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January 14, 2020 5:08 PM

This is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by Horace Rumpole (58 comments total)

does anyone read the posts down here?
posted by jeremias at 5:32 PM on January 14, 2020 [7 favorites]

This just keeps happening!

Well played...
posted by Windopaene at 5:35 PM on January 14, 2020

We're no strangers to cat posts
You know the rules and so do I
An old reference's what I'm thinking of
You wouldn't get this from any other MeFi
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:40 PM on January 14, 2020 [29 favorites]

WHAT
THE
FUCK
METAFILTER???
posted by lazaruslong at 5:45 PM on January 14, 2020 [5 favorites]

I have concealed
the link
that was on
the webpage

and which
you were probably
clicking
for cat-scan

Forgive me
it was Rick Astley
so Rick
and so Rolled
posted by tonycpsu at 5:55 PM on January 14, 2020 [34 favorites]

The xkcd comic where rickrolling is presented as an old and rather played-out was posted on November 30, 2007. That the first time I had ever heard of it, and judging by the chatter on IRC at the time I wasn't the only one.
posted by ckape at 6:09 PM on January 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

.

echo
posted by humboldt32 at 6:20 PM on January 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

I see what you did there.
posted by lilac girl at 6:21 PM on January 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

I regret not going to see Rick Astley in Singapore while I was there in 2008.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:32 PM on January 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

It hurts. Every time. Every single damned time.
posted by hwestiii at 6:40 PM on January 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

my name is Meta,
and wen its nite,
or wen the Blue
is shiyning brite,
and all the Askers
haf gon to bed -
i stay up late.
i rick the roll.
posted by kalimac at 6:41 PM on January 14, 2020 [27 favorites]

Life is a Rick
But the radio Rolled me
posted by briank at 6:50 PM on January 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

my naym is rik
an wen i rol
the triksy waze
they takes its toll
for wen ur eyes
are wyde like pup
i let yu down
i give yoo up
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:52 PM on January 14, 2020 [64 favorites]

This will not wendell.

But hasn't Smashmouth's All Star eclipsed the Rick Roll as Most Annoying Musical Meme?
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:53 PM on January 14, 2020 [4 favorites]

Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 7:04 PM on January 14, 2020 [20 favorites]

But hasn't Smashmouth's All Star eclipsed the Rick Roll as Most Annoying Musical Meme?

Hey now
posted by mubba at 7:15 PM on January 14, 2020 [52 favorites]

if we’re doing old memes again can we bring back longcat
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:18 PM on January 14, 2020 [6 favorites]

Nicely done.

I still somehow have the Rickroll hotline in my phone contacts. Even more surprisingly, it still works fifteen years later. Someone out there is seriously committed to that joke. (1-248-434-5508 if you're curious.)
posted by biogeo at 7:18 PM on January 14, 2020 [21 favorites]

So, here we find ourselves again.
posted by absalom at 7:19 PM on January 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

I dated someone in high school who gave me a mixtape which included Never Gonna Give You Up when I was like 16, true story. I thought it was pathetic and stupid at the time, I was already playing in a band that gigged at punk clubs in SF (please note how much cooler I used to be). But we were Doing the Nasty at the time so it didn’t matter, Rick Astley understands. Anyway, in retrospect, she dumped me for some way cooler surfer dude right after the mixtape exchange and I think I can confidently say, the very first Rickroll happened via TDK cassette circa 1987 to some poseur California punk high school kid.

But I got the last laugh because she has like a billion kids and is super Christian and happily married and wealthy living in some god forsaken suburb while I’m still playing music and full of angst and miserably dismissive and rebellious and living in the big city paycheck to paycheck and who’s smiling and happy now? Oh wait a minute...
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:28 PM on January 14, 2020 [46 favorites]

[phone] (Australia)
1-760-706-7425 (US)
National Rick Astley Hotline Upgraded.
If you can find one of pjf's conference talks where he talks about learning VoIP and associated tech needed to set this up it's well worth a watch. pjf is always a good watch no matter what.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:36 PM on January 14, 2020 [8 favorites]

First mention I could find on the blue - June 10, 2007 in the Sleep is where Ralph is a Viking post no less.
posted by unliteral at 7:44 PM on January 14, 2020 [6 favorites]

This will not wendell.

CORRECTION: This DID not wendell.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:24 PM on January 14, 2020 [4 favorites]

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Nieur gwyne giff ye uppe; nieur gwyne lette ye douwne,
Nieur gwyne runne yground an dessurt ye.
Nieur ymaken ye crye,
Nieur spake god be with ye
Nieur spake an lie and hurt ye.
posted by jenkinsEar at 8:26 PM on January 14, 2020 [34 favorites]

That Oregon Legislature video is *awesome*. On so many levels.
posted by leahwrenn at 8:39 PM on January 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

Who here likes pancakes? I love pancakes.
posted by MrBadExample at 8:45 PM on January 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, nothing involving memes is truly news.
posted by signsofrain at 8:55 PM on January 14, 2020

That Oregon Legislature video is *awesome*. On so many levels.

Yes, agreed, Oregon has won RickRolling and we should all just move on.

You know the rules, and so do I.
posted by solotoro at 9:07 PM on January 14, 2020 [4 favorites]

zengargoyle thank you for sharing the Australian hotline- I haven't laughed like that for a while.
posted by freethefeet at 9:10 PM on January 14, 2020

[this is good]
posted by Joey Michaels at 9:36 PM on January 14, 2020

Happy Birthday!
posted by augustinetill at 10:00 PM on January 14, 2020

Ralph is a Viking

My neighborhood Place to Be A Viking closed this year. But we can get beer and throw axes instead!
posted by tilde at 10:12 PM on January 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

in the Sleep is where Ralph is a Viking post no less.

Wow. I can't believe I'd never heard of that thread before. Also, I cannot believe how nuts the "alternate" interpretation is! I can't tear myself away from the thread because each time I come across a comment saying he meant "Viking" metaphorically, I'm so incredulous that I for some reason keep scrolling until I hit the next one, as though I need to keep ingesting bizarro hits of micro-rage.

Someone also asked in that thread why the metaphorical view was so provocative to the literalists. I'm still thinking about that question, and I truly don't have an answer. It's just profoundly maddening!

Also, there's some language in that thread that would be regarded as quite unacceptable today. Hooboy.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 12:38 AM on January 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

We have Rickrolls
posted by TedW at 3:29 AM on January 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

Welcome to Metafilter, Rick
posted by TedW at 3:29 AM on January 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

At least after his musical career, Astley went on to bigger and better things.

Read the comments this time. (And quite possibly only this time.)
posted by Naberius at 4:53 AM on January 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

Is it me or is the fact that we now have an oral history of the Rick Roll meme perhaps a sign that we may wanna give oral histories a bit of a rest as a go-to pop culture journalism option?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:18 AM on January 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

The most fun version, IMO. Technically a mashup, but whatevs.
posted by drivingmenuts at 7:25 AM on January 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Never forget Nick Lowe's proto-Rickroll in the first verse of All Men Are Liars. In 1990 the song had already taken on the patina of joyous irritant.
posted by bendybendy at 7:32 AM on January 15, 2020

if we’re doing old memes again can we bring back longcat ceiling cat
posted by scratch at 7:46 AM on January 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

rick
rick
rick

CAPS LOCK IS HOW I FEEL INSIDE RICK
posted by joannemerriam at 8:25 AM on January 15, 2020 [16 favorites]

Caldwell: I run Know Your Meme, which is the world’s largest internet culture database [...]

I will be disappointed if this is not in the citations for "oxymoron" in at least three online dictionaries.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 9:03 AM on January 15, 2020

Happy birthd... wait. Something ain't right here...
posted by JoeXIII007 at 9:19 AM on January 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Slarty Bartfast: "I dated someone in high school who gave me a mixtape which included Never Gonna Give You Up when I was like 16, true story.

But I got the last laugh because she has like a billion kids and is super Christian and happily married... "

So you might say you .... knew the bride when she used to rick and roll?
posted by chavenet at 9:32 AM on January 15, 2020 [14 favorites]

National Rick Astley Hotline Upgraded.

I still somehow have the Rickroll hotline in my phone contacts. Even more surprisingly, it still works fifteen years later. Someone out there is seriously committed to that joke. (1-248-434-5508 if you're curious.)


< clickty-click > Changes dial-in for upcoming internal team meeting......
posted by inflatablekiwi at 9:57 AM on January 15, 2020 [8 favorites]

The article gets Rick Astley's career wrong as he had 2 #1s in the US. Never Gonna Give You Up and Together Forever.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:16 AM on January 15, 2020 [5 favorites]

I never tire of being Rick-rolled, especially nowadays when it happens so infrequently.
posted by ceejaytee at 12:12 PM on January 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

MetaFilter: It hurts. Every time. Every single damned time.
posted by Pallas Athena at 1:27 PM on January 15, 2020

Ask not for whom the Rick rolls.... it rolls for thee
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 1:27 PM on January 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

Eh, rickrolling is just a tamed version of goatse.cx that somehow managed to supplant it. Thank God.
posted by suetanvil at 2:45 PM on January 15, 2020 [5 favorites]

EVERY YEAR WE GET THE CROCHETY--

oh, wrong holiday. sorry.
posted by eclectist at 2:57 PM on January 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

The article gets Rick Astley's career wrong as he had 2 #1s in the US. Never Gonna Give You Up and Together Forever.

Make that three number-one hits in the US (Cry For Help was actually one I quite liked).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:05 PM on January 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Critical Windows 10 vulnerability used to Rickroll the NSA and Github
posted by tonycpsu at 8:45 AM on January 16, 2020

Is it me or is the fact that we now have an oral history of the Rick Roll meme perhaps a sign that we may wanna give oral histories a bit of a rest as a go-to pop culture journalism option?

I know what an oral history means in the context of anthropology. Or, at least, I think I know enough about it so as to not embarrass myself at cocktail parties attended by people who do that work for a living. (They may disagree.)

I don't actually know when it means here. Is it different in any way from "interview?" First person memories, recorded by people who write things on paper for a living seem like a rather different thing. Maybe that's a biased view of what deserves to be considered anthropology.

Fun post. The season's wrong, though, so even though I clicked on it, I claim not to have gotten got.
posted by eotvos at 1:21 PM on January 16, 2020

>>But hasn't Smashmouth's All Star eclipsed the Rick Roll as Most Annoying Musical Meme?

>Hey now

...don't dream it's over
posted by k3ninho at 3:49 AM on January 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

While Astley continued working until 1993, he never had another hit and retired from the music business in 1994. His short career and one-off hit made Astley and “Never Gonna Give You Up” fuse into a singular entity in the public consciousness in a way that only a “one-hit wonder” can.

Rick Astley had multiple hits in multiple countries. Get outta here with this one-hit wonder horsecrap.
posted by tantrumthecat at 8:04 PM on January 19, 2020

I enjoyed duckroll as a meme. One of the things glossed over in the article about it was that you wouldn't link to the image directly, generally speaking.

On 4chan, you reply to an earlier comment with >>1234567, where that's the number of a specific comment. That makes a link to that comment.

So the form of duckroll was that you'd start a new thread with the duckroll image, or a variant of it, as the picture attached to the first comment. Then you'd go into another existing thread, and make a comment that appeared to be replying to to something there, but with unclear context. You'd put the comment ID of your duckroll thread as the reply ID, so that when someone clicked it to see what you were replying to, they'd end up there. Cue the replies in the duckroll thread all being a variation of "damnit"

What I like about this over rickrolling is that it's entirely native to the message board format: it's always clear that you're linking to youtube (or maybe a link shortner), but this was just a link to a comment on the same message board. There was flexibility in the exact image, which led to interesting developments and variations in it.

Rickrolling is fine, but duckrolling had a greater specificity that made it more fun.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:50 PM on January 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

One other aspect that I remembered:

The format on 4chan is that whenever a thread is replied to, it gets bumped to the top. On the page for any particular subforum, you'll see the n-most recently active threads, with the first post in that thread and it's image shown. There was a fair amount of churn, but generally you'd see all of the currently active threads after only a few refreshes.

What this means was that you had a kind of warning that someone was actively seeding duckroll links if you saw a duckroll thread popping up. Which I think helps make it more of a game.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:05 AM on February 3, 2020