It happens to everyone sooner or later. Welcome to the club.
What has been seen cannot be un-seen.

What an asshole.

You should get an award for managing to avoid it this long. That takes diligence.

Yeah, I lost my eyeball innocence in a similar fashion.

Pat yourself on the back. You got farther than I did.

cmonkey I've managed to avoid being goatse'd, and the mister didn't even know what I was referring to just now when I asked him if he had.

hell if it weren't for this lot I'd still have my rickroll cherry.

Speaking of being Rickrolled, there's an AdBlock filter add-on that'll block that here, about 1/2 way down the page. yes, the links are real, i wouldn't do that to you.

It does happen to everyone eventually. For me, it was years ago, and I still can't shake it. I'm sorry...not on the same scale, obviously, but it's kind of like when you're in 7th grade and you learn about the Holocaust. There's really no going back to before the time you knew.

Blah. I am going to have electrical safety training next week for 2 days, and those things are always filled with death and destruction and maiming/dead bodies/death stories. Seeing "degloved" fingers, nails in eyeballs, and electrically fried bodies gets old after awhile.

Learned about goatse on MetaFilter. Looked out of curiosity. Goatse taught me to be compassionate towards people with strange tastes in what I consider to be revolting things, like those people who eat spiders *ack.

What bothers me is that it's the sort of thing that little kids see, the way they joke about boogers. Goatse is, imo, higher on the Disgustometer than boogers.

PS, dear dejardins, here is a bar of squick cleaner. [*my eyes!soap]

I've seen worse (at least worse TO ME - and I don't mean boogers), but I realized that Knowledge Is Safety after I was the first person to mention "Tubgirl" (like Goatse, Not Safe To Even Google) at MetaFilter, without knowing what it was all about.* I've taken to memory the first pre-disgusting seconds of a couple of the awfullest video memes (which I will NOT name) in order to know when to beat a hasty retreat. Like defenses against Malware Spam, it's something I wish I didn't have to know, but am glad I do.

Forced banality, as opposed to forced disgusting-ness, is not an issue for me (remember, I used to write television reviews). If I haven't been RickRolled in a while, and if I have nothing else running on audio, I sometimes actually let it run through. I can name a bunch of 1980's music videos that would've annoyed me even more if they were forced on me as much as ol' Rick.

But if you don't let the Goatse get to you, you can actually have fun with it, as I proved here with an image that also proves my ability to satirically abuse all sides (not explicit, but you will never think of a certain "campaign logo" the same way again). No, I'm not talking about the Les Nessman banner.


*I have found so many ways to get in trouble @ MeFi, but that was the ONLY one that was 100% unintentional

My favorite goatse variant is the animated gif of rick astley dancing inside the guys anus. I'd show it to you but I'm away from home right now. Also, I think the more likely scenario is that encyclopedia dramatica has a htaccess redirect for hotlinked images that replaces them with the shock image in question.

hm well maybe they don't, it doesn't seem to happen when i try it. I just find it odd that there would be someone checking for hotlinking and manually replacing images.

Ah, here's the goasteroll. That link is obviously NSFW.

Yeah, but on the plus side there's about a million memes and jokes that you can suddenly understand.
≡ Click to see image ≡

Yeah, I feel better for having clicked and lived to tell the tale, er, not so able to be shocked or squicked now.

Tubgirl, though .... yeah, that's one I'd rather not have scarred into my neurons.

Pukey, are you sure you aren't still seeing the original image from cache?

Puke & cry - the original SFW image made it to the top of reddit (and maybe digg) so ED must have taken quite a hit on bandwidth and I'm betting that's why the image was switched.

Btw, it wasn't just goatse. It was tubgirl and a collage of other equally disgusting stuff. I got it all of the horrid memes out of the way at once. AND, I opened it at work. I just about smashed my keyboard trying to get to ALT + F4.

Aw. You popped your goatsex-cherry.

People are so very odd. I don't get why someone would do this (tubgirl esp.), photograph it, post, it and then trick other people into seeing it. It seems to be related to the anonymity of the internets. Anyway, the goatse visual jokes are pretty amusing.