Domo

Domo-kun (or just Domo) is the mascot for the Japan's NHK television station. The station made various 30-second stop-motion promo spots for their channel featuring Domo. They are rather strange to say the least…

Domo spends most of his time hanging out in a cave with the wise rabbit Mr. Usaji and watching TV. Apparently, "his body is stout, but his heart is pure". The clips also feature a bunch of bats (one of which has a drinking problem), a hungry bear and a girl-weasel.

For more on the Domo characters, check out their official website.

Without ever being shown outside of Japan, Domo-kun became an Internet hit. And while the strange-but-endearing movie clips had something to do with his fame, it’s mostly thanks to Domo’s ability to be Photoshopped into some amazing situations that made him the Internet star he is today.

A lot of his original fame can probably be attributed to this image of kittens running from Domo-kun.

The image was created by a Fark user, who used this student magazine front page as his inspiration.

More recently, this Domo-kan image has found its way onto forums and boards, and is used after a noob has made a stupid comment…

A quick search on Flickr and Deviant Art will show you just how widespread Domo-kun’s fame has become, especially amongst Anime fans. Domo plush toys, t-shirts and other merchandise are all the rage.

Domo’s popularity continues to grow – he’s now appearing in the UK on Nicktoons (part of Nickelodeon) in short 2-minute spots.

He’s also being used as the theme of Target’s 2008 Halloween promotions.

If you're looking for a Halloween costume, here's a Domo-costume how-to.

And just in case you haven’t had enough Domo for today, go check out the Domo-Kun’s Angry Smash Fest flash game.

F40PH Fridays

Yet another 4chan meme. On Fridays, the 4chan /b/ board used to get flooded with ‘Furry’ hentai posts – in honour of Furry Friday. These images feature anthropomorphic animals in a sexually explicit way. To counter this ‘scourge’, the guys at /b/ created F40PH Friday.

The F40PH is – well, it’s a train.

 
According to Wikipedia, the General Motors Electro-Motive Division model F40PH is a 3000 horsepower B-B diesel-electric locomotive built from 1976 onwards. Supposedly, it's quite a train - equipped with a turbocharged 16 cylinder, two-stroke, water-cooled "Vee" diesel engine.

Anytime anyone started a ‘Furry Friday’ thread, it would be flooded with pictures of the great F40PH. Often 4channers use a directory dumper to mass-dump pictures of the train into the thread, taking it over. 

Here's a video featuring some of the F40PH pictures used on F40ph Friday:

All Glory To The Hypnotoad!

Futurama (in case you’ve been living under a rock) is an animated sitcom created by Matt Groening (the man famous for creating the Simpsons). The series follows the adventures of a pizza delivery boy, Philip J. Fry, who gets frozen just before the new millennium and is then revived a thousand years in the future.

One of the recurring characters in Futurama is the Hypnotoad - a large brown frog with spinning eyes, who emits a low, buzzing sound.

The Hypnotoad has the power to hypnotize almost any living thing at will – and he has his own TV show, called ‘Everybody Loves Hypnotoad’ in which it hypnotizes the audience. He’s also been known to show up in TV commercials endorsing products.

The Hypnotoad became a meme on 4chan when people began ending their forum post with ‘ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD’ – the Hypnotoad supposedly hypnotises the poster, so he cannot finish his original thought and instead honours the Hypnotoad. The next poster will continue the trend, until the whole thread is filled with ‘ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD’.

Click to enlarge

The Hypnotoad meme is often used to end a thread that someone considers boring, because after the Hypnotoad is introduced… it takes over.

Mudkips: you liek?

A bit of background:

Pokémon, in case you’ve never heard of it, is the second most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world (behind the Mario series, which is also made by Nintendo). In the Pokémon game, a Trainer captures a wild Pokémon creature and trains it up to battle other Pokémon.

One of the Pokémon creatures is the Mudkip – a small but strong water-type creature.

DeviantArt is an international online community for artists. They aim to provide a place for artists to exhibit and discuss their work. With over 8 million members, over 62 million submissions, and 36 million visitors a year, DeviantArt is quite a site. It was launched in 2000 – long before Flickr came into existence.

Within the DeviantArt website, different types of artwork are organised into different categories, like photography, digital art, traditional art, literature, Flash and filmmaking. One of the popular sections of DeviantArt is dedicated to Fan Art where people display artwork devoted to their favourite TV shows and computer games.

A meme is born:

When one Pokémon-fan commented on another Pokémon-fan’s picture, inviting him to join his Pokémon fan group, he began with the now-famous words: "So I herd u liek mudkipz”.

This little phrase found it’s way to the 4chan boards where it was developed into a popular piece of copypasta.

Copypasta is basically a body of text (often a story or narrative) that gets copied and pasted over and over in different posts by different people.

The copypasta story involving Mudkips can be found here, but I warn you, like many things on 4chan, it’s not pretty…

DeviantArt is still flooded with people creating art around the Mudkip meme, and YouTube has a growing collection of Mudkip-related videos.

On April Fools Day this year, DeviantArt turned the all of the avatars on DeviantArt to a picture of a Mudkip.

I leave you with a little YouTube mudkip-mashup:

A little language called leet

I’m going to digress from talking about memes and take some time to explore the Internet ‘language’ known as Leet.

The Leet ‘language’ is actually an alternative alphabet system with uses a combination of numbers and other keyboard characters to replace normal letters. So for example, Leet is spelled 1337 (1=L, 3=E and 7=T).

It was originally developed on bulletin board systems way back in the 1980s. One theory is that Leet actually came about so that people chatting on the boards could get around the text filters which picked up ‘forbidden’ topics like hacking and cracking.

It developed from there and then became a way to show off your knowledge of the in-joke. Lately though, Leet has become a part of ‘mainstream’ Internet culture and slang, and is even considered cheesy by ‘those in the know’. It is now also used to mock newbies (N00BZ), or newcomers, on web sites, or in gaming communities.


Why did they call it ‘Leet’?

Leet comes from ‘Eleet’ – which originated from ‘Elite status’ on Bulletin Board systems. Initially, the word leet was used as an adjective, to primarily describe ‘elite’ accomplishments.


Hax0rs Pwn

Besides simply replacing letters with numbers, Leet also has it’s own vocabulary.

Haxors or Haxorz is a common term meaning ‘hacker’ (and often it’s actually used in a self deprecating way or to insult someone).

Pwn is derived from ‘own’ and means the domination or humiliation of a rival (in an argument or video game, for example), or the successful hacking of a website or computer.

A lot of Leet words contain deliberate misspellings – and pwn is a prime example. The letter P is right next to the letter O on the keyboard, and so it might have originally been a common misspelling, which became an in-joke, and then eventually a standard word that everyone used.

LOL teh N00b Suxorz!!!!111one11!

If you don’t know that LOL stands for ‘Laugh Out Loud’, you should really get out more. LOL is considered to be part of Leet, but really this term has become so mainstream its practically a part of the English language by now.

Again, teh is deliberate misspelling which originated from people typing ‘the’ fast and making the error. It has been adopted as a part of Leet speak, and people deliberately type it incorrectly.

Noob or N00b is derived from, newbie (as in new and inexperienced or uninformed). Apparently, there is a widely accepted separation of the definitions of newb and n00b: a newb is merely new to something (usually the person also wants to learn more), which is forgivable, while a n00b continues to engage in "newb" behaviours long after they should know better (and usually refuses to learn). Generally the term N00b is insulting!

Suxxors or suxorz means to suck. The opposite of Suxxor is roxxor (to rock, basically) and both can be used as a verb or a noun.

Over exclamation is another common feature of Leet. When chatting in chat rooms or playing games online, people would often overemphasise, ending their sentences with many exclamation marks (so for example “Pwnage!!!!!”). Of course, people would end typing ‘1’ instead of ‘!’ (because they haven’t pressed the shift key down). As this was such a common mistake, people started making it on purpose, as a joke. The joke has evolved, and now people actually type out the number (for example: “I pwn!!11one!1!” or in the case of extreme sarcasm: “OMG!!!!111!11shiftone1!11shift1!!1111capslock1!one12131”)

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

This Dancing Banana animated GIF started it’s life as an emoticon (an icon denoting an emotion, like a smiley face ☺) on message boards.

But the Banana made its real leap to internet stardom when Ryan Etrata had a brain wave. He created a flash animation featuring the Banana dancing to an incredibly catchy song called ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ (written by The Buckwheat Boyz). Watch it here.


Fame!
The Dancing Banana soon made its way to television shows and began to appear as an icon in American Pop Culture. In an episode of the TV show, The Family Guy, Brian tries to cheer up Peter by performing "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" dressed as the Dancing Banana. The Banana and phrase ‘It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ also appears in a Weezer music video Pork and Beans.


As the popularity of the Dancing Banana grew, hundreds of variations of the image were created including dancing strawberries, carrots and video game characters. This site features an updated 2006 version of Peanut Butter Jelly Time.

Rickrolling

Rick Astley... British singer/songwriter, boyish looks, cheesy songs... who ever would have thought that one of his hits 'Never gonna give you up' would spark and Internet phenomenon?

The campy music video for this song became the basis for an phenomenon known as "rickrolling".

The joke originated on internet message boards like 4chan. People would post a link on the message board, claiming it is relevant to the topic at hand - but it actually takes the reader to the Rick Astley video.

The phenomenon spread to spread rapidly onto other message boards and onto email. Emails with a promising-looking link (like 'Check out these hot babes at the topless carwash') would actually lead to the Rick Astley video, with the taunt 'You've been Rickrolled'

Click here to be 'Rickroll'd'

And now the follow-up phenomenon: Click here to be 'Flick Rolled'