<
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/02/get-ready-to-feel-old-the-all-your-base-music-video-turns-20-today/>
'As the Internet began crystallizing into its modern form—one that now arguably
buttresses society as we know it—its anthropology of common language and
references matured at a strange rate. But between the simple initialisms that
emerged by the '90s (ROFL!) and the modern world's ecosystem of easily shared
multimedia, a patchwork connection of users and sites had to figure out how to
establish a base of shared references.
In some ways, the Internet as we know it really began on February 16, 2001, 20
years ago today, when a three-word phrase blew up: "All Your Base."
On that day, a robo-voiced music video went live at Newgrounds.com, one of the
Internet's earliest and longest-lasting dumping grounds of Flash multimedia
content, and went on to become one of the most beloved Internet videos of the
21st century. Though Flash support has since been scrapped across the entire
Web-browsing ecosystem, Newgrounds continues to host the original video in a
safe Flash emulator, if you'd like to see it as originally built instead of
flipping through dozens of YouTube rips.
In an online world where users were previously drawn to the likes of the
Hamster Dance, exactly how the heck did this absurdity become one of the
Internet's first bona fide memes?'
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
