Unheard History of Bodybuilding Forums

I love finding and reading these classic threads again.

> He convinced a lot of people that he was an expert at all things science despite using an incredibly immature writing style

I skimmed the article, but couldn't find examples or mention of his writing style.

Body building forums were really weird places, back around 2002, up until maybe 2004 when MySpace started to explode, and then, eventually Facebook.

I remember encountering at least one, and the passages I read tended to brush up against a sort of dimwitted infantile fan fiction, mixing bizarre fantasies with near-zero understanding of human anatomy and physiology.

One particular discussion that sticks out in my mind was something akin to a 12 year-old's musings (and it might, very well, have been some little kid), about how protein travels from a dinner plate all the way into the muscles, and it was tempting to believe one person was sock puppeting the whole thread, pretending to carry multiple sides of the conversation, as a sort of blend of creative writing and performance art, but just based on the voice and tone of the various replies, it really did seem like some sort of group fantasy role playing session.

This was before I knew the true depth and breadth of furry subculture, and eventually, once I became more familiarized with such facts of life, and developed an understanding of the intersection of interests between fan fiction and fur suit fetishists, I surmized that on some level, what had been going on with all those body building forums was that a subset of the fur suit/fan fiction subculture had begun to fantasize collectively about bulging human muscles and oiled up skin, as if it were a form of fur suit, and then took to authoring concept pieces, to role play within that context.

In the same way that ASMR is something akin to an alt-kink version of phone sex, this sort of thing seemed to be likened to alt-cybering in an obscure sub-genre of fur kink.

Anyway, that was the weird shit I remember bumping into back then. Now I suspect it's all rolled into the general morasse of Facebook flotsam, diluted and washed out. Maybe it's better that way... Maybe.

Bodybuildingforum is one of the most entertaining and influential places on the internet. I honestly believe it to be on par with 4chan in scope of "internet cultural influence"

Omg, this is awesome. I love this quote:

> "You don't count what day it is when counting days, I just explained that. If today is SATURDAY, it's not 2 days until SUNDAY now is it?"

The sheer concept that Sunday to Sunday = 1 week versus Sunday to Saturday = 1 week is kind of bending my brain.