Web Video / Tales From the Internet

The man and his logo

Tales From the Internet is a YouTube and Storyfire series created and hosted by Twitch streamer and guitarist Justin Whang. It focuses on stories of bizarre and often fairly obscure online content. Topics frequently include various memes, viral photos and videos, rumors, hoaxes and other oddities that have emerged from the Internet since its inception. In each episode, Whang explores the topic by delving into its origins, attempting to discover who is responsible for the content and explaining how it took on a life of its own. Many of the episodes cover content from the late 1990s and early 2000s (i.e., pre-social media) but some venture into The New '10s as well.

Whang's channel also features some spinoffs on the formula, such as Angelfire Adventures (where he looks up old websites hosted on Angelfire) and Gaming Mysteries (centered around trivia from games and related media).

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This series provides examples of:

• Agony of the Feet:
  • Averted in "CUT OFF MY FEET". Paul Morgan deliberately attempted to chop off his feet with a guillotine as a form of medical necessity, which thanks to his paralysis, he wouldn't be able to feel the pain.
  • While there wasn't any pain involved during the moment in question since the foot was removed under anaesthetic, the titular Redditor in "The Redditor Who Ate His Own Foot" certainly qualifies; after having one of his feet critically injured during a motorcycle accident (which in contrast, must have been extremely painful), he finds that his foot is too damaged to ever work normally again, and has it amputated. He then manages to get the hospital to agree to allow him to take the now-fresh cut of meat home with him, carves it up into strips of meat, then serves them in tacos for himself and a few friends.
• Ambiguous Situation: Though Whang admits that the 30-year-old Kairo Seijuro taking a 16-year-old girl out to a secluded island, supposedly to train her in swordsmanship, definitely sounds suspicious, he still doesn't want to jump to conclusions, because if there's anyone who would take a 16-year-old girl out to a secluded island and genuinely intend to train her in swordsmanship without any ulterior motive, it would be Kairo, since he's a textbook example of a Chuunibyou.
• Artistic License – Biology: Whang notes in the video about the Jolly Rancher story that, simply put, the story depends on a medical condition of which there's no proof of it existing.^{Context (Warning: Squick)}The story is about a man who supposedly was giving oral sex to a woman while have a Jolly Rancher in his mouth, lost it in the woman's nether regions, and then retrieved what he believed was the candy, only to discover that he actually retrieved a "gonorrhea nodule", a bloody, pus-filled capsule, revealing that the woman had said STD. Whang says that investigating about the illness turns out that gonorrhea in itself does not produce any such "nodule".
• Ass Shove: The Legend of the Jar Man centers around a shock video of a man named Alexei sticking a glass jar up his rectum, only for the jar to break.
• Bestiality Is Depraved:
  • The infamous "Colby 2012" story starts off with a man discovering to his horror that his teenage son has been sodomizing the family dog, and it only gets worse from there.
  • "Boy Caught Making Out With Dog" doesn't feature any real-life acts of Bestiality, instead discussing the webcomic Raine Dog and the infamous scene of the titular character kissing her owner.
  • "Mr. Hands" involves the infamous shock video where a man has sex with a horse and the zoophilia community of Washington at that time due to the state's then lack of bestiality laws.
  • "Orangutan Prostitute!," which deals with truly horrifying case from Indonesia.
• Big "NO!": Kairo Seijuro's last words before drowning were allegedly this, most likely because he realised his kayak with his swords was drifting away while he struggled in the water.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Grape-Kun: The Penguin With an Anime Waifu ends this way; Grape-kun dies of old age after finding love with a cut-out of Hululu from Kemono Friends, but he is memorialized with a brand new cut-out of him and Hululu standing side-by-side—in one form or another, they will always be together.
  • Orangutan Prostitute! ends with Pony finally safe from the brothel's madam, living in the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Center. However, due to her horrifying formative years spent being violated by the brothel's clients, she can never return into the wilderness as a true orangutan should. On top of that, she doesn't want to mate with male orangutans either (and really, who can blame her?).
• Body Horror: Videos like BME Pain Olympics and The Legend of the Jar Man deal with people graphically mutilating themselves for the purpose of sexual thrills (though for the latter, it was accidental).
  • An especially horrifying example comes from the Blowfly Girl episode, in which the eponymous Blowfly Girl very nearly killed herself in an attempt to gain stimulation through the use of larvae, rotting meat, and an extremely disgusting and visceral action that ended with a case of myiasis (A parasitic infestation of the body with the larvae of numerous species of insects) so severe it resulted in hospitalisation and permanent damage to her body.
• Book Ends: The Forgotten Ninja Turtles Character starts off with Whang talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise at the height of its popularity. The episode ends with Whang explaining how the failure of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III marked the beginning of the franchise's decline in popularity.
• Celebrity Impersonator: One episode is about a homeless, drugged out conman who would trick gay men into thinking he was Mike Portnoy, the drummer of Dream Theater, go back to their house/apartment for sex, and then rob the place before they woke up the next morning. Though he did apparently look a little bit like Portnoy, if you saw the two of them side-by-side you could clearly tell them apart. Instead, he convinced people he was Portnoy primarily by knowing a ridiculous amount of trivia about Portnoy and Dream Theater, down to memorizing old Dream Theater tour schedules so he'd know what cities Portnoy would have been in on specific dates. The chief weakness in his ruse was that he was apparently not a very good drummer.
• Chuunibyou: Kairo Seijuro, from The Legend of Kairo Seijuro, believes himself to be a skilled Japanese swordsman and hero to the community. In actuality, he's a mentally unstable white American who based this new identity of his from his love of samurai anime.
• Creepy Painting: The episode about The Hands Resist Him, complete with an eBay seller writing a really long story about how it is supposedly haunted.
• Dawson Casting: Lampshaded in-universe in the Our First Time episode; the scam revolved around two supposed 18-year olds that were going to livestream themselves losing their virginities to each other, but both of them clearly look decades older, which Whang pokes fun at several times throughout the video. (They were eventually revealed to be two actors in their 30s.)
• Deadpan Snarker: Justin himself delivers many of his discussions on the channel with a professional tone but will drop jokes and a brand of trolling tone— all with a stoic face.
• Embarrassing Last Name: When trying to work out why his videos keep getting demonetised, Justin Whang guesses that his last name makes YouTube's censors think his videos are about penises.^note While he has made videos about things like the man who went to Reddit claiming he had two penises, they are in the minority. Though Whang himself seems the complete opposite of embarrassed by his name, seeing as how he uses Last-Name Basis for all his branding and even called his alternate channels "Whang Uncut" and "Let's Play With Whang".
• Even Evil Has Standards: Sure, sites like 4chan and Ogrish may revel in photos of real life gore and other forms of debauchery, but one thing they won't stand for is mistreating cats in any way.
• Extreme Omnivore: A particularly gross example in the case of the Messytails episode, about a furry who had an unhealthy obsession with coprophagia— especially with the consumption of his own "product." The person regularly posted detailed tweets on how he desired to consume the substance and eventually began doing so, sometimes mixing it with chemical lubricants not meant to be ingested. It's often speculated by internet users that this obsession resulted in him being institutionalised, dying from some kind of enteric disease or poisoning, or both. An update video revealed that there were posts claiming both that he was institutionalised and eventually moved on from his dangerous obsession or that he died due to his condition, and in turn revealed that both posts were fakes. Thus, the ultimate fate and whereabouts of Messytails remains a mystery, and any of the three potential outcomes are just as plausible as each other.
• Fake Memories: A recurring theme in his videos, mainly his lost media ones, is people claiming the existence of something from their past, only for it to ultimately be the result of severe misremembering.
  • Whang made a series of videos about the rumor that Sinbad played a genie in a '90s film called Shazam. He ultimately demonstrated that there was no such film and the rumor was nothing more than an example of the Mandela Effect.^note There was a '90s film about a genie, but it was titled Kazaam and it starred Shaquille O'Neal. Sinbad getting roped into the rumor appears to stem from either conflating the time he had dressed as a genie for a 1994 marathon of Sinbad the Sailor movies or him having a prominent role in the '90s family film Jingle All the Way.
  • Turned out to be the origin of the "Evil Farming Game" — a reddit user described a Harvest Moon-style farming sim they once played which started out normal, but then featured a dark twist where the protagonist murders his wife, and the rest of the game is spent both tending to your farm as normal while also trying to hide the body from the police, who can randomly show up at any time to investigate. As it turned out, Vinesauce member Joel had riffed on the N64 game Body Harvest during a stream, saying the title made it sound like a Harvest Moon horror game and speculating on what the plot of such a game would be; the original poster misremembered this as an actual game they had played, possibly aided by the fact that someone did a fan animation for the audio, and the fact that the poster would regularly watch Joel's streams in bed, falling asleep along the way.
• Gag Penis:
  • The Redditor with Two Penises, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Though it's implied he made it all up for attention.
  • Meatspin! is about the eponymous Shock Site, well known for involving a trans woman spinning around her very elongated penis while in a "reverse cowgirl" position.
  • "Mr. Hands" has a section where Whang highlights Kenneth Pinyan's oddly-pierced penis.
• G.I.R.L.: In "He Almost Got Away With It!", a Twitter account called Soya No Sohi and focusing on motorcycles got little attention, until the photos of motorcycles and scenic views from biking trips started including a beautiful young woman... who was actually a 50-60 year old man using a gender swap filter from an app - followers had noticed clues before, but he opted to preempt any scandal by revealing himself on national TV. The story had a surprisingly happy ending: the reveal actually increased Soya No Sohi's followers, and the older followers stayed because they might have been initially drawn by the "thirst trap" photos but had stayed for the personality and motorcycle knowledge; meanwhile the man behind the account said that the experience made him experience a different side of himself, reflect on gender roles, and become an LGBTQ ally.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: When discussing the Reddit decomposing fetus story, when mentioning that the woman on whom the decomposing fetus was found was subjected to a transvaginal ultrasound, Whang mentions that "transvaginal ultrasound" sounds like "a pretty awesome name for a prog rock band." He then adds that he might be thinking about Transatlantic.
• Gross-Out Show: Much of the videos deal with extremely disgusting, grotesque, painful, and/or horrific Internet stories. There may be some videos that do not revolve around such topics and may even be fairly innocent, but most of them involve horrific and/or disgusting incidents. Most of the time, visuals are mercifully not shown, but the textual descriptions as narrated by Whang are still more than enough to do the job.
• Hope Spot: During Woody Harrelson's disastrous Reddit AMA, there's a certain point where he starts to answer a question about veganism that actually felt genuine and had nothing to do with the movie Rampart, which he was forcefully trying to promote. Redditors upvoted his answer with hope that it'll mean honest answers from then on. But alas, after that one question, it was right back to Rampart-related answers.
  • Many of the unsolved mysteries have moments where new leads come up only to not amount to much or at all.
• Horrifying the Horror: Apparently, a 4chan user who managed to watch Saki Sanobashi was so traumatized by it that they cried themself to sleep.
  Whang: A 4chan user getting that upset by a violent anime? I'm not convinced.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • He has covered infamous internet cannibal Armin Meiwes and his "dinner date" with Bernd Brandes.
  • He also covered the mysterious picture of a Chinese man eating a baby, though that ended up being a piece of performance art by artist Zhu Yu, who used a fake baby.
  • The episode promptly titled The Redditor Who Ate His Own Foot. To get specific, it involved a man and his friends willingly eating tacos made with meat carefully prepared from his amputated foot that he had removed after a motorcycle accident disabled it, just to see what human flesh tasted like.
• Indecipherable Lyrics: The lyrics to The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet. There's naturally no official lyric sheet, so there's some debate as to what the words are— it doesn't help that the vocals are a little low in the mix, the singer has a bit of an odd accent, and the lines people seem to generally agree on seem to lean towards Word Salad Lyrics. What most can agree on is that the most likely title for the song is either "Like the Wind" or "Blind the Wind", from two different interpretations of the first verse's first line, or "Check It In, Check It Out", from the first line of the chorus.
• Jerkass Has a Point: As Justin points out in his Silent Hill Circumcision Meltdown, many people were telling user AlexSheperd that they agreed with his opinions on circumcision. They just didn't think the Silent Hill wiki was the best place to discuss these issues. Neither did he endear himself or his opinions to others when he later turned out to be one of the wiki's admins and tried using these admin powers to silence anyone who debated with him, whether they agreed or not.
• Made of Iron: The infamous "Jar Man", who shoved a glass jar up his ass only for it to accidentally shatter inside of him. He made absolutely no sound when it happened or even when he was digging the glass out simply because he "didn't feel like it", and never sought medical attention because he was too embarrassed to tell a doctor what happened. He just stuffed some cotton up there and went to work as normal. Of course, he is Russian.
• Medical Horror:
  • The episode covering the Reddit anecdote from a nurse that was dubbed "The Swamps of Dagobah" after one of the descriptions of the gruesome situation described... which involved an obese woman with an epic case of Perineal Abscess.
  • There was another story on Reddit from a former medical student (this story being the entire reason they're a former medical student) involving another morbidly obese woman and a decomposing lost pregnancy with tons of black ooze and bad smell.
• Mermaid Problem: In his video about the website selling supermodels' eggs, Whang says that to breed with The Little Mermaid you'd have to jizz over eggs she's laid because that's how fish work.
• No Ending: Several mysteries Whang has covered just end with no resolution in sight, primarily because the people originally involved in uncovering them lose interest after multiple dead ends.
• Non-Indicative Name: One video focuses on Panchiko's album D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L - despite the title the album could be categorized as either Alternative Rock or shoegazing (Whang consistently calls it the latter), but definitely not Death Metal — along with its status as lost media, part of the internet's initial fascination with the album was probably due to the incongruity between the title, contents, and cover image (black and white manga art of an offended-looking young girl, sourced from the manga Mint na Bokura).
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: When covering the Silent Hill Circumcision Meltdown, Whang needs to point out that the lengthy rants about circumcision the video is about are placed in a wiki about Silent Hill, a game without any references about circumcision whatsoever.
• N-Word Privileges: Discussed in the Reddit decomposing fetus story. As Whang relates the story, he finds many derogatory terms related to the weight of the morbidly obese woman on whom the titular decomposing fetus was found. Whang speculates that, given that the account the story was posted from is named "fatmama923", the poster was most likely an obese woman herself, hence why the poster felt so free to use those terms.^note Keep in mind that the story also states that the morbidly obese woman was rather uncooperative through the operation, which certainly couldn't have helped her get No Sympathy from the (former) medical student who posted the story.
• Old Shame: As noted in the video about the song, the anonymous creator of "Sea of Retards" is less ashamed of the song itself, and more the fact that the only song they've made to become famous contains the R-slur in the title.
• Otaku: Kairo Seijuro is seen by those close to him as a deranged individual who used elements from Rurouni Kenshin and several samurai manga to craft his fictional backstory.
• Painting the Medium: The PTKFGS episode itself received the PTKFGS treatment in its title and thumbnail. The title labels it "Stories from Online" instead of "Tales from the Internet", the red "WHANG" logo in the top left corner of the thumbnail is now a green "JUSTIN" logo in the top right, and a different picture of Whang than usual is used, again moved from the left side of the thumbnail to the right.
• Poe's Law: Discussed in-universe with Bonsai Kitten. Despite being an obvious parody website, it was still seen as a sincere animal abuse website that got the attention of several news outlets, Moral Guardians, and even the FBI.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Discussed in-universe during his series on The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet. In the fifth video on the topic, Whang goes over a rumor suggesting that the song was written and performed by Greek Synth-Pop band Statues in Motion thanks to the vocalists sounding similar, leading one of the surviving members to give conflicting accounts on the veracity and details of the claim, which Whang attributes to just how much time had passed since the band was active. Whang notes that the main pieces of evidence against the rumor are the band's different style and the fact that they broke up in 1983, whereas the synth widely thought to be used in the song didn't become available to the general public until 1984 (though it had a limited launch the year prior).
• Pro Wrestling Episode: Videos like Two Ultimate Warriors? (about the rumor that Ultimate Warrior was replaced with another performer for his 1992 return), The Lost Cartoon About Vince McMahon's Ass (which covers a lost cartoon about Vince McMahon's ass becoming sentient and gaining muscles) and The Rusev 9/11 Tattoo Reddit Bet (the story of an infamous Humiliating Wager made on the r/SquaredCircle subreddit) are about wrestling, more specifically the WWE.
• Real-Person Fic: Whang spends an episode of the Angelfire Adventures series delving into fanpages devoted to Sonic Underground and eventually finds one of these. Namely, one of the Sonic fanfic authors also wrote script fics about himself and other members of the military^note assuming any of them actually exist fighting against Osama bin Laden In the Style of Sonic Underground. Needless to say, Whang is baffled at the portrayal of bin Laden as a Saturday morning cartoon villain.
• Riddle for the Ages: In most cases, the viewer comes away knowing who created the content being discussed by the end of the episode. There have also been a few cases of episodes with vague endings getting a follow-up video that gives more concrete answers (such as The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet above). But sometimes, the identities of those responsible remain a mystery; the Max Headroom incident is a prime example.
• Running Gag: Often when the topic revolves around or ends up mentioning a Reddit thread, he will reference the site's reputation in some other online communities of having a lot of Know-Nothing Know-It-All or just plain lying users.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The entire "Evil Farming Game" saga ends with this trope. It was discovered that Joel from Vinesauce had riffed on the N64 title Body Harvest during a stream, saying it sounded like a Harvest Moon horror game and speculated on what the plot would be; the original poster fell asleep while watching this stream and later misremembered this as an actual game they had played, which means that after 6 long years it was found out that there was no game at all. This is slightly downplayed in that somebody has started development of an actual Evil Farming Game. There's also the part where several posters who claimed to remember playing the game mentioned it having a fishing minigame, which Joel did not mention in his plot speculation, meaning there could be a different Evil Farming Game actually out there somewhere.
• Shout-Out: Videos usually have a short intro sequence that includes either music from video games or a Chip Tune style instrumental cover song— the song usually relates to the topic of the video, but only in a way you'd notice if you recognized it from the source material. For instance, the "Boneghazi" video deals with a "Tumblr witch" openly selling bones found in a graveyard online (and the ensuing drama): the title screen is set to a chiptune cover of "Dig Up Her Bones" by The Misfits.
• Signing Off Catchphrase: Each episode ends with Whang saying "If you like this video, you might like the one I made about [insert topic here]. I'm outta here." This is usually followed by an ending card that plays one of his band's latest songs.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Warlord47, from "The Lost Liveleak Video: chechclear", felt that he deserved respect for uploading his VHS collection of Russian snuff films onto Liveleak in HD. This volatile behavior resulted in him being targeted by an alleged copyright troll that took his "chechclear" video down.
• Snuff Film: "The Lost Liveleak Video: chechclear" revolves around a Liveleak user who uploads his collection of Russian videotapes depicting real murders in (relatively) high quality.
• Straw Vegetarian: The one and only question that Woody Harrelson answered honestly during his AMA, without mentioning Rampart even once, was a question about his veganism, which Whang chalks up to vegans being physically incapable of not talking about veganism at every available opportunity.
  Whang: Because of course, no matter how much they don't wanna be there, no matter how much they don't care, no matter how much they wanna promote Rampart, if you ask a vegan about vegan shit, they're gonna tell you about vegan shit.
• Stylistic Suck: The ads for Chuck Testa's taxidermy shop that went viral were created by Rhett & Link and were deliberately made to resemble low budget local commercials.
• Synchro-Vox: He animates members of the Parents Television Council members this way in his video about them trying to censor wrestling.
• Take That!: In Urinal Poop dot org, Whang censors photos containing the titular poop in urinals by replacing the feces with photos of Castlevania 64, St. Anger, the infamous dam level, and Battle Royale 2.
• Taxidermy Is Creepy:
  • Averted with Chuck Testa, a decent man who runs a taxidermy shop, well known for his silly commercials.
  • Subverted with Gradendine, who created a life-sized, realistic Sally Acorn doll widely believed to have been made from a skeleton (a belief reflected in the episode's title); the doll's "bones" were actually made from carefully-carved wood, and he only included a skeleton in his build because he's an artist looking to perfect his craft by making the doll as realistic as possible.
  • Zig-zagged with cummy—eyelids/Lana, the woman who created a necklace out of a human toe. On the one hand, the owner of the toe had commissioned her to do this and the underlying reason she lost the toe had caused baggage that makes it kind of understandable that she would want to keep the toe in this manner, and while photos of the finished product are unavailable, Lana's other handiwork is skillfully crafted. But on the other hand, one of these products incorporated human bone dust, and Lana later went on to post photos posing with the likely grave robbed skeleton of a child and was very unprofessional to even constructive criticism regarding this.
• Time Travel: The episodes covering John Titor and "Safety Not Guaranteed" deal with the possibilities of time travel, though the former turned out to be an elaborate ARG, while the latter turned out to be a joke.
• Title Drop: "The Swamps of Dagobah" is taken from a line from the viral Reddit Medical Horror anecdote, describing the condition of the operating room...
  "...He was performing surgery in the swamps of Dagobah, except the swamps had just come out of this woman's ass and there was no Yoda..."
• Uncertain Doom: The fate of Messytails, a furry with a fetish for eating his own poop who mysteriously disappeared off the face of the internet. One poster claiming to be a real-life friend of his said that he died of malnutrition due to all the poop he ate, while another claiming to be Messytails himself said that he had been in a mental institution and had been cured of his fetish, and both of them were fakes. Nobody actually knows what became of the guy, as either scenario is equally plausible.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Invoked and discussed in the video about "Celebrity #6" — Someone posted curtains designed with pop art style portraits of celebrities online hoping the internet could help identify the one figure that they couldn't recognize. Due to a combination of the person's ambiguous features and how heavily stylized the edited photo was, people were identifying "celebrity #6" as various male and female celebrities or models.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Discussed in-universe in the episode "You Can't Play This Game", which focuses on Moirai and why you can't play it anymore. While the biggest reason was that another programmer messed with the game so badly it stopped working for other players, some players started trolling others by entering vicious swearing and other offensive content rather than roleplaying.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Whang often provides updates on people who achieved viral fame in the early years of the Internet, such as the Star Wars kid and the boy who created a website called "Hello My Future Girlfriend".

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