Skeptical Baby

Skeptical baby is an image macros meme (in other words, a meme that uses a picture with funny text superimposed on top) that started on Reddit.

When father and photographer, Jarod Knoten, uploaded this picture of his son and himself to Reddit he had no idea his little boy would become 'internet famous'. Redditors soon got hold of the quirky picture and added 'skeptical baby' captions - most of which began with something along the lines of 'you mean to tell me that...'

This meme normally highlights the innocence of young babies, and some of the 'harsh realities of life' they will soon discover.

Want to create your own Skeptical Baby image? You can do so here.
 

Shoop da Whoop

Here’s another meme (like Over 9000) that started with a Dragonball Z character - Cell is one of the main villains in Dragonball Z (specifically 'Imperfect Cell').

Someone on 4chan’s /b/ board used the very basic paint program, MS Paint, to alter Cell’s face into what is now known as Shoop da Whoop.

Cell's face has been blacked out and big eyes and red lips have been painted in amateurishly. A picture of ‘Shoop’ is usually accompanied by a phrase like 'IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER’

But Shoop da Whoop has a dark side – apparently, the Shoop da Whoop character was intended as a parody of early comics and thetre shows that featured black people in a stereotypical way, with bright red lips and very dark faces. (Like the 'Blackface' theatre characters seen on the American stage in the 1830's.) Even the ‘Shoop da Whoop’ wording and the phrases ‘IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER’ or ‘FIRIN’ MAH LAZER’ are meant to imply a typical African-American Southern drawl. The 'Imperfect' Cell character and another Dragon Ball Z character called Mr. Popo both caused some controversy for their resemblance to 'Blackface characters.

Pictures of the Shoop character generally appear in succession. Shoop usually starts by charging his laser, then shooting it out his mouth, then swallowing it.

Since the meme's introduction, numerous spinoff images have also been created, featuring various characters painted with the Shoop face. Check out many YouTube videos featuring Shoop.

Here's a YouTube video, featuring the 'Firing my laser' phenomenon.

Upsidedown Dogs

It's not quite a meme yet... but who knows. This could take off.

Upsidedown dogs are just like regular dogs, except they are upside down...

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:

The Internets

‘Internets’ is a Bushism – a great quote straight from the mouth of George Dubya.

It’s now a general Internet in-joke (often used to joke about the ignorance of an Internet user, but often just for fun).

United States President George W. Bush first used the word publicly during the 2000 election campaign.

And as if once wasn’t enough, he repeated the term in the second 2004 presidential election debate on October 8, 2004.



Like similar memes, many image macros have appeared featuring the phrase.


Just for the record, here’s an extract from the 2000 debate:

JOYCE CLEAMER, AUDIENCE MEMBER:
“I'm very concerned about the morality of our country now. TV, movies, the music that our children are, you know, barraged with every day. And I want to know if there's anything that can be worked out with the—Hollywood, or whoever, to help get rid of some of this bad language and whatever, you know.”

BUSH:
“We can have filters on Internets where public money is spent. There ought to be filters in public libraries and filters in public schools so if kids get on the Internet, there is not going to be pornography or violence coming in.”

And here’s the second debate:

DANIEL FARLEY, AUDIENCE MEMBER:
“Mr. President, since we continue to police the world, how do you intend to maintain our military presence without reinstituting a draft?”

BUSH:
“Yes, that's a great question. Thanks. I hear there's rumors on the, uh, Internets [pause] that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft, period....”

The bucket saga continues

One of the most famous spin-offs of from the LOLcat meme is the LOLrus. The original LOLrus image showed a walrus who had his bucket forcibly taken from him. The ide of the LOLrus and his missing bucket has been adopted by the internet, and many have added new chapters to the ‘missing bucket’ saga. Someone has now compiled the pictures into a full story… see it here.

I'm in ur base...

Loosely defined, “In your base, killing your d00ds” is a catchphrase that basically means “right now, I’m pwning you, and you don’t even know it."

The phrase originally came about when a ‘N00b’ player, playing multiplayer Starcraft online typed in a message asking his opponent “dude, where are you?” At the time, the more experienced player had managed to rush into the N00b’s base and had started destroying everything in sight. His response is now famous: “I’m in you’re your base, killing your d00dz.”

Screenshots of this famous exchange were posted on imageboards, and the meme spread from there.


Initially, people took the phrase and placed it on a number of different pictures. But as the meme grew, the phrase took on a life of it’s own.




The formula: take a picture and add any variation of "Im in ur (noun), (verb-ing) ur (noun)".









During the height of the LOLcat meme, it became very popular to put an “im in ur” phrase together with a cat picture.




















Political images were also very popular at one point. The meme is quite old now, but you still do see references to it popping up from time to time.

Do Not Want

You gotta love bad Engrish translations. ‘Engrish’ is loosely defined as the humorous mistakes that come from translating Chinese or Japanese into English.

Previously I blogged about the AYBABTU meme which developed because of the strange translation of Japanese text into English.

DO NOT WANT is also a meme that developed from a strange translation:

A pirated version of Star Wars Episode III appeared for sale in the US soon after the movie release. This version had subtitles that had been translated into Chinese and then back into English – with some strange results.

Even the opening credits, where the English words appear on the screen have been mistranslated.
(The backstroke of the West?)








But the scene that started the meme appears right at the end of the movie when Darth Vader screams “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Darth Vader’s cry appears in subtitles as “Do Not Want”.





And the rest is history.

The phrase has been used to create hundreds of Image Macros (many feature LOLcats, but the meme is certainly not limited to pictures of cats).

A series of tubes

The Internet is a bunch of tubes…

Well, that’s according to US Senator Ted Stevens anyway. He gave a speech criticizing a proposed amendment to a US bill concerning Network Neutrality, and basically showed his complete lack of understanding of how the Internet works.

Boing Boing had this to say about the senator: “This man is so far away from having a coherent picture of the Internet's functionality, it's like hearing a caveman expound on the future of silver-birds-from-sky and why we need to keep them from flying so high they anger the gods.”

Here’s a taste of what he had to say:

“I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.”

Here’s the speech on YouTube.

In true Internet in-joke fashion, many Internet-users make oblique references to the 'series of tubes' (and the truck) – crossing into many memes including LOLcats and demotivational posters.


MySpace user Andrew Raff sang the senator's words over a folksy ditty and anonymously posted it to MySpace.com.

Comedian Jon Stewart aired part of Steven's speech on The Daily Show, complete with a helpful diagram illustrating how a tube-based internet might work.


My opinion - great fun, some clever humor

The Hoff

You can’t talk about the Chuck Norris Internet phenomenon, without touching on ‘The Hoff’ – David Hasselhoff.

Hasselhoff was best known for his lead roles in Knight Rider and Baywatch. He also became a pop icon in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

His music videos are so scary, you would be forgiven for thinking they were fakes.

Check it out:

In the late 90s, Hasselhoff started to become something of an Internet phenomenon, mostly as a subject of fun. Much like the Chuck Norris meme, ‘the Hoff facts’ started circulating, along with images of David Hasselhoff photoshopped into movie posters and other pictures.




David Hasselhoff didn’t shy away from the fun, instead he embraced it, even agreeing to take part in an advert, where he proclaimed himself ‘King of the Internet’.

His Internet fame also landed him a role as judge on America’s Got Talent, where he often uses the catchphrase that the Internet created for him: "Don't Hassel the Hoff!"