Charlie the unicorn??
Charlie! Look out for the Liopleurodon! A magical Liopleurodon!
Ah shit they took my kidneys.
Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
101–110 of 215 posts
Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#102Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
what H*R quotes do you find yourself unconsciously quoting to this day? for me it's "dag, yo" and, whenever I see "Ontario": "On-tah-REE-oh, CAH-nah-da—ooh, a little south of the border flavor"
"Email, I hope it's from a female!" And I often hum the "fhqwgads" tune, and go "boop boop" on an imagined keyboard.
I said
uh
come on
fhqwgads
come on fhqwgads
push it to the limit everybody to the limit
Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#104It feels perverse to even mention YouTube when this was the bread and butter of Newgrounds (and others) for so long before YouTube took off.
YouTube only absorbed it later on as a delivery platform.
Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, I think Flash was first. Before they hooked up with Quiznos, remember those rodents who "love da moon"? Or someone would take a mashup of Ol' Dirty Bastard ("Shimmy Shimmy Ya") and The Cure ("Close to Me"), then make a clunky video of the instruments (xylophone, but also humanoid skulls) played by various animals and sung by a tiger in that Monty Python-like jaw animation.
I think those were both rathergood productions. The Quiznos rodents were called spongmonkeys. Rathergood provided me with many memories -- American Girls, the cats playing Independent Woman, kittens stomp marching to Tanz mit Laibach, etc.
I'm glad someone else mentioned rathergood! That's the one that sticks out in my memory as older weird internet
Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#106Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#107Pre-YouTube internet largely didn't exist anymore. Flash is gone and one-by-one the old sites fall with no usable archive. A lot of the old culture is just GONE. It is now myth or legend. The stories only exist verbally. Stile, Encyclopedia Dramatica, LiveJournal, Geocities. Much of the culture content from the early internet is just gone.
Geocities at least is archived and fairly easy to torrent the whole thing.
There is definitely the desire to memoryhole a lot of this though. I'm surprised motherless is still around but i guess it's just a porn site now (was it always?)
Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#108I recently heard about Skibidi Toilet being the latest sensation among teenagers and had a very old person "what is wrong with kids today" moment when I watched some, before remembering that 20 years ago my friends and I were all watching Salad Fingers, Sick Animation, Homestar Runner and other dumb flash cartoons on albinoblacksheep.com.
I think there's definitely a qualitative difference, though. Salad fingers, at least, had better quality "stories", and the weirdness was less "basic." Skibidi Toilet is an excellent representation of the hyper-ADHD-ification of kids due to rapid-fire content consumption brought on by newer social media platforms.
I'm a bit younger than the average commenter here, but not young enough to be in the "skibidi toilet" demographic. But looking at both skibidi and the older type of YTP and idk the talking orange videos for example, I just don't see the difference. Maybe it's because I was too young to grow up watching them a lot but yeah. And that's saying nothing of the much more ADHD type of videos that were also common back then.
Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe MeatCanyon[1], or Joe Cappa's stuff[2], could fall into the modern "YouTube weird" - but I think a lot of the particular "weird" vibe of the early days of the modern web is pretty much dead - or at least not mainstream enough for me to know about it. There was a much more amateur bent to a lot of the old viral flash stuff, which I think just wouldn't stand out today. These two are a sort of new kind of weird -…
It may not be as aberrant as MeatCanyon, but I would say that Felix Colgrave is defining his own genre enough to be considered weird. https://www.youtube.com/@FelixColgrave
Oh man, I absolutely love his stuff. Every once in a while that Fever the Ghost song gets stuck in my head, even a decade after that video debuted. He's definitely got a very psychedelic and surreal style that is 100% Felix Colgrave. And I think that he certainly deserves the title of weird as much as anyone.
Especially his earlier stuff very much has that old school net sensibility about it. (Although he's talented and polished enough that it's not _quite_ the same amateur vibe of those early Newground days).
Another source of phenomenally cool and interesting "content" is the Adult Swim Off the Air series, which also has a very psychedelic vibe to it. The series collects a wide variety of really awesome animations (and also lots of silly stuff).
Probably my favorite thing to ever come from the Off The Air oeuvre is the animated music video for Dan Deacon's song When I Was Done Dying[1]. They also did a 20 minute special episode featuring Dan Deacon's music which is extremely cool[2]. I was exposed to so much cool stuff via Off The Air, the first episode is still one of my favorite ten minutes of weirdness[3]. There are so many other great episodes, too, if you like this kind of thing.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59QBOO6m210
Re: Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
#110Is this a paid post or something? Weird and avant-garde compared to what? The reason most of this crap never got archived is because it was the purest of crap, not the death of flash or other silly excuses.
Similarly nobody cares about the vast majority of YTMND or Vine.
There absolutely was a certain type of "nerd" into the junk on Newgrounds and they were probably the same loud minority who flocked to Facebook until they realized how crappy that was too. Nobody really wants to remember the internet between 2000 and 2015. Nobody likes most media from that era in general.