Meme Machine
Meme Machine. A history of all those internet memes. (HT: Greg Laden)
I was a little surprised he doesn’t have up the beginning of the slang “troll” and “spam” which I believe was in the early 80′s. I remember the latter as around 1984 on Usenet with people soon thereafter posting ASCII pictures of SPAM. I used to have a tape drive of all the USENET archives from around the late 70′s through I think ’88 somewhere. Although I’m sure it’s decayed and unreadable by now.
Anyway it’s a cool page and amazingly all done in Ajax. Pretty impressive. It takes a minute or two to generate though. So don’t get impatient.
So, after you visit that page, what were your favorite Internet Memes over the years?
I loved the artificial flame war over a purported Scottish marital art called Greenoch.
Godwin’s Law was pretty great. I remember way back in the early days of mailing lists of that being big.
My all time favorite though was Bert is Evil which was sadly taken down when clip art from the site was put on posters by Al Queda supporters. Yes, they were marching against America with posters of Bert soon after 9/11. There’s a new site up that has some of the things from the original but also a ton of advertising. For info on the history of the original site check out the wiki.
An other one I love was Badger, Badger. Hypnotic.
Ones I hate? Oh, there are so very many. Dancing Baby, Goatse, All Your Base, and a bunch more. And the Star Wars kid one, while initially funny, was pretty sad when you hear what happened to the kid because of it.
Posted on August 11, 2008, in Television. Bookmark the permalink. 15 Comments.
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I kind of liked AYBABTU. At least at first. Granted, it got old very fast. Goatse should not even be mentioned without a warning to the youngsters not to Google it.
Being Ricshawed got lame after, oh I don’t know, one day.
Is “Ricshawed” different from “Rickrolled”?
My husband only heard about “rickrolling” recently and thought it was the funniest thing, ever. So funny that my son bought him the Rick Astley album on vinyl from a swap meet (only a $1). Now my son likes to “rickroll” people in person. “Let me show you this awesome album I got!”
I still like Hamsterdance. Anything that annoying deserves to be loved forever.
Whatever. I tried to block him and his meme out of my mind.
Clark, you cannot neglect the power of Rickroll. Watch the video: about half-way in, there is the silliest dance-leap you will ever see.
What’s funny is that as pop music (a genre I’m not a fan of) it actually is pretty good. It’s catchy memorable and doesn’t have the excessive but incompetent play that has characterized so much singing the past decade.
BTW – just looking at that Al Queda mob with Bert in the poster behind Bin Laden still cracks me up. I started laughing again as I was writing these comments.
All Your Base is still amazing. I don’t care what you say. Clearly Katz took your base and you’re still sore.
Clark clearly didn’t move enough zig.
Clark’s dissing of AYB is for great injustice!
What you say!?!
Clark has no chance to survive.
make your time, Clark.
Ha ha ha ha…