With Thanks To

Nothing on this page is a licence, a partnership or an endorsement, in either direction. These are the things GoblinLife was looking at when it should have been working. The attribution lawyers read is on Credits.

The newsroom

  • The print-era Onion, 1998 to 2008, which GNN's own style guide names as its ancestor in the first line. Bleak, hyper-specific suburban misery treated as front-page news.
  • South Park, for the engine where a trivial grievance becomes a holy war and everyone involved is an idiot.
  • Borat, for the polite narrator who reports a deranged premise as small talk.
  • ClickHole's early years and the BuzzFeed personality quiz, which our quizzes break on purpose by question three.
  • Every news site whose fake paywall, auto-linked words and “related stories” dropped mid-paragraph we rebuilt with a straight face. You know who you are. So does your ad network.
  • The content farm, the listicle and the trending wire, for formats we fill with the wrong things.
  • LinkedIn, where some of GG's longest essays were first posted, and where GNN found several of its writers' voices.

The shopping channel

  • Home shopping television, QVC to the regional knock-offs, for the price box, the countdown clock and the caller on line two.
  • The late-night infomercial, 1948 to the present. The pitchmen are gone from our stream; the cadence stayed. None of them was cloned.
  • SaltyBet, for proving a stream can run forever with nobody in charge.
  • NFT hype, for floor prices, rug pulls and diamond hands, a vocabulary Bargle uses wrong with confidence.
  • Casino lobbies everywhere, for the wall GGG copied without a single brand, logo or game name.

Works the lore borrowed from

  • Duck Soup (1933): Freedonia, and General Rufus T. Firefly, who surrendered by radio.
  • Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden (Tales of Game's, 2008): the Chaos B-Ball and the Hell B-Ball.
  • Blaseball (The Game Band): the Austin Madres' rivals, the Immaterial Plane and the necromancy charges.
  • The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Rigatonia, both schisms and Al-Dente.
  • Idiocracy (2006), for a future the Council keeps mistaking for a plan.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four and Interstellar, which GNN reviewed, badly.
  • The Knight Bus from Harry Potter: The Bus 2.0, shrunken head included.
  • Pickle Rick from Rick and Morty: one fitness goblin's whole career.
  • The Hangover, for one bootleg-movie craze on Mudwick Isle.
  • The Budweiser frogs (1995), and Pepe the Frog (Matt Furie), for what became of the third frog.
  • Flavortown, which has an Antarctic branch now. It did not ask for one.
  • The Mandela Effect, for the name of the game readers play with our history.
  • Public LLM leaderboards, for GoblinBench, and every AI app builder, for VibeCoder.
  • SaaS pricing pages, for the Subscription to Nothing. Yearly is the default. It saves nothing.
  • Cookie banners, browser permission prompts and the guided tour that insists it has 37 steps.
  • Trustpilot and Yelp, for Tuskpilot and Squelch, two review services that are not corrupt.
  • Chess engines, and the annotation marks of Lichess and Chess.com, for Yapper Arena's !! and ??.
  • World of Warships and its community, for the mods, the dispersion and Major Cope's entire personality.
  • Twitch chat, Discord and Reddit, whose habits we studied closely and then adopted.

The archives

  • The Prelinger Archives and the Internet Archive, for a 1948 pitchman, some 1950s coffee drinkers and a 1957 narrator who never asked to anchor the news.
  • The Philharmonia Orchestra, for recording every note of every instrument and letting people use them.
  • Google's Magenta team, for drummers who play our auctions out.
  • Google Fonts, Fontsource and the type designers named on Credits.
  • Everyone who writes open-source software and its documentation at two in the morning.

If you see yourself here and would rather not, write to us. If you see yourself here and want a bigger font, also write to us.

Last reviewed 2026-11-08.