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An anniversary for great justice: Remembering “All Your Base” 20 years later
- tomc1985 6y agoAh, the days when memes were actually funny
- btilly 6y agoI remember "all your base" as a meme on Slashdot. They weren't particularly funny then, either. More generally, memes are only funny to people who are immersed in them. You were probably more immersed in the memes then so they were funny to you. And less now so they are not. But nothing fundamental has changed. Memes by their nature tend to be based on inside jokes that are only funny to the people on the inside.
- 1_2__4 6y agoWithout commenting on what OP meant I would say memes definitely used to be more quirky and funny and lighthearted in general. Heck, originally calling them memes was because they stuck around and passed between people despite often being nonsensical. They tend to be more opinionated nowadays, and popular ones are usually topical, political, snarky, or all of the above. Not a random mistranslation of an old video game.
- tomc1985 6y agoI don't know why this comment was downvoted into oblivion as you hit the nail on the head. If there is one thing I can think of that separates memeing 20 years ago from memeing today its that todays memes are far more expressive -- as if they are used as a substitute for conversation or discourse -- than funny. It seems they are overwhelmingly trying to express emotions than be lighthearted or funny. I'm part of several gaming subreddits that hold an overly hostile view of the game's developers, and the number of memes used to stab or jab at said devs outnumbers old-school "funny" memes or even the more contemporary "shared experience" memes practically two-to-one. Plus, there are all these unwritten social rules about meme templates, and indeed they seem to have their own economy of sorts. Take everything together and it seems that memes are serious business, which is stupid if you ask me. Memes are supposed to be funny and lighthearted!
- NortySpock 6y ago"Supposed to be" funny, sure, but this is drifting towards "funny sad" or just anger. I think with all the frustration out there, urban red-state Millennials like myself are stuck expressing themselves in meme form since our congressional representatives (Missouri) appear to be chasing rural voters who think Biden is a scary socialist. One of these days I'll find time to grab a stamp and mail off a few memes on paper to my congressperson, since they don't seem to be reading my emails to them or listening to the voicemails I send them. To wit: "If the money to feed, clothe, and house the homeless has to come from taxing Jeff Bezos... I'm not going to lose any sleep over that."
- tomc1985 6y agoJust be careful their meaning isn't lost as I doubt your congresscritter is part of the in-group that would actually get them
- Jon_Lowtek 6y agoimage macros have been around for 20 years as well
- xtracto 6y agoOther memes i remember from /. are: In soviet russia SUSTANTIVE VERBs YOU! In north korea email is for old people
- vesinisa 6y agoSlashdot was ripe with memes. One of the more sinister ones was posting a comment link to something mundane looking, but it was actually a link to a .cx shock site containing "goat" in the domain name. Later it evolved into Rick Rolling, but the goat thing predated that by long. I think the prank / meme became so widespread that at some point they changed the site code to spell out the linked domain name in text after the <a>.
- IcePic 6y agoImagine a beowulf cluster of those..
- midasuni 6y agoWith hot grits
- QuesnayJr 6y agoI fell for that one so many times that I became completely desensitized to the picture.
- midasuni 6y agoThe goatse meme lived on until 2012 when the bbc broadcast an Olympic logo suggestion based on it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YXyTn3-bluk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YXyTn3-bluk
- mauvehaus 6y agoAnd instead we got one that's been described as "Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob". I'm not sure we did better.
- 6y ago
- tomc1985 6y agoI don't know if I've ever been immersed in 'memes', in fact I don't think you really could be immersed in them around the turn of the century. They were just amusing gifs being passed back and forth, that seemed to be especially good at catching peoples' eyes. Think dancing baby, zombo.com, cheezburger cat... they were funny, we passed em on, that was that. I do remember saving the ones I liked in a 'funny pics' folder -- which I still have -- but I'm not sure there were very many people 'immersed' in them any more than any other fringe part of internet nerd culture. That said, AYB was probably the first meme I ever 'immersed' in, in that it was the right combination of weird and zany and that it fit my zeitgeist back in the day. But then icanhazcheezburger.com and KnowYourMeme came around, and that their efforts to collect and categorize probably marked the beginning of the end.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fullshark 6y agoYes when we were 15 years old
- mhh__ 6y agoI absolutely love the variation and thought that goes into many a meme these days. Bad memes are awful (Sturgeons law), but a good meme is cheap fun that I can consume in a second
- tomc1985 6y agoSure there's lots of variation but they seem to be little more than people trying to passive-aggressively express some agenda or frustration, most of the time.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoidk, when memes became mainstream (I'm thinking mainly of the heaps and heaps of impact font advice animals and rage comics) they weren't funny. I prefer the absurd ones nowadays, the endless rapid fire clip shows on youtube, etc.
- staticautomatic 6y agoIs there a name for these old memes? Vintage memes? Antique memes?
- jareklupinski 6y agoclassic memes
- CompuHacker 6y agoFads. Not derogatory, this is what they were called at the time.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThe term "meme" for such internet things started in the early 90's. https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/ https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/
- JimiofEden 6y agoThis is true, but colloquially they were known as fads. At least on YTMND, 4chan, SA, or any other major hub in the late 90s/early 00s
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ArnoVW 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia : The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.[12]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deadmetheny 6y agoFads was a strictly YTMND term. On 4chan they were generally called memes, on SA they were image macros.
- jareklupinski 6y agohttps://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/11940 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/11940 Newgrounds seems to have converted their popular Flash animations to MP4... time to re-watch Xiao Xiao :)
- cableshaft 6y agoStill a catchy song.
- Zanni 6y agoAgreed. As is "The Terrible Secret of Space," also by The Laziest Men on Mars. Even more delightfully absurd (IMO), but never achieved the meme status of AYB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_CoY0sBb1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_CoY0sBb1M
- sillysaurusx 6y agoAlso the lesser-known Dr. Kleiner and Barney version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAj7RMIo-4w&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=ShawnPresser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAj7RMIo-4w&feature=youtu.be...
- grishka 6y agoYou can still watch the original swf through Ruffle. https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/11940/format/flash https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/11940/format/flash
- 29athrowaway 6y ago"Zero wing Rhapsody" is worth watching too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE6emvdmg-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE6emvdmg-M
- endgame 6y agoIf this is the subthread for AYB remixes: Steamed Hams but it's a meme from 2001: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG-kEchCKHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG-kEchCKHo
- 29athrowaway 6y agoMain screen turn on...
- spiritplumber 6y agoAll your base are belong to Stingy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um0TLiWa8Dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um0TLiWa8Dw
- 29athrowaway 6y agoLive action version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aYaO93UiYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aYaO93UiYQ
- ar-nelson 6y agoZero Wing Zero Hour is here at last. https://xkcd.com/286/ https://xkcd.com/286/
- Clewza313 6y agoAnd the hover caption correctly predicted that it will occur in AD 2021!
- seg_lol 6y agoThe xkdc guy used to write for the Simpsons' so it makes sense that he can also predict the future.
- kgwgk 6y ago?
- midasuni 6y agoRandall Munro worked briefly for nasa during/after college but has been full time on xkcd since then (2006). He never worked for the Simpsons.
- toyg 6y agoIt’s really weird to see new urban legends being coined about stuff I know, like this one. Randall Munroe never worked on the Simpsons, at least not the Randall Munroe who created XKCD.
- rjzzleep 6y agoHe predicted the year correctly in 2007. Maybe he had a hand in steering this !
- ArnoVW 6y agoI'm on mobile, so can't do 'show source', but it's not simply a clever use of getYear()?
- Exmoor 6y agoA huge chunk of what we now consider internet culture was derived from the Something Awful forums and some of the other sites that sprouted out of it (4chan). I believe most/all the images in the video the OP is derived from were from a "Photoshop Friday" content from Something Awful. I remember the first time I saw what we'd now call "memes", but were then called "image macros" on some of these forums. (This is the most work friendly example I remember: http://bensbargains.net/thecheckout/wp- http://bensbargains.net/thecheckout/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/discount-tent.jpg ) It's incredible to me that the form of media is been largely unchanged in almost two decades of accelerated cultural change. 20 years ago the big joke was photoshopping "All Your Base" into some photo. The biggest meme of 2020 was photoshopping Bernie Sanders into some photo. The biggest difference is that these things used to have a relatively burn as they worked their way through the culture and now they burn white hot for a few days and are immediately dated a week later.
- gfodor 6y agoHonestly the SA photoshop contests were different (and in many ways, more entertaining and impressive) than contemporary memes.
- jonny_eh 6y agoI feel the same, but I suspect it's old man nostalgia.
- crtasm 6y agoI was never on SA but am curious if you'd enjoy https://b3ta.com/ https://b3ta.com/ , they've run a weekly(?) Image Challenge since the early 2000s. Currently 'boxes' https://b3ta.com/challenge/boxes/popular https://b3ta.com/challenge/boxes/popular Previous challenges: https://b3ta.com/challenge/ https://b3ta.com/challenge/
- gfodor 6y agoI only looked briefly but those jokes are way less funny than what I remember from SA. SA's photoshop contests today probably would get some posters doxxed by the New York Times for wrongthink.
- gryson 6y agoA clue as to the origins of the Zero Wing translation in this interview with Masahiro Yuge of Toaplan: >-Toaplan also ported Zero Wing to the Megadrive. Who came up with the broken English “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US” from the overseas attract mode? >Yuge: It may have been this guy who was in charge of our exports at the time. He was always having business meetings with people from overseas, and I went to a few of them myself, and his English was really terrible (laughs). http://shmuplations.com/toaplan-yuge1/ http://shmuplations.com/toaplan-yuge1/ And you can see the original All Your Base thread posted by Bad_CRC archived here on Tribal War (all image links are dead, though): http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=24539 http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=2453... I can remember when this was posted on Tribal War and the deluge of mediocre photoshops that it generated. Back then, your internet cred was measured in your photoshop ability. Good times.
- Terr_ 6y agoThere's a bittersweet nostalgia in finding any web-forum where you can see your own account with an ancient last-posted date.
- simonh 6y agoAs usual XKCD has this covered: https://xkcd.com/2363/ https://xkcd.com/2363/
- OscarCunningham 6y agoExcept sadly the xkcd forums themselves were wiped from the internet.
- HeckFeck 6y agoAs have too many others. It fills me with the same sadness as deforestation.
- hackerbabz 6y agoWhy did that happen?
- a3n 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme > The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. ...
- schoen 6y agoA logic puzzle I made last year largely consisting of jokes about this: https://eff30.cat/kitty-o-games/gentlemen/ https://eff30.cat/kitty-o-games/gentlemen/
- walrus01 6y agoThe origin of most of the photoshopped images that made it into the animation was on a web bulletin board dedicated to this FPS game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starsiege:_Tribes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starsiege:_Tribes I remember seeing them all in their much higher resolution originals before the animation existed. http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=24539 http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=2453... https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-your-base-are-belong-to-us https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-your-base-are-belong-to-u...
- gryson 6y agoAs I recall (I was active on TribalWar then), the images in the original animation were taken from other sites (including SomethingAwful) by Bad_CRC, who made the animation and posted it on TribalWar. It then took off big time after that and people made a lot of new images.
- sneak 6y agoMan, Tribes was such a great video game. It still holds up, even, and I don't know of anything like it in the 25(?) years since.
- technics256 6y agoI agree. I played that and tribes 2 so much. I haven found a game with such intense action with so many players as that since.
- 6y ago
- dimal 6y agoI remember the night I saw this for the first time. It was after a friend of mine had a “Roadhouse” themed party in his loft where he had a stage surrounded in chicken wire where people went inside to sing karaoke and we’d throw beer bottles at them. After we trashed the place, someone showed us this weird video on their laptop. We watched it over and over, convinced it was brilliant. It felt like a defining moment for my generation. God, I’m so old.
- mkl 6y agoIt was brilliant. I watched it again a few weeks ago though, testing out the Ruffle Flash player, and found most of it kind of boring.
- jrumbut 6y agoThis is the best first AYB exposure possible. I actually felt a little reassured it's only 20 years old. That's about when I heard about it, but by the time it reached me it felt ancient.
- cdubzzz 6y agoA Roadhouse party is a hilariously weird concept. Is this a thing people did at some point or do you just have really wonderful friends?
- irrational 6y agoHas it really been 20 years? In the days before memes, this was basically a meme on Slashdot for years. I feel so old suddenly.
- midasuni 6y agoYou must be new here
- malingo 6y agoAlmost 18 years later, this is still pretty funny: https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=56859&cid=5503174 https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=56859&cid=5503...
- enw 6y agoThis gives nostalgia vibes of the 4chan from 10-ish years ago. Back then “memes” were fringe, but 9gag slowly took over with washed down normie memes.
- seg_lol 6y agohttps://ziglang.org/ https://ziglang.org/ for great justice.
- KineticLensman 6y agoFrom the Zig tutorial[0]: file.writeAll("all your codebase are belong to us\n") catch unreachable; [0] https://ziglang.org/learn/overview/ https://ziglang.org/learn/overview/
- guiriduro 6y agoWhat happen?
- spiritplumber 6y agoSomebody set up us the bomb
- ncmncm 6y agoNow might be a good time to recall: AOL is sucks!!!what you can do with ther cd rom bisk: :cost to mutch :it suck :no good :send to many disk. :Me and my friends took a bisk and lit it on fire and froze it :slamed it angaisnt the boor. ...adjudged by Richard Cretan "a marvel of compression and thwarted expiation". <http://www.violently-happy.net/unprofessional/lib/txt/folklore/bisk.txt http://www.violently-happy.net/unprofessional/lib/txt/folklo...> It is almost a miracle that Google was able to locate the text. Could this be the same RICHARD CRETAN, freelance writer in St. Paul, Minnesota reachable via rcretan@mac.com ?
- spiritplumber 6y agoWe used a crossbow and fishing line to make it look like we climbed on a university building to hoist a AYBABTU banner. Took them the better part of three days to figure out how we did it.
- jonsolo 6y agoI’m amazed at how much of early memes were like “hey look I photoshopped these words into a sign somewhere”, whereas now it’s just “here’s a funny picture that I drew words on”. I think the current way is better? Less skill to execute, but more variety in content.
- hannob 6y agoFWIW: It's quite a nice game. If you like retro games fire up an emulator and give it a try.