September 22, 2023 • 39 mins
What is a meme? What are some of the notable tech memes, and where do they come from? How does something become a meme?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
are you? It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode.
This episode originally published March twenty ninth, twenty seventeen. It
(00:28):
is called tech Memes, and y'all, I honestly don't have
any memory of what's on this episode. It is very
likely something that at this point is so obvious and
cringe that I hesitated to run it as a classic episode.
But there's there's a part of me that is morbidly
(00:48):
curious about how bad it is. So I believe in
a warts and all approach to tech stuff. So here
is this classic episode called tech Meme. Dan writes in
with all your base are belonged to us. I would
love to hear your take on the history of this
(01:10):
ancient meme. And indeed, the Babylonians in their writings did
talk of the one who would bring noe. It's not
that ancient, I mean, I guess in the terms of technology,
it's kind of old.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I told Dan that this particular.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Story, while great, wouldn't quite merit a full episode by itself.
So we're gonna look at a few different memes that
tie in with technology in general and video games in particular.
I'll probably do more episodes about big tech memes and
where they came from in the future, but today we'll
just examine a few. So where do some of the
(01:47):
most famous video game memes come from? And how did
they spread around and what did they mean? Well, first
things first, let's define what a meme is. And the
nice thing is we don't really have to because Richard
Dawkins did it for us in a book called The
Selfish Gene Now. Dawkins proposed the idea of a meme,
(02:08):
a meme being something we would use to describe an
idea that spreads quickly throughout a population of people. That population,
by the way, does not have to be regional, you know,
you don't have to say the population of a town
or the population of a country. That population could be
any group of like minded individuals within a particular subculture,
(02:31):
and the Internet makes it possible for memes to spread
globally rapidly. It's important to point out that memes don't
have to be on the Internet at all. That's one
of the ways that we encounter memes, but that's just
one method of distribution. A meme is an idea. The
Internet is just the handy way of getting those ideas
(02:52):
spread throughout the globe. So while an image with a
funny joke on it is a meme, not all memes
are images with a funny joke on them. It's just
one single type of meme. It's kind of one of
those all dalmatians are dogs, but not all dogs are
Dalmatians kind of thing. Some memes spread primarily through a
(03:14):
specific culture, so gamers are a good example. We're going
to talk a lot about video games, and a lot
of these memes spread at least at first primarily through gamers,
some of which then ended up going into mainstream. So
that's where I'm going to start with this discussion, and
I'm going to answer Dan's question first. I'm not going
to make him wait. The meme all your base are
(03:37):
belong to us as part of a group of memes
that all originate from the same source material, and that
source is a video game called Zero Wing, which came
out in nineteen eighty nine. It's a side scrolling game
in which the player controls a spaceship called a Zig
blasting through various enemies. Now those enemies are robotic aliens
(04:00):
called kats Cats, and in the very beginning of the game,
it's revealed that this group of aliens had recently signed
a peace treaty with Earth, but are now betraying that treaty.
And if you understand Japanese and you play the original game,
all of this is very very clear. It's a little
(04:21):
less clear in other versions. You see, the game started
out as an arcade game in Japan, and it was
really really popular, so it was one of the ones
that was chosen to be ported over to home video
game systems in Japan. It was also ported to the
Sega Mega Drive in Europe. Here in the United States
(04:42):
we called the Mega Drive the Sega Genesis. It's the
same machine, but two different names. So the European version
of the Zero Wing game featured some poorly translated dialogue
in which the original Japanese was transformed into mangled English.
And what follows is a reading of the transcript of
(05:04):
the first part of this game in the Mega Drive version.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
What happened somebody the bomb? What main screen turn on?
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Is you?
Speaker 2 (05:21):
How are you all your base to us? You are
on the way to destruction. What do you say you
have no chance to survive?
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Hah ha, Captain, take off every zig.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
You know what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Move zig for great justice. It's really moving, isn't it.
It's a kind of gets you. Yeah, it's it's like
the Brave Heart speech. Really it's it's really what it
comes down to. So interesting fact, the United States never
got that version of the game, at least not officially.
People might have ordered an import, but the official version
(06:00):
with the terrible translation came from the European market, not
the US market.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
And it's a bit.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Surprising that this meme even took off at all because
the game's release preceded the World Wide Web. The earliest
known examples of the memes appearing online date to nineteen
ninety eight. Now, that is pretty ancient for internet memes,
because most of them kind of surface and then maybe
they're popular for a few months or a little over
(06:26):
a year, and then they kind of fade away. But
you also have to remember nearly a decade had passed
since the game came out before it even showed up
on the Internet in the first place, so it's pretty
incredible now. Despite the long amount of time between the
game's release and its celebration online, the meme did take off.
Various forums, particularly on gaming sites, saw the phrase popping
(06:49):
up in discussions and profiles.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Some musicians and.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Other creators began to incorporate phrases and references in their works,
popularizing it even more.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
By two thousand and one, Wired.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Had covered the story, and soon it got the attention
of other mainstream outlets like The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle,
and USA. Today, the phrases from this translation live on
to this day. You will often hear people refer to
or see references to all your base are belong to us.
And this really shows you the power of memes. The
(07:23):
good ones catch on quickly and spread rapidly through various
groups and stick around. They don't just get really popular
and then disappear. It's an interesting kind of pop culture
in a way. Some of them can break three of
their origins and become mainstream pop culture and not just
stay in those little enclaves that they began in. But
(07:46):
some of those might be stuck in smaller niches. For example,
do a barrel role that could be one of those, Hey, Dylan,
do you recognize do a barrel role? N Dylan does
recognize do a barrel role. This meme comes from a
nineteen ninety seven Nintendo sixty four game called star Fox
sixty four, which in itself was a popular sequel to
(08:08):
an earlier Super Nintendo game simply called Starfox. Now, in
both games, you pilot a spaceship and you can dodge
incoming enemy laser fire by doing a barrel roll. But
in star Fox sixty four the maneuver received special attention.
There's a point when you're heading toward these stationary turrets
(08:28):
that are firing on you, and that's when a character
I think he's a donkey pops up. His name is
Peppy Hare, and he shouts to a barrel roll, just
as Dylan did earlier, and thus a meme was born.
By nineteen ninety seven, the World Wide Web was becoming
a household name. It would take a few more years
for it to develop its cheeky side, and on January thirtieth,
(08:52):
two thousand and four, someone created a definition of do
a barrel roll on the Urban Dictionary, that great repository
of information both entertaining and incredibly base, and in two
thousand and six, a group of four Chan pranksters began
to call Tom Green during his talk show and they.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Would just shout do a barrel roll over the phone.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Now, to be fair, this was not a case of
people being unsolicited mischief makers, because Tom Green's career was
based off of hosting call in shows in which most
of the calls were some sort of prank. So it's
not like Tom Green was new to this kind of experience.
It was just a very specific implementation. The meme found
(09:36):
its way on numerous images and animated gifts on the Internet.
And yes, I pronounce it gifts. I know that the
creator of the format says giffs, but he's wrong. Gift
is how it should be said. I'm planting my flag
on this one. Not my flag anyway. There are plenty
of examples of this meme online, usually involving animations of
(09:57):
people or animals flipping over accompanied by the text do
a barrel role. And even if you Easter eggs, So
here's one. If you want an Easter egg, go to Google,
just google dot com and do a.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Search for do a barrel role. Go ahead, give it
a shot.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
It's pretty cute.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
All Right, I got a several more memes I want
to talk.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
About, but before I do, let's take a quick break
to thank our sponsor. All Right, we're back, and the
next meme I want to talk about is the Zerg rush. Dylan,
(10:40):
do you know this one? Dylan does not know this one.
This refers to a tactic in the game StarCraft. So
StarCraft is a real time strategy game with the science
fiction theme, and you play one of three different factions
in the game. You control various units and methods of production,
and you participate in strategic battle in order to control
(11:01):
essentially what is a board.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
So you build.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Various facilities which allow you to create units, and you
use those units to try and defeat the other player.
So one of those three species are the Zerg, and
that's of course in the original StarCraft game, and they
are insect like critters. Their main advantage is that you
can make an awful lot of them relatively quickly. So
the individual units, particularly the starting ones, aren't very strong,
(11:28):
but sheer numbers can make up for it. Because your
production time is so short, you can produce a lot
more units as Zerg than people playing the other factions
in the game. So one go to strategy is just
to ramp up unit production as quickly as possible and
just overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers, just hordes of soldiers,
(11:50):
and that is the zerg rush. It's a rush both
because you are overcome by huge numbers and that it
happens pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
It's such an effective.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Tactic that it became pretty common in StarCraft games for
players to establish some rules of decorum that it was
considered kind of common courtesy to say when someone would
be allowed to launch a zerg rush. Typically you'd say
that zerg players would have to withhold attacking in that
(12:21):
way for a certain number of minutes, like you might
say no zerg rush for eight minutes, meaning eight minutes
of the game have to pass before you can do
a zerg rush, and that gives the other players an
opportunity to shore up their defenses or otherwise work on
a strategy to survive an incoming attack.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Otherwise, it was largely.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Seen as unfair that you were taking advantage of a
very simple mechanism within the game, and you were defeating
people not through superior strategy, but just by the fact
that the game favors these underpowered but numerous units. As
for the meme, this story goes that there was a
(13:01):
multiplayer match in which a Korean group was controlling the
Zurg forces and an English speaking group were the opponents,
and early in the match, a group of Zerg units
began to attack, at which point one of the English
speaking participants typed OMG zerg rush, and the Korean player
typed kiki k k E k e k e, which
(13:22):
is akin to lol in English. You might sometimes encounter
kiki ki along with zurg rush references in this mean,
and those references tend to be on images or enemy
gifts or something being swarmed by something else. So I've
seen one where there's a plane that looks like it's
being surrounded by a big flock of birds and it
(13:43):
was labeled zerg rush. Or you might see one type
of person completely surrounded by other people and that might
be zurg rush. Like I would imagine a picture of
Dragon Con, for example, with a whole bunch of people
in costume and one person who's clearly not in costume
just stuck in the middle of it. That would be
something that you might see zerg rush attached to oh
(14:06):
in a Google by the way, has an Easter Egg
for this meme too, so you can just go to
Google Search and type in zerg rush. That's a zerg rush.
Let me know how you do if you try that out. Now,
not all video game memes are about criticizing a game
mechanic or making fun of a specific game, or even
celebrating a specific game. Some are just a celebration of
(14:28):
good game design and writing, and I think that's the
case with the Cake is a Lie. That meme comes
from the game Portal, which published in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Now.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
In Portal, the player takes on the role of a
young woman who is being held captive in a scientific
research facility, and her captor is a passive, aggressive, snarky
artificial intelligence named GLaDOS, and GLaDOS is constantly goading the
character further down the pathway to keep trying to get
through increasingly difficult puzzles. GLaDOS is constantly there, criticizing you
(15:05):
and then giving you lackluster, insincere praise. Whenever you successfully
navigate one of these tough puzzles, you get a lot
of snark from GLaDOS, including one of the greatest post
credit Songs of All Time written by Jonathan Colton in
the voice of GLaDOS. When you explore the game world,
(15:27):
you can encounter stuff like messages scralled on walls, and
the messages are from an old lab worker named Doug Ratman,
and one of the famous messages is the phrase the
cake is a lie, written repeatedly. The reason for this
is GLaDOS constantly tells you that if you are to
complete all the tasks, you will.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Get cake, and that the cake will be amazing.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Occasionally, GLaDOS will even give you the recipe for a cake.
There's a lot of cake, at least references to it
in Portal, but Doug Ratman, the character that has left
his evidence behind, says that the.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Cake is a lie.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
And for a while people use the cake is a
lie as just a general reference to Portal. But gradually
this phrase took on a more general meaning, and it
came to mean the thing you are looking for doesn't exist,
or even you are trying to achieve something that isn't possible.
An urban dictionary translates it rather eloquently. I think into
(16:30):
your promised reward is merely a fictitious motivator. So you
could use this idiom to describe a common thread and
a lot of stories. For example, in the classic The
Wizard of Oz, the Wizard promises rewards to Dorothy and
her friends if they can get rid of the wicked
Witch of the West. Only it turns out the Wizard
(16:51):
is a flim flam man with no real powers of
his own apart from being a fast talker. The cake
is a lie. He doesn't have the ability to give
the characters what they want. In fact, when they were
turned victorious, he bestows gifts on them simply by telling
each character that they already possess the thing that they want,
which is a good thing since the Wizard had no
(17:13):
way to deliver upon his promises. Now, some memes aren't
about specific games at all, but rather gaming cliches in general,
and one of the big ones is called video game logic.
Now this refers to things that happen in video games
that defy common sense. For example, a popular meme in
this category has a picture of Master Chief, who is
(17:35):
the protagonist of the Halo franchise of games, and the
memes says can flip an extremely heavy tank can't control
gun recoil. So this refers to the fact that if
you come up to a tank that's on its side
and you press the right button, Master Chief will move
the tank so that you can get into it. And
yet every time you fire your gun, it flies up
(17:57):
in the air, and you think, well, if he's strong
enough to move a tank over canny control the movement
of a handgun, it does seem to defy logic. And
this is pretty common, and that's not the only example.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
I mean. Sometimes it's something like.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Invisible walls that you are free to roam anywhere until
you encounter an invisible wall, which in the video game
world makes sense, but when you think of it outside
of that context, you start to question, why is this
a design in this game? Or maybe there is a
game rule that says if you even step foot in
the edge of water, your character will drown. That's another
(18:36):
instance of video game logic, like especially a character that
seems to be resilient to almost any kind of damage,
like you can be shot fourteen times in the chest
and keep going, but if you touch water, you immediately drown.
Your toe is apparently where you breathe, and you're a goner.
Lots of different variations of this exist online and Mainly
(18:59):
it's just to point out how video games can be
inconsistent with their logic, that things that the game allows
in some cases mean that things it doesn't allow in
other cases don't really make sense, And it really kind
of helps bring attention to shortcomings in games. Sometimes those
shortcomings are necessary just to make the game work properly.
(19:23):
Another example of a shortcoming in a game is repetitive dialogue,
particularly in non player characters that you might encounter in
something like a role playing game. Now, it's not really
feasible to create a game in which every one you
encounter has a distinct personality and a non repetitive dialogue option,
(19:43):
particularly for games that have hundreds of characters in them.
So the more characters you have, the harder it is
to give each one an individual personality and history and
conversational options.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
So that means sometimes you.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Hear the same phrase is repeated, and sometimes that gets
a bit comedic, And that is the case with our
next meme, I Took an arrow in the knee. That
one comes from Skyrim, which is from Bethesda, and that
game came out in twenty eleven. It's a big, sprawling
fantasy game across an enormous map, and that map has
several towns and villages and outposts in it, and most
(20:19):
of those places have guards living there, and there are
male and female guards, and they often have different voices.
They got several different voice actors to record the same
lines of dialogue, and that's the problem. They all pull
from the same pool of scripted lines. So while the
guards you see may look different and sound different from
(20:41):
each other, they all have very similar stories to share.
Like it turns out, they all have the exact same background,
which includes a mysterious incident in which they were shot
in the knee by somebody. So the actual line of
dialogue is I used to be an adventurer like you.
Then I took an arrow in the knee. Now, it
(21:01):
doesn't pop up every time you meet a guard, but
it does happen occasionally, and that line is so distinct
that it's noticeable every single time you hear it.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
So there are tons of memes.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Based off this game experience. There are video montages of
guards talking about getting shot in the knee, which gets
funnier the longer it goes, because you realize that Skyrim
is almost entirely populated by guards with a limp. There
are variations on images in which the first part of
the phrase gets replaced by something else. So, for example,
(21:33):
I saw one with a My Little Pony character on
it that says I used to wonder what friendship could be.
Then I took an arrow in the knee. But my
favorite was one that I couldn't immediately identify. I didn't
know what video game it was from, but it showed
like a typical fantasy villain, something that you might see
in like Diablo or something along those lines. But it
(21:55):
was a headless character. So it was this big monstrous
suit of armor but with no head, and the caption
said I used to have a face. Then I took
an arrow to the knee, which makes perfect sense. Really,
I love that one. I once actually pitched a short
comedy commercial about a guard recruitment service that would supply
(22:16):
villages and towns with guards, and their method would be
to seek out adventurers and then shoot them in the knee,
and then the only suitable job they would have at
that point is guard and voila instant security force for
your town. But I never did make that video. Maybe
one day I will. I've got some other memes to
talk about, including the creepiest one on this list. But
(22:38):
before I get to that, let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor. Now some memes go beyond being silly,
and now it's time to talk about slender Man.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
And actually to talk about slender Man, we.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Have to talk about spooky spaghetti. No, I'm sorry, I'm
at creepy pasta. And here's where the old man in
me surfaces, because I gotta be honest with you, guys.
I had to look all this stuff up because I'm old.
I know what slender Man is, but the creepy pasta
stuff that's after my time on the internet. So I
had to actually learn about this stuff, which was really interesting.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Actually, So for those.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Who do not know, there's this phenomenon on the Internet
called creepy pasta. Now that term actually is a twist
on an older Internet slang word called copy pasta, which
first started popping up on the forum four chan in
the mid two thousands. It's a word used to designate
an example of viral copy and pasted text. So this
(23:46):
is when you will encounter, like a paragraph of text
that has clearly been copied from somewhere else and pasted
into this forum and it just starts to spread from
that point forward. You see it all over the internet,
particularly in forums and Facebook. You'll see a lot of
copy pasta on Facebook. I see it all the time
where people have copy and pasted a message they clearly
(24:10):
didn't write it themselves, and it has gone viral from
that point. Now, creepy pasta is a more specific type
of this copy and paste viral information.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
It's a term that describes stories.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
That have a horror element to them, frequently that is
supernatural in nature, although not necessarily, but a lot of
them are kind of paranormal creepy stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
This, by the way, is not a new thing.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
I mean, we've had folklore for as long as people
have been able to tell stories. Before the Internet, we
would use technology to share these kinds of information using faxes.
It was actually called fax lore. People would share jokes
and stories, cartoons, and other printed material by faxing it
to each other. So there's something innate about humans that
(24:56):
drives us to create and share these stories and ideas,
whether it's through the Internet or a fax, or just
sitting around a fire chatting away.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Let's get back to slender Man now, slender Man didn't
just start off as like creepy pasta per se. Originally,
it was actually part of a series of pranks pulled
by members of the Something Awful forums. Something Awful is
a comedy website, and in one of the forums, members
had decided to manufacture photos depicting seemingly supernatural phenomena using
(25:29):
Photoshop and other editing software. So the idea was, let's
take pictures, let's manipulate the photos so that we can
give them a weird, otherworldly element to them, and then
here comes the prank part. Let's share those photos on
paranormal forums, like forums that are about paranormal activity or
(25:51):
are you got an interest in paranormal subject matter, and.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Pass them off as real.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
So the challenge was create these altered photos and then
share them on various paranormal sites and try to convince
people that these are in fact actual examples of photographed
paranormal activity. Now, one of the members of that forum
was Eric Knudsen, who contributed under the handle Victor Surge.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
That was the name he used.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
He edited some photos of people and typically school children,
but not just school children, some teenagers as well, and
inserted the figure of an unusually tall man in what
appeared to be a suit. The man didn't seem to
have a face and perhaps had some tendrils or something
coming off of him. It was hard to make out
because the details were pretty fuzzy but also very unsettling.
(26:51):
Victor posted these images on a forum for people interested
in the paranormal, along with a short account of what
the pictures supposedly show, and according to Victor's story, it
was people being evacuated from a library that had caught
fire and the unusual ghostly creature may have had something
to do with it, and many of the children were
(27:12):
never found again, and that was the birth of slender Man. Now,
this particular character was probably inspired by other depictions of
ghouls and bogeymen. There are a lot of different historical
variations on this idea of the faceless, unusually tall creature
(27:34):
that looks vaguely like a man, very menacing in nature.
There are also examples of this even in computer games,
so it's not like it was a totally new idea,
but this was a particularly interesting incorporation of this idea
and a really compelling photoshop job. It really struck a
(27:56):
nerve others. Something awful members began to incorporate slender Man
into their own stories, and they began to add to
the mythology sometimes referred to as the slender Verse. Slender
Man had entered the world.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Of creepy pasta.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
He popped up on lots of different sites, including four Chan, Fangloria, Unfiction,
TV tropes, deviant Art, and many other websites and forums.
So it became one of those things where people began
to shape and evolve and tweak this idea and make
it grow from there. That's kind of this defining feature
(28:31):
of folklore and memes in general.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
And also you could argue that.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
It's a continuation of the same sort of ideas you
would even see back in the pulp horror novel days.
HP Lovecraft, for example, created a bunch of fictional books,
including the Necronomicon in the mythology of the stories, and
he encouraged his author friends to incorporate elements of his
cathul universe, including mainly those fictional books, in their own work,
(29:05):
and he would do the same. So in this case
you had a bunch of different authors incorporating each other's
creations and giving those creations more weight. They seem to
be more real because more people were writing about it.
How could it be one person's imagined thing when it's
popping up in other people's stories. Very similar with slender Man,
except we're talking about the Internet in general, not a
(29:28):
small group of authors. And over time you began to
see other incarnations and implementations of slender Man that included
a video game in which you play as a person
being pursued by the slender Man while you uncover clues
in a secluded forest in your fenced end, so you
can't easily escape, and you have to find notes, but
each note you find gives the slender Man more of
(29:50):
an idea where you are, and he starts to close
in on you. Several filmmakers have created online videos inspired
by the character. There are series like every Man, Hybrid,
Tribe twelve, and Marble Hornets that all took inspiration from
and added to the mythology of slender Man in interesting ways.
And there are really too many incarnations and incorporations of
(30:13):
slender Man for me to go into here. You can
find him or variations of him in things like Minecraft
and short films. But obviously I can't leave this topic
without also mentioning the twenty fourteen stabbing incidents, and I
say incidents because there was one in Wisconsin and one
in Ohio that year. Both of them are terrible stories.
(30:35):
So in Wisconsin, two twelve year old girls were arrested
on attempted murder charges after attacking and stabbing a mutual
friend nineteen times. Allegedly, the friend has since recovered from
her wounds, but the two girls remain in the court
system being tried for this crime, and one of the
(30:57):
two attackers, during a confession, said that slender Man was
the motivation behind the attack. She claimed that she believed
that slender Man would harm her family if she did
not carry out this attack. There's been some move on
the family's lawyer in this case to strike that confession
(31:18):
due to a claim that the miranda rights of the
accused were not properly administered. So that's still something that's
unfolding in the court system as I record this. The
second incident happened in Ohio, and that was a little different.
(31:38):
A mother was attacked by her daughter and the daughter
stabbed her mother several times and it mostly resulted with
superficial cuts. But the mother said she believed her daughter
was obsessed with the slender Man story and that that
was the motivation behind the attack. Now I'm not a psychologist.
I have no training or expertise in psychology. However, I've
(32:00):
seen similar cases involving other types of pop culture, and
that includes rock music, role playing games, video games, las
that kind of scene. I've seen people blame other things
for the behavior of folks. I don't necessarily believe that
it was the thing that inspired the person to go
(32:22):
out and do terrible things. I think in most cases
there's some indication that there were underlying factors that were
the real problem. Maybe the video game or pop culture
reference or whatever gave some direction, but the motivation factor.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Was already present.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I don't think that a fictional creation has that much
power over actual people. Now, I don't want to end
on such a grim note, so I'm going to talk
about one last goofy tech meme, and in this case,
I'm going to talk about a brave, some might say
foolhardy character.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Named Leroy Jenkins.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
This meme concerns the granddaddy of MMORPGs, that would be
the world of Warcraft. The story begins with a video
which was potentially staged of a group of guild members
from Pals for Life, leading an excursion into an area
of the game called the Rookery. So, if you're not
familiar with World of Warcraft, it is a fantasy based MMORPG,
(33:28):
meaning you're playing a role with a bunch of other people,
all online, a massive multiplayer online role playing game, and
you can do a lot of stuff on your own,
but the game encourages you to form friendships with other
gamers and to form groups with them, guilds with them,
and do things as a guild. And one of the
(33:50):
things you might do is go into particularly difficult areas
that you would have very little chances of surviving on
your own. One of those at this time World of
Warcraft's history was the Rookery. They had a lot of
potential monsters to fight, including Dragon's spawn, which are pretty nasty.
It takes a clever strategy to defeat the hordes of enemies,
(34:11):
particularly talking to people about their use of healing abilities,
you know, the support characters, while the damage characters go
in and try and clear out as many of the
bad guys as possible. And that's where the video gets
its humor. So as this group is standing outside the
room discussing over microphones, so you can hear everybody talking
what the best tactics are, and also acknowledging the likelihood
(34:34):
that they're all going to be massacred because their survival
percentage chance is somewhere in the thirties.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
As I recall, one.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Character steps forward and says, all right, let's do this,
le row giant cads, and he just charges inside. Immediately
his party follows them, and they are very quickly eviscerated
by the dragon's spawn, and they very quickly also admonish
Leroy for his impetuous decision and LeRoy's response as well.
(35:03):
At least I got chicken, and truer words were never spoken.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Now.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
The guild uploaded the video of this incident to a
fan site called Warcraft Movies, and later they uploaded it
twice to YouTube, and the second time it really found
huge success. Gamers and non gamers alike found it very amusing.
Ben Schultz, who was the player controlling Leroy Jenkins, found
himself the center of attention. Blizzard, the company that makes
(35:31):
World of Warcraft, actually invited Schultz to come and be
a keynote speaker at their gaming convention blizz Con.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Schultz has repeatedly.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Been asked if the video was actually a real capture
of honest to Goodness gameplay or if it was just
a staged video for comedic purposes, and he says he
likes to leave that up to the individual viewer. I'm
pretty sure it's staged, but honestly, I don't really care
because it's just entertaining. It's pretty funny, perfectly captures the
(36:00):
frustration that gamers can feel when someone on their team
behaves recklessly. I'm sure the gamers among you have been
in a situation where you're in a team based game
and you all have a pretty good plan for how
things should turn out, and one person just goes completely
off the rails and ruins.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
It for everybody.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
It's a very frustrating experience. It's funny to watch, but
it's not that funny to be in at the time. Also,
I really like this one because I have a friend
named Ariel. She's been on the show a couple times,
and her band Tenpenny Travelers wrote a song about Leroy
Jenkins and it makes me laugh a lot. I wish
I could share that with you, but they don't have
a recorded version, otherwise I would include it with this episode.
(36:44):
But the meme of Leroy Jenkins spread like crazy, not
just in the World of Warcraft circles. It also spread
on too, lots of gifts and stuff, and you would
see Leroy Jenkins being applied to any situation where someone
seemed to arch headlong into a scenario without fully considering
the consequences of their actions. It became kind of shorthand
(37:06):
for that, and Schultz would end up seeing his character
incorporated into official Blizzard products like a card in Hearthstone
or NPCs within World of Warcraft, which is pretty phenomenal
when you think about it. I mean, you gain a
level of immortality by creating this headstrong character rushes into
(37:29):
danger without thinking of the consequences. I think that's pretty amusing.
There are a lot of other memes I can mention.
One of my favorites is Luigi's death Stare from Mario
Kart eight. There's some of the funniest videos produced from
the Luigi's Death Stare, but that one is so dependent
upon the visual of Luigi's sneering down at you as
he passes by that doesn't really work that well for
(37:51):
an audio podcast, and the memes out there keep on growing.
Some will endure, many will fade away. A few might
come back after disappearing for a while, because ideas are
like that.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
And that was a classic episode about tech memes. You know,
there was a time when the word meme was not
generally well known, and then gradually meme just became such
a common phrase that it feels like everyone's always known
what memes are. But y'all, I'm old enough to remember
when memes were, you know, first starting to enter the
(38:25):
general lexicon, and it was not always the case that
everybody knew what meme meant. I don't know if that's
a defense for what you just heard, but it is
the truth. All Right. That's it for this classic episode.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I hope you are all.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
Well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. You
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
are you? It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode.
This episode originally published March twenty ninth, twenty seventeen. It
(00:28):
is called tech Memes, and y'all, I honestly don't have
any memory of what's on this episode. It is very
likely something that at this point is so obvious and
cringe that I hesitated to run it as a classic episode.
But there's there's a part of me that is morbidly
(00:48):
curious about how bad it is. So I believe in
a warts and all approach to tech stuff. So here
is this classic episode called tech Meme. Dan writes in
with all your base are belonged to us. I would
love to hear your take on the history of this
(01:10):
ancient meme. And indeed, the Babylonians in their writings did
talk of the one who would bring noe. It's not
that ancient, I mean, I guess in the terms of technology,
it's kind of old.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I told Dan that this particular.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Story, while great, wouldn't quite merit a full episode by itself.
So we're gonna look at a few different memes that
tie in with technology in general and video games in particular.
I'll probably do more episodes about big tech memes and
where they came from in the future, but today we'll
just examine a few. So where do some of the
(01:47):
most famous video game memes come from? And how did
they spread around and what did they mean? Well, first
things first, let's define what a meme is. And the
nice thing is we don't really have to because Richard
Dawkins did it for us in a book called The
Selfish Gene Now. Dawkins proposed the idea of a meme,
(02:08):
a meme being something we would use to describe an
idea that spreads quickly throughout a population of people. That population,
by the way, does not have to be regional, you know,
you don't have to say the population of a town
or the population of a country. That population could be
any group of like minded individuals within a particular subculture,
(02:31):
and the Internet makes it possible for memes to spread
globally rapidly. It's important to point out that memes don't
have to be on the Internet at all. That's one
of the ways that we encounter memes, but that's just
one method of distribution. A meme is an idea. The
Internet is just the handy way of getting those ideas
(02:52):
spread throughout the globe. So while an image with a
funny joke on it is a meme, not all memes
are images with a funny joke on them. It's just
one single type of meme. It's kind of one of
those all dalmatians are dogs, but not all dogs are
Dalmatians kind of thing. Some memes spread primarily through a
(03:14):
specific culture, so gamers are a good example. We're going
to talk a lot about video games, and a lot
of these memes spread at least at first primarily through gamers,
some of which then ended up going into mainstream. So
that's where I'm going to start with this discussion, and
I'm going to answer Dan's question first. I'm not going
to make him wait. The meme all your base are
(03:37):
belong to us as part of a group of memes
that all originate from the same source material, and that
source is a video game called Zero Wing, which came
out in nineteen eighty nine. It's a side scrolling game
in which the player controls a spaceship called a Zig
blasting through various enemies. Now those enemies are robotic aliens
(04:00):
called kats Cats, and in the very beginning of the game,
it's revealed that this group of aliens had recently signed
a peace treaty with Earth, but are now betraying that treaty.
And if you understand Japanese and you play the original game,
all of this is very very clear. It's a little
(04:21):
less clear in other versions. You see, the game started
out as an arcade game in Japan, and it was
really really popular, so it was one of the ones
that was chosen to be ported over to home video
game systems in Japan. It was also ported to the
Sega Mega Drive in Europe. Here in the United States
(04:42):
we called the Mega Drive the Sega Genesis. It's the
same machine, but two different names. So the European version
of the Zero Wing game featured some poorly translated dialogue
in which the original Japanese was transformed into mangled English.
And what follows is a reading of the transcript of
(05:04):
the first part of this game in the Mega Drive version.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
What happened somebody the bomb? What main screen turn on?
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Is you?
Speaker 2 (05:21):
How are you all your base to us? You are
on the way to destruction. What do you say you
have no chance to survive?
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Hah ha, Captain, take off every zig.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
You know what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Move zig for great justice. It's really moving, isn't it.
It's a kind of gets you. Yeah, it's it's like
the Brave Heart speech. Really it's it's really what it
comes down to. So interesting fact, the United States never
got that version of the game, at least not officially.
People might have ordered an import, but the official version
(06:00):
with the terrible translation came from the European market, not
the US market.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
And it's a bit.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Surprising that this meme even took off at all because
the game's release preceded the World Wide Web. The earliest
known examples of the memes appearing online date to nineteen
ninety eight. Now, that is pretty ancient for internet memes,
because most of them kind of surface and then maybe
they're popular for a few months or a little over
(06:26):
a year, and then they kind of fade away. But
you also have to remember nearly a decade had passed
since the game came out before it even showed up
on the Internet in the first place, so it's pretty
incredible now. Despite the long amount of time between the
game's release and its celebration online, the meme did take off.
Various forums, particularly on gaming sites, saw the phrase popping
(06:49):
up in discussions and profiles.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Some musicians and.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Other creators began to incorporate phrases and references in their works,
popularizing it even more.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
By two thousand and one, Wired.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Had covered the story, and soon it got the attention
of other mainstream outlets like The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle,
and USA. Today, the phrases from this translation live on
to this day. You will often hear people refer to
or see references to all your base are belong to us.
And this really shows you the power of memes. The
(07:23):
good ones catch on quickly and spread rapidly through various
groups and stick around. They don't just get really popular
and then disappear. It's an interesting kind of pop culture
in a way. Some of them can break three of
their origins and become mainstream pop culture and not just
stay in those little enclaves that they began in. But
(07:46):
some of those might be stuck in smaller niches. For example,
do a barrel role that could be one of those, Hey, Dylan,
do you recognize do a barrel role? N Dylan does
recognize do a barrel role. This meme comes from a
nineteen ninety seven Nintendo sixty four game called star Fox
sixty four, which in itself was a popular sequel to
(08:08):
an earlier Super Nintendo game simply called Starfox. Now, in
both games, you pilot a spaceship and you can dodge
incoming enemy laser fire by doing a barrel roll. But
in star Fox sixty four the maneuver received special attention.
There's a point when you're heading toward these stationary turrets
(08:28):
that are firing on you, and that's when a character
I think he's a donkey pops up. His name is
Peppy Hare, and he shouts to a barrel roll, just
as Dylan did earlier, and thus a meme was born.
By nineteen ninety seven, the World Wide Web was becoming
a household name. It would take a few more years
for it to develop its cheeky side, and on January thirtieth,
(08:52):
two thousand and four, someone created a definition of do
a barrel roll on the Urban Dictionary, that great repository
of information both entertaining and incredibly base, and in two
thousand and six, a group of four Chan pranksters began
to call Tom Green during his talk show and they.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Would just shout do a barrel roll over the phone.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Now, to be fair, this was not a case of
people being unsolicited mischief makers, because Tom Green's career was
based off of hosting call in shows in which most
of the calls were some sort of prank. So it's
not like Tom Green was new to this kind of experience.
It was just a very specific implementation. The meme found
(09:36):
its way on numerous images and animated gifts on the Internet.
And yes, I pronounce it gifts. I know that the
creator of the format says giffs, but he's wrong. Gift
is how it should be said. I'm planting my flag
on this one. Not my flag anyway. There are plenty
of examples of this meme online, usually involving animations of
(09:57):
people or animals flipping over accompanied by the text do
a barrel role. And even if you Easter eggs, So
here's one. If you want an Easter egg, go to Google,
just google dot com and do a.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Search for do a barrel role. Go ahead, give it
a shot.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
It's pretty cute.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
All Right, I got a several more memes I want
to talk.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
About, but before I do, let's take a quick break
to thank our sponsor. All Right, we're back, and the
next meme I want to talk about is the Zerg rush. Dylan,
(10:40):
do you know this one? Dylan does not know this one.
This refers to a tactic in the game StarCraft. So
StarCraft is a real time strategy game with the science
fiction theme, and you play one of three different factions
in the game. You control various units and methods of production,
and you participate in strategic battle in order to control
(11:01):
essentially what is a board.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
So you build.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Various facilities which allow you to create units, and you
use those units to try and defeat the other player.
So one of those three species are the Zerg, and
that's of course in the original StarCraft game, and they
are insect like critters. Their main advantage is that you
can make an awful lot of them relatively quickly. So
the individual units, particularly the starting ones, aren't very strong,
(11:28):
but sheer numbers can make up for it. Because your
production time is so short, you can produce a lot
more units as Zerg than people playing the other factions
in the game. So one go to strategy is just
to ramp up unit production as quickly as possible and
just overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers, just hordes of soldiers,
(11:50):
and that is the zerg rush. It's a rush both
because you are overcome by huge numbers and that it
happens pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
It's such an effective.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Tactic that it became pretty common in StarCraft games for
players to establish some rules of decorum that it was
considered kind of common courtesy to say when someone would
be allowed to launch a zerg rush. Typically you'd say
that zerg players would have to withhold attacking in that
(12:21):
way for a certain number of minutes, like you might
say no zerg rush for eight minutes, meaning eight minutes
of the game have to pass before you can do
a zerg rush, and that gives the other players an
opportunity to shore up their defenses or otherwise work on
a strategy to survive an incoming attack.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Otherwise, it was largely.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Seen as unfair that you were taking advantage of a
very simple mechanism within the game, and you were defeating
people not through superior strategy, but just by the fact
that the game favors these underpowered but numerous units. As
for the meme, this story goes that there was a
(13:01):
multiplayer match in which a Korean group was controlling the
Zurg forces and an English speaking group were the opponents,
and early in the match, a group of Zerg units
began to attack, at which point one of the English
speaking participants typed OMG zerg rush, and the Korean player
typed kiki k k E k e k e, which
(13:22):
is akin to lol in English. You might sometimes encounter
kiki ki along with zurg rush references in this mean,
and those references tend to be on images or enemy
gifts or something being swarmed by something else. So I've
seen one where there's a plane that looks like it's
being surrounded by a big flock of birds and it
(13:43):
was labeled zerg rush. Or you might see one type
of person completely surrounded by other people and that might
be zurg rush. Like I would imagine a picture of
Dragon Con, for example, with a whole bunch of people
in costume and one person who's clearly not in costume
just stuck in the middle of it. That would be
something that you might see zerg rush attached to oh
(14:06):
in a Google by the way, has an Easter Egg
for this meme too, so you can just go to
Google Search and type in zerg rush. That's a zerg rush.
Let me know how you do if you try that out. Now,
not all video game memes are about criticizing a game
mechanic or making fun of a specific game, or even
celebrating a specific game. Some are just a celebration of
(14:28):
good game design and writing, and I think that's the
case with the Cake is a Lie. That meme comes
from the game Portal, which published in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Now.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
In Portal, the player takes on the role of a
young woman who is being held captive in a scientific
research facility, and her captor is a passive, aggressive, snarky
artificial intelligence named GLaDOS, and GLaDOS is constantly goading the
character further down the pathway to keep trying to get
through increasingly difficult puzzles. GLaDOS is constantly there, criticizing you
(15:05):
and then giving you lackluster, insincere praise. Whenever you successfully
navigate one of these tough puzzles, you get a lot
of snark from GLaDOS, including one of the greatest post
credit Songs of All Time written by Jonathan Colton in
the voice of GLaDOS. When you explore the game world,
(15:27):
you can encounter stuff like messages scralled on walls, and
the messages are from an old lab worker named Doug Ratman,
and one of the famous messages is the phrase the
cake is a lie, written repeatedly. The reason for this
is GLaDOS constantly tells you that if you are to
complete all the tasks, you will.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Get cake, and that the cake will be amazing.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Occasionally, GLaDOS will even give you the recipe for a cake.
There's a lot of cake, at least references to it
in Portal, but Doug Ratman, the character that has left
his evidence behind, says that the.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Cake is a lie.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
And for a while people use the cake is a
lie as just a general reference to Portal. But gradually
this phrase took on a more general meaning, and it
came to mean the thing you are looking for doesn't exist,
or even you are trying to achieve something that isn't possible.
An urban dictionary translates it rather eloquently. I think into
(16:30):
your promised reward is merely a fictitious motivator. So you
could use this idiom to describe a common thread and
a lot of stories. For example, in the classic The
Wizard of Oz, the Wizard promises rewards to Dorothy and
her friends if they can get rid of the wicked
Witch of the West. Only it turns out the Wizard
(16:51):
is a flim flam man with no real powers of
his own apart from being a fast talker. The cake
is a lie. He doesn't have the ability to give
the characters what they want. In fact, when they were
turned victorious, he bestows gifts on them simply by telling
each character that they already possess the thing that they want,
which is a good thing since the Wizard had no
(17:13):
way to deliver upon his promises. Now, some memes aren't
about specific games at all, but rather gaming cliches in general,
and one of the big ones is called video game logic.
Now this refers to things that happen in video games
that defy common sense. For example, a popular meme in
this category has a picture of Master Chief, who is
(17:35):
the protagonist of the Halo franchise of games, and the
memes says can flip an extremely heavy tank can't control
gun recoil. So this refers to the fact that if
you come up to a tank that's on its side
and you press the right button, Master Chief will move
the tank so that you can get into it. And
yet every time you fire your gun, it flies up
(17:57):
in the air, and you think, well, if he's strong
enough to move a tank over canny control the movement
of a handgun, it does seem to defy logic. And
this is pretty common, and that's not the only example.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
I mean. Sometimes it's something like.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Invisible walls that you are free to roam anywhere until
you encounter an invisible wall, which in the video game
world makes sense, but when you think of it outside
of that context, you start to question, why is this
a design in this game? Or maybe there is a
game rule that says if you even step foot in
the edge of water, your character will drown. That's another
(18:36):
instance of video game logic, like especially a character that
seems to be resilient to almost any kind of damage,
like you can be shot fourteen times in the chest
and keep going, but if you touch water, you immediately drown.
Your toe is apparently where you breathe, and you're a goner.
Lots of different variations of this exist online and Mainly
(18:59):
it's just to point out how video games can be
inconsistent with their logic, that things that the game allows
in some cases mean that things it doesn't allow in
other cases don't really make sense, And it really kind
of helps bring attention to shortcomings in games. Sometimes those
shortcomings are necessary just to make the game work properly.
(19:23):
Another example of a shortcoming in a game is repetitive dialogue,
particularly in non player characters that you might encounter in
something like a role playing game. Now, it's not really
feasible to create a game in which every one you
encounter has a distinct personality and a non repetitive dialogue option,
(19:43):
particularly for games that have hundreds of characters in them.
So the more characters you have, the harder it is
to give each one an individual personality and history and
conversational options.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
So that means sometimes you.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Hear the same phrase is repeated, and sometimes that gets
a bit comedic, And that is the case with our
next meme, I Took an arrow in the knee. That
one comes from Skyrim, which is from Bethesda, and that
game came out in twenty eleven. It's a big, sprawling
fantasy game across an enormous map, and that map has
several towns and villages and outposts in it, and most
(20:19):
of those places have guards living there, and there are
male and female guards, and they often have different voices.
They got several different voice actors to record the same
lines of dialogue, and that's the problem. They all pull
from the same pool of scripted lines. So while the
guards you see may look different and sound different from
(20:41):
each other, they all have very similar stories to share.
Like it turns out, they all have the exact same background,
which includes a mysterious incident in which they were shot
in the knee by somebody. So the actual line of
dialogue is I used to be an adventurer like you.
Then I took an arrow in the knee. Now, it
(21:01):
doesn't pop up every time you meet a guard, but
it does happen occasionally, and that line is so distinct
that it's noticeable every single time you hear it.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
So there are tons of memes.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Based off this game experience. There are video montages of
guards talking about getting shot in the knee, which gets
funnier the longer it goes, because you realize that Skyrim
is almost entirely populated by guards with a limp. There
are variations on images in which the first part of
the phrase gets replaced by something else. So, for example,
(21:33):
I saw one with a My Little Pony character on
it that says I used to wonder what friendship could be.
Then I took an arrow in the knee. But my
favorite was one that I couldn't immediately identify. I didn't
know what video game it was from, but it showed
like a typical fantasy villain, something that you might see
in like Diablo or something along those lines. But it
(21:55):
was a headless character. So it was this big monstrous
suit of armor but with no head, and the caption
said I used to have a face. Then I took
an arrow to the knee, which makes perfect sense. Really,
I love that one. I once actually pitched a short
comedy commercial about a guard recruitment service that would supply
(22:16):
villages and towns with guards, and their method would be
to seek out adventurers and then shoot them in the knee,
and then the only suitable job they would have at
that point is guard and voila instant security force for
your town. But I never did make that video. Maybe
one day I will. I've got some other memes to
talk about, including the creepiest one on this list. But
(22:38):
before I get to that, let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor. Now some memes go beyond being silly,
and now it's time to talk about slender Man.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
And actually to talk about slender Man, we.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Have to talk about spooky spaghetti. No, I'm sorry, I'm
at creepy pasta. And here's where the old man in
me surfaces, because I gotta be honest with you, guys.
I had to look all this stuff up because I'm old.
I know what slender Man is, but the creepy pasta
stuff that's after my time on the internet. So I
had to actually learn about this stuff, which was really interesting.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Actually, So for those.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Who do not know, there's this phenomenon on the Internet
called creepy pasta. Now that term actually is a twist
on an older Internet slang word called copy pasta, which
first started popping up on the forum four chan in
the mid two thousands. It's a word used to designate
an example of viral copy and pasted text. So this
(23:46):
is when you will encounter, like a paragraph of text
that has clearly been copied from somewhere else and pasted
into this forum and it just starts to spread from
that point forward. You see it all over the internet,
particularly in forums and Facebook. You'll see a lot of
copy pasta on Facebook. I see it all the time
where people have copy and pasted a message they clearly
(24:10):
didn't write it themselves, and it has gone viral from
that point. Now, creepy pasta is a more specific type
of this copy and paste viral information.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
It's a term that describes stories.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
That have a horror element to them, frequently that is
supernatural in nature, although not necessarily, but a lot of
them are kind of paranormal creepy stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
This, by the way, is not a new thing.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
I mean, we've had folklore for as long as people
have been able to tell stories. Before the Internet, we
would use technology to share these kinds of information using faxes.
It was actually called fax lore. People would share jokes
and stories, cartoons, and other printed material by faxing it
to each other. So there's something innate about humans that
(24:56):
drives us to create and share these stories and ideas,
whether it's through the Internet or a fax, or just
sitting around a fire chatting away.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Let's get back to slender Man now, slender Man didn't
just start off as like creepy pasta per se. Originally,
it was actually part of a series of pranks pulled
by members of the Something Awful forums. Something Awful is
a comedy website, and in one of the forums, members
had decided to manufacture photos depicting seemingly supernatural phenomena using
(25:29):
Photoshop and other editing software. So the idea was, let's
take pictures, let's manipulate the photos so that we can
give them a weird, otherworldly element to them, and then
here comes the prank part. Let's share those photos on
paranormal forums, like forums that are about paranormal activity or
(25:51):
are you got an interest in paranormal subject matter, and.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Pass them off as real.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
So the challenge was create these altered photos and then
share them on various paranormal sites and try to convince
people that these are in fact actual examples of photographed
paranormal activity. Now, one of the members of that forum
was Eric Knudsen, who contributed under the handle Victor Surge.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
That was the name he used.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
He edited some photos of people and typically school children,
but not just school children, some teenagers as well, and
inserted the figure of an unusually tall man in what
appeared to be a suit. The man didn't seem to
have a face and perhaps had some tendrils or something
coming off of him. It was hard to make out
because the details were pretty fuzzy but also very unsettling.
(26:51):
Victor posted these images on a forum for people interested
in the paranormal, along with a short account of what
the pictures supposedly show, and according to Victor's story, it
was people being evacuated from a library that had caught
fire and the unusual ghostly creature may have had something
to do with it, and many of the children were
(27:12):
never found again, and that was the birth of slender Man. Now,
this particular character was probably inspired by other depictions of
ghouls and bogeymen. There are a lot of different historical
variations on this idea of the faceless, unusually tall creature
(27:34):
that looks vaguely like a man, very menacing in nature.
There are also examples of this even in computer games,
so it's not like it was a totally new idea,
but this was a particularly interesting incorporation of this idea
and a really compelling photoshop job. It really struck a
(27:56):
nerve others. Something awful members began to incorporate slender Man
into their own stories, and they began to add to
the mythology sometimes referred to as the slender Verse. Slender
Man had entered the world.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Of creepy pasta.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
He popped up on lots of different sites, including four Chan, Fangloria, Unfiction,
TV tropes, deviant Art, and many other websites and forums.
So it became one of those things where people began
to shape and evolve and tweak this idea and make
it grow from there. That's kind of this defining feature
(28:31):
of folklore and memes in general.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
And also you could argue that.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
It's a continuation of the same sort of ideas you
would even see back in the pulp horror novel days.
HP Lovecraft, for example, created a bunch of fictional books,
including the Necronomicon in the mythology of the stories, and
he encouraged his author friends to incorporate elements of his
cathul universe, including mainly those fictional books, in their own work,
(29:05):
and he would do the same. So in this case
you had a bunch of different authors incorporating each other's
creations and giving those creations more weight. They seem to
be more real because more people were writing about it.
How could it be one person's imagined thing when it's
popping up in other people's stories. Very similar with slender Man,
except we're talking about the Internet in general, not a
(29:28):
small group of authors. And over time you began to
see other incarnations and implementations of slender Man that included
a video game in which you play as a person
being pursued by the slender Man while you uncover clues
in a secluded forest in your fenced end, so you
can't easily escape, and you have to find notes, but
each note you find gives the slender Man more of
(29:50):
an idea where you are, and he starts to close
in on you. Several filmmakers have created online videos inspired
by the character. There are series like every Man, Hybrid,
Tribe twelve, and Marble Hornets that all took inspiration from
and added to the mythology of slender Man in interesting ways.
And there are really too many incarnations and incorporations of
(30:13):
slender Man for me to go into here. You can
find him or variations of him in things like Minecraft
and short films. But obviously I can't leave this topic
without also mentioning the twenty fourteen stabbing incidents, and I
say incidents because there was one in Wisconsin and one
in Ohio that year. Both of them are terrible stories.
(30:35):
So in Wisconsin, two twelve year old girls were arrested
on attempted murder charges after attacking and stabbing a mutual
friend nineteen times. Allegedly, the friend has since recovered from
her wounds, but the two girls remain in the court
system being tried for this crime, and one of the
(30:57):
two attackers, during a confession, said that slender Man was
the motivation behind the attack. She claimed that she believed
that slender Man would harm her family if she did
not carry out this attack. There's been some move on
the family's lawyer in this case to strike that confession
(31:18):
due to a claim that the miranda rights of the
accused were not properly administered. So that's still something that's
unfolding in the court system as I record this. The
second incident happened in Ohio, and that was a little different.
(31:38):
A mother was attacked by her daughter and the daughter
stabbed her mother several times and it mostly resulted with
superficial cuts. But the mother said she believed her daughter
was obsessed with the slender Man story and that that
was the motivation behind the attack. Now I'm not a psychologist.
I have no training or expertise in psychology. However, I've
(32:00):
seen similar cases involving other types of pop culture, and
that includes rock music, role playing games, video games, las
that kind of scene. I've seen people blame other things
for the behavior of folks. I don't necessarily believe that
it was the thing that inspired the person to go
(32:22):
out and do terrible things. I think in most cases
there's some indication that there were underlying factors that were
the real problem. Maybe the video game or pop culture
reference or whatever gave some direction, but the motivation factor.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Was already present.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I don't think that a fictional creation has that much
power over actual people. Now, I don't want to end
on such a grim note, so I'm going to talk
about one last goofy tech meme, and in this case,
I'm going to talk about a brave, some might say
foolhardy character.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Named Leroy Jenkins.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
This meme concerns the granddaddy of MMORPGs, that would be
the world of Warcraft. The story begins with a video
which was potentially staged of a group of guild members
from Pals for Life, leading an excursion into an area
of the game called the Rookery. So, if you're not
familiar with World of Warcraft, it is a fantasy based MMORPG,
(33:28):
meaning you're playing a role with a bunch of other people,
all online, a massive multiplayer online role playing game, and
you can do a lot of stuff on your own,
but the game encourages you to form friendships with other
gamers and to form groups with them, guilds with them,
and do things as a guild. And one of the
(33:50):
things you might do is go into particularly difficult areas
that you would have very little chances of surviving on
your own. One of those at this time World of
Warcraft's history was the Rookery. They had a lot of
potential monsters to fight, including Dragon's spawn, which are pretty nasty.
It takes a clever strategy to defeat the hordes of enemies,
(34:11):
particularly talking to people about their use of healing abilities,
you know, the support characters, while the damage characters go
in and try and clear out as many of the
bad guys as possible. And that's where the video gets
its humor. So as this group is standing outside the
room discussing over microphones, so you can hear everybody talking
what the best tactics are, and also acknowledging the likelihood
(34:34):
that they're all going to be massacred because their survival
percentage chance is somewhere in the thirties.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
As I recall, one.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Character steps forward and says, all right, let's do this,
le row giant cads, and he just charges inside. Immediately
his party follows them, and they are very quickly eviscerated
by the dragon's spawn, and they very quickly also admonish
Leroy for his impetuous decision and LeRoy's response as well.
(35:03):
At least I got chicken, and truer words were never spoken.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Now.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
The guild uploaded the video of this incident to a
fan site called Warcraft Movies, and later they uploaded it
twice to YouTube, and the second time it really found
huge success. Gamers and non gamers alike found it very amusing.
Ben Schultz, who was the player controlling Leroy Jenkins, found
himself the center of attention. Blizzard, the company that makes
(35:31):
World of Warcraft, actually invited Schultz to come and be
a keynote speaker at their gaming convention blizz Con.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Schultz has repeatedly.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Been asked if the video was actually a real capture
of honest to Goodness gameplay or if it was just
a staged video for comedic purposes, and he says he
likes to leave that up to the individual viewer. I'm
pretty sure it's staged, but honestly, I don't really care
because it's just entertaining. It's pretty funny, perfectly captures the
(36:00):
frustration that gamers can feel when someone on their team
behaves recklessly. I'm sure the gamers among you have been
in a situation where you're in a team based game
and you all have a pretty good plan for how
things should turn out, and one person just goes completely
off the rails and ruins.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
It for everybody.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
It's a very frustrating experience. It's funny to watch, but
it's not that funny to be in at the time. Also,
I really like this one because I have a friend
named Ariel. She's been on the show a couple times,
and her band Tenpenny Travelers wrote a song about Leroy
Jenkins and it makes me laugh a lot. I wish
I could share that with you, but they don't have
a recorded version, otherwise I would include it with this episode.
(36:44):
But the meme of Leroy Jenkins spread like crazy, not
just in the World of Warcraft circles. It also spread
on too, lots of gifts and stuff, and you would
see Leroy Jenkins being applied to any situation where someone
seemed to arch headlong into a scenario without fully considering
the consequences of their actions. It became kind of shorthand
(37:06):
for that, and Schultz would end up seeing his character
incorporated into official Blizzard products like a card in Hearthstone
or NPCs within World of Warcraft, which is pretty phenomenal
when you think about it. I mean, you gain a
level of immortality by creating this headstrong character rushes into
(37:29):
danger without thinking of the consequences. I think that's pretty amusing.
There are a lot of other memes I can mention.
One of my favorites is Luigi's death Stare from Mario
Kart eight. There's some of the funniest videos produced from
the Luigi's Death Stare, but that one is so dependent
upon the visual of Luigi's sneering down at you as
he passes by that doesn't really work that well for
(37:51):
an audio podcast, and the memes out there keep on growing.
Some will endure, many will fade away. A few might
come back after disappearing for a while, because ideas are
like that.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
And that was a classic episode about tech memes. You know,
there was a time when the word meme was not
generally well known, and then gradually meme just became such
a common phrase that it feels like everyone's always known
what memes are. But y'all, I'm old enough to remember
when memes were, you know, first starting to enter the
(38:25):
general lexicon, and it was not always the case that
everybody knew what meme meant. I don't know if that's
a defense for what you just heard, but it is
the truth. All Right. That's it for this classic episode.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I hope you are all.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
Well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. You
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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