(no subject)
Jun. 29th, 2010 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoyOkay, confession time: after my insightful Shakespeare = Strong Bad observation, I realized that I sort of was wondering whatever happened to The Homestar Runner. I haven’t been to that site in, like, five years, so this week I decided to go back and see if it was still funny.
The answer is: yes. Yes, it is.
I gotta hand it to them: I am impressed that they can still make me laugh outright despite being a) old meme* and b) a website entirely based on … guh … Flash.** Probably it's due to context-dependency: most old memes are inextricably tangled up in the context of a certain point in time, and their humor derives from reapplying and rearranging that meme and context. These, on the other hand, are just dumb cartoons.
It’s also reaffirming to discover that even this kind of site has a painstakingly in-depth wiki edited by compulsive fangeeks willing to cross-check a giant unrewindable corpus of daffy Flash cartoons for continuity issues. There’s something so wonderfully consistent about a discovery like that.
*What’s six years in internet time? I think that, unlike dog years, internet years are logarithmic, so that depending on your starting variables, 6 years internet time could be anywhere from 64 years to older than the current age of the Universe.
**Not to mention heavy flashback action. This goddamn site was hot shit among my high school proto-nerd brethren right around the time of my first catastrophic Fukitol failure. For reasons known only to my subconscious, anything that was going on around me during one of those episodes is now seared into my brain as some sort of halcyon bastion of Better Days, which itself is a sign of insanity, since those Better Days were the days of random moments of collapsing in a jellied heap sobbing about death or something during, say, jewelry class. (Let me tell you, nothing scares a shop teacher worse than a desperately sobbing student.)
I suspect it’s my brain’s attempt at a sort of do-over. I was supposed to be enjoying dumb shit like Flash sites and David Eddings books (another halcyon memory) back then. I didn’t really get the chance, so now my brain is making up for it with heavily edited memories.
The answer is: yes. Yes, it is.
I gotta hand it to them: I am impressed that they can still make me laugh outright despite being a) old meme* and b) a website entirely based on … guh … Flash.** Probably it's due to context-dependency: most old memes are inextricably tangled up in the context of a certain point in time, and their humor derives from reapplying and rearranging that meme and context. These, on the other hand, are just dumb cartoons.
It’s also reaffirming to discover that even this kind of site has a painstakingly in-depth wiki edited by compulsive fangeeks willing to cross-check a giant unrewindable corpus of daffy Flash cartoons for continuity issues. There’s something so wonderfully consistent about a discovery like that.
*What’s six years in internet time? I think that, unlike dog years, internet years are logarithmic, so that depending on your starting variables, 6 years internet time could be anywhere from 64 years to older than the current age of the Universe.
**Not to mention heavy flashback action. This goddamn site was hot shit among my high school proto-nerd brethren right around the time of my first catastrophic Fukitol failure. For reasons known only to my subconscious, anything that was going on around me during one of those episodes is now seared into my brain as some sort of halcyon bastion of Better Days, which itself is a sign of insanity, since those Better Days were the days of random moments of collapsing in a jellied heap sobbing about death or something during, say, jewelry class. (Let me tell you, nothing scares a shop teacher worse than a desperately sobbing student.)
I suspect it’s my brain’s attempt at a sort of do-over. I was supposed to be enjoying dumb shit like Flash sites and David Eddings books (another halcyon memory) back then. I didn’t really get the chance, so now my brain is making up for it with heavily edited memories.
