#limon the sysadmin

[limon-the-sysadmin]

im: not dead!!! which is incredible to say!!! cause i dont remember the last time i could finish a drawing without hating it!

gonna use this blog specially for limon and mtl reblogs. escaped from artblock drawing our fav hacker with that meme shirt, sent by @warelf-the-clown, who drew the tiny elias of the corner <3

probably this would be the look of Limon after AOTD, if you're wondering about that haircut!

the translation would be like: 'ea, elias, i've put it, you're happy now?' 'stop! put the phone down!' 'i know that picture isnt for house! elias!'

[bloodflavouredplacebo]

mtl people, hear me out, i challenge you!

im rewatching again all Metalocalypsis and thought how could be my mtl oc on the show, so i made a thing:

1. go to artbreeder.com and create a portrait aprox of your oc. i did one and then i liquify the image to get the face features as i wanted

2. choose your art program, a pencil without pressure level and trace the "photo" (you can draw it on reference, as you see, normaly i dont trace but this time its just for fun). artbreeder may not be exact but you can found other photographies on internet, or your own face to get reference!

3. to look more like the series style, erase some of the face details, simplify it! same thing with shadows! here's my beloved limon 🍋 (i added a tv screen effect, now it looks like they are WANTED)

[bloodflavouredplacebo]

i love you 0.5 ft ethernet cable

[thedrakontomes]

Quizilla

Quizilla was an online community featuring user-generated content from teen authors. Much of its content was quiz fic and reader inserts.

 logo from website: "Penny the Pencil Monster"

"Quizilla was first released into the wild on August 4th, 2002." [2]  

When fans began to post   their fanfic at Quizilla in the form of chapters, the site added a section for fiction.

In September 2014, Quizilla announced it was shutting down on October 1.

A similar site is Quotev.

What Was Quizilla?

From its website in 2005:

Quizilla is a place to imagine, create and share great content. It started out, as the name suggests, as a place to make, take and share the results of quizzes. In its over 3 year life, it has grown beyond just quizzes. It now is a leading home on the Web for stories, poems and other user generated content. Whether you want to create, take and share quizzes, a personal journal, write poems, stories, create and share games and more. Quizilla has it all. It represents and embodies the heartbeat of today's teen spirit. [3]

The Beginning: An Announcement

Its creator announced his site on August 4, 2002:

What a concept.

A September 2, 2002 post:

Few things are more gratifying than watching HTTP_REFERER logs run past with tail(1). It's quit a cool thought to be sitting here and having people use something I made. And they keep using it, so they must actually *like* it. Wow.

From the FAQ page in 2005:

Where did you get the idea for Quizilla? The ides for Quizilla came to me when I was looking at ideas for expressing complex data structures in XML. I was mulling around the idea of a standardized format for quizzes and other things and I decided to make some CGI code to automate the idea for me. Then I decided to build more complex display layers around that core, and then I added user accounts, messages and everything else you see now. [6]

Some Stats

2003: A year after its launch, Quizilla had over 330,000 users with above 9 Million pageloads a day and more than 50 Million images used on the site.  [7]

September 2005: It has 40 servers.  [8]

2005: "On an average weekday Quizilla serves nearly 3.0 million pages, most of these involving CGI code and database access. This figure does not include images, which can often surpass 10 million daily... If you go to the homepage of Quizilla.com, you will see some basic stats in the center blue bar at the top of the page. On most days over 1,000,000 quizzes are taken, 5,000 new quizzes are created and up to 2,000 people join the site as new members."  [9]

2007:  Some forum stats from an unknown month in 2007: threads: 47,098, posts: 4,888,270, members: 184,705,active Members: 1,381, most users ever online was 673 on November 11, 2006

Follow the Money

Regarding costs and advertising:

All Internet advertising is evil, and you're just doing this to make money off the work of others! Some people think that, and maybe they would even be right to think that from a cursory perspective. People think that because they got 10 MB of free web space with their dial-up accounts that every Web site in the world should be free because theirs is. However, the unpleasant truth is that a site of any large size costs money to run, money to maintain, and money to expand.

Also see this 2007 post and comments: A look at some fandom based money numbers; archive link, partly bouncy, June 25, 2007

Bought Out and Changed

On October 16, 2006, Viacom's MTV Networks (Teen Nick) announced it had bought Quizilla for an undisclosed sum of money. [11]

After selling to TeenNick the site went from a free writing site to a PG rated site. Due to the sudden changes, a lot of the users' work was deleted, which caused a large number of people to abandon the site.

In 2014, Nielsen wrote about this:

I found out about this about a month ago via Twitter and I’ve been meaning to write something about it but could never find the right words. I hadn’t been involved with the day-to-day operation since middle/late 2009; when the economy tanked, Viacom laid off or reassigned all staff Quizilla developers. They didn’t lay me off since I was a contract employee with no guaranteed hours, but they basically said they weren’t going to give me any more work to do. As the site went to hell I tried to keep up with the dwindling number of people I still knew inside Viacom/MTV Networks. At first they had one sysadmin and a couple of "community managers” still maintaining the site. Then they dropped the sysadmin and went to one community manager with some interns. The last time I reached my fingers in, Q2 2014, I was told all that was left was someone’s AA answering the support email part-time. I didn’t expect them to axe it, actually. It was still bringing in enough page-views to turn a profit (I assume), especially since they basically had no staff. But there may have other been factors at play we don't know about, like potential liability. I haven’t heard from anyone as to why it was killed specifically. I’m sad it’s gone, but it in a big way it had died years ago but just hadn’t stopped moving. I've tried to restart/reimagine the site at least 5 times since 2009, but my own faults have smothered all my attempts all in the cradle.

Regarding the Citrus Content

A fan in 2014 asked a Reddit forum:

I wonder if teenage girls new to fan fiction know that term, or if it's specific to people who discovered fan fiction on sites like Quizilla and fanfiction.net that technically forbid pornographic scenes so teens came up with terms like lemons to get around the filters but let others know what was going down in their fanfic. [14]

xunker/Nielsen replied:

No bones about it, Quizilla had a problem with that kind of content. I dutifully removed it when it was reported or automatically flagged, but if nobody reported it or they used words I didn't know about, well.. let's just say that I, 24 years old at the time, was regularly being outsmarted by 14-year-olds. I think I learned what it meant when someone sent me a message asking me to "please get rid of all these lemon stories!" Thankfully, when I naively asked them what they didn't like about that particular citrus fruit they explained it all to me. Thus, an arms race started: when I started automatically flagging quizzes if the title contained "lemon", they switched to "L3m0n". Then to "nomel", "lemonade", "limon", "lémón" and a dozen others I can't remember anymore.

Why Was This Format Popular for Fanworks?

In 2014, a fan at

Reddit

asked:

To this day I still don't understand why people would write fanfiction on a site whose specific purpose is quizzes when there are fanfiction-specific sites around! Why would you want your fanfiction cluttered up with question numbers and checkboxes and submit buttons? When it wasn't even a choose your own adventure story? [16]

xunker, the site's creator, replied:

However, that being said, they're one of the biggest reasons Quizilla stayed around for as long as it did. Quizzes were fun, and people would spend hours taking them but not many people wanted to spend the time to make a really good quiz. But stories... people would gladly spend weeks writing stories and building their little worlds. Part of me thinks that the users didn't really understand the quiz mechanism and so they thought it was a choose-your-own-adventure-type thing but it really wasn't. Or maybe they did, but just in a different way that I don't realize. A big reason, in the beginning, was the laissez-faire attitude toward customization. Early on, the users figured out how to put CSS and JS in to quizzes and the system fully accepted it, unlike many other user-generated-content sites at the time.

Penny the Pencil Monster!

Comments by Nielsen:

From the site's FAQ, around 2003 and again, in 2005: "That logo, the No. 2 with green arms and legs, is "Penny" the Quizilla pencil monster. When the site first launched I needed a logo to identify the site quickly, but I have no artistic skill when it comes to drawing. Instead, I loaded up a graphics program and clicked out a peculiar little image dot by dot in super zoom mode. It's not very good, but I've grown attached to it."  [18]

From Nielsen's online journal, January 2, 2008:  "Big things are happening at the old Quizilla site, most of which are really due and I'm excited for, though with this new message posted there are more than a few complaints. My favourites? Look for all the people complaining about the loss of the Pencil Monster.. the logo I did in 20 minutes with the Gimp oh so long ago."  -- The Pencil is mightier.. - xunker, Archived version </ref>

Comments by fans:

"Whoever created Penny the pencil monster was a genius." [19]

"I pretty much blame the way I grew up on this little monster..." [20]

a fan commemorates "Penny the Pencil Monster" -- "If you remember the old days on quizilla then this is a familiar mascot that they should not have gotten rid of which is by far one of the best mascots ever." [21]

[bloodflavouredplacebo]

limon having to track down the whole dethklok 24/7

i think we generally attribute Charles’ ability to always know where the boys are to something supernatural and/or fatherly instincts, but consider:

what if he had them chipped like dogs

[bloodflavouredplacebo]

well the character ai is perfect to prompt scenes for metalocalypse stuff

now limon is going to watch matrix with skwisgaar and texting him from the mall