In 2003, Something Awful did not merely write jokes about a fictional idiot named Daring Armstrong. It gave him an entire personal homepage so he could lie about his adventures properly.
Visit Daring Armstrong’s Awesome Page of Heroism
The page is written entirely in character as Armstrong, a catastrophically self-impressed American time adventurer. He explains that the site celebrates his journeys “through time, through love” and whatever other exciting nouns he cannot currently remember. His fictional intern, Laura Abromowitz, is supposedly responsible for turning his journals and scrapbooks into a website where grateful citizens can thank him for repeatedly saving the world.
Navigation is part of the joke.
There are Comics of Adventure, a Photo Album of Adventure, a Journal of Adventure, the Timelab Crew of Mild Excitement, trophies, and a section cataloging women he claims to have seduced. Random “Dareotoids” deliver useful hero knowledge. The trophy cabinet includes awards for everything from skin moisture and bocce ball to time travel, steak consumption, film editing and being extremely attractive.
The joke works because it is not presented as a modern article explaining a character.
It is presented as his website.
The fake homepage is the artifact
Daring Armstrong appeared in Something Awful stories about aliens, time travel, political stupidity and other genre nonsense. The hosted site takes the parody one step further by giving that fictional universe its own in-world Web presence.
That format belongs to a particular period of Internet comedy. A character did not need a social account with scheduled posts. You could build the character a terrible homepage, stuff it with fake photographs and self-authored biography, and let readers explore the joke sideways.
The surviving page also preserves the architecture of early Web humor: image-heavy navigation, separate HTML sections, little bits of lore scattered across subpages, and enough commitment to the premise that the reader has to poke around to find everything.
There is a useful preservation lesson hiding under the stupidity. Comedy websites are easy to dismiss as disposable because they were built around current jokes. But years later they document formats, voices, design conventions, and communities that serious institutional archives rarely bothered to collect.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is not limited to historically respectable material. The old Internet also contained a great deal of meticulously constructed garbage, and some of that garbage was excellent.
Daring Armstrong would presumably claim he invented the Web himself during a classified adventure.
Fortunately, his homepage is more credible than he is.