Deck's latest track, "4chan."

/b/ seems like the last place any black, 20-year-old rapper would think of promoting his music. But for Josip—real name Josip Opara-nadi— it was the perfect match.

That's because Opara-nadi is the Internet's otaku rapper. Instead of fast cars and fast money, he's obsessed with Japanese anime.

"The Internet is a huge jungle but at the same it's so important to Otaku and so important to life," Opara-nadi told the Daily Dot from his home in Jackson, Miss. "So I knew that if I could gain access to the Internet by just being natural, then I could get these people to see who I was. Let me make a good-ass song and explain what people on 4chan do. I guess the people on 4chan liked it."

Opara-nadi has frequented 4chan since he was 12 years old, but he never expected the site to embrace his music—especially since 4chan’s original purpose has long been eclipsed by its most controversial imageboard, /b/. 

4chan was founded in the fall of 2003 by Christopher "moot" Poole, then a 15-year-old living in his parents’ New York City apartment. He envisioned the site as an American spinoff of Futaba Channel (2chan), a Japanese message board.

In its early days, 4chan offered a place for anime fans to share comics and images. The first two imageboards Poole created were /a/ (anime), and /b/ (random). Over the next nine years, /b/ would overshadow /a/—and the rest of 4chan—with its high profile hacks, vote-rigging vendettas, and justice-seeking brigades. It can also be one of the most racist forums on the Internet, featuring frequent threads about "n**gers." 

Despite all this noise, Opara-nadi felt right at home on /a/.

Through anime classics like Dragon Ball Z and FLCL, and an almost academic obsession with Tokyo district Akihabara (which he described as "a Disneyland for anime"), Opara-nadi got hooked on otaku culture.

The term “otaku” is generally used to describe "Japanese enthusiasts of animation and manga in the early 1980s," scholar Lawrence Eng writes in "The Origins of 'Otaku.'" 

The literal definition of the word, on the other hand, has resulted in these superfans being criticized and mocked. 

"Another common theory about the term 'otaku' is that it refers to the fact that otaku rarely leave their homes, since 'otaku' literally means 'your home' as well as 'you' (formal)," Eng explains. "This proposed etymology of the term is generally used in a deprecating manner, negatively stereotyping otaku as being antisocial and isolated from the world at large."

With his wealth of otaku knowledge and his musical talents, Opara-nadi began recording at home, but his music went mostly unnoticed for years. That all changed last spring with the help of the biggest Dragon Ball Z fan on the planet.

The video opens with a scrawny black teenager starring into the camera, explaining how all he ever wanted to be when he grew up was a Super Saiyan, one of Dragon Ball Z’s superhumans who summon their power by yelling at the top of their lungs. YouTube user KillaKarisma confesses that he feels "worthless" and wishes he could be as powerful and exciting as the superheroes he idolizes. 

"I feel like anything you set your mind to, your mind can create that force," KillaKarisma explains from his bedroom in Atlanta. "Because your mind is this powerful machine. Whatever you set it to, and you believe, and you work toward achieving it, you can do it. I believe I can be a Super Saiyan."

At about the 3:40 mark in the video, KillaKarisma makes good on his promise by popping his shirt off and letting out a primal scream you'd never imagine a kid of his size could produce.

KillaKarisma's video has since been seen more than 7.6 million times on YouTube. At least one of those views came from Opara-nadi.

But while most of those millions of viewers mocked Karisma, Opara-nadi recognized him as a kindred spirit.

Last July, Opara-nadi flew to Georgia to record a music video with KillaKarisma for the song "Anime Pussy." They shot in KillaKarisma's bedroom, wearing winter hats and palming Nintendo Gameboys while they jammed out to the chiptune beat. They also threw in some screenshots of 4chan's hentai board, /h/, a place to find all sorts of anime porn. That decision ended up making all the difference.

"Anime Pussy" collected more than 50,000 views in its first 24 hours, and ultimately caught the attention of 4chan moderators. They contacted Opara-nadi and asked if they could feature the video on the site (which, according to Alexa, ranks in the top 400 most visited in the U.S.). By the end of the month, it had collected 200,000 views. 

A year later, Opara-nadi released "4chan," an ode to the site that helped shape his otaku obsession. Moderators once again let his music autoplay for anyone who visited 4chan.

Despite his apparent sincerity, /b/ wasn’t sure if the rapper was serious or just a master troll. 

"You've derailed this entire site with one simple fucking post," one anonymous user wrote. "You magnificent fuck."

In the end, it doesn't matter—Opara-nadi is making music his full-time job. And although it’s a full-time job he has yet to collect an honest paycheck from, he's not discouraged. 

Opara-nadi explained to the Daily Dot that mainstream rappers like Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West have incorporated parts of otaku culture into their formulas for success. In 2008, Fiasco formed the rock band Japanese Cartoon and featured anime-inspired art on its album. The same went for West's 2007 album "Graduation." He even took his anime love a step further when he infamously played anime porn during a listening party.

Will Opara-nadi ever achieve this level of success? He thinks so.

On the hook of "4chan," he calls himself Otaku Kami-sama—"Otaku God"—and that combination of geeky obsession and braggadocio is more than just a punchline. It could be enough to inspire his fellow otaku to stop hiding from the world and take pride in their hobbies.

"I wanted to be an otaku leader," Opara-nadi says. "I knew I could encourage them to believe in what they love more by making music."

Photo via @josipondeck/Twitter

If there were ever a need for a 4chan Bat-Signal, the time is now. 

Two 15-year-old girls in Maine were arrested Monday after they tweeted a video allegedly showing them stuffing an 8-week-old kitten into a microwave and turning it on.

The teenagers have been charged with animal cruelty, reported the New York Daily News. Because the girls are minors, their names were not released. 

In the past, age hasn’t stopped 4chan’s random imageboard /b/, the Internet's Sodom and Gomorrah, from digging up personal info of anyone messing with baby cats and dogs, then making their lives hell.

In August, /b/ raged against a South Carolina teenager for kicking a kitten on Vine. /b/ retaliated against 17-year-old Walter Easley by posting his personal information online, contacting his school and local newspaper, and prank-calling his home. /B/'s tactics ultimately paid off. On Aug. 19, Easley was arrested and charged with cruelty to animals. 

Anonymous, the 4chan-spawned hacktivist collective, went after two teenage girls at a U.K. boarding school after they were caught on video throwing a kitten back and forth until it lost consciousness. The title of the document that ID’d the girls and their school: “Don’t fuck with the kittens.”

A week ago, /b/ hunted down the information for Kevin, a senior at Maryland's Tuscarora High School, who uploaded the following photo to his Instagram:

Eventually, Kevin deleted it and the rest of his photos. But it was too late. 

"[T]his bitch needs a good raiding," one anonymous user wrote in a /b/ thread containing his full name and links to his Twitter profile and Facebook page.

As was the case with the cat Easley abused, the kitten from Maine was retrieved by authorities and is in good shape. It is currently up for adoption at the Animal Refuge League in South Portland. She's been renamed Miracle, WGME reports.

Cumberland County District Attorney's Office is handling the case against both girls. The teenagers are expected in court in November. 

H/T New York Daily News | Photo by david_shane/Flickr

After three years and 77 videos, one of the greatest Internet mysteries ever constructed will come to an end on Sept. 24.

It’s a YouTube account called  Pronunciation Book, and since 4chan's home of all things paranormal, /x/, discovered it in early July, curious fans have dissected every last syllable and rumor from every last one of its videos. 

Now these anonymous sleuths might have uncovered another conspirator trying to capitalize on the Pronunciation Book buzz.

The video is called "Government Whistleblower Exposes Hip Hop Conspiracy," and it has inspired members of /x/ and 4chan's random imageboard /b/ to don their shiniest tinfoil hats. In it, a man named Robert Connors claims to be a former Department of Defense operative with information on how the government uses hip-hop music to manipulate people. 

Connors calls the initiative “Operation Sedgwick" before promising to release more information on Sept. 23. At the end of the video, the image cuts to black as Connors provides an alleged recording of Michael Jackson's final phone call before his death.

"The majority of shit on /x/ is bullshit, at least this has some basis in reality," one anonymous /x/ user wrote. "I'm not going to just choose ignorance for no reason when all I have to do is watch this story."

But not everyone was so convinced. After some digging, /x/ discovered that Connors is an author trying to hock his latest novel, Red Krypto, a story of cyberespionage. Connors is also an adjunct professor at New England's Endicott College, where he teaches a course on Emergency Management in Homeland Security. 

"I just read that the average novel is about 130,000 words. Yikes," Connors blogged in January. "That's a lot of writing, but for a first time author, I hear 110,000 is the right number. That will be about 440 pages at 250 words/page. The other consideration is how many pages/chapter. Guess I'm going to have to look at some of the novels I've read to see how many pages they average for each chapter."

Many suspect—and the Daily Dot has confirmed—that Pronunciation Book is a viral marketing campaign. It’s quite possible that Connors modeled a promotional campaign for his book on the YouTube channel’s success. After all, Pronunciation Book inspired /x/ to create a 100-plus-page document full of theories—maybe the rookie author hoped to harness the imageboard’s obsessive energy for himself.

With both Pronunciation Book and Connors due to reveal their secrets early next week, we won’t have to wait long for answers.

Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III