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CONFONZ — Everyone's seen Rotten.com before. It's the site that launched a thousand lawsuits, cease and desists, and mouth-covered sprints to the nearest vomit receptacle. But what you may not know is that the site is not simply a one-off, man-in-a-basement affair. Instead, it is one arm of a larger entity, populated by DorkBot-teers, wayward bubble profiteers, and weird chefs. They all work together to build the most horrifying and terrible retinue of sites on the Net, and Buddha bless them for their hardwork. After the jump, we tip-toe through the Rotten Tulips.

While the standard Rotten faire is mostly focused on pictures of dead people, strange and suggestive photos of old, and historical curiosities, the rest of the Rotten empire isn't as gruesome. But that's not saying much, because the Vietnam war was somewhat less gruesome than Rotten.com as well.


Lately, the primary focus of Rotten's staff has been the NNDB, AKA the notable names database. This massive list of biographies was initially created to support another aspect of the Rotten empire: the Rotten Deadpool. If you don't have a Deadpool account yet, you're letting the terrorists win.


While we're on the subject of the Deadpool, it should be noted that the world of software is not seen as one of danger by Deadpool users. take, for instance, the fact that Bill Gates is only in 91 deadpools. And that Steve Jobs is only on 17! That's nowhere near the top names in the game: Billy Graham has 10,269 picks. There's just no substitute for wishful thinking when you're trying to build a list of people you expect to die in the next year, eh?


We close now, with an anecdote overheard told by Rotten's founder and chief creepy guy, Rotten Dot Tom. Tom was waiting in line at a bank one day, when he overheard the teller and a customer arguing over which site on the Internet was the grossest. The teller insisted that it was Rotten.com. The customer was adamant that it was Rate My Poo. Rotten Dot Tom smiled inside... he runs both.