Single-Serving Sites. Hampster Dance. About Hampster Dance is one of the earliest single-serving sites, featuring rows of dancing hamster GIFs set to a sped-up sample of the song “Whistle Stop” by Roger Miller.
The site became popular in the late 90s through e-mail, blogs and bait & switch pranks. Origin The original Hampster Dance website was created by Canadian Deidre LaCarte, an art student at the time, during a competition between her best friend and sister to see who could generate the most web traffic. Using the web hosting service GeoCities, LaCarte created an homage to her pet hamster, Hampton, featuring 392 animated hamster sprites doing different dances in August 1998.
Spread The Hampster Dance site began spreading through e-mail and newsgroups, with little mention before 1999. YTMND. About YTMND, an abbreviation of the phrase “You’re the man now, dog!
", is an online community and memetic hub site that hosts user-generated remixes and parodies of popular culture in the form of multimedia webpages featuring a still image or animated GIF with an overlay text and looped audio track. History The phrase “you’re the man now, dog!” Is a memorable quote by uttered by the character William Forrester (player by Sean Connery) in the 2000 drama film Finding Forrester (shown below). On July 6th, 2001, YTMND founder Max Goldberg created the site Yourethemannowdog.com, which was originally composed of white, 3-dimensional ASCII text on a black background reading “YOURE THE MAN NOW DOG DOT COM” (shown below, left).   On April 1st, 2004, Goldberg registered the domain ytmnd.com. 2005 Redesign On November 25th, 2005, Goldberg updated the site with a new redesign, comment layout, news system, content management system, URL scheme and added two new servers. Sponsored Pages 2006 Redesign. Ualuealuealeuale. About Ualuealuealeuale refers to a YTMND fad associated with the incoherent gibberish chorus from the song “Chacarron Macarron” by the Panamanian artist Rodney Clark, a.k.a El Chombo.
Origins. EPIC Maneuvers. About EPIC Maneuver is a popular YTMND meme dating back to July 2006, after a user named “airbornebryan” uploaded an animated gif of Geordie (Star Trek: The Next Generation) doing an overly dramatic roll to evade capture, accompanied by equally gravitating BG music--“Ghost Love Score” by the Finnish power-metal band Nightwish.
A typical “epic maneuver” usually involves a short action footage that is deemed unnecessarily/comically theatrical, whilst the Nightwish song is played in the background to further emphasize the epic nature of maneuver. Notable Cases of Epic Maneuvers. Safety Not Guaranteed. About *Safety Not Guaranteed" is a YTMND series based on a newspaper ad featuring a portrait of a young man sporting a mullet haircut next to an advertisement seeking a time-traveling companion.
Origin The original newspaper advertisement seeking a partner for time traveling was written by John Silveira and published as filler in the September/October 1997 issue of Backwoods Home Magazine. After his publisher, Dave Duffy, asked him for something to help fill up the classifieds page, Silveira wrote up a personal ad seeking a girlfriend and the time travel ad as a joke, using the same P.O. box numbers for both ads. As of October 2010, he had received thousands of responses to the time travel one and only five for his personal ad.
NEDM. Background In July 2005, a video of a cat being burned alive was uploaded to the forum site ogrish.org, evoking strong reactions from other forum users as well as the administrators.
Following an official investigation led by the site, the Belgian teenager who uploaded the video was eventually arrested and the man who actually commited the crime eventually turned himself in. Shortly thereafter, a YTMND site was created out of the video featuring music from the PC game DOOM. YTMND user Titanium-Gecko was outraged to find that some users had given the site 5 stars. He then proceeded to under-rate any sites created by users that had done so. X Doesn't Change Facial Expressions. X has ONE weakness! About The “X has ONE weakness!” Was a meme originating in YTMND; its webpage was created by a user named Super-Penguin on August 7, 2005. Although generally this phrase is confined to YTMND only, it has been referenced to all over the web in places like YouTube and message boards.
Conan is... About PROTIP: Conan is an alligator Conan is… is a series of YTMND sites based on Conan O’Brien’s “alligator snapping jaw” motion on Late Night with Conan O’Brien during an interview with Matthew McConaughey.
In typical fashion, the fad cross-bred with other popular internet memes and fashioned into newer, stronger YTMNDs. Music Used Origin On April 17, 2005, user Dasyati uploaded the site Conan is…AN ALLIGATOR to YTMND. YouTube mirror: KHAN! About “KHAN!” Is a YTMND fad that uses a memorable scene from the blockbuster 1982 feature film Star Trek II: The wrath of Khan. Kirk: Khan, you bloodsucker. You’re gonna have to do your own dirty work now, do you hear me? Catch That Man. Catch That Man* (a.k.a Box Chase) is an animated GIF series featuring a man in a box with a motorcycle helmet, propelling himself forward with his hands in an attempt to escape from a group of Asian men. The series is usually accompanied by a sped-up Europmix version of Japan Break Industries, a corporate anthem made for a Japanese demolition company. Today, there are over 100 spin-offs of CATCH THAT MAN! Brian Peppers. About Brian Peppers was a sex offender from Ohio whose hard-to-believe photo was widely circulated on the Internet in 2005.
While it was initially suspected to be fake, online sleuths Snopes.com were able to confirm the photo’s authenticity with Ohio authorities. Snopes even managed to dig up some photos of Brian in highschool Snopes also suggests that Peppers’ unusual appearance may be due to “a condition such as Apert’s Syndrome or Crouzon’s Syndrome.” Spread The photo of B-Peps followed a typical memetic path of photoshoppery, “OMG WTF” and “stop being so mean,” culminating in Jimbo Wales banning Brian Peppers from Wikipedia. Notable links Brian Peppers would set the bar high for sex-offender memes to come (e.g.
Crimes Peppers was sentenced to 30 days in jail with 5 years probation in 1998 for the crime of “Gross Sexual Imposition.” Search Trending. LOL, internet. About Lol, Internet is a catchphrase used to emphasize that the Internet should not be taken too seriously, similar to the use of The Internet is Serious Business.
The phrase was later adopted into an animated GIF series known as “Steam, Steam” on YTMND. Origin “LOL Internet” became popular following 4chan’s 100,000 GET event on April 19, 2004. Medieval Macros - Bayeux Tapestry. About Medieval Macros (also known as Bayeux Tapestry Parodies) are a series of images macros.
Origin The Historic Tale Construction Kit was one of many eCard generators created by Bjorn Karnbogen of Cologne, Germany in 2003; the same year that 4chan was created. From an archived version of Wikiworld’s 4chan entry: Olde English image macros of existing memes created using the Historical Tale Construction Kit. Stole my bike.