Slashdot Mirror
Dotcom Era Fads
prostoalex writes "Nostalgic USA Today looks at the fads of the dotcom boom era. The Dancing Baby, HamsterDance, I Kiss you dot org and the phrase 'All your base are belong to us' made the list."
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Also, kibo is about *usenet* -- and predated the dot.com thing by many years. The dot.com boom was all about the web.
But when did you ever see this sort of article about the interweb get anything right?
Toaplan creates the Zero Wing video game.
Toaplan releases a port for the Sega Genesis console with the addition of an intro scene, which is then translated into english (very poorly) and released in the United States.
Toaplan goes out of business.
Someone from a Zany Video Game Quotes website notices the poor translation, and highlights the game.
Overclocked.org does a humorous voiceover of the Zero Wing intro in a fake Wayne Newton voice.
Dozens of game-related messageboards begin to post quotes from the parody, and images altered to show the phrase.
Most of the threads lose interest and die off quickly as the trend is pronounced dead countless times.
The Flash movie/video is released with images from the threads and music taken from the origional game someone had added the phrase "all your base" to.
AYB explosively expands to the general (non game messageboard-reading) public.
The origional site for the video is shut down within hours due to excessive traffic, and moves to PlanetStarsiege.
Lycos ponders how "All your Base" was transformed from obscurity to a top 50 search practically overnight.
Mainstream media begin to notice the trend, and stories appear in Time Magazine, USA Today, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, Tech TV, Wired, and many others.
As the 'remix' used in the video goes from 58 hits a day to several thousand per day, mp3.com notices the track has been ripped directly from the video game and pulls the music off their site due to copyright violations. It is later returned unchanged.
The trend continues to grow as it expands into nearly every corner of the web.
Large websites like Angelfire and Hewlett Packard sneak "all your base" references into their designs.
"All Your Base" is pronounced dead several times every day, yet it's 15 minutes of fame continue for some reason...
All Your Base Are Belong to Us. This is an example of a saying or idea that rockets across the Net and becomes as familiar as an actual person. (The term spam, when used in reference to junk e-mail, is the most famous and successful of these.) The phrase, derived from a bad Japanese-to-English translation in the game Zero Wing, started showing up in the far corners of the Net in 2000 and shot to Web superstardom the following spring. People picked up the phrase and created a panoply of Web sites using it; they built Internet billboards, they morphed photos, they even put together music videos. But like other flashes in the pan, it retreated as quickly as it had appeared. You only wish it retreated as quickly as it had appeared. We were stuck with the links being emailed to us, or posted on our messagesboards, for months, if not years. Hell, people are STILL sending it to me.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
I would've put this on the list -- not because it faded as a result of the dot com bust, but its fading was indicitive of the craziness of the dot-com boom in general.
Sadly, most people have never heard of it now...
The "Am I Hot" TV show was not a derivitive of the AmIHotOrNot website.
Long before AmIHotOrNot.com - hell, long before there was a WWW (we're talking 1991 and perhaps prior) - Howard Stern's radio show featured a frequent segment called "The Evaluators." Women would come in, typically get naked, and a panel of judges would rate them from 1 to 10. The segment involved the use of a laser pointer with which judges would point to various good/bad parts of the model's body. While the laser pointer obviously did nothing for the radio show, it went over well on the E! channel's TV version of his program.
Enter a man named Scott Einziger. He used to be the producer of the E! television channel's "Howard Stern" show, which features highlights of the radio show. He was also the producer of Howard's short-lived Saturday night show on CBS TV, which was similar to the long-running (and still running) E! show. He was a friend of Howard's, and definitely an insider as far as the radio/TV shows were concerned.
Scott quit working for E! and Howard in 2001, to pursue a career as a "real" network television producer at ABC. His first gig was as co-producer of "The Amazing Race," ABC's attempt at reality TV. This year, ABC introduced "Am I Hot?" Scott Einziger, ex-Stern-groupie, was the producer. The show was a complete and total rip of the Stern segment, right down to the laser pointers. The entire concept of the "Am I Hot?" TV show was taken from Howard Stern. The AmIHotOrNot website had absolutely nothing to do with it.
And now you know the rest of the story.
Speaking of hot or not, Rate Naked People at Fuck Meter! (not work-safe)
Luser Attitude Re-adjustment Tool
m l
(LART) Something large, heavy and painful, used to
respond appropriately to particularly annoying lusers.
The alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ recommends the following
LARTs. A 2x4 works fine, but a real professional needs
something a little more effective. Unfortunately, this is a
very personal thing, and no consensus has yet been reached on
the group. Everything from a simple, 7.65mm Walther (for the
Bond fans only, it's not a very good gun) to a 155mm with
depleted Uranium rounds has been suggested, some even going
for exotic things like Thermite, nukes or flamethrowers. For
further info, look at the rec.guns home page.
alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ
(http://www.ctrl-c.liu.se/~ingvar/asr/overview.ht
I don't remember that one, so I looked it up
http://www.funnyjunk.com/pages/mydog.htm
It's a shockwave file, and it's not bad. Not bad at all
-- james
There was the Exploding Whale
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Since nobody here seems to know the original source, I'd better chime in. The prank is from a Jerky Boys CD. Despite their stupid movie, those guys produced two (maybe more) hilarious CD's full of these types of calls. Even though the "why you kick my dog!" routine is funny, it isn't their best material. If you like the skit, I suggest you look into the full CD's. (I have no financial interest here; I'm simply a fan.)
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
In Soviet Russia - explanation on Everything2.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
various cybercultural oddities (a.k.a. memes) over the years have made a fleeting impact on Net culture
I didn't think a meme was a cybercultural oddity. I thought it was a (usually false) idea whose character was to spread through human consciousness in a viral manner (e.g. - all small bandages are Band Aids (tm), the SR-71's fuel is the consistency of peanut butter, etc.).
This brings up a question. Has the idea of a meme become a meme?
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
to a text-only shell account with a 1,500 bps modem :-)
No such thing as a 1500 bps modem. It was 2400 or 9600 baud.
Wikipeda has a great collection of "Slashdotisms", which they categorize under "Slashdot Trolling Phenomena". They're all here (or if not all, then most): Natalie Portman, In Soviet Russia, Beowulf Clusters, etc. The Slashdot Effect has its own entry, too.
They forgot one other fad: Mr.T Ate My Balls (and original site). I have to admit, I never got that one.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
It's a kind of coarse cornmeal, and is prepared similarly to oatmeal ("instant grits" exist, as well as the old fashioned kind). The cooked grits can then be used in a variety of different recipes. Grits are generally eaten in the southern regions of the USA, though of course the Native Americans originated the concept (since corn, after all, came from the Americas, not Europe).
Grits were also featured in My Cousin Vinny. What they have to do with Natalie Portman, I couldn't say.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I guess I've been around too long in software development circles and don't see what the problem is. I've worked for a number of companies and we were always expected to work 5 days a week. Generally most of the companies I worked for had what we called "core hours" which were between the hours of 10AM and 4PM. These were the hours we're expected to be around for meetings etc. This also gives people the flexibility to come in from anywhere from 7:00AM to 10:00AM so long as we're around during core hours. I've never worked anyplace where people would take afternoons off during the work week.
I have worked for a few companies there had a schedule where people could work nine 9 hour days in a row which then allowed a person to every other Friday off. I've always put in alot of hours in my programming jobs over the year since it goes with this sort of job. We don't do death marches but the programmers I work with know if they're behind or not and if they need to work an extra day or two on the weekend sometimes to catch up they do it. I never saw any of this "slacker" behavior where just because someone put in some extra hours on some days earlier in the work week that they're now entitled to take a few afternoons off during the week.
I'm trying to sound like a hard ass but I was around as a programmer long before the dot.con boom and I'm still around after the bust. I've never ever had a programming job that was 9 to 5 and that just sort of goes with the job IMHO. At least now with VPN solutions available if I have to do some work on the weekend I can do it from home and not waste the time driving into the office. And with the IT downturn I'm doing alot more than just programming now. I'm also our office's part-time Oracle DBA and I'm also resposible for system admin duties for several Linux servers and a Win2K server.
I do agree that you should be able to take the vacation time off that you've earned but I'm not real sympathetic about whether you can or can't take Thursday and Friday afternoon off. A reasonable manager may not care how many hours you work each week so long as you get all of your work done on time and done correctly. But your manager may also have a PHB putting pressure on him/her and so that pressure gets passed down to you.