seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from Canada
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from Russia
One thing I think is funny about a lot of "creepy internet mystery" type videos is that every time the internet is like "is this a murderer?? Did we find a serial killers YouTube/website etc etc???" And 90% of the time the answer is always either a weird experimental art project or fetish content
I suggest Strange Aeons!
Channel Link: https://www.youtube.com/@STRANGEONS
Photo: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/youtube/images/0/04/STRANGE_%C3%86ONS.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20201206154738
Brief description: fandom/internet history deep-dives
Do you like STRANGE ÆONS?
yes
no
i used to like them
i have never watched this channel
link: https://www.youtube.com/@STRANGEONS
subject matter: fandom + internet deep dives
blameitonjorge
https:// www. youtube .com/ user/ blameitonjorge
unsolved mysteries, lost and obscure media, internet oddities
Do you like blameitonjorge?
yes
no
i used to like them
i have never watched this channel
link: https://www.youtube.com/@blameitonjorge
subject matter: unsolved mysteries + lost media + internet deep dives
Do you like Nexpo?
yes
no
i used to like them
i have never watched this channel
link: click here
subject matter: true crime + internet deep dives + video game analysis
Do you like Izzzyzzz?
yes
no
i used to like them
i have never watched this channel
link: https://www.youtube.com/@Izzzyzzz
subject matter: internet deep dives
u/YAYVIDEOGAMES
Alex isn't here to entertain us with their posts, but I'm really, very, extremely bored and I need something to do. Yes, it's 2 days late, but who's counting anyways? Passage of time is even harder percieve at this point so :P.
You know that I love(/hate) reading about creepy, horrifying, gory, disturbing, <any number of adjectives> stories I can get my hands upon. One of my favourite channels is Nexpo (Nightmare Expo, formerly). They cover lots of, well, just what I described earlier. Oh huh, their latest video is about thalassophobia! That's a hell of a coincidence. (Other readers: Alex is thalassophobic, which is really unfortunate because I'm a thalassophile. I think the posts I made during our first run make that obvious.)
These are the kind of videos they make. Walten Files and Gemini Home Entertainment are Analog Horror series, huh, that's a topic for another day. Okay, let's move on before I delete this post to write about analog horror.
One of their videos is
on what I'm talking about today. You can watch that, he goes into much more detail than I will today. It's nothing too extremely disturbing, but very intriguing, which is why I decided to cover it today. Their video however, was made somehow, exactly a month before the case was closed, so I will be appending that too, so, you can just watch the video and skip to the ending section if you wanna.
u/YAYVIDEOGAMES is a Reddit user that perplexed users that happened to stumble upon his many spammed comments all over Reddit. He seemingly started spamming comments on Reddit after a conversation about Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Come with me, as we find out, who is u/YAYVIDEOGAMES, and what was his purpose of doing this, and what became of him (Yeah, the cheesy documentary intro was on purpose).
The Beginning
The story begins on September 8, 2010, on a post titled "Just got Oblivion for PC. What are your favorite mods?" in r/gaming(Oblivion is the 4th game in the Elder Scrolls video game series). Seems harmless, right? YAYVIDEOGAMES (Referred to as YVG from here on) comments about the game being terrible to uninstall because it leaves behind junk files. He receives a reply saying "Wat?" which seems to be what jumpstarted all this. He replies back.
"The uninstall button…The game is great, Ubisoft goes Steamworks bye bye, always on DRM. But you oft go work, always on work DR. Check out the junk it leaves behind in you."
Ubisoft - Video game publisher
Steamworks - Software designed by Steam to allow developers to add additional features, one being DRM, or Digital Rights Management, which is what stops you from doing whatever you want with software from online stores.
The comment looks pretty tame, albeit with some incoherent parts. The other person responds saying "that makes even less sense" and that the uninstallation works perfectly fine.
This is where stuff gets uhhh concerning. The comment is met with 60 or so comments, all with some variation of the text I bolded in the previous comment.
Let's turn back the clock to August 13, 2010. This is when a post titled "Ubisoft goes Steamworks bye bye always on DRM.", linking to an article about Ubisoft dropping it's terrible DRM. is posted to r/gaming. It's filled with comments with the same content, but they're very few, comparitively, at least, it's still an ungodly amount, and exactly the same, unlike the others. I would like to paint a clearer picture of the timeline, but internet connectivity is limited at the moment, so let's work considering the September date as the beginning.
This is also another comment thread from August 13. The content will be relevant later. Sorry about the light theme, new reddit UI is awful and I'm on dad's laptop so no forced dark mode.
At first glance, it may seem like a bot, but the thing is, so many of them are differently formatted, and with random links, that it's unlikely it was a bot that was made to do all that. A very dedicated troll then, you might say, but it's 4,000 comments + countless many on other threads. As we will see later on, the truth is much darker.
Comment history if you wanna look through it yourself.
There's also a comment in the sea of all the ubisoft goes steamworks, replying to someone asking if they're the only fan of a retro game called "Illusion of Gaia", saying "Apparently you are" linking to a Bing search of "i am a fan of illusion of gaia", which I have no idea what it was supposed to mean, the meaning might just be lost because it's been 13 years. He is greeted by "hahaha everybody, this guy uses Bing! LOL" which triggers another comment thread of a 100 variatons of "LOL!Bing". There's also this one comment that is repeated quite a few times on a post on r/WTF titled something that I wish I never read saying "We are smarter than them" or a spin on it, but seemingly a bit more coherent. This goes on for a long time, until September 23, where it abruptly stops. There are a few normal comments, albeit none are much to comment on. One thing to note, however, is that a few of the targeted posts contain the word "hipster" and some of his normal comments contain it too.
Here's a reddit comment compiling the images that he linked to.
They're all pretty cryptic and random however, don't think anything could be discovered from that. There is also a handwritten version of that, prepended with "https://www.reddit.com/spoiler".
His last message on reddit with the user u/YAYVIDEOGAMES was a post titled "Magic" content: "I need some for help. I would not use it evilly." on the subreddit r/Cleanliness.
Someone knew I was coming.
r/Cleanliness
At first glance, it is a seemingly normal, albeit empty subreddit about sanitation, and there's a moderator named u/NoSubstanceHere.
u/NoSubstanceHere has a post on the subreddit with the title "Zelda" and content "Zelda the princess." Weird for a sub named Cleanliness, you'd think, until scroll down the comments. There you encounter u/NotSureHowBigYouAre with weird cryptic messages, a "conversation" with u/NoSubstanceHere, and one word repeated a ton. "Upvoted." There's also a seemingly random comment by u/VinylRecord saying "Zelda" with a link to an image of a man with Joker-looking-but-sad lipstick smeared on his lips. That name sound familiar?
u/NoSubstanceHere
NSH here has seemingly normal threads on r/gaming, but they seem to contain the same content: "the interrogation room underwent some changes while you were away". There's also a comment on a post titled "Hipster Frodo" saying "I had the one ring when it was on vinyl." They also have a comment with "Oh my god" repeated a ton in response to a comment by NSHBYA (huh, weird, this one's initials resembles the other's). Another post to note is one asking "Who is the best game girl?". It has a few repeated one word comments by them, and one saying "Look" with the aforementioned weird lipstick picture. Another is this thread.
the link is to the starting of the LOL!Bing thread, which is interesting.
They also mod r/BananaFreaks, which contains just 2 posts. One of a uhh weird..? image of a creepified anthropomorphic banana and a disgusted man, and one with just Cheetos. Both of them have comments by NSHBYA and no one else, so they seem to be related somehow.
u/NotSureHowBigYouAre
This account was pretty active, and there's a ton of normal posts. I would have liked to read all the posts, however they are huge and too many, unlike YVG, so from what I could read from the latest few messages, they all seem to be about big pharma, drugs and chronic fatigue syndrome, which they say they suffer from. They also made a post, looking for roommates, where he mentions his chronic pain, over-medicated irritability, and being an ex-Jehovah's Witness. I had no idea what this was, being an Indian atheist with only a little interest in religion, so if you're like me, here. I may just be dumb, but the language is kinda esoteric, but basically, radical, so-conservative-they-want-Christianity-to-go-back-to-1st-Century. I'm too lazy to read through all that, so forgive my misconceptions, but from what I've read, it sounds hellish and cultish. There are also posts that tell us that they were pretty much bedridden from the chronic pain and suicidal, and suffered from hallucinations and nightmares of demons, which their mother told them was all real. I think the mother is the actual demon here, for god's sake.
Let's divert our attention for now to the subreddits that they moderate, namely r/HumorlessClassical and r/HipsterJokes. The former contains one post by the account with the sub link with the comment "LOL Right?", and a bunch of movie piracy threads, but nothing else out of the ordinary. The latter however, is filled with posts by this one account which make seemingly no sense. A lot of them contain words or phrases like "pretty underground", "you've probably never heard about it", "I liked it before it was mainstream/popular", vinyls, casettes and records and some have images linked with just one word, "Before". The sub is pretty empty, except for... u/VinylRecord. Remember them, the "Zelda" guy? Yeah, they seem to be connected to NSHBYA. They are the only other commenter on posts on r/HipsterJokes. Scrolling through their post history, we see more spam. A ton of posts that just say "I'm on vinyl" or "Those jokes get me every time, upvoted". After that though, they get pretty normal. There's a standout, however. There's a comment saying "I have this chart on Vinyl" in response to a link to a website with title "Hipster Fashion Cycle. You go down into the replies aaaaannnnddddd *drumroll* Ubisoft goes Steamworks bye bye, always on DRM. We have come full circle.
What Happened to u/YAYVIDEOGAMES?
Okay, this part is all new, if you already watched Nexpo's video. NSHBYA's last post was on January of 2015. What happened to him after that date was unknown... until Nexpo's video gave it so much coverage. More alts are found, key being u/Nebslox, which appears to be his main account. The username led investigators to his other accounts, one being his last.fm, using which they were able to find Luke McLeish, who seemed to be friends with YVG. He was a member of the band "Jack The Stripper", who YVG also mentioned in a few posts. They also found a 2016 interview where Luke states that his best friend from high school took his own life early in January of 2015. With YVG calling the band his best friend's and from what we know about his CFS and chronic pain and how he found it hard to live, it was unfortunately pretty clear what happened. Luke holds an AMA in the subreddit, where he reveals that his name was Lyndon Wachtel, and he did indeed take his own life in early 2015.
The story of u/YAYVIDEOGAMES aka Lyndon Wachtel is a fascinating and haunting one. What began as seemingly random and incoherent comments on Reddit soon revealed a much darker and complex narrative. The enigmatic user, whose comments flooded various threads, caught the attention of investigators and internet sleuths, leading to a deep dive into their online presence and real-life identity.
Rest In Peace, Lyndon Wachtel, we're glad you finally found peace, and you will be remembered.
This story has enchanted me for a long time, so I hope you enjoyed it too. I love storytelling videos and such, so I was hoping to emulate it kinda in text form.
