Thoughts on TFM’s 2 Year Anniversary

Rob Fox13 years ago

TotalFratMove turns two years old today. Funny, at this point it seems like the site has been around forever. Granted it probably feels that way because two years in Internet time equates to about 80 years in real time. Go back and watch the Paris Hilton sex tape from 2004. It’ll be like you’re watching an old timey silent film. Shitty night vision is the new sepia tone. Nowadays I can’t imagine a world without TFM, although that might be because I work for TFM. And actually I can imagine a world without TFM. It involves me living beneath a highway overpass, using a sharpened screwdriver to fight off bums who want to violently molest me while I try and shill dick jokes on the side of the road in exchange for food scraps. What I mean to say is I’d probably be living in Los Angeles.

But TFM has been around for two years and this anniversary has me thinking about what, if any, impact the site has had. There are the small but obvious things, like the proliferation of a certain urinary rectal fetish. One sexually demented user actually submitted a real live picture of him in the act of doing said fetish. It haunts my nightmares. There’s also the absurd Twitter culture that has popped up around the site. The TFM Twitter-sphere is a world littered with weird Internet flirting, psychotic ramblings, quips that make Holocaust jokes seem as innocuous as a bad pun, and daily death threats lobbed at the TFM staff. I love it. In fact I think it’s pretty safe to say that there is a legitimate TFM community. It’s a sick and twisted community, filled with vile perverts and shameless teases, but a community nonetheless. I love it too.

Outside of the Internet TFM has had an impact on Greek Life in general. I should note that neither this impact (whatever the size), nor any of the things I mentioned above (especially the butt pee picture) were product of any intentions. TFM was created solely to amuse people. I’ve said that before. But there has been an impact. Before I started working for TFM I spent my days in St. Louis being severely underpaid at a shitty marketing job. Because the job sucked and paid shit I wasted an inordinate amount of my time dicking around on the Internet. I loved TFM. I looked forward to every Fail Friday and thought that the “Pledge of Allegiance” was fucking hysterical. To me it was a funny website. Then fall came and I headed down to Columbia for tailgating and spending the weekend drinking until I forgot that I was supposed to be a contributing member of society. That’s when I noticed something. All the undergrads were dressed a little differently. Preppier. “Fratter.” It’s not that there weren’t Sperrys or Polo littered throughout Greek Life at Mizzou before TFM, they were of course. But things had been kicked up another level. It was honestly starting to look more and more like an SEC tailgate. This was in September. Mizzou wasn’t accepted into the SEC until November.

I talked to a few of the actives and they agreed that TFM was in part responsible for that trend as well as many others. What does that mean? I’m not really sure. We honestly don’t think about it too much. When you’re trying to poetically describe sex with a French chick being interrupted by a jealous ninja you have to stay focused. In an interview I did with Mizzou’s issue of The Odyssey (yeah that’s right, people interview me, I’M IMPORTANT) I said that if anything TFM has somewhat standardized Greek Life culture. In the past Greek Life was a very regionalized institution. It still is. The South is different from the Northeast is different from the West Coast and so on. But after TFM those aspects started to mix together. Greek trends moved faster. I can tell you that cooler painting was not a thing at Mizzou while I was there. It is now. I’m convinced that that’s the type of thing that happens because of TFM. I’m also sad that I don’t have a painted cooler. I’m so lonely (*looks at plain white cooler, cries*).

I don’t know what Greek Life was like before or after TFM at other schools, I can only really use Mizzou as a frame of reference. That said I think it’s a good frame of reference. Political, cultural, and economic analysts consider Missouri a bellwether state. Since 1904 Missouri has predicted the winner of the presidential election in all but two years (1956 and 2008). Columnist Chris Suellentrop had this to say about the bellwether status, he claimed that the state “isn’t so much a bellwether as it is a weathervane: It doesn’t swing the country, the country swings it…”I tend to agree with that, and I think that the whole effect is pretty cool. Why not import the awesome stuff other schools are doing to your own campus?

Granted not all the effects of TFM have been good. For instance people who have no idea what Greek Life is or what it’s about see the tongue-in-cheek humor and take it completely seriously. Some of these people are GDIs who hate Greeks. Others are pathetic try-hards. Most of them are high school kids. All of them are idiots. But you have to take the good with the bad I guess.

TFM has definitely changed things. Not intentionally, but there have been changes. Still at the end of the day we just want to make you laugh. It’s a pretty great job to have. If the rest of the staff and I have to endure fetish pornography and daily personal attacks to do it, fine by us. Thanks TFM for employing me. Thanks readers for making TFM an entity capable of employing people. So to TFM, Happy Birthday. To the readers thank you for your continued support of the site.

Look forward to a future full of dick jokes, pics of passed out girls crapping themselves, frat humor and so much more. TFM.

Follow me on Twitter @BaconTFM