U mad?

It seems just yesterday that Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman was one of the most beloved men on the Internet, having converted a generation of readers into fans of the turn-of-the-century scientist Nikola Tesla and spearheaded an Indiegogo campaign to get the man an American museum.

Nowadays, between the rape joke and the angry screeds, he's starting to look like a guy who just can't quite learn when to keep his mouth shut.

The trouble started last week, when Mr. Inman made a tasteless, offensive rape joke--revolving around how his F5 key is a perpetually violated rape victim--in a comic. His response to the backlash landed him in even deeper manure: He replaced the offending panel with a pissy note claiming "anytime a comedian says the word rape everyone jumps out of their seat in protest" and alleging censorship. He finally took that down, too.

Buzzfeed contributor Jack Stuef followed up on the controversy with a lengthy profile of Mr. Inman, exposing his history of work as an SEO spammer and suggesting that Mr. Inman is more hit-generating viral machine than artist. It seemed pretty sure to knock the man down a peg:

Inman’s work was not originally a labor of love, a slow process of honing one’s voice, developing an original perspective and take on the art form, and eventually building an audience. It was always business, always a play to known sources of Web traffic, whether for clients or for himself.

(Let us pause, however, to appreciate the irony of Buzzfeed lecturing anyone on content propelled by built-in virality.)

Mr. Inman responded in a fashion that's become typical: by reproducing the offending article and annotating it with his own responses. On the matter of the rape joke, he basically pleads a bad day and says that, "at the time I genuinely felt like I'd done more good in the world than bad, and I acted like an asshole when I saw myself being vilified for making one bad joke on the internet."

He also goes into a long digression about how the money from his comics has allowed him to buy a house for his sister and her six kids. "You didn't find this in your 'investigation' of my finances because I never talk about it." (Except this once, of course.)

It all builds to a grand finale:

Yeah, u mad.

He proceeds to republish a tasteless comic that Mr. Stuef drew while employed at Wonkette, poking fun at Trig Palin. (Yes, the one with Down's Syndrome.)

Uh, when do we get our 32 pictures that will renew our faith in humanity?

However, amid the angry red writing Mr. Inman also pointed out a pretty glaring problem in the profile, which is that Buzzfeed's article took a fake profile on something called "SodaHead" at face value, suggesting that Mr. Inman was, in fact, a Republican. (OH NO THEY DIDN'T.)  The piece has been edited to remove the portions of the article based on the misattributed SodaHead profile, with a note at the bottom admitting the error.

In the final accounting, the successful creator of The Oatmeal comes off, frankly, as overly defensive and even as a bit of a whiner. Nobody likes being called a Republican, but the merits of Mr. Inman's work are certainly fair game for criticism. From his response, though, we can't help but conclude that he's used to hate mail from Internet trolls he can dismiss as dummies. But he struggles with how to self-edit (hint: when you start to make a rape joke, don't) and handling legitimate criticism (like maybe you shouldn't make rape jokes).

All we know is, somewhere Thomas Edison is chortling to himself.

(Photo: Twitter)

"The purpose of this blog is to provide sourcing for texts quoted by @Horse_ebooks and, whenever possible, provide context," wrote freelancer Jack Stuef on a freshly-minted Tumblr conceived in the bleary midnight hours early Friday morning. Born out of that insomniac haze is "The Annotated @Horse_ebooks," a blog devoted to teasing out nuance and substance from the glorious fountain of non-sequitors that is the Internet's favorite Twitter account, @Horse_ebooks.

"The idea to do a Tumblr just came to me, but I had looked up some of Horse's tweets before, and sometimes the sources of those can be just as bizarre and hilarious as the tweets themselves. Or they can be incredibly dull. I thought it was interesting," Mr. Stuef, who frequently writes for The Onion and BuzzFeed, told Betabeat via Gchat.

Since the blog has only been live for less than 12 hours, Mr. Stuef has only had time to annotate a handful of @Horse_ebooks tweets, but they're all from some pretty obscure sources. The first tweet came from a U.S. patent office report from 1987; another from a 1914 book called Photoplay.

How do you find this stuff? Do you just Google it? we wondered.

"Yeah, basically," replied Mr. Stuef. Easy enough, we suppose.

"I was considering immediately abandoning it, but the Internet seems to like it, so I guess I'll keep going until we all get sick of it," he said, presumably with a disinterested shrug. "I'll post every time Horse tweets something that's long enough to determine its source."

Of course, there are bound to be some rabid @Horse_ebooks fans angry with the project for ruining the mystery enshrouding the Internet's favorite horse. Adrian Chen's definitive account of his search for the man behind Horse did elicit some pretty angry responses, after all. ("Yes, I’m sort of ruining it," wrote Mr. Stuef in his first post to the Tumblr.)

But Mr. Stuef has a message for those wary that an annotation project of the account will destroy its novelty: "Don't read the blog, I guess?"