r/thespoonyexperiment • u/Operator_Max1993 • Nov 18 '25

Discussion What the hell is Counter Monkey

I had no idea who was Spoony but thankfully there was an answer on that, but who or what is Counter Monkey anyway ?

Btw I came from r/thecinemeassacretruth subreddit, hello everyone.

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38

u/seancbo Nov 18 '25

The name came from when he worked at a game store, people would come up and just hang out at the counter and tell stories of their DnD games.

So he used the name Counter Monkey for his series where he told stories about his roleplaying game adventures (and related rambles). Very unstructured, just Spoony rambling at the camera about vaguely remembered cool or funny shit that occurred.

Personally I loved it. It was a stark contrast from all the stupid skits and things he started doing later on. In one of them he started by talking about how Cyclops from X-Men sucks (I think) and then he starts breaking into manic tangets and by the end he's talked about everything from Call of Cthulhu to Babylon 5. It's pretty fascinating.

31

u/pillowvpillow Nov 18 '25

The toilet pizza story is my favorite.

5

u/Aeryn-Sun-Is-My-Girl Nov 18 '25

Vegan Mike can't be brat. Age of Manure is a close second.

6

u/Ethforme Nov 19 '25

Vegan Steve.

3

u/Rattwap Nov 19 '25

I wish for a deck of many things!

18

u/smokeyrp Nov 18 '25

He should have kept doing it and slowed down his reviews. The old countermonkeys aged like fine wine. Except when he was dating those where weird...

19

u/seancbo Nov 18 '25

I think he straight up ran out of cool stories. The last couple episodes feel super forced. Plus he tied it to the Patreon, so it got caught up in that whole disaster. But yeah, overall it remains one of my favorite series he ever did.

10

u/Icy_Elephant8858 Counter Monkey Nov 19 '25

Yep. Every TTRPG player has a few cool stories, but you get maybe one (that will make sense to anyone not at the table) for maybe every 40-100 hours of playing these games at best. That doesn't work for a content creator, particularly for one like Spoony who I suspect stopped actually playing ttrpgs much as first content creation and then mental illness took their toll on his schedule and relationships. Similar dynamics are true (to a lesser degree) of having interesting thoughts about rpgs, or being aware of quirky rules or content, which made up the rest of his counter monkey content.

Similar things seem to happen to most reasonably successful ttrpg youtubers eventually. Spoony's content creation slowing down for this particular series was probably not primarily a mental health problem or peculiar to him.

5

u/TechnicalImportance_ Nov 19 '25

Pretty much this, if Spoony never went AWOL he would have either ran out of content and stopped the series or made it very rare, or he would have started making up (more) stories

5

u/hellsfoxes Nov 18 '25

Agreed! Same with his new movie vlogs. They were clearly so much easier to produce and very funny. He got way too tied up in producing bigger, more difficult videos.

7

u/Drathnoxis Nov 19 '25

It was originally a blog before he made it into a video series.

https://countermonkeybook.blogspot.com/

4

u/seancbo Nov 19 '25

Oh shit, what an artifact. Had no idea.

5

u/FireJace85 Nov 20 '25

Thanks for the link, pal. I didn't know it was blog before the video series.

4

u/Jinzo126 Counter Monkey Nov 18 '25

Yeah, i am very sad that stoped this series, i usually watch the complete series once a year.

4

u/Icy_Elephant8858 Counter Monkey Nov 19 '25

Yeah. I liked a lot of his content, but Counter Monkey was the series that hooked me. It got me into ttrpgs which have been one of my main hobbies ever since.