Am I wrong, or are Inglourious Basterds’ subtitles set in Arial?
I also think I saw a single straight quote where an apostrophe should have been.
30 posts with category “Culture”
What Zalgo Is
Frequently described as “Lovecraftian” or “Cthulhu-inspired,” Zalgo actually bears a closer similarity to Shub-Niggurath or Yog-Sothoth, the latter described by Lovecraft as resembling
protoplasmic flesh that flowed blackly outward to join together and form that eldritch, hideous horror from outer space, that spawn of the blankness of primal time, that tentacled amorphous monster which was the lurker at the threshold, whose mask was as a congeries of iridescent globes, the noxious Yog-Sothoth, who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time!
It is a manifestation of a terror that is based on insanity and chaos rather than ordinary mortal danger — comics, of course, being an apt target for this idea, as their innocence and relative shallowness make for an especially jarring juxtaposition.
Weirdly, Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields wrote a song about Yog-Sotheth with a side-project he called “The Gothic Archies,” a bizarre coincidence given that the first known Zalgo creations involve Archie comics.
First conceived by Something Awful member “Shmorky” in 2004 as grim modifications of old comic strips, it was embraced by other members of the forum. After remaining in obscurity for several years, Zalgo appears to have resurfaced in a pair of Something Awful threads (1, 2) mocking the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del, where the practice of Photoshopping certain strips eventually evolved into “Zalgo edits,” beginning I believe with this post (Google cache) by member Dammerung in October 2008.
A convenient summary of all these Photoshops was compiled in this post (Google cache).
The blog Grim Reviews posted an overview of the phenomenon shortly after its fall 2008 resurrection. The meme subsequently flourished on 4chan. A b3ta.com forum member named Evilscary credits himself with some of the more popular and more recent Garfield Zalgo comics, writing in his profile:
I seem to be responsible for the recent surge of ZALGO that has engulfed the internet.
I didn’t create ZALGO (indeed, he created himself in a torrent of darkness and corruption) but I certainly aided in reviving his following.
And because Internet loves Garfield parodies, it wasn’t long before Zalgo became popular and therefore no longer funny. One Something Awful member even noticed a reference to it (Google cache) in the game Space Trader.
Maybe most responsible for the curiosity around Zalgo is the proliferation of weird Unicode diacritics that accompany more recent Zalgo-babble, which creates the illusion that whatever Zalgo is, it is now directly affecting your computer and that by Googling it you have introduced it into your home. Try it and you’ll see what I mean. I’m pretty certain 4chan is responsible for this clever twist on the idea.
With the increased popularity of Zalgo, someone has come forward claiming to have thought it up in 1998 as “simply encroaching darkness” before infecting various forums with the idea in 2003, though most people aren’t taking this claim seriously.
As a side-note it also reminds me of the 1997 film Event Horizon, whose “antagonist” is some extra-dimensional realm of pure chaos.
More Zalgo resources include:
- Zalgo on Know Your Meme
- Zalgo on Encyclopedia Dramatica
- The talk page for that article
- A deleted Wikipedia page
- Fortress: Ameritrash blogged about Zalgo before me
- So did centerNegative
Video: That MTV “Vertebrae” Commercial
Hey, I didn’t say it was good.
I guess what I find so fascinating about it is: When did MTV ever condone being unpopular? Between the Spring Break programming and drunk girls crying on The Real World, it was an odd change of pace, but one that reminded me of the attitude MTV used to have, in the ’80s, before they became shameless culture-mongers. Still, it’s important not to ignore that this guy actually is attractive, and dressed fashionably, and — at least at my school — probably would have been popular. I guess it would have turned too many viewers off to have presented him as acne-ridden, overweight, without any sense of style, and listening to black metal?
Something I forgot to mention last time is that this was part of a series of commercials, if I remember correctly, that played on the “V” in “MTV,” although I forget the titles of the other installments.
Thanks to La fille des montagnes (“The girl mountain”?) for sending me the video.
The Abyss
You might remember this 1989 James Cameron movie.
Yeah that one. I caught up with it about halfway through last night, and I don’t think I’d seen it in maybe a dozen years. I remember having wanted to like it as a kid, as I was into stuff like aliens and Atlantis, but I also remember feeling as though the underwater intelligences were hardly emphasized, almost as an afterthought, and that the main plot revolved around some boring adult drama stuff blah blah Cold War. And also that the ending was horribly unsatisfying.
Man, I was right, especially about the ending. Okay so the final plot point is that Ed Harris needs to go like four miles deeper than their submarine already is, by himself, in just a diving suit whose helmet won’t implode because it’s filled with pink breathing fluid instead of air. They claim that it’s similar to the stuff you breathed “for nine months” in the womb, but I thought oxygen was supplied by the umbilical cord? At any rate, down he goes, until he’s greeted by one of these non-terrestrial intelligences who just kind of glows and blinks at him for a while before taking his hand and leading him to this grand underwater city.
Earlier we had seen what we assumed to be a ship belonging to these guys, though it was fluid and seemingly bioluminescent. One of the crew had suggested that “their whole technology” is based on manipulating water, so okay, I can suspend belief enough for that, it’s a cool idea anyway. So as Ed Harris and this alien are careening through this underwater city we imagine, Okay, maybe these skyscraper-like structures are made of water, whether they freeze it or otherwise fix it molecularly by ionizing it or something?, look, I’m not a chemist.
“Substantialiscious”
This word is used in Snickers’ new ad campaign, wherein they plaster these long, awkward neologisms (e.g., “Peanutopolis,” “Hungerectomy,” etc.) on buses and billboards and on their candy bar wrappers themselves.
What struck me about this one is that anybody reading it would promptly assume that it is a fusion of “substantial” and “delicious”; but wouldn’t that produce “substantialicious,” not “-scious”? In fact, the only words that end in “-scious” are “luscious” and the various forms of consciousness. I don’t think they meant to evoke lusciousness, and even if they did, shouldn’t they have coined “Substantialuscious”?
Things got worse when I opened the wrapper:
Substantialiscious \sub-'stan(t)-shu-'li-shus\
(noun). The weight of something when you weigh it with your tongue.
It is, of course, an adjective, a fact that a contributor to Urban Dictionary even tried to point out, albeit incorrectly.
It’s an easy target, I know, but I’m just genuinely surprised that they let something like that get out the door; it’s a fairly clever campaign, and “Hungerectomy” in particular presupposes that the average person is smart enough to know what the suffix “-ectomy” means. And wouldn’t somebody who knows that also know an adjective from a noun? It’s just confusing.
foobar2000 Is Dead or Dying: Part 1
Originally written June 30, 2007.
There’s always been a significant faction of foobar2000 users whose primary attraction to the player is its appearance, or rather the level of control given to its users over its appearance. In its infancy, with the standard (and still default) UI, very little was possible — the main window consisted solely of a tabbed playlist and several functional toolbars — but people nevertheless took a lot of pride in making it their own, and some impressive things were done with relatively minimal flexibility. It was in the standard UI that users began experimenting with album-level presentation, choosing not to repeat redundantly the artist and album name on each line of the playlist, but to use the second, third, and sometimes fourth lines to display other info, such as year, label, genre, replaygain info, etc. Each of these customizations was unquestionably unique, but most of the broad details of the interface were consistent and inescapable.
The Columns UI component began as an experiment in allowing for multiple columns within the playlist display, emulating the Windows Explorer “Detail” view (and many other Windows programs), with sortability via clickable column headings. Eventually Columns UI added a sidebar and, later, panels, allowing the whole foobar window to be split up indefinitely into panel-based component displays, the playlist viewer becoming just another one of these. This granted much greater flexibility, allowing users to tailor the interface even more precisely to their needs. You could now display album art as prominently as you wanted, or not at all; your entire library tree could be embedded within the main window, rather than tucked away in a pop-up; and with the trackinfo panel’s exceptionally lax (by that era’s standards) stylizations, the personalization of your foobar became even more addictive, and, more importantly, rewarding.
Many seemed hell-bent on concocting the most garish presentations imaginable: giant gothic blue-on-black custom fonts, deep-red 200-px-tall spectrum analyzers, all, of course, coupled with custom OS “vis.”
While some still preferred the purity and elegance of the standard UI, the personalizations made possible by Columns UI were inarguably functional ones, for the most part. Fonts, colors, distribution of panels, and a rudimentary method of text alignment were really as far as you could go. At the core of all the boasted screenshots was a recognizable structure, all slight variations on the theme of playlist+trackinfo+albumlist+albumart. Outside of displaying album art, there was nothing profoundly new that Columns UI allowed you to do — rather, Columns UI gave you more control over how you did what you needed to do.
That Old MTV “Vertebrae” Commercial
Of which I completely expected to find a copy on YouTube, but about which I could find only a single internet reference at all.
Do you remember that?, where the kid is walking past the lockers in high school, and he has those big can headphones on, and all the jocks or whatever are sneering at him, and he just smiles contentedly and turns up his music?
I think it may have been an MTV2 campaign specifically. Anyway. I remember that.
Holy crap I can’t sleep.
A SEMIOTIC BLACK HOLE
sin·gu·lar·i·ty (sĭng’gyə-lăr’ĭ-tē): A point in space-time at which gravitational forces cause matter to have infinite density and infinitesimal volume, and space and time to become infinitely distorted.
Or maybe a Möbius strip? I don’t know.