Various Authors
- Jan 31, 2023
- 6 min read

The Best Online Content of 2022

From Garfield to Goncharov, it's been as weird a year as ever for the internet.

Is there ever a wholly good year for the internet? Really? Probably not. Honestly, being online in 2022 has been a frequently terrible experience. It probably doesn't really help that the world continues to be totally on fire, you-know-who has bought Twitter, and I'm a chronic doomscroller. It isn't exactly a winning combo.

It's not all doomscroll and gloom, though. The internet continuously provides me with a total lifeline. Like a lot of people, I work online, live far away from most of my loved ones, mostly attend events online, and access most of my entertainment via the net. I basically live for the little gay people in my phone at this point in my life, and I wouldn't really change that for many things (besides possibly herding us all up into a field together to start an undoubtedly ill-fated, but much dreamed about, queer commune).

With that in mind, let's take a moment to think about some of our favourite online releases from 2022. Starting with..:

Defunctland: The Bizarre Garfield Dark Ride

It all started with a tweet. On the 22nd of March, 2022, Kevin Perjurer tweeted a simple request: to email them if you ever “made out or made love” (or, perhaps, made anything else) in the Old Mill dark ride in Pennsylvania’s own Kennywood amusement park. The rest was history.

Or, the rest was gay history, as it turned out. As revealed in the video Defunctland: The Bizarre Garfield Dark Ride, a whole lot of people were “gay in the Garfield dark ride”. For the next two months, I waited on tenterhooks to find out more. May eventually rolled around, bringing with it some unseasonably warm weather, and so did the great reveal: a lot of people sure WERE gay in the Garfield dark ride.

Although the audience is mostly spared from too many sticky details, the video shares some incredible stories of the rise and fall of Garfield’s Nightmare - the cryptically named Jim Davis overlay given to the ride. Admittedly, I went into the video expecting it to be slightly cursed; I don’t really want to think about heavy petting in any Garfield-related context, saved for literally, uh, stroking the cat. Instead, the mini-doc does an exceptional job of sharing an incredibly human part of history. I may have never had the chance to be gay on the Garfield dark ride, but I did still get to come away from the video bleary-eyed and touched. ~ Toni Oisin H.C.

Make Some Noise

For as long as I can remember, the media that I enjoy generally falls into one of two broad camps: nerdy shit and completely daft comedy. Somehow, Make Some Noise straddles both camps. One side of my brain is here for Brian David Gilbert’s Greek mythology-inspired board games, while the other side is cheering for a cartoon volleyball that pulls the Dreamworks face. What can I say, I know what I want.

Honestly, I could have put any of Dropout TV’s content here. They’re made up of some of the best teams of comics around today, and it’s refreshing to see a comedy group with queer creators at the forefront. What makes Make Some Noise so special, though, is its simplicity. Sure, there are some high-concept rounds - the tasks involving recreating a pre-made sound are absolute genius. But honestly, what’s better than getting some of the best comics around in a room, giving them increasingly absurdist prompts, and hearing them, well, make some noise? Absolutely nothing. ~ AC

Top 5 Beatdown

I rewatched Pushing Daisies this year and was totally baffled to hear the first iteration of “himbo” on TV that I remember coming across. Himbos? In, like, 2009? I guess it can happen. Although I’m not totally sure of when himbo entered our collective lexicon, himbos have absolutely had their fair share of hot moments over the past couple of years. But what exactly makes a himbo? Thankfully for us, Shane Madej and Ryan Begara are here to walk us through it.

I first encountered Top 5 Beatdown via the collection of mini videos Watcher made for Tumblr. The format’s simple: Shane and Ryan essentially go through ranking their top five favourite things from different categories. Perfectly normal categories, of course, such as the Top 5 Hottest Horror Movie Characters and Top 5 Poor Little Meow Meows - you have to keep it normal on Tumblr, after all.

When the series drew to a close, I was a little disappointed. What am I supposed to do on my coffee breaks if I can’t find out who the guys from BuzzFeed Unsolved’s favourite ships are? But, lucky for me, the guys have a whole full-length series going on YouTube as a part of the Watcher programming. Now, excuse me while I go and find out which cryptids Shane wants to fuck… ~ Toni Oisin H.C.

Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey

In January CollegeHumor’s Dimension 20, one of the biggest and best names in big-budget TTRPG actual play, started off the year with a new full season: the first time back in the dome for the original six Intrepid Adventurers since the pandemic and the near-death of CollegeHumor, Dropout, and all its' productions thanks to the unstable machinations of dot-com capitalism. It’s fitting, then, that A Starstruck Odyssey took D20 to the stars to tackle the machinations of space capitalism in the satirical retro-futurist world of the Starstruck graphic novels created by Michael Kaluta and Elaine Lee (the mother of D20 mastermind Brennan Lee Mulligan).

The planet-hopping, sci-fi farce with a hint of Cowboy Bebop saw the cast playing the bounty-hunting crew of hot-dog-shaped starship The Wurst, keeping the ball rolling up in an adventure that takes them via space-Austin, space-Vegas, and space-Disneyland: A 1950s-roller-waitress android who is the first and last of her kind (Emily Axford). A meathead, himbo clone whose brothers were all slain at the zoo (Brian Murphy). A short-king engineer whose cyborg body puts him in eye-watering medical debt (Lou Wilson). A naive, psychic, Yorkshire-accented merperson who is caught in a pyramid scheme (Siobhan Thompson). A power-suited businesswoman whose most powerful weapon is email (Ally Beardsley). And (mild spoiler for Episode 2) a brain slug who must learn to operate in the body of a veteran pilot (Zac Oyama).

The cast revel in the new setting and game system (having swapped D&D for Star Wars 5e), making some of the biggest plays and most exciting gambles ever seen in the D20 dome. And of course, Brennan Lee Mulligan is the Game Master guiding them through comedy, conflict, drama, and economy, all while expertly weaving a complex plot around everyone’s character arcs full of satire, pastiche, and pathos. ~ JC

Goncharov

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but 2022 was absolutely Tumblr’s year. After a few dark years around the site’s repeated sales and a mass exodus of the vast majority of the site’s users, it seems the site has started to come back into its own. As it turns out, 2022 was also Martin Scorsese’s year, with the critical reappraisal of Goncharov.

Or… Was it? Goncharov was, unfortunately, all a massive ruse inspired by a bizarre pair of boots. While the film wasn’t real, the way the online community banded together to orchestrate the whole spectacle certainly was real. A fandom basically pulled together around the fictional film faster than you could say Matteo JWHJ0715 - the meme originally started floating around back in 2020, but we were all kind of tied up in something then - to make fanmixes, fanfiction, edits, and art of the supposed Scorsese classic.

For a sweet moment in time, it was a joke that almost everyone seemed to be in on - including the Scorseses themselves. The meme provided a basically perfect moment of whimsy and silliness in an otherwise often difficult year. The “new internet”, so to speak, is rarely a form of escapism in the sense that the “old internet” maybe once was. What is a better form of escape from the doom and gloom than straight up logging in to play pretend with complete strangers for a little while? ~ Toni Oisin H.C.

Toni Oisin H.C. is the Head of Audio at QSO Media. Read more of his writing here.

AC is the Head of Written Content at QSO Media. Read more of their articles here.

JC is a musician, graphic designer, and one-third of dinopunk band Nervous Rex. Follow them on Instagram and Twitter.

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