#lessons in internet history

[collector1observer]

I had to find out what the meme was about

If we're talking about the Airplanes art/meme, it is not based on anything. The story behind its creation was that bluedog444 (the artist behind the original, infamous Airplanes art, who was 9 at the time) just wanted to make something for the MordeTwi fan group, and the song was living in their head rent-free at that moment.

For how the Mordecai x Twilight pairing itself became a thing, it's a compelling story. I recommend just watching this video:

this meme is killing me

Now that I've seen both these shows I had to find out what the meme was about. And then for no reason at all I had to draw it.

[clown-of-rivia]

Fun Fact and History Lesson!

The 'no beta we die like [character]' originated from this damn photo that went viral on Tumblr in 2016 and changed Ao3 tags and fanfic vernacular forever.

Meaning: it's a tag used on fics that were not beta read (the author didn't get someone to read it for them before posting). Betas read fics to check for spelling, grammar, consistently, etc and often edit it.

*

Similarly, 'Dead dove' or 'dead dove do not eat' is from this scene in Arrested Development.

Meaning: if there's a warning of something really dark/bad, don't open/read it and expect something different. Or: 'mind the tags this is dark, don't read if you don't like it'.

[arconinternet]

Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (Book, Earl Scruggs & Burt Brent M.D., 1968)

You can digitally borrow it here.

Below: some great banjo players of history.

[skankhunt44]

This was back when you had two web pages open, MySpace, and MSN.

Your emo song lyrics as your status, trying to become the alpha emo. You always took a selfie from above. Times were wild brah.

Then there was dialup internet... it was the worst sound. Also if anyone picked up the phone, you were fucked.

It was a time. That most of you weren't alive...

[lennythereviewer]

Discourse over Super Smash Bros. Ultimate literally shaped a piece of internet vocabulary.

It started with "Scrimblo Bimblo" For those not in the know, fans of Smash Bros. are notorious for having a hatred for the Fire Emblem characters on the roster due to the fact that they occupy so many spots on the roster, half of them have playstyles that are derivative of Marth's moveset, and can kind of bleed together visually which earned them the "Anime Swordsman" moniker.

The arrival of characters like Shulk and Cloud only compounded the notion that too many "Anime Swordsmen" were taking up roster spots that could have been filled with more visually distinct or more nostalgic characters from other game genres, specifically platformers (and even more specifically, Crash Bandicoot, one of the biggest fan requests) One tweet however changed everything when it coined the phrase "Scrimblo Bimblo" a catch-all to describe platformer mascots as sort of a counter to "Anime Swordsman"

Scrimblo Bimblo caught on quick by frustrated JRPG fans who were tired of being talked down to and they finally had something that got under the skin of people who kept shitting on their favorites. The two sides fought back and forth until the DLC for Ultimate ended, but Scrimblo Blimbo ended up leaking into other sides of Twitter and Tumblr where it took on a whole new meaning outside of it's original origin

It somehow got twisted into "Skrunkly Scrimblo" which became sort of a term of endearment. It's meaning is flexible but seems to commonly used for "funny little guys" or something that's cute in an almost ugly or pathetic way

Eventually the Scrimblo was dropped from Skrunkly, and Skrunkly took over this specific definition And finally today, Scrimblo (without the Bimblo) has sort of made a resurgence, now has just become an overall term of endearment for not just a favorite character but for anything or anyone

Isn't that interesting? A term born out of fandom bullying to put down a persons personal taste ended up circling back around to become a term of enjoyment and affection. And it came from the funny platform fighter that lets you kick Sephiroth's ass with Minecraft Steve

[unforth]

I know the Musk "trillion people means more Mozarts" thing is stupid as fuck but I just saw a prominent blogger reply to it by saying anyone has the ability to be a Mozart and I'm sorry but "talent doesn't exist" discourse has officially gone too far, and I say that as someone who hates the word "talent" and has replaced it almost entirely with the word "skill" in my vocabulary.

Not everyone is a prodigy. Yes, prodigies get lost because they lack opportunity, but that still doesn't mean everyone is a prodigy. If everyone WAS then everyone with enough wealth and opportunity WOULD be and like. I'm sorry, have you SEEN what a fucking moron Elon Musk actually is?

[justforthedead]

n e ways

[sege-h]

Like some kinda shark fin a now unrebloggable post on my dash has let me know whats going on on Twitter right now

Which is people going "UMMM NOT EVERYONE LIVES IN AMERICA OFC I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE ODYSSEY IS NOT ALL OF US HAD TO READ YOUR AMERICAN BOOK IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS" about being told it kinda sucks they dont know what the Odyssey is

Brother

Brother

I'm from Macedonia. That's like NOWHERE. WE had to read the Odyssey for school. And I knew of it BEFORE we had to read it for school because it was common knowledge. There was also some multi part Hallmark adaptation of it they kept playing on TV

[goldensunset]

there were a couple years i couldn’t even say the name of the show vld i couldn’t even allow my fingers or tongue to form the shape. to this day it’s still my instinct to call it v slur lol

[collector1observer]

I just want to write my story

This is about how I came across MordeTwi and how it became one of my obsessions. It's kinda funny to look back to because I never really cared about Regular Show back then and I was one of those people who avoided MLP like it was the plague.

The first time I encountered a redraw of the Airplanes meme was actually in the year 2020, when I was browsing the Comics & Cartoons board of 4chan.

It was a "Barney Bait" thread, this was the thread's thumbnail. I had no strong reaction to this image, nor thought to figure out the context for its creation. I wasn't fully aware about the ship yet at this point, I just assumed this image was a commission and not part of a greater cultural phenomenon. Okay, I'll admit: this was also during the time I was in a phase where I irrationally hate Regular Show and what it stands for (I believe the Simp meme was popular at this point too), and when I looked at this image then, I swear I was like "Heh. Mordecai is being partnered up with some random pony." (I didn't know at the time that Twilight is also a main protagonist like he is lol)

Jump forward to more or less a year later, I was binge watching Jabroni Mike's stream VODs. One video in particular has Frederick Knudsen as a guest, and it was about AI generated images (this was back when Dall-E wasn't a thing yet, I think). One of the prompts was the lyrics of Airplanes, and at some point Fred had to bring up MordeTwi because Mike had no idea what's going on. That one fateful second... Fred shared the original Airplanes drawing (Mike showing it to us thru OBS), and that's when it hit me...

"Hey, this image looks familiar. Hmm... A meme. And it involves Mordecai and MLP..."

I had to pause the video but it only took me seconds to remember that 4chan thread. This was also the first time I learned of the pony's name – Twilight Sparkle. "Ah. I know my search term now, thanks Fred!"

Google: mordecai x twilight sparkle

This was when the Airplanes meme was still just about to blow up into mainstream popularity (re: resurge as a trend big time). Searching MordeTwi during this time was better since you got to see more of the older stuff that wasn't to do with the redraw trend or the Airplanes meme in general. At the same time I was deep diving in this search, I was also looking at my browser history trying to rediscover that 4chan thread to make sure I wasn't going crazy (actually, I had to look it up through an archive, e.g. Desu Archive).

I learned a few things that day:

1, Mordecai x Twilight Sparkle was a thing for a long time

2, the ship itself did not stem from the original meme image – which there's a trend over it – but alot of people don't seem to know that

3, there was a trend back in 2020 to "redraw MordeTwi"

4, there was an ongoing trend to make content related to: A, the ship, or B, the meme based on the ship.

There's just something about this pairing, it just... stuck to my head. Like, it's some kind of cosmic horror – they're bound together one way or another, their pairing is inevitable, and your mind just won't quiet about it. But there's something else I learned about MordeTwi in those early times: the original shippers of this pairing were kind of the underdogs. This was a full on fanbase too, I must add, with a fan club. Just a few days in for their existence and they were already getting hate sent their way; they were misunderstood – though granted, they didn't have a FAQ section to clear things up, until two years after their club was founded.

Suffice it to say: learning about this ship – how its' fans/creators got treated over time, and how it was perceived overall... that got me rooting for MordeTwi. It's a pity that MordeTwi is mostly seen these as "that fake ship/joke pairing that a nine-year-old made up out of nowhere".

[forgottenbones]

Un tumblelog, o tlog, è un tipo di sito web, variante del blog, la cui caratteristica principale consiste nella brevità dei contenuti testuali arricchiti da altri elementi multimediali, differentemente dai lunghi editoriali frequentemente associati ai blog.

Il termine tumblelog è stato coniato da why the lucky stiff in un blog post del 12 aprile 2005 per descrivere il sito Anarchaia. Secondo Jason Kottke, «un tumblelog è un flusso di coscienza improvvisato, un po' sul genere delle liste di collegamenti dei linklog, ma con più contenuti oltre ai link».

Si tratta di una forma più specifica del microblogging usata per includere contenuti tra cui collegamenti, fotografie, citazioni, dialoghi di chat e video. A differenza dei blog, questo formato �� frequentemente usato dall'autore per condividere creazioni, scoperte ed esperienze, senza la possibilità di commentare, caratteristica tipica dei vari social network.

Tumblelog

[kashiichan]

Happy 11th anniversary, Spiders Georg!

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[troythecatfish]

[kcmakhubele]

Top 10 Historical Events That Changed the World

History is not just a series of dates and facts—it’s a collection of powerful moments that have shaped the world as we know it. Some events altered the course of civilizations, while others inspired movements that affected entire continents. These transformative events resonate through time, leaving legacies that influence every aspect of modern life. Here, we explore the top 10 historical events…

[copperbadge]

Tomorrow I will have been in fandom for thirty years.

I can mark the anniversary very precisely because I know the name of the first fanfic I ever read, which is fortunately archived online along with the date it was posted, the same day I read it. I don't believe Usenet exists anymore and I've been here too long to believe that nothing ever disappears off the internet, so I know that archives are truly a gift to history.

I posted my first fanfic not that long after. It wasn't well-written but reading it today I can see that the narrative was sound. People said they liked it, which was kind given how extremely bad my grammar was. I was an awkward teenager with undiagnosed ADHD and praise was rare for me, but when I wrote fanfic someone always said something kind about it. Eventually a few of them took me under their wing and explained things like "where quotation marks go" and "paragraph breaks". Commas, I fear, are a lost cause even today, but they tried, bless them.

I thought about doing something big to commemorate the anniversary, but I couldn't really think what I might do and the world right now is pretty exhausting. I'm forty five and I'm tired. But imagine how much more exhausting the world would be without fandom -- how much emptier my life would be without my friends, this community, the writing I do, the art and beauty fandom exposes me to. So for now I'm just meditating on that a bit -- the richness of the experience, the gifts I've been fortunate to receive, the lessons I've been fortunate (if sometimes reluctant) to learn.

In another thirty years I'll be seventy five, if I live so long. Thirty years ago we didn't in any meaningful sense have digital cameras, let alone cellphones or smartphones, social media, streaming television, GPS. I did a report on the science of cloning for my high school biology class (on the suggestion of a fellow fan) a year before Dolly was cloned. I wrote my first fanfic using a computer running Windows version 3.1. I wrote it in Notepad, still a constant companion.

I hope I live to seventy five. As tired as I am, I'm looking forward to seeing where the next thirty years will take us.

I hope Notepad will still be there.

[forgottenbones]

Douyin was launched by ByteDance in September 2016, originally under the name A.me, before rebranding to Douyin (抖音) in December 2016. Douyin was developed in 200 days and within a year had 100 million users, with more than one billion videos viewed every day.

While TikTok and Douyin share a similar user interface, the platforms operate separately. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them, along with other features such as buying, booking hotels, and making geo-tagged reviews.

ByteDance planned on Douyin expanding overseas. The founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, stated that "China is home to only one-fifth of Internet users globally. If we don't expand on a global scale, we are bound to lose to peers eyeing the four-fifths. So, going global is a must."

The app was launched as TikTok in the international market in September 2017. On 23 January 2018, the TikTok app ranked first among free application downloads on app stores in Thailand and other countries. TikTok has been downloaded more than 130 million times in the United States and has reached 2 billion downloads worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower (those numbers exclude Android users in China).

In the United States, celebrities, including Jimmy Fallon and Tony Hawk, began using the app in 2018. Other celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Alba, Will Smith, and Justin Bieber joined TikTok as well as many others. In January 2019, TikTok allowed creators to embed merchandise sale links into their videos.

On 3 September 2019, TikTok and the U.S. National Football League (NFL) announced a multi-year partnership. The agreement occurred just two days before the NFL's 100th season kick-off at Soldier Field, where TikTok hosted activities for fans in honor of the deal. The partnership entails the launch of an official NFL TikTok account, which is to bring about new marketing opportunities such as sponsored videos and hashtag challenges. In July 2020, TikTok, excluding Douyin, reported close to 800 million monthly active users worldwide after less than four years of existence.

In May 2021, TikTok appointed Shou Zi Chew as their new CEO who assumed the position from interim CEO Vanessa Pappas, following the resignation of Kevin A. Mayer on 27 August 2020. In September 2021, TikTok reported that it had reached 1 billion users. In 2021, TikTok earned $4 billion in advertising revenue.

In October 2022, TikTok was reported to be planning an expansion into the e-commerce market in the US, following the launch of TikTok Shop in the United Kingdom. The company posted job listings for staff for a series of order fulfillment centers in the US and is reportedly planning to start the new live shopping business before the end of the year. The Financial Times reported that TikTok will launch a video gaming channel, but the report was denied in a statement to Digiday, with TikTok instead aiming to be a social hub for the gaming community.

According to data from app analytics group Sensor Tower, advertising on TikTok in the US grew by 11% in March 2023, with companies including Pepsi, DoorDash, Amazon and Apple among the top spenders. According to estimates from research group Insider Intelligence, TikTok is projected to generate $14.15 billion in revenue in 2023, up from $9.89 billion in 2022.

On March 8, 2024, President Joe Biden said he would sign into law a bill forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok within 180 days. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously, 50-0, to advance the bill on March 7, 2024. ByteDance launched a congressional lobbying campaign mobilizing TikTok users in response.

On 9 November 2017, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, spent nearly $1 billion to purchase musical.ly, a startup headquartered in Shanghai with an overseas office in Santa Monica, California, U.S. Musical.ly was a social media video platform that allowed users to create short lip-sync and comedy videos, initially released in August 2014. TikTok merged with musical.ly on 2 August 2018 with existing accounts and data consolidated into one app, keeping the title TikTok. This ended musical.ly and made TikTok a worldwide app, excluding China, since China already had Douyin.

TikTok