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
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.
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.
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.
He primarily uploads publishes all his material, alongside with Jerry Jackson et al, to his own website[0]. I remember subscribing to it over RSS as a kid and his stuff would always drop there first. Might be some gems to discover if you haven't browsed it before (: Newgrounds, ebaumsworld etc were all reuploads [1].
[1]: 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. Firth did publish himself on NG, and later on YouTube. But I think he only appeared as himself on YouTube like a decade or so after Salad Fingers first went viral. https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/276616https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBaum%27s_World#Copyright_infr...
You are correct - I say this as the website ‘landlord’ (scroll right to the very bottom!)
The fun part was hosting this myself 20-something years ago and seeing traffic spike like mad. Rented cheap servers from Kimsufi or Ikoula and tuning apache as best I could without a real clue what I was doing…
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
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.
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).
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.
There's a YouTube channel called BuiltByGamers that does nothing but post absurd fake podcast clips where two guys pretend to argue about FNAF and Skibidi Toilet and get all the lore wrong. I think it's interesting because I've never thought of trolling elementary schoolers as a business idea. Watching them feels like getting a lobotomy though.
That reminds me, tangentially, of the videos with deepfaked voices of Obama, Trump, and Biden playing video games together. For me it gets stale fast, but I will admit there's something pretty hilarious about the whole setup.
My nephew and everyone in his generation seem to be really into it, even to the extent that I heard kids singing 'tears for fears' songs (from the 80s) used in it in the street the other day.
I tried to show him source filmmaker in an attempt to get him to be interested in messing around / producing stuff rather than consuming it on an iPad, but sadly he wasn't interested.
Oh man, I absolutely love his stuff. Every once in a while that Fever the Ghost song gets stuck in my head, even a decade after that video debuted. He's definitely got a very psychedelic and surreal style that is 100% Felix Colgrave. And I think that he certainly deserves the title of weird as much as anyone.
Especially his earlier stuff very much has that old school net sensibility about it. (Although he's talented and polished enough that it's not _quite_ the same amateur vibe of those early Newground days).
Another source of phenomenally cool and interesting "content" is the Adult Swim Off the Air series, which also has a very psychedelic vibe to it. The series collects a wide variety of really awesome animations (and also lots of silly stuff).
Probably my favorite thing to ever come from the Off The Air oeuvre is the animated music video for Dan Deacon's song When I Was Done Dying[1]. They also did a 20 minute special episode featuring Dan Deacon's music which is extremely cool[2]. I was exposed to so much cool stuff via Off The Air, the first episode is still one of my favorite ten minutes of weirdness[3]. There are so many other great episodes, too, if you like this kind of thing.
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.
my personal rule of thumb : if they're going for the eccentricity, it's absurd -- but if they just act that way and they lean-in they're weird.
Tim & Eric and similar acts are absurd -- the people themselves are somewhat normal and put on a show when the gong sounds; this is obvious in their 'normal' productions.
Bjork, Steven Wright, Emo Phillips, Andy Kaufman, Tom Waits -- they roll out of bed 'acting that way'.
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.
Salad fingers and weebl and bob were both on weebl's stuff AFAIK http://weebls-stuff.com/ back in the day but got put on to youtube so that he could reach a wider audience. (and with the downfall of flash player).
Edit: Reading up about it, salad fingers had a different author
'Badger! Badger! Badger!', scampi, magical trevor etc. were also from there. It was a favourite site of my friend group when we wer 12 and spent lunchtime in the computer lab at school.
Those were excellent. Such was their popularity that their (badgers, Weebl) creator was invited for a presentation at the Holywell Music Rooms in Oxford; I can't remember exactly when but it must have been 20 years ago. This was fairly well attended (including the entire bioinformatics group from my institute).
"Unaware of anything that originated on Youtube that fits into this category"...
What?! Currently the most watched animator on youtube falls squarely into this category. You don't know about it because you're old. TBF I only heard about it from an elementary school teacher. Here's a summary for the old folks, aka everyone here:
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.
Absolutely true - it's actually crazy how much of an art form YTP became. (Not sure how popular it is these days?). It was a whole style with its own conventions, memes, etc. And on the surface, it seems really stupid, but there's a lot of creativity and talent that went into those wild videos.
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.
The really crazy thing is that I initially hated Youtube poop for some reason, despite having made several Animutations. Later on I realized how silly that was.
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”.
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.)
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.
Rejected is definitely the OG "weird" internet video for me. I must have seen it a thousand times. There are a few phrases from it that have a permanent place in my vocabulary.
In the late 90's my dad got dialup and a brand-new e-mail address, and someone forwarded him a GIF of Don Hertzfeldt's Ah L'Amour. So this was happening before Rejected even came out.
By the time I was in college in 2003, Don Hertzfeldt animations were all over the Internet (usually in truncated, uncredited form).
Don's new series, World of Tomorrow, is really great, btw, and a wonderful maturation and evolution of the animation style I saw in that GIF in 1998.
The first "accelerated" video card I bought (I don't remember what it was) included drivers and some "multimedia" demo stuff on a CDROM, including Rejected as a .MPG file or some such.
It hadn't occurred to me until just now, to wonder if that CD is still around, and if anyone ever archived it. I'll probably see my folks for the holidays and I'll try to remember to take a usb cd drive in case I can lay hands on the disc.
Later, Rejected showed up in Spike & Mike's animation festival, but I think I'd seen it passed around online by that time, and actually most of the stuff in the festival that year (probably 97?) was familiar. IRC Fservs were huge by then and they basically demolished the novelty of in-person festivals.
"They look the same" is so burned into my brain that it's part of my basic vocabulary. I cannot count the number of times I've said "they look the same" in that goofy voice while looking at a diff, PR, or comparing two config files or something.
In a similar vein, the famous "Miss Teen South Carolina" stuck in my craw, and I often throw out a "like such as" when demonstrating something for humorous effect.
I guess these pop culture references really date me, but among my age group they get a laugh, for whatever that's worth.
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.
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?”
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 :)
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
> 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.
> 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.
I was looking for someone to mention this. When I saw the Ramses scene for the first time, it scared the living shit out of me for some reason. Just something about him slowly approaching from the distance was absolutely terrifying
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.
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.
Geocities at least is archived and fairly easy to torrent the whole thing.
There is definitely the desire to memoryhole a lot of this though. I'm surprised motherless is still around but i guess it's just a porn site now (was it always?)
I think you're a touch overestimating the degree to which everything is lost. The Internet Archive has some coverage (though admittedly, not all), and the Flashpoint Project has decent coverage of Flash games and animation. It's not as dire, IMO. A large part of the culture has been saved, enough to give people who put in some effort to access it, a gist of what it was like.
Say what you want about Flash but Flash allowed you to create such creativity, nowadays there's nothing even close to the faculty of what it could provide.
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.
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.
I'm a bit younger than the average commenter here, but not young enough to be in the "skibidi toilet" demographic. But looking at both skibidi and the older type of YTP and idk the talking orange videos for example, I just don't see the difference. Maybe it's because I was too young to grow up watching them a lot but yeah. And that's saying nothing of the much more ADHD type of videos that were also common back then.
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.
Why did you have to mention ADHD? It has nothing to do with ADHD... As someone honestly struggling with severe ADHD for years, it's as if you told a disabled person that the latest new movie is not a great watch because it makes whoever watches it disabled.
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.
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
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.
If anything, I had a feeling of pride and nostalgia with Skibidi Toilet. It's a long and proud tradition of total nonsense somehow turning out to be funny.
What's different today is that it's actually popular. Whereas none of the other kids at school knew about Neil Cicierega or Arfenhouse.
Way before YouTube and also before Flash, in the late 90s and early 2000s, is when weird and silly animation and video began to pop. Hamsterdance.com, dancing baby, Kompressor[1], and so many others (abevigoda.com) predate the 'weird YouTube' phenomenon with nothing more than basic HTML and a few JPEGs. And because of that simplicity, you can still enjoy them as they were thanks to archive.org.
Aeon Flux is wonderful. About 20 years ago Peter Chung curated his favorite episodes for some animation festivals. Pity it never was released on Blu-Ray from what I can find via the Blu-Ray.com forums.
Shoutout to Lev from ingredientx and Tales of Mere Existence from the same era, also Monkey Dust but that was a BBC production that felt like modern day YouTube.
I wish we would stop pretending topics inside generic social media constitutes some unique community. It’s the same site, used by the same people; there is nothing unique or special about it.
But everyone has to pretend “their thing” is special.
Such a shame that this era of the Internet is dead. Now everyone and their mum is on the net and things like TT have only worsened the quality of content. It's just a huge pool of reposted content, clout seeking, compliment seeking bs all with an annoying robotic voice over it (at least some of the YouTube bots have started using 11L I guess).
Sure, now the Internet is much like humanity itself, the average person likes football and celebrities like the kardashians, trashy shows like love island. But I really do miss the Internet back when it was uncool and geeky.
Not sure if it counts a 100% as Weird Youtube, but Bill Wurtz music is my favourite weird stuff on there (because it's also actually interesting musically).
I don't know if I buy the Skibidi Toilet thing. It reminds me more of Badgers than Salad Fingers. I remember it used to be really commonplace for spam groups to make loops over songs in single flashes or collabs as well. Back in the glory days where we all hated Wade for trying to do his job...
As many comments have stated, this predates YouTube.
By a weird coincidence, something that is recent YouTube weird is called "Bobby Fingers" and is probably worth checking out if you like this stuff though its not quite the same.
The focus on pre-YouTube content reminds us of the golden era of Newgrounds, where the weird was more raw and less polished. Fast forward to today, and YouTube's 'weird' is a different beast. Think MeatCanyon with their bizarre body horror and Joe Cappa's indescribable humor. Yet, the essence of internet weirdness isn't lost – it's just found new forms, like the SCP lore captivating today's youth. It's a testament to the internet's ever-changing, ever-weird landscape
I recently enjoyed the Netflix show I Think You Should Leave, it has some of the absurdist style like weird YouTube but with more budget and mainstream appeal. Recommended.
Is this a paid post or something? Weird and avant-garde compared to what? The reason most of this crap never got archived is because it was the purest of crap, not the death of flash or other silly excuses.
Similarly nobody cares about the vast majority of YTMND or Vine.
There absolutely was a certain type of "nerd" into the junk on Newgrounds and they were probably the same loud minority who flocked to Facebook until they realized how crappy that was too. Nobody really wants to remember the internet between 2000 and 2015. Nobody likes most media from that era in general.
> Nobody really wants to remember the internet between 2000 and 2015.
Literally all of HN wants that era of pre-FANG commodification of the internet to come back. Before so much of the web was siloed off into corporate gated communities and the death of personal websites, blogs, BBS forums, and the like.
I think Salad Fingers is very good, but surrealism was not invented in 2003. Surely there must have been earlier animated films with surreal themes. It could have a place as early internet art, and I don't understand how novel it really is, but I am not a art historian either.
On the contrary, I think many of us miss a bit of the internet that was before 2015. Todays walled gardens of stalker ad agencies and mega corps feels very different to the internet I knew.
