I do! The blue ball machine started when someone on SA posted a template gif which other people used to make their own tile of the machine. You just had to make sure the balls entered and exited in the same spot. I made the one where the ball gets frozen in ice. Then all the tiles were combined into a single gif. I remember being disappointed when the version that went viral only included half of the tiles that people submitted.
It's the other way around, the film is based on a classified ad, which many years earlier was a YTMND meme/fad.
NEDM is also a classic YTMND meme. https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/NEDM
It has a complicated origin, but a lot of YTMND was organic and weird like that.
Sorry, that meme started on YTMND in 2005 based on a post in a newspaper from the 90s. Saying the references in this thread are of the movie is like saying any mention online of "Gandalf" is a reference to the Lego Lord of the Rings game.
It's a shame this has happened. I wonder to what extent this has been archived, I've taken a quick glance at it on archive.org, and it seems the main page has been well archived but I'd be sceptical if any of the "deeper" pages so speak were archived.
It makes me wonder what will happen with similar online communities as time drags on, and makes me sort of concerned for them too and the content that could be lost due to their disappearance.
With the web going forward, it seems as if similar memetic communities will primarily exist on platforms such as reddit, and possibly tumblr?
I'm not sure to what extent YTMND itself would be archivable. The last I saw it it loaded frames with some Flash loader, which handled sync with the audio (as opposed to the very early YTMNDs which were just a gif/audio and text).
Places like tumblr and reddit are much more easily archivable as they're just text and image files, and now video files which with modern web standards can just be grabbed as is and put into archival systems with automatic transcoding as standards change.
I just hope whoever was running it at the end makes the archive publicly available.
Was it loading any Flash or it was a Flash app provided by the website that you could upload your content to?
I know of a certain adult website which hosts "webteases", which are basically interactive/choose your own adventure slideshows. The content was originally provided with Flash, but now they reworked it to use HTML5 and most of the content seems to work because it was using the website provided framework for the content.
IIRC, you would upload wav or mp3 to YTMND, and then it would play back in Flash. I think it worked like this for one or both of these reasons:
1. Syncing the audio and video. It is difficult to sync a gif with audio. They have to be started at the exact same time, be the exact same length, and never get out of sync due to lag/stutter. This wasn't important for early YTMNDs, but mattered later when people created what were disparagingly referred to as "___ short films".
2. Bandwidth. I think Max had said the Flash solution was more efficient than serving the raw audio and gif. Think of it as an early version of WebM.
I think the use of Flash could be controlled on a per-YTMND basis - the creator could disable the use of Flash. And/or maybe it was that Flash was only used for animated gifs?
"YOU'RE THE ARCHIVE NOW, DOG: Archive Team took a full copy of You're The Man Now Dog (YTMND) last year - should be playable in Wayback Machine now or soonish."
It’s still weird and great, just not public and you’re not cool enough to get invited.
Greatest open secret of the last 5 internet years: Real social media happens in private chatrooms and group “texts”. People are tired of posting publicly.
I'm cool enough to be invited or at least grandfathered-in to some of them but it's not the same. You can't just go online and find a different weird community every evening like you used to 15 years ago.
Also, with the tightening of privacy, there's less and less recruitment going on which makes me pessimistic as to the long-term viability of these private groups and forums. They seem to be slowing down with fewer posts every month. Many smaller ones which made the transition from IRC to webforum to some modern software are a pale shade of their former selves even when the Internet around them has been booming.
A core part of the early weird internet was the fact that you could stumble into it entirely accidentally. Private communities can be great, but they're a very different thing.
I always saved the wav/mp3 and gif files of the ones I liked the most. I do this for all sites I like because inevitably, they vanish and rarely render correctly on archive.org.
My favorite was "amorningfilledwith400billionsuns" - or also known as "A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits sagan" with the auto-tuned version of Carl Sagan singing about our possible future.
Hard to pick a single favorite actually. There were so many great ones.
It will only work for search result pages Archive.org saved, and only for the first page of results, but they archived a LOT of them, so most relatively common search terms should work.
The archived YTMND also has a comprehensive list of "fads", which is great for context and examples:
I only checked out again ytmnd a couple of days ago and left after I saw that all pages required flash. (Was that always the case? I thought it only required basic HTML)
That was a feature they added later on when people started making pages that required the audio to be in sync with the gif. Flash would wait until both were fully loaded to start playing them.
Sad. Back in 2000-2002 I was in grad school and I have fond memories of setting the home page on the shared imacs to YTMND with the volume turned all the way up and hearing it go off when someone would open up the browser.
This is crazy - was just browsing through the site a bit last week. I just finished a project[1] partially inspired by YMNTD and spent some time... getting inspired. A lot of the pages didn’t seem to have working audio - perhaps modern browsers don’t allow what YMNTD required. (It seems that gifsound.com has also had to adapt over time - you have to click a few times to get it to play, to work around autoplay restrictions.) I didn’t check, but I imagine the site didn’t work at all on iOS.
If the audio doesn't work, click one of the arrows in the top archive.org bar to go to another page. It doesn't appear to work if you load the page, but it does work after navigating.
It's really easy to perform a conversion of what you describe, for the sake of publishing an archive.
Extracting audio from flash objects is trivial, and coverting HTML frames to a single page format is a basic markup task, using divs.
This stuff is so easy, you could not only automate it, but build an abstraction layer to convert it on demand or even client-side, with a JS library.
Anyway, as the GP implies, the archive was likely performed collaboratively, with the consent and direct assistance of YTMND. Why else would they have closed user registration, but left the site available for a full year.
Wow, strong nostalgia. I haven't thought about that site since about 2006. What a strange and beautiful thing it was. I still never felt like I really understood it.
YTMND was the first time the notion of memes (in the dawkins sense of the word) made literal sense to me. There were a somewhat limited number of themes/motifs -> memes that you'd see combined and recombined. Some were more pervasive than others. Most of them spread with little to no relation to their original meaning/purpose/context. It was interesting to watch the meta level of the thing
133 comments
[ 97.7 ms ] story [ 728 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_Not_Guaranteed
I wonder whether the original comment about "doom music" is also a reference to the film? I had never heard of it.
It has a complicated origin, but a lot of YTMND was organic and weird like that.
Nedm is another meme.
I officially am a boomer spotcorrecting ancient memes
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/safety-not-guaranteed?full=1
It makes me wonder what will happen with similar online communities as time drags on, and makes me sort of concerned for them too and the content that could be lost due to their disappearance.
With the web going forward, it seems as if similar memetic communities will primarily exist on platforms such as reddit, and possibly tumblr?
Places like tumblr and reddit are much more easily archivable as they're just text and image files, and now video files which with modern web standards can just be grabbed as is and put into archival systems with automatic transcoding as standards change.
I just hope whoever was running it at the end makes the archive publicly available.
I know of a certain adult website which hosts "webteases", which are basically interactive/choose your own adventure slideshows. The content was originally provided with Flash, but now they reworked it to use HTML5 and most of the content seems to work because it was using the website provided framework for the content.
1. Syncing the audio and video. It is difficult to sync a gif with audio. They have to be started at the exact same time, be the exact same length, and never get out of sync due to lag/stutter. This wasn't important for early YTMNDs, but mattered later when people created what were disparagingly referred to as "___ short films".
2. Bandwidth. I think Max had said the Flash solution was more efficient than serving the raw audio and gif. Think of it as an early version of WebM.
I think the use of Flash could be controlled on a per-YTMND basis - the creator could disable the use of Flash. And/or maybe it was that Flash was only used for animated gifs?
edit: ironically, one of the non-flash versions doesn't work in Safari since it doesn't like a raw MP3 file in an OBJECT tag. The MP3 file is there though. https://web.archive.org/web/20060603154932/marioteachesptkfg...
"YOU'RE THE ARCHIVE NOW, DOG: Archive Team took a full copy of You're The Man Now Dog (YTMND) last year - should be playable in Wayback Machine now or soonish."
http://web.archive.org/web/20190512045939/http://ytmnd.com/s...
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Frequently_Asked...
Greatest open secret of the last 5 internet years: Real social media happens in private chatrooms and group “texts”. People are tired of posting publicly.
Also, with the tightening of privacy, there's less and less recruitment going on which makes me pessimistic as to the long-term viability of these private groups and forums. They seem to be slowing down with fewer posts every month. Many smaller ones which made the transition from IRC to webforum to some modern software are a pale shade of their former selves even when the Internet around them has been booming.
My favorite was "amorningfilledwith400billionsuns" - or also known as "A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits sagan" with the auto-tuned version of Carl Sagan singing about our possible future.
Hard to pick a single favorite actually. There were so many great ones.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180625031725/http://amorningfi...
https://web.archive.org/web/2019/http://SUBSITENAME.ytmnd.co...
This works for me even on iPad, so no Flash is needed. Also, you can search by tweaking the end of this URL:
https://web.archive.org/web/2019/http://ytmnd.com/keywords/S...
It will only work for search result pages Archive.org saved, and only for the first page of results, but they archived a LOT of them, so most relatively common search terms should work.
The archived YTMND also has a comprehensive list of "fads", which is great for context and examples:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170120213744/http://wiki.ytmnd...
Also, the most-viewed YTMNDs of all time:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190512045939/http://ytmnd.com/...
Lastly, this MetaFilter post I did rounded up some of my favorites:
https://www.metafilter.com/180917/You-Were-the-Man-Then-Dog
[1] https://www.kickscondor.com/slaptrash/
https://web.archive.org/web/20060603154932/marioteachesptkfg...
If the audio doesn't work, click one of the arrows in the top archive.org bar to go to another page. It doesn't appear to work if you load the page, but it does work after navigating.
Extracting audio from flash objects is trivial, and coverting HTML frames to a single page format is a basic markup task, using divs.
This stuff is so easy, you could not only automate it, but build an abstraction layer to convert it on demand or even client-side, with a JS library.
Anyway, as the GP implies, the archive was likely performed collaboratively, with the consent and direct assistance of YTMND. Why else would they have closed user registration, but left the site available for a full year.
The writing was on the wall.
We Didn't Start This Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-DMIf-WZYU
[1]:Lol, Internet
YTMND was a bit before my time, but I can appreciate it's place in early "meme culture". At least Something Awful is still around.