And:
Posted on 12/24/2022 2:12:00 PM PST by thecodont
Thirteen years ago, a man was sitting at the Denver airport. Bored, he turned his attention to his favorite website: “I see a lot of people on laptops around using the free wifi,” he wrote on the popular subreddit r/AskReddit. “Just on the off chance, any fellow Redditors here?”
What followed was a lively exchange among the platform’s most ardent superusers deciding how best to identify a fellow Reddit obsessive in the “real world.” The phrase they landed on combined several pieces of mid-aughts message board slang and coded inside jokes, yet, crucially, was otherwise meaningless: “The narwhal bacons at midnight.”
Today, this phrase is more likely to elicit groans and sighs rather than excitable recognition from anyone who was active on Reddit in 2009. That’s because “the narwhal bacons at midnight” has become a relic of an era nearly everyone who spends time on the internet feels deeply embarrassed by, whether they participated in it or not. Count it among the similarly mortifying phenomena of ironic finger mustache tattoos, job listings for “software ninjas,” the wildly popular YouTube channel Epic Meal Time, rage comics, idolizing Ron Swanson, Advice Animal memes, and dogespeak (“much feels” “very art”) and in particular the tone they’re associated with — hyperbolic, cutesy to the point of smarminess, and stuffed with seemingly “random” nouns. In short, it’s cringe.
“Cringe” is a shortened form of “cringey,” which itself is a shortened form of “cringeworthy,” referring to the embarrassment (often the secondhand kind) of witnessing something that is awkward, uncomfortable, passé, or cliché. Cringe content — whether created in earnest or as parodies of earnest cringe content — makes up an astonishingly large portion of the social internet; it combines everything from hysterical Twitter scolds to Instagram thirst traps to the entirety of the TikTok Discover page.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
Nice summary of Internet history as it relates to humor.
Important for the meme-aware.
Bkmk
I managed to get perma-banned from about 20 subreddits before they nuked my whole account.
Otherwise known as FReepers, Class of 1998.
Examples of early FReeper cringe sayings...
--What happened? I was taking a Shower.
--Stuned me with my beeber.
--A+Bert, Eschoir and Ash Alerts.
--Deep in the Hurtgen Forest & Classy Green Eyed Blonde (on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog).
--Italians off!
--Viking kitties & zot!
--Laz would hit it!
Not to forget Hugh and Series.
I’m a new guy. I didn’t get here until late 2000.
You’re a lot closer to the class of 98, my FRiend... You meshed with us while many of these weren’t even cringey yet!
I don’t even know when that happened.
Thailand?
Remember, “5”? (I believe this meant “Fifth-Columnist”)
Dont forget! All your base are belong to us!
With great justice!
I was lurking in ‘98. Those people scared me. Joined in 2000 and almost immediately had A+ Bert fry me in a FReepmail for something or the other.
And:
**Cringe**
**Cringe**
Lol. forgot that one.
I was a lurker in 99 or so. I didn’t really say a whole lot until fairly recently. I am sure most people would prefer me to go back to lurking, but I am too old to care now, I am that old guy that walks around naked in my house with all the curtains open without a care in the world
Similar lurk and sign up dates. Don’t remember getting flamed like that, but definitely remember being intimidated about posting with the the FReepers of that era.
Back in that lurking era, I used to send obscure stuff I got from FR late at night to talk radio host Neal Boortz. I’d had his email from when he actually had it public on his web site a couple years prior, before CGI forms for that sort of thing became the norm. He probably went to bed at 8 or 9 so he could get up at 5 in the morning to do his show prep. Fairly frequently, he’d use the stuff I’d sent, so that was sort of fun. FR was ahead of the curve on so many topics back then.
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