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Revision as of 11:36, 15 May 2007

Goatse.cx was an infamous Internet shock site that became well-known among various Internet forums because of trolls who posted links in order to upset other forum readers. Its front page featured a picture, hello.jpg, of a naked man stretching his anus open to a diameter roughly equal to that of his hand, with the inside of his rectum clearly visible. Visible below his anus were his scrotum and dangling, flaccid penis.

The site goes offline

As of January 14, 2004, the domain goatse.cx was taken offline. But many mirrors of the site are still available, and the image is displayed on many websites. The most common mirror was goat.cx; but this, like its predecessor, was taken offline as of February 22, 2005. As of February 27, the domain goat.cx, like goatse.cx, was suspended by the Christmas Island Internet Administration; but it appeared, as of April 2005, to be back online showing only the message "eat my goatse'd penis!" As of May 2005, there is an image on the site showing a pumpkin with some hands around it as if it is stretching its anus.

The goatse.cx domain name was reported sold at an Auction on 30 April 2007 to a currently unknown bidder. According to seobidding.com, the first auction ended with fake bids so the auction was reactivated.

Chris Spoldi Is A Bitch!

Geographic location

The site used the .cx country code, the top-level domain of Christmas Island, whose operators will not disclose registrants' personal information. The actual server of Goatse.cx was not located on Christmas Island, but in the United States and is owned by Hick.org, a website about computer programming and bathroom humor. The Hick.org domain was registered by Matt Miller in Overland Park, Kansas. Both Goatse.cx and Hick.org originate from the same IP address; the server is located in the Kansas City, Missouri metro-region. Goat.cx, formerly a mirror of Goatse.cx, was located in the Dallas, Texas metro-region, while current mirror Goatse.cz seems to be located in Clifton, New Jersey.

Parodies, tributes, and trivia

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Because many frequent Internet users have been tricked into viewing the site at one time or another, it has become something of an Internet meme. As such, hello.jpg and the other images on the site are common subjects of parodies and tributes.

• The man in hello.jpg was wearing a golden ring on his left hand.
• Inside the CD case of the album Pie Full of Knives by rapper Wombstretcha: the Magnificent- if you remove the CD from its case, the hello.jpg image can be found on the casing underneath.
• The game Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil by Nerve Software and id Software features blocks forming a rough image of hello.jpg in level 3 of the Hellanoid game.
• Unreal Tournament 2004 features an assault level called as_junkyard for which the final objective is to move the Hellbender through an object that bore similarity to the Goatse.cx anus.
• The online role-playing game Kingdom of Loathing features two tributes-
  • while fighting a Spam Witch - "She shows you a picture of her pet goat. 'This is my goat, see?' she says. Dear god, the horror."
  • In an adventure during The Daily Dungeon called "Seriously, I Just Read It For the Articles." If the adventurer does not have sleaze resistance, s/he buckles down and looks at a centerfold, only to have it be from the magazine "Secret World of Goatse."
• Alex Albrecht of Diggnation fame made a reference to Goatse.cx on episode 20 of Tiki Bar TV. The Tiki Bar crew were having Internet bandwidth issues, and Alex (playing the character "Son of the Internet"), said that their issues were affecting the whole Internet. - "Goatse's down, people are happy about that."
• German industrial techno porn grind band Libido Airbag used hello.jpg as their cover on the infamous split CD release with gore band Cock and Ball Torture.
• The alt attribute on the image, "Stinger", actually comes from the EFnet #quake channel. The image itself was discovered on a webpage called members.xoom.com/stinger hosted by XOOM (now defunct). Goatse.cx was created by a #quake member expressly for the purpose of displaying the image.
• A parody story mashing up H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos with Goatse (by art group monochrom).
• Threadless created a t-shirt with the word "GOATSE" on the front, a clear reference to the website.
• A parody involving a iGoatse iPod skin
• The video game web comic VG Cats featured a comic referencing the goatse.cx picture, although the actual image was not shown.
• The recently updated WestNet internet providers logo (an Australian ISP) bears some resemblance to Goatse.
• Comedy Writer "Dr. David Thorpe" of Something Awful fame, went on G4TV and cited that several goons of Something Awful had a hand in hello.jpg. David described the image as a "man elaborately manipulating himself."
• Following Hurricane Charley in August 2004, a photograph purporting to show "the hands of God" in the cloud formations in the aftermath of the disaster circulated via email. The image was eventually proven to be a photoshopped Goatse parody.

Notes

1. "Goatse Mirror (viewer discretion advised)". Retrieved 2007-05-08.
2. "Goatse.cx Domain Auction". Retrieved 2007-05-08.
3. "Whois.net Lookup for Hick.org". Retrieved 2006-10-25.

• Articles lacking sources from February 2007
• Defunct websites
• Domain hacks
• Internet memes
• Shock sites