One of the most influential bands in the world is coming back with brand new music in early June. The band has teased fans with a brand new single, Pork and Beans, that will be released in full on June 8th. The song is based on the theme of a consumer society with a weak economy and a morally bankrupt populace coming to blows. The band is giving fans a moment to reflect on the things that are wrong with our society as the song plays, including a line that says “the only thing you’re good at is when you’re not online”.
The original Weezer song is about a person who doesn’t know how to handle anger, and the video portrays this theme well. The video is a collection of images that depict the band members and their fans in various scenarios. Some of the images include: a person wearing a crown, a person in the foreground doing a silly face, a person running in a circle, a person punching the ground, and a person with a pipe stuck in his/her mouth. The video also shows the band members laughing, playing music, and singing. Although the video is humorous, it is also a warning to all those who may try to emulate the individuals in the video.
The internet is teeming with people who mistake memes for real life. The “Pork and Beans” meme is based around a popular joke in the gaming community that began after a YouTuber made an absurd claim in a video. This is where it all began.
Take a break from your day to watch Pork and Beans again. It’s such a fantastic song to me since it was very rad and amazing during 2009/2010. Today, it’s like a time capsule of an age when the Internet was still the wild west compared to what I believe is a dystopian future of toxicity on social media with memes springing up and disappearing in the span of a few claps of Pewdiepie’s hands.
Wow, you have Chocolate Rain, the Star Wars child, numa numa, and a whole lot more. It was like the original YouTube Rewind before there was a YouTube Rewind. It’s also a lesson that memes don’t hold up well over time. We’re constantly bored in our contemporary existence, and what alleviates it now is unlikely to alleviate it in the future.
Do you think it’s held up nicely over time? At the same time, I’m nostalgic because this was my youth, and I’m thinking, “Wow, that was entertaining?” A man singing, people tossing mentos into a glass, and a group of hands performing a song? These days, that’s so pedestrian and… lovely.
Because movies and material took longer to load in the early to late 2000s, bandwidth limitations (anything over 6 Mbps was considered excellent Internet) made them more expensive. It wasn’t as fast and instantaneous as it is now, with gigabit Internet allowing you to effortlessly go from video to video. So, if you bothered to do anything online, the time spent waiting and preparing was well worth it.
Back then, there were also a lot of problems with documenting things. Because smartphones did not exist at the time, YouTubers had to rely on cameras capable of recording digital video and converting it to a format that YouTube would accept. This was before the days of HD videos becoming commonplace. It was difficult to make a video. It’s very difficult. Fraps was excellent at capturing gameplay videos, but there was no streaming, and you still had to edit them into something viewable.
It’s so bizarre that I completely forgot about this video, but viewing it to write this post has brought tears to my eyes as I recall the memories. Chocolate Rain, your whole base, the Star Wars child, numa numa, leave Britany alone, and much more are all crammed into one 480p masterpiece. It serves as both a nostalgic piece of art and a meme cemetery for memes from before 2010.
The memes are simple and harmless. A man singing an intriguing song, mentos being dropped into Coke, some hands performing a Daft Punk song, and more were all born of an age when technology had progressed just far enough for us to have an idea of what we could do with it but not far enough for us to execute it effectively.
Between bandwidth constraints, in a period before 4G Internet and smartphones with 4K cameras in every pocket, and a dearth of things to do online, these memes thrived in their simplicity and ease of sharing. They captured the spirit of the period as everyone started to explore what this wild and crazy Internet might accomplish. They were short, easy on the bandwidth, and produced out of love rather than a desire to profit.
The video hasn’t aged well in 2019, ten years later. Short meme-lifecycles that spawn new memes based on previous memes, an army of Internet users all equipped with cameras, photo and video editing software built into both their PCs and phones, and an entire planet of Humans collaborating on ideas generating them are nothing compared to the swirl of what is going on these days with short meme-lifecycles that spawn new memes based on previous memes, and an army of Internet users all equipped with cameras, photo and video editing software built into both their PCs
If you wanted to create a meme and capture it on video in 2005, you only had a few choices, ranging from costly camcorders to attempting to utilize outdated webcams that needed a lot of strong light to even see what they were trying to film. Gameplay videos were also difficult to film since they required a large amount of hard drive space and a powerful computer, as well as the capacity to trim them down to a size that could be shared.
All Your Base was just a picture, and the most of the memes included were short films, maybe about 10 seconds long, that got the humor through, sort of like a crazy Tik Tok thing before Tik Tok was a thing. Waiting two minutes for the video to buffer before viewing it truly soaked in the worth of your time and experience, unlike nowadays, when you can scroll through hundreds of videos in a matter of minutes before deciding on one you’re simply OK with watching.
Because there wasn’t much else to do, all of these memes from that period were amusing. Memes are unique in today’s world, when everyone has a smartphone, everyone has a camera on them at all times, and picture manipulation is essentially a middle school lesson. They’re usually one-hit wonders, waiting for the next viral sensation.
Back then, monetization wasn’t a huge issue. It was almost difficult to get to the point where YouTube would pay you, and you had to rely on Maker or another third-party to monetize your videos for you. It’s so much simpler these days, and most films are made with the intention of “monetizing.” Things were created for pleasure and because you could back then.
In the same way that earlier video games don’t age well, the “difficulty” of older games may stem from technical problems with how the game has to be designed to function. Because the technology wasn’t what it is now, they had to employ techniques left and right to bring their visions to life, which added to the complexity and resulted in a lot of what we now consider bad gaming choices.
It’s simply fascinating to me, so I thought I’d post an old flashback today and issue a warning: what you think amusing now may either make you cringe or make you nostalgic in the future, but it won’t likely age well. Put your best pre-2010 meme in the comments area, and let’s all laugh about it.
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