Giving you the backstory and appraisals of vintage memes!
Submissions should be vintage memes or commentary about vintage memes. Commenters are advised to appraise the internet value and provenance meme antiquities.
Rules:
I wish I had saved some of the super niche memes from back in my days on the Penny-Arcade and usenet forums I frequented in the late 90's up until about graduating high school. I suspect many of them would be confusing as shit even when they weren't in-jokes centered around those specific communities just because they're like ancient Egyptian to these more 18th century aged memes.
I miss philosoraptor
I miss the simpler days
I don't get half of the comments. Ragecomic boomer here.
I dunno if you can claim Boomer if rage-comics were your time; maybe Gen-X?
I had to blow the dust off this one https://conanzeromus.ytmnd.com/
Jesus Christ, I can't believe ytmnd is still around
Speaking of ancient memes I showed this to my teen the other day and they didn't even begin to understand.
Hmm, wired earbuds (RIP) and the phone with buttons dates it a bit, but captchas are still around (and infidelity). Although, I'm seeing less and less of the distorted text kind these days.
I haven't seen a captcha like that in years and my teen didn't even understand it as a captcha at all. If you're still seeing those I'm definitely curious where.
Uhh, I'm thinking I've had to fill them out to read scientific papers at some point recently. Maybe other more web 1.0 type pages, although most of them are moving over to the Cloudflare JavaScript checkbox service.
There was a time when memes were just dudes fighting snails in the margins of medieval manuscripts.
𝔉𝔬𝔯𝔰𝔬𝔬𝔱𝔥! 𝔗𝔥𝔦𝔰 𝔱𝔞𝔭𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔶 𝔥𝔞𝔱𝔥 𝔟𝔢𝔢𝔫 𝔞𝔩𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔢𝔡. ℑ 𝔠𝔞𝔫 𝔱𝔢𝔩𝔩 𝔣𝔯𝔬𝔪 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔱𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔤, 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔥𝔞𝔳𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔰𝔢𝔢𝔫 𝔪𝔞𝔫𝔶 𝔰𝔲𝔠𝔥 𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔤𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔢𝔰 𝔦𝔫 𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔢 𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢.
Whoa, do you know where this is from?
There was a time when all memes were demotivational posters.
I CAN'T HANG IN THERE TIL FRIDAY
THAT'S OK, YOU'RE WORKING SATURDAY TOO
Despair.com (apparently still around!) was my go-to back in the day for those
Successful black man where have you been?
Trump has been in office. He went into hiding.
All good with these coming back, but let's keep the racist puffin in the past.
There was a time when all memes were le text
What the fuck did you just call me? *holds up spork*
Back when racism was at least thinly veiled...
I always saw it as mocking racists, but with the power of hindsight I guess it’s a real Schrödinger’s racist situation.
Dumbasses not understanding irony, same as it ever was
Agree. The whole point is to lean into a racist stereotype, and then subvert it.
I miss the veil
There was a time before that too.
Yeah plain text based & image only memes
I put on my robe and wizard hat, that dancing baby gif, all your base, etc
There was also some push back on posting images with text embedded because it makes the text unsearchable/not compatible with screen readers at the time/forced font and color that can make it harder to read, but then the image macro sites took off that made it simple for anyone to create from a template and there was no turning back
I remember when memes were just a picture of a duck with wheels or a gif of a dancing baby.