• MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
    36·
    9 days ago

    Dunno maybe this was localized but

    Tunak Tunak Tun was declared the anthem of my California middle school computer graphics class. Lots of FlashMX tribute animations and such.

    It apparently went way beyond that, as we saw the Draenei rocking that dance in WoW: Burning Crusade. :D

    It still freaking slaps. :D

    It was a great time for foreign music, as Gary’s silly dance and lip sync to the “numa numa” song was proliferating everywhere.

    I wonder if a lot of this was from all the fun file sharing and explosion of P2P networks going on? I don’t miss how easy it was to catch malware but I do miss some very particular feeling about those days…

        • samus12345@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          7 days ago

          2003 internet was worlds different than mid-90s. I definitely don’t think of them as the same eras.

          • Wren@lemmy.worldOP
            11·
            7 days ago

            But people will in another few eras. I’m sure the people in the 1600’s viewed the people in the 1400’s to be vastly different, but yet- they both make up a part of the Renaissance Era.

            Additionally; I think people are taking this meme WAY too seriously.

            • samus12345@lemm.eeEnglish
              3·
              7 days ago

              Well, yeah, when nobody’s alive who experienced it it’ll be different, but that time hasn’t come yet!

              Nobody’s taking it seriously - it’s just fun to point out the young whippersnappers who weren’t around for 90s internet thinking as far back as they can remember was “first.”

    • Wren@lemmy.worldOP
      22·
      8 days ago

      I think it’s meant to imply that this is among the first era of memes, not that it’s the first.

  • gibmiser@lemmy.world
    331·
    9 days ago

    I just want to say, all you degenerates in this thread, you are my people. Thank you for remembering the terrible shit we shared.

  • slappypantsgo@lemm.eeEnglish
    23·
    8 days ago

    I have no idea what the snake and mushrooms are and I was born before the internet existed, so it’s not only kids.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      37·
      8 days ago

      Yeah, but were you chronically online in 2002? Ie exposed to the memes of the time.

      Nowadays all sorts of normies fill the internet. Internet used to be explicitly for “nerds”.

      I remember when nornies didn’t even know how to.

      And now we’ve gone around again and the youngest generations have really poor PC skills because they just do everything on their phone.

      Do you remember the dancing baby? That was a few years earlier than Badgerbadgerbadger.com but it was more mainstream, being like in Ally Mcbeal etc.

      • slappypantsgo@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        I was chronically online back then! Haha I mean, not chronically necessarily, but I got super into el interneto around 1995 and then waxing and waning every now and again. 2002 I was a journalist…yep chronically online for sure!

        Anyway, thanks for linking that. I realized that I just completely forgot about anything other than the “badger badger badger” line. It’s been so long and I’m old. :)

      • AngrySquirrel@lemm.ee
        8·
        8 days ago

        My mom used to call the house from work at a random time between when my brother and I got home from school and when she left work. If she got a busy signal, she would wait about 15 minutes to half an hour and call back. If she got a busy signal a second time she would assume one of us was on the Internet and we would get in trouble when she got home.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
          5·
          8 days ago

          Oh that’s pretty smart of mom.

          I’m getting nostalgic over thinking about the sound of the modem and the emotions that went with it.

        • gibmiser@lemmy.world
          21·
          8 days ago

          I have a hard time reconciling the fact that the word f*ggot was used constantly.

          Like, constantly.

          • JollyBrancher @lemm.ee
            2·
            7 days ago

            Eddie Murphy’s one earlier standup special (Raw?) drops it a bunch. I meannn even in the later oughts the one big joke in The Hangover was “paging Dr. Faggot!!!” Straight up trailer material to boot, if I’m not mistaken. More like 80s-early 2000s. Most people learned over time to change for the better socially, for a bit at least.

            • ᴍᴜᴛɪʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴᴡᴀᴠᴇ @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              7 days ago

              For me, I was a kid in the 80s/90s and I (thought I) didn’t know a single gay person personally. So many people were in the closet back then.

              I didn’t really say fag much but for us kids, gay meant lame. “That’s gay” - I would hear or say it many times a day. It didn’t even mean homosexual, although once I got older I could see how it was harmful. Once people I knew came out and I knew gay adults I made the conscious decision to stop saying it.

      • CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        51·
        8 days ago

        That’s true enough, I guess we were formed & forged out of necessity. If you wanted to surf web well, you had to figure all kinds of shit out. If you wanted to pirate, same deal. Watch porn? Better delete that web history, but also make it look believable.

        It was baked into our brains at a young, impressionable age. And we absorbed it all.

        Now these kids don’t seem to know how to do shit. Frustrating. They should be tech savvy.

        • taxiiiii@lemmy.world
          4·
          7 days ago

          I know parents who don’t own PCs. Just phones. A bunch of working class kids are without access to a PC. Of course they’re going to be worse at it than we were. How are they supposed to learn?

          It’s not like we did it because we wanted to show off our useful skills on the job market, lol.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
          3·
          8 days ago

          Yeah, but back then the internet wasn’t as obiquitous as it is now, so something being online didn’t necessarily mean that you’d have seen it, whereas now if something is a hit you’ll see it in a matter of hours, really.

          Like I probably did see the Hampster dance in the 90’s possibly, but like the computer in the library wasn’t one you could really use the speakers on, and I think it took until like 99-00 for dad to get a computer with an Internet connection. No it couldn’t have been that late I was looking up Zelda faqs when playing Ocarina of Time and that was a few years earlier, as N64 came out in 1996. OOT came out in 98 okay.

    • Stovetop@lemmy.world
      23·
      9 days ago

      Memes are also not inherently digital. Going back to the definition set by Richard Dawkins (trans-hating bigot he is), a meme is anything that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” Perhaps that’s a bit broad of a definition compared to what we conventionally think of as memes, but it’s how we got to where we are.

      People in ancient Egypt building pyramids and obelisks because someone before them built pyramids and obelisks is a meme. Cathedrals being built in much the same way throughout Renaissance Europe is a meme.

      But those examples aside, there are still a few pre-internet examples that would still resonate more with the idea of memes as we know them today. Kilroy was Here is considered a meme and goes back to World War II. Or a bit before that, this “How you think you look” cartoon which I am not entirely sure was overly meme-like in its day but certainly feels relatable today.

      But even slogans or popular sayings could be considered memes; if we consider internet terms/phrases like “pog” or “Are ya winning, son?” or (dating myself) “I can haz cheezburger?” to be memes, what about pre-internet sayings like “Luke, I am your father,” “It’s just a flesh wound,” or “Where’s the beef?” Or going way, way back, what about saying “Break a leg” before a performance, or “All the world’s a stage,” or even “Carpe diem”? I think one could make a case for just about any repeated and widely understood concept, really.