Posts Tagged ‘Yuri Gagarin’
“As for memes, the word ‘meme’ is a cliche, which is to say it’s already a meme”*…
(Roughly) Daily began nearly two decades ago as a (roughly daily) email to friends. One of the earliest “editions” featured a then-current video (and the myriad reactions to and appropriations of it)…
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… 20 years ago [this week], 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?
One possible reason is that the “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” video appealed to the early Internet’s savviest users, since it was sourced from an unpopular ’90s video game. Zero Wing launched on the Sega Genesis in 1992… Across the earliest post-BBS Internet, underappreciated 8-bit and 16-bit games changed hands at a crazy rate thanks to small file sizes and 56K modems—and if you were an early Internet user, you were likely a target audience for activities like emulating a Sega Genesis on a Pentium II-powered PC.
That was the first step to exposing the world to Zero Wing‘s inadvertently hilarious text, translated from Japanese to English by an apparent amateur. Classic Japanese games are littered with crappy translations, and even mega-successful publishers like Nintendo are guilty of letting bad phrases slip into otherwise classic games. But Zero Wing soundly trounced other examples of wacky mistranslations thanks to its dramatic opening sequence pitting the generic “CAPTAIN” against a half-robot, half-demon creature in a robe named “CATS.”
Its wackiness circulated on the early Internet as a tiny GIF, with each of its silly phrases (“How are you gentlemen!!”, “Somebody set up us the bomb”) pulling significant weight in terms of weirdly placed clauses and missing punctuation. Early Internet communities poked fun at the sequence by creating and sharing gag images that had the silly text inserted in various ways. But it wasn’t until the February 2001 video, as uploaded by a user who went by “Bad-CRC,” that the meme’s appeal began to truly explode. The video presents the original Sega Genesis graphics, dubbed over with monotone, machine-generated speech reading each phrase. “You are on your way to destruction” in this voice is delightfully silly stuff…
Newgrounds was one of many dumping grounds for Flash animations, making it easier for friends to share links not only to videos but also free online games—usually in ways that school computer labs didn’t necessarily block, which led kids to devour and share their favorites when teachers weren’t carefully watching students’ screens. And in the case of “All Your Base,” its general lack of vulgarity made it easier to reach kids without drawing parental ire. This wasn’t like the early ’90s Congressional hearings against violent and sexual video games. It was just… weird.
And, gosh, it still is. Yes, this video’s 20th anniversary will likely make you feel old as dirt [indeed it does], but that doesn’t mean the video itself aged badly. There’s still something timeless about both the wackiness and innocence of so many early-Internet pioneers sending up a badly translated game. And in an age where widely disseminated memes so often descend into cruelty or shock value, it’s nice to look back at an age when memes were merely quite stupid.
Back in the day, memes didn’t benefit from centralized services like YouTube and Twitter: “An anniversary for great justice: Remembering “All Your Base” 20 years later.”
See also: “All Your Base Are Belong To Us has turned 20.”
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As we watch time fly, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that the Soviet Union launched the base unit of the Mir Space Station into orbit. Mir was the first modular space station; it was systematically expanded from 1986 to 1996. And while it was slated to last five years, it operated for fifteen– outliving the Soviet Union– after which it was replaced by the International Space Station.
(We might also note that it was on this date in 1962 that John Glenn, in Friendship 7, became the first American to orbit the earth. Yuri Gagarin had become the first person to accomplish this feat when he orbited the Earth in a Soviet Vostok spacecraft on April 12, 1961.)
Desk Jobs…
Bihar, India. Sushma Prasad (b. 1962) is an assistant clerk at the Cabinet Secretary of the State of Bihar (population 83 million) in The Old Secretariat in the state capital, Patna. She was hired “on compassionate grounds” because of the death of her husband, who until 1997 worked in the same department. Monthly salary: 5,000 rupees ($110, euro 100).
Bureaucratics is a project consisting of a book (ISBN 978-1-59005-232-7) and exhibition containing 50 photographs, the product of an anarchist’s heart, a historian’s mind and an artist’s eye. It is a comparative photographic study of the culture, rituals and symbols of state civil administrations and its servants in eight countries on five continents, selected on the basis of political, historical and cultural considerations: Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States, and Yemen. In each country, I visited up to hundreds of offices of members of the executive in different services and at different levels. The visits were unannounced and the accompanying writer, Will Tinnemans, by interviewing kept the employees from tidying up or clearing the office. That way, the photos show what a local citizen would be confronted with when entering.
– Dutch documentary photographer Jan Banning
China. Qu Shao Feng (b. 1964) is chief general of Jining Public Security Bureau Division of Aliens and Exit-Entry Administration in Jining City, Shandong province. Monthly salary: 3,100 renminbi ($384, 286 euro).
USA, Texas. Jessie Wolf (b. 1952), a former professional football player for the Miami Dolphins, is now sheriff of Tyler County (some 20,000 inhabitants), Texas, based in Woodville, the county seat. Monthly salary: $ 3,417 (2,542 euro).
Yemen. Alham Abdulwaze Nuzeli (b. 1982) works at the regional office of the Ministry of Tithing and Alms in the city of Al-Mahwit, Al-Mahwit governorate. Monthly salary: 12,000 rial ($67, euro 46). Behind her a portrait of president Saleh of Yemen.
Continue the tour through dozens more photos at Jan Banning’s “Bureaucractics.”
[TotH to Flavorwire]
As we feel the need of a coffee break, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) introduced America’s first astronauts to the press: Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper Jr., John H. Glenn Jr., Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Walter Schirra Jr., Alan Shepard Jr., and Donald Slayton. The seven men, all military test pilots, were selected from a group of 32 candidates to take part in Project Mercury, America’s first manned space program.
After they were announced, the “Mercury Seven” became overnight celebrities. But the Mercury Project suffered some early setbacks; and on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth in the world’s first manned space flight. Less than one month later, on May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard was successfully launched into space on a suborbital flight. Then on February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. NASA continued to trail the Soviets in the space race until the late 1960s, when NASA’s Apollo program put the first men on the moon and safely returned them to Earth.
The gentlemen with The Right Stuff (source: NASA)
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