[HN Gopher] Salad Fingers and the dawn of 'weird YouTube'
___________________________________________________________________
Salad Fingers and the dawn of 'weird YouTube'
Author : BobbyVsTheDevil
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-12-01 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| flashback2199 wrote:
| I always thought of salad fingers as like one of those weird
| flash videos but as a YouTube series. Anybody remember
| albinoblacksheep.com? I'm sure there were others too, maybe
| ebaumsworld but I'm not sure if those were as weird
| traspler wrote:
| Yes, very much :) that's also where I first saw Salad Fingers
| and The End of the World is still on my mind today.
| bebrws wrote:
| Fire the miiiiissssillllleeeezzzzz
| pjot wrote:
| I can count all the way to schfifty-five
| dieselgate wrote:
| Have been considering the vanity plate "MYIQS55" for years
| kingkawn wrote:
| Salad Fingers I'm pretty sure started as a Newgrounds.com
| series
| wkjagt wrote:
| Isn't that also where Burnt Face Man is from?
| willcipriano wrote:
| Same guy. David Firth. I watched it on Newgrounds.
| OliveMate wrote:
| Much like Salad Fingers, Burnt Face Man was created by David
| Firth - https://www.youtube.com/@davidfirth
|
| I don't remember where he originally uploaded each series,
| but his Jerry Jackson series (a personal favourite) were
| first uploaded to Newgrounds as a series of troll animations.
| Legogris wrote:
| Newgrounds, ebaumsworld etc were all reuploads [0].
| Officially I think he just uploaded them, alongside with
| Jerry Jackson et al, to his own website[1]. I remember
| subscribing to it over RSS as a kid and his stuff would
| always drop there first. Very much pre-YouTube. Might be
| some gems to discover if you haven't browsed it before (:
|
| [0]: At least ebaumsworld was notorious for the bad kinds
| of piracy. albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, and
| somethingawful, were the major hubs outside of other
| individual creator sites like weebls and lemondemon
| otherwise IIRC.
| https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/276616 https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/EBaum%27s_World#Copyright_infr...
|
| [1]: https://www.fat-pie.com/
| ikari_pl wrote:
| it WAS a flash series for sure. YouTube was just for the crowds
| :p
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Right, I think Flash was first. Before they hooked up with
| Quiznos, remember those rodents who "love da moon"? Or someone
| would take a mashup of Ol' Dirty Bastard ("Shimmy Shimmy Ya")
| and The Cure ("Close to Me"), then make a clunky video of the
| instruments (xylophone, but also humanoid skulls) played by
| various animals and sung by a tiger in that Monty Python-like
| jaw animation.
| bitwize wrote:
| I think those were both rathergood productions. The Quiznos
| rodents were called spongmonkeys. Rathergood provided me with
| many memories -- American Girls, the cats playing Independent
| Woman, kittens stomp marching to Tanz mit Laibach, etc.
| barcode_feeder wrote:
| I'm glad someone else mentioned rathergood! That's the one
| that sticks out in my memory as older weird internet
| noqc wrote:
| This title seems to imply that youtube was normal before it was
| weird, though both reality, and tfa suggest that it was weird
| before it was normal.
| amelius wrote:
| What does it have to do with youtube?
|
| Youtube is just the pipe.
|
| It's not like we ever said that VHS became weird ...
| mastax wrote:
| The medium is the message. It affects how the content is
| consumed, interpreted, and created.
| maven29 wrote:
| We would have if VHS had a built-in recommender system or
| discovery mechanism.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Outside of YouTube, the dawn of "weird web" for me is Homestar
| Runner [0], and Don Hertzfeldt's _Rejected_ [1].
|
| 0: https://homestarrunner.com/main
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSb-nV8l2QY
| Loughla wrote:
| Jesus Christ, nothing makes me reminisce about college quite as
| much as homestar runner.
|
| That site was the beginning of my love affair with all things
| weird and esoteric on the internet.
|
| I got scroll buttons as the day is long.
| adamrezich wrote:
| what H*R quotes do you find yourself unconsciously quoting to
| this day?
|
| for me it's "dag, yo"
|
| and, whenever I see "Ontario": "On-tah-REE-oh, CAH-nah-da--
| ooh, a little south of the border flavor"
| bombcar wrote:
| I still say "eaten by some kind of Linux" anytime I
| accidentally cat a binary file.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| "Can we just call you fhqwhgads?" when someone sends a
| Yubikey code over Slack.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Maybe not a quote per se, but every time I go to the gym
| and put my boxing gloves on, I think something to the
| effect of "How am I going to be able to type in these?"
| pjot wrote:
| "First draw an S, okay now a more different S"
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| "I'll improve on _your_ technique! "
| pjot wrote:
| "I said consummate v's! Consummate!"
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| I believe I remember "dorito" being used in the context of
| "deleting something" so I always say to dorito something.
| If I have misplaced my hat, "where my hat is at?"
|
| Perhaps more because H*R is a brainworm which refuses to
| leave :)
| MandieD wrote:
| "Burninatin"... and telling my toddler off for throwing a
| light switch rave.
| smcl wrote:
| There's so much in that sbemail that I love. I recently
| remembered his second attempt at the dragon, saying
| "Let's put one of those beefy arms back on him for good
| measure. That looks really good ... coming out of the
| back of his neck there" and was chuckling to myself. And
| the little music video at the end where the drawings all
| feature nicely shaded drawings like the one Strong Sad
| made that got burned. God what a site :D
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| "what what, the email"
|
| "...oh trevor, I pine for you!"
|
| "..ohhh, there's TWO of them"
|
| "how's it hangin, texas?"
| smokel wrote:
| "Email, I hope it's from a female!" And I often hum the
| "fhqwgads" tune, and go "boop boop" on an imagined
| keyboard.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I said uh come on fhqwgads come on fhqwgads push it to
| the limit everybody to the limit
| dekken_ wrote:
| arrowed!
| andygcook wrote:
| Top quote I say has to be, "Nice jorb, the Chort!" and top
| mental sound bite I play in my head is "404'd!" whenever a
| page throws a 404 error.
| archagon wrote:
| Baleted!
| salad-tycoon wrote:
| First video podcast I ever got on my iPod. Amazed I could
| watch movies. At least I think I got it from iTunes, might
| have been limewire. Who knows. Reading this thread is great.
| I'm sharing the classic viral videos with a younger person
| now. Going through the classics like: -double rainbow "look
| at that rainbow!", -GI joe PSA "hey kids I'm a computer, stop
| all the downloading", and, -End of the world "hoookay here's
| is ze world, ROUNDDD,..." and now am remembering more by
| reading comments here. Many of these videos aged just fine in
| the era of polished-to-attract-advertising influencer "viral
| videos." Reading the quotes below, I'll have to go back and
| catch H*R , seems like something I didn't know to appreciate
| at the time.
| saurik wrote:
| I was at UCSB when Don did Rejected and the idea of it having
| much of anything to do with the Internet is mind-contorting...
| he didn't use any computers to film it and I see it premiered
| in person at ComicCon. But like, AFAIK, we had all gotten to
| see it in the theatre, as part of some campus-level film
| showing; though I think he later got to be on our Arts and
| Lectures circuit, and I feel like it was shown at the cartoon
| festival he co-ran soon thereafter (just to get people hyped
| up).
|
| How did you watch it online, before it was (much later) put on
| YouTube? I feel like he didn't have a website at the time, but
| maybe it was that obvious? Were people sharing a video of it on
| file-sharing networks? (Honestly, I do feel like we knew it too
| well to not be watching it on loop, but I simply don't remember
| how we did it... all of my memories of Don's work--and honestly
| some of the short interstitials he did for the film festival
| are some of my favorites! "the illuuuussion of mooovement" ;P--
| are in a theatre.)
| RankingMember wrote:
| It was super popular on web forums like SomethingAwful's and
| was shared as big ol' hosted video files, probably in xvid
| format and usually direct-linked off someone's web provider's
| meager hosting space.
| archagon wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we got it off file sharing networks. My high
| school friend group quoted it endlessly.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| To me it's a crime to not mention Group X / Mario Twins in this
| sort of article.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIeOULX79VA
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| They look the same!
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Important to note that the paper the article is referencing [1]
| is titled:
|
| "Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the 'weird'
| future of animation"
|
| So, the actual data is about _PRE-Youtube_ weird internet.
| Baffling why they chose to focus on YouTube instead of Newgrounds
| like the original paper does
|
| I think I'm reacting like this because I'm actually unaware of
| anything that originated on Youtube that fits into this category.
| Youtube just reposted stuff from elsewhere (it's the biggest
| pirate site on the internet probably).
|
| Edit: The key point is that there is a huge network of weird
| internet that predated and continues outside of YT. The
| Absolutely[2] Produced stuff is the standard bearer here
|
| [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565231208569
|
| [2] https://absolutelyproductions.com/
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Maybe MeatCanyon[1], or Joe Cappa's stuff[2], could fall into
| the modern "YouTube weird" - but I think a lot of the
| particular "weird" vibe of the early days of the modern web is
| pretty much dead - or at least not mainstream enough for me to
| know about it. There was a much more amateur bent to a lot of
| the old viral flash stuff, which I think just wouldn't stand
| out today.
|
| These two are a sort of new kind of weird - MeatCanyon is based
| largely around gross-out body horror parodies of pop culture,
| and Joe Cappa is ... I'm not sure what it is, but I love his
| stuff.
|
| If you like either of these videos the rest of their work is
| well worth a look. Especially the Joe Cappa "Haha You Clowns"
| series is just the weirdest kind of hilarious.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3BJpO59F4g
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQckI_NqgY
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| Dude, that is the best shit on YT right now. I think it's
| more "absurd," than "weird," though. It's more in the spirit
| of Tim & Eric than Salad Fingers. I haven't checked
| MeatCanyon, but I will be soon.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Maybe so, and I even agree - but if being in the spirit of
| Tim and Eric doesn't qualify as weird, idk what does.
| Kiro wrote:
| > There was a much more amateur bent to a lot of the old
| viral flash stuff, which I think just wouldn't stand out
| today.
|
| The biggest thing right now is DaFuq!?Boom! and the Skibidi
| Toilet series, which looks like it was made in Garry's Mod or
| something.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Skibidi Toilet is 100% worth calling out - very in line
| with that DIY weird vibe of the Newgrounds/AlbinoBlackSheep
| era. Has to have been Garry's Mod or probably these days,
| Source Filmmaker (SFM).
|
| Makes me feel old, though - that's a meme from my kids
| generation, which I know about only because of them.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| > but I think a lot of the particular "weird" vibe of the
| early days of the modern web is pretty much dead
|
| I take it you haven't had a 12 year old talk your ear off
| about Five Nights at Freddy's lore or "SCP" then?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation
| epiccoleman wrote:
| SCP Foundation has been around for like 15 years! The wiki
| itself is absolutely great though, it's definitely a good
| example of that DIY ethos. It's been interesting to see how
| much content has been generated from the stuff on the site
| over the last few years. My kids seem to enjoy the SCP lore
| explainer videos (at least, when they're allowed on
| YouTube).
| cafeinux wrote:
| Oh, I see you've met my godson...
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Check out Conner O'Malley's stuff on YouTube. He did some
| really great stuff around the 2020 election.
| archontes wrote:
| It may not be as aberrant as MeatCanyon, but I would say that
| Felix Colgrave is defining his own genre enough to be
| considered weird.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@FelixColgrave
| afavour wrote:
| Yeah, this threw me too. Salad Fingers is absolutely pre-
| YouTube. I remember watching that, Weebl and Bob, Charlie the
| Unicorn etc etc, all as Flash videos.
| pjot wrote:
| Too Many Cooks, I think, originated on YouTube.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Too Many Cooks was produced by Williams Street and aired on
| Adult Swim.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > Charlie the Unicorn
|
| Shun the non-believer....
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Caaaaaarrrrl[1]...
|
| Ending of that series caught me off guard a bit, got really
| down for a while first time.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJOwdrTA8Gw
| ogurechny wrote:
| It's quite obvious that the author doesn't understand the
| difference between "internet" and "internet TV", and only used
| the latter. Otherwise, the article would say "weird internet".
| foota wrote:
| Green is not a creative color?
| https://youtu.be/9C_HReR_McQ?si=hPwd3zmnOx21ww1L
| bombcar wrote:
| I believe YouTube poop originated in YouTube. But maybe it was
| available from things like YTMND.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Yeah YTP is what I think of when I think of YouTube-
| originated art form. It's sort of like a visual version of
| the "Paul's Boutique" crazy sampling to make new art.
| ogurechny wrote:
| I've always thought people simply copied the style of "Robot
| Chicken", "12 oz. Mouse" and other shows of that era because
| it was considered "HiLaRiOuS!!!!" by some crowd, and did not
| require complex work in the video editor.
| archagon wrote:
| Seems like a cousin of the animutation to me.
| macNchz wrote:
| I recently heard about Skibidi Toilet being the latest sensation
| among teenagers and had a very old person "what is wrong with
| kids today" moment when I watched some, before remembering that
| 20 years ago my friends and I were all watching Salad Fingers,
| Sick Animation, Homestar Runner and other dumb flash cartoons on
| albinoblacksheep.com.
| vinberdon wrote:
| Okay but there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with Homestar
| Runner. Well... yes there is, but there's nothing wrong with
| the site aside from it being built in Flash.
| bombcar wrote:
| There is a Poopsmith.
|
| I have to assume that us quoting Strongbad seemed as weird to
| our parents as this skibidi toilet or whatever is gem these
| days.
| smcl wrote:
| Honestly I would have struggled to describe to my parents
| why on earth I was howling with laughter when "homsar"
| became a thing on Homestar Runner. I'm quite happy that Gen
| Z have their own weird humour like skibidi toilet that is
| impenetrable for older people like me.
|
| There's even a level that I can genuinely enjoy this little
| universe too - I have no idea if these tweets and replies
| are made by someone invested in the whole toilet thing or
| poking fun at it (likely the latter) but I loved them:
| https://twitter.com/nleglopnar/status/1679676790401380357
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| I remember them making a metajoke[1] about Flash being dead
| and Strongbad was trying to rapidly learn HTML5 as a result
| lol
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU
| klyrs wrote:
| Thanks for writing that; my kid told me about skibidi toilet
| yesterday and I wasn't parsing "skibidi" well enough to look it
| up.
| sidlls wrote:
| I think there's definitely a qualitative difference, though.
| Salad fingers, at least, had better quality "stories", and the
| weirdness was less "basic." Skibidi Toilet is an excellent
| representation of the hyper-ADHD-ification of kids due to
| rapid-fire content consumption brought on by newer social media
| platforms.
| wayfinder wrote:
| Tbh this kind of sounds like that old man saying music in the
| 80s was the best and it's never been good since.
| sidlls wrote:
| And this sounds like a convenient way to dismiss
| criticism/comparisons of new vs old. Not every such thing
| is an old man raging at change he doesn't understand.
| Sometimes there actually is some merit to the criticism.
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| But not here. Skibidi toilet has a plot and themes.
| sidlls wrote:
| I never wrote or implied that Skibidi Toilet doesn't have
| a plot or themes.
| 5ADBEEF wrote:
| I've watched all of the skibidi toilet episodes. It's really
| the same as 2000s or 2010s gmod YouTube poop, it just managed
| to find a larger audience.
| smlavine wrote:
| 20 years old. Not an iPad kid. It might just be shitposting in
| the end but I watched around a half hour of it a few weeks ago
| and I found the sci-fi war story interesting, the occasional
| moments of "humanity" touching, the action impressive, and yes,
| the toilet humor funny. All the more impressive with
| effectively no dialog.
| all2 wrote:
| No _Happy Tree Friends_?
| slowhadoken wrote:
| "Weird YouTube" owes a lot to Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted
| Festival of Animation. It spawned shows like MTV's Liquid
| Television.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| But (thank god) the internet opened it up so anyone with the
| ideas and motivation to put together a video can get their art
| out there.
|
| Best thing about the internet, IMHO.
| CivBase wrote:
| > While it looks and feels like a children's show, Salad Fingers
| does not conform to the norms of children's television.
|
| What part of Salad Fingers could the author possibly be referring
| to that "looks and feels like a children's show"? Every part of
| it - colors, character designs, animation, voices, music, story
| subject matter, everything - is designed to be extremely
| discomforting.
| anyfoo wrote:
| That baffles me as well. Nothing about Salad Fingers gives that
| vibe to me. Does the author also think that Akira looks and
| feels like a children's show?
|
| There were other shows that went for that vibe only to subvert
| it (happy tree friends or what it was called, I was not a fan
| of it at all), but Salad Fingers is not that.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What part of Salad Fingers could the author possibly be
| referring to that "looks and feels like a children's show"?_
|
| Between the Hays Code (1968) and the _Simpsons_ (1989), most
| Americans had no exposure to adult animation. So even in 2004,
| for a subsantial number of adults, animation meant children 's
| television.
|
| Also, a _lot_ of 90s kids ' television played with the
| boundaries of what is and isn't disturbing.
| pjot wrote:
| "Courage, the cowardly dog" was horrifying.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I was thinking of that and Rocco's Modern World.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| The episode where Rocco sits in his bosses chair is
| burned indelibly into my brain since I saw that as a
| child. Real fever-dream material.
| acuozzo wrote:
| The man in gauze, the man in gauze.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Very unimaginative adults believe that all cartoons are for
| children.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Charlie the unicorn??
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Charlie! Look out for the Liopleurodon! A _magical_
| Liopleurodon!
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Ah shit they took my kidneys.
| mmikeff wrote:
| And weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
| rcurry wrote:
| Salad fingers was good, but nothing tops the Spoilsbury Toast
| Boy.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Peeks at paper.
|
| They immediately misspell Tom Fulp.
| csours wrote:
| We've always had weird shit. Look up "The Goon Show" on BBC, or
| Firesign Theatre
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmWFrMq3qNY
| JohnMakin wrote:
| If you think Salad Fingers is weird, wait until you discover Cool
| 3d World.
| themagician wrote:
| Pre-YouTube internet largely didn't exist anymore. Flash is gone
| and one-by-one the old sites fall with no usable archive.
|
| A lot of the old culture is just GONE. It is now myth or legend.
| The stories only exist verbally. Stile, Encyclopedia Dramatica,
| LiveJournal, Geocities. Much of the culture content from the
| early internet is just _gone._
| k__ wrote:
| Tangentially related, but as someone who watched Salad Fingers
| when it came out (I was ~20) I have the feeling it didn't age
| well.
|
| Somehow much of the stuff I found really funny in the 00s seems
| kinda pointless to me now. I rewatched Scary Movie and thought it
| was disgusting.
|
| People say, yes that's because you're old now, but it's not true
| for everything, and especially not for stuff that came before the
| 2000s.
| oliwarner wrote:
| It feels perverse to even mention YouTube when this was the bread
| and butter of Newgrounds (and others) for so long before YouTube
| took off.
|
| YouTube only absorbed it later on as a delivery platform.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-01 23:00 UTC)