Skewt
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Skewt is a Speakonia Community member who was active from 2014 to 2020. He began his career in Drew Pickles Goes To and Secret Missing Episodes, but eventually became one of the first users to popularize the Blood-style videos besides Blood himself in early 2015, and, despite slight disagreements with Blood over what Blood perceived as some minor derivativeness to some of his videos, and one channel termination in 2016, became something of a face for the modern incarnation of the Barney Bunch in his short 5-year career. He would later retire in 2018, but returned at the end of the year onto VidLii to help kickstart the Second Renaissance era before finally becoming inactive in November 2020.
History edit
Skewt discovered the community in mid 2014, after having heard of the Drew Pickles meme and seeing several Drew videos be recommended to him but never having watched them, he decided to give one of the videos a shot to see what they were all about. Skewt's exact first Speakonia video viewed is a point of contention in his brain, he says his first memory of watching a Drew Pickles Goes To video was "Drew Pickles Goes To Tommy Parky's House" (which he would later remake as Drew Pickles Goes to The UTTP's Base for his first video ever) which before 2014 was even over had gone missing and he had only watched once, but he also claims Drew Pickles Goes to Discovery Zone by iheartnes was the first video he clearly remembers watching that is still online, despite briefly being taken down and eventually reuploaded.
Skewt quickly became obsessed with the videos and downloaded Speakonia for himself, but did not begin making videos immediately as he had not made a YouTube account at this time and his original plan was to wait for Google+ to be removed from YouTube (given how Google+ was only shut down entirely in 2019, it's probably best he made his account when he did), coupled with the fact he was having computer troubles around August which forced him to use a desktop with no video editor until his computer was returned in October. He created his account in the meantime on August 23, 2014 under the name "Scoot69", Scoot being a nickname for the Scout character from Team Fortress 2, of which Skewt was an avid player of at the time and the Scout was his favorite class in the game.
Skewt's computer was fixed in late October and he quickly got to work on making videos. His first Drew video, Drew Pickles Goes to The UTTP's Base, though a rocky start for him, launched him into the Barney Bunch scene. During this time he also experimented with other series, such as Microsoft Sam Rants in which Microsoft Sam would rant about YouTube trolls of which only two episodes were made, and even a brief time in commentary videos in the style of people such as Tbone2004 and YoungBloodFantasy91, not Leafy, which were needless to say complete failures and he abandoned it after roughly 3 episodes.
During this time Skewt was friends with users such as Justice Seeker, dildosdildo123, and Prime8NStuff, and the latter two eventually joined forces by year's end to create the Barney Bunch Google+ community which finally brought the Barney Bunch to the status of connected community once again rather than scattered users making videos but not necessarily interacting as it was during the Fourth Generation, of which Skewt is a part of.
In early 2015, Skewt began making videos in the style of user Blood, who's videos he found some of the absolute funniest ever made during his early days due to their insane and extreme nature, which eventually caught the attention of Blood himself and caused him to return that very year. However, Blood would once again enter hiatus a few months later due to real life matters.
In early 2016, the Barney Bunch Renaissance was quickly gathering steam, with the return of BarneyBunchCompany and Life Or Death, as well as Blood coming out of hiatus, and Skewt quickly jumped in on the action, beginning with a sequel to one of his 2014 classics, Bob The Builder Is Really Really Gay, and continuing to pump out Blood-style video after Blood-style video, even inventing the style of Trap Videos after being influenced by videos Prime had made where, instead of dialogue, he instead used looped bits of metal songs, but Skewt took it a step further and played the whole song instead, which then led to Life Or Death making videos in said style and it became one of the most prevalent styles during the Renaissance.
Around the first stages of the end of the Renaissance, Blood created the Barney Bunch Weekly Contest in October after noticing that video production was at an all time low, and after several weeks of participation, Skewt eventually won the contest for the first time and became the host in early November. However, that very week, tragedy struck. On November 14, 2016, the day he was to judge that week's videos and select the winner for that week, Skewt's original channel was terminated after he received a third strike on his account (he had gotten a second strike the previous day and posted a video about it to his now-abandoned backup channel which he created in late 2014), so he had to create a new account and reuploaded a select batch of his old videos that he had selected for preservation.
Skewt would continue on his new account for the next year and a third, but eventually, the community had become so uneventful that he retired from active video making on March 29, 2018, with his final two major videos of note being a two-part saga where Drew's son Drew Pickles Jr. is kidnapped by the Pube Muppet, but the second part of which was taken down under his nose and he has no way of reuploading it, leaving the saga incomplete. However, he eventually moved to VidLii on December 12, 2018, and continued to make new content on there, helping spearhead the Second Barney Bunch Renaissance there. He gradually lost interest in the Barney Bunch by November 2020. On March 30, 2022, his second YouTube channel, Skewt Is Back, was terminated. Thankfully, most of his videos were saved and uploaded to the Internet Archive.
On April 27, 2023, the community discovered that his VidLii account and videos were hidden. Luckily, a decent number of his videos on the platform were archived on the Wayback Machine, and using the developer tools, the URLs for the video files were found. The video files were surprisingly intact and therefore downloadable, so they were uploaded to the Internet Archive as well starting in February 2024.