Determining the time of a photo by measuring its shadows
— if you know the location/date and have a clear, straight shot, you can estimate within 30 minutes #Preserving Worlds
— a “documentary travelogue through aging but beloved virtual worlds,” interviewing people trying to preserve them via MetaFilter #Aaron A. Reed on LambdaMOO
— it’s stayed running continuously for over 30 years, still easily accessible today #AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google
— ding dong, AMP is dead via Jeremy Keith #Exploring a general store untouched for nearly 60 years
— the 153 Mile Store opened in 1914 and closed in 1963 with everything inside, a time capsule of the early 20th century #Pouët looks at 20 years of demoscene trends
— wild that the Commodore 64 passed Windows for the last two years, albeit with smaller prods #Visit the first Apple Store from 2001 in augmented reality
— please do Electronics Boutique in 1988 next, thanks #Twitter shares learnings about biased image cropping algorithm
— they found it favored white faces, leading to the cropping changes this month #Freenode staff resigns after hostile takeover of IRC network
— the holding company for the world’s largest IRC network was sold under false pretenses #NYT’s Amanda Hess talks to Sinead O’Connor
— “I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.” #Trash the Planet
— browser-based idle game about capitalist raccoons taking over the world via @molleindustria #Vandal
— browser add-on to see historical versions of a webpage from the Wayback Machine without leaving the tab via @matt_muir #pmndrs market
— newly-launched database of freely-licensed 3D models/textures with an open API via @0xca0a #After 20 years, eBay closing its adults-only categories next month
— including all adult art, comics, and games, presumably because they’re transitioning from Paypal to traditional payment processors #Google previews Project Starline, a life-size holographic 3D video chat booth
— multiple cameras and sensors capture a 3D model in real-time, displayed on a 65-inch holographic light field display #Prosecutors can’t prove cheerleader mom deepfake is actually a deepfake
— with evidence pointing to its authenticity, seems like a case of deepfakes being blamed for teens screwing around #Sending an international email in 1984
— “I won’t tell you my account number” (clearly types in account number and “0000” PIN on keyboard) via @JonErlichman #Colossal Cave Adventure as a playable long-polling GIF on AO3
— learn more about Andrew Sillers’ Living GIFs, including Doom on AO3 #Itch.io waiving all fees today for Creator Day
— go get some delightful indie games with 100% of revenue going to their creators #Vox on the Gaza doom loop
— solid explainer on the political dynamics behind Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority #The Palestinian Dispossession at the Heart of the Gaza Conflict
— “They will rubber stamp more evictions, all the while using the tool of law to provide a veneer of integrity.” #Wired’s Megan Molteni on the 60-year-old scientific error that helped Covid kill
— related: Zeynep Tufekci on the long delay in accepting spread by aerosol transmission #Aaron A. Reed on Monster Island, a play-by-mail MMO from 1989
— over 250,000 rooms and 1,600 concurrent players, all running on a 386 and played via postal mail #David Farrier gets scammed by a foot fetishist
— don’t miss his interview with an online sex worker about their lessons learned: cash up-front and never use Paypal #Enhancing photorealism in GTA V with a convolutional networks
— processing game imagery using a network trained on cityscapes #Google Docs to switch from HTML to canvas based rendering
— I wonder when media sites will start doing this to prevent ad blockers via Belong.io #How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body
— Laine Nooney on the history of computer-induced pain and the ways people tried to manage it #WaPo interviews the Japanese biker dad who uses FaceApp to post as a young woman
— raises complex questions around authenticity and identity online #P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A. (1988)
— teen hackers in communist Czechoslovakia made and swapped illegal protest text games on bootleg cassettes #Genesis Noir leads IGF 2021 finalists
— as always, an incredible year of indie games to seek out and play #Stumbled
— StumbleUpon reborn, it immediately paid off for me with this laser bagpipe via Garbage Day #Neopets’ blackmarket pet scandal, explained
— Simone de Rochefort dives into the site’s history, current drama, and future #LiveLeak shuttered after 15 years
— I never knew until today that it started as an offshoot of internet shock site Ogrish #Report finds ISPs funded fake net neutrality comments
— 18 out of 22 million comments were fake, 7.7 million from a single 19-year-old college student #Signal banned from running Instagram ads revealing how much Facebook knows about you
— a stunt, but a good one via @sdw #How Basecamp Blew Up
— incredible reporting from Casey Newton on the disastrous all-hands meeting that led to a third of the company quitting #Verizon sells Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm
— the new company will be just called “Yahoo,” finally dropping the exclamation point #Web Curios returns
— after a nine-month hiatus, Matt Muir’s link-laden newsletter is back and at its own domain #Basecamp employees quit en masse after politics ban and severance offer
— I counted 19 out of 57, fully one-third of their team, and those are just the ones who announced it publicly #Snopes or Nopes
— guess whether Snopes fact-checks were true or not based on the article titles via b3ta #Colin’s Bear Animation, Revisited
13 years ago, I wrote about a 16-second video I instantly fell in love with and interviewed its creator. (It still holds up.)
This week, I saw a meme pop up on TikTok where literally tens of thousands of people re-enacted the Colin’s Bear Animation dance — but with no reference to the original and entirely different audio.
Instead of Mother 3’s “Funky Monkey Dance,” the soundtrack is a deep-fried muddy version of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” which seems like it was first uploaded to TikTok by @zunknownhamster, kicking off the meme with this video viewed 1.5 million times.
Stripped of its original “college animation class” context, the new meme format cracks a joke about the name of some movie, show, game, or other media property, followed by “idk i never watched it” or some variation.
There are over 22,000 of these:
stranger things fans when things get stranger
death note fans when the death is noted
jojos bizarre adventure fans when jojos adventure is bizarre
when you stay at your friend Freddys house for about a week
when people build forts in the night
skyblock players when there’s a block in the sky
You get the idea.
But how did it end up on TikTok? I messaged @zunknownhamster to see where they first found it, but it’s clearly sourced from Kemdizzzle’s Garfield Dancing to Happy, uploaded to YouTube in June 2019.
That video replaced the audio from this February 2017 episode of Fatal Farm’s Lasagna Cat, a surreal webseries that ran from 2008 to 2017, and featured this pitch-perfect tribute to Colin’s Bear Animation.
Arriving 13 years after the original meme, it wouldn’t surprise me if most of the people doing the Colin’s Bear Animation dance on TikTok had never seen it before. Around 25% of TikTok’s user base wasn’t active online, or even alive, in 2008.
By definition, memes mutate and find new life and meaning over time. I’m just happy to see it keep evolving.
when colin animates a bear
idk ive never seen the video