Rule no. 1: Catch the first Pokemon you encounter in each route/cave/whatever and nothing else. If you fail to catch it, too bad, continue onwards. Rule no. 2: If your Pokemon faints, consider it dead and release it. In 2010 a 4chan user posted
these rules for making Pokemon more of a challenge, as well as a short comic on his exploits in a world where Pokemon can die. The "
Nuzlocke" comic became wildly popular, spawning dozens of elaborate offshoots in
comic and
story form.
[more inside]
posted by melissam
on Dec 3, 2011 -
15 comments
Founded in 2004 as a place to catalog LiveJournal drama rejected from Wikipedia,
Encyclopedia Dramatica rapidly became the premier site on the web for all manner of
lulz. Intended
"in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary," ED grew into a sprawling crowdsourced compendium of memes, subcultures, communities, personalities, and the endless feuds and controversies spawned by
4chan and
other anonymous imageboards. While comprehensive, the site developed a reputation for nastiness -- full of "ironic" (?) racism, gratuitous porn, organized attacks on other sites, and disturbingly thorough dossiers on perceived enemies, all dripping with vicious snark (just check out
their entry on MetaFilter). But now, after more than six years, it appears the troll has become the trolled. Founder Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo, allegedly
disillusioned by the site's
legal woes and
nihilistic trajectory, has
permanently shuttered the site and replaced it with
OhInternet, a slicker, cleaner, Web 2.0 effort modeled after more respectable internet guides like
Know Your Meme (which recently sold to
Cheezburger Networks for a cool
$N million, discussed
here).
Backups and mirrors abound, but as for the source? Pool's closed...
forever.
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 15, 2011 -
85 comments
The Isleños are
said to be a dying traditional American subculture.
Descendants of Canary Island immigrants of Louisiana, the name Isleños was given to them to distinguish them from Spanish mainlanders, known as "peninsulares." But in Louisiana, the name evolved from a category to an identity
. For a long time they were one of those rare subcultures that found a way to maintain a living tradition as the world around them modernised by carving out a livelihood as crabbers and 'shrimpers'.
Then Katrina hit and the wetlands, which were central to the Isleños identity, essentially dissapeared. Despite the blow to their economy, they still
have their songs and
annual fiestas, evidence of a strong culture which binds their community together, and their
rebuilding following Katrina demonstrated how strong that sense of identity and culture can be. So perhaps the Isleños shouldn't be written off just yet, then. After all, as Isleño Irvan Perez says, "
This is home. Where else would we go?"
posted by Effigy2000
on Dec 7, 2008 -
7 comments
orz. Picture a guy facing left and kneeling on the ground. The "o" is the head, the "r" symbolises the hands and body whilst the "z" is the legs. Because Hao-Ren finish last.
posted by seanyboy
on Feb 9, 2005 -
40 comments
For Westerners, the index case of subculture has to be the
1960s UK conflict between the razor-sharp, tailored
mods and their mortal enemies, the greasy
rockers.
Difference was critical to these first self-identified youth subcultures: difference in dress, in music, in drug of choice, in the favored
mode of
transport...everything. This obsessive focus on not just standing out, but standing out
just so - on showing the world precisely the right angle of a hat, length of a coat, shortness of hair - has defined many a subculture since. We recognize
b-boys,
ganguro girls, and
straightedge punks by such deployments, among many, many other identifiable groups. (It's not just a youth thing, either:
leathermen and the
delightfully recrudescent roller derby culture are largely adult phenomena.)
To a devotee of a given subculture, such matters, far from being a "narcissism of small differences," are a matter of pivotal import in framing how one presents oneself to the world:
how we want to be seen, how we want others to understand us. But I'm getting older now, and further out of the loop, and I realize that just maybe I'm losing the ability to discern these differences in the people I pass walking down the street. I find myself asking, who and where are the new subcultures? And how do they choose to present themselves to us?
posted by adamgreenfield
on Sep 25, 2004 -
17 comments
Punks vs. Yuppies in San Francisco I don't know how I feel about trying to get yuppies and punks to reconcile but I do like the idea of a yuppies vs. punks Olympics. It'd be funny if they had one here in NYC (I'd nominate Willimasburg as the location).
posted by zinegurl
on Jun 16, 2002 -
27 comments
Tooling around today, I happened upon small but burgeoning subculture-
gay Heavy Metal fans. Headbanging and Rainbow Pride stickers may seem like an odd combo until you think of the number of openly gay performers in Hard Rock (Roddy Bottum of
Faith No More, Doug Pinnick of
King's X-a gay
Christian metalhead, and of course the great Rob Halford formerly of the legendary
Judas Preist. I dunno whether this is a large trend or merely people coming out of yet another closet, but it's nice to see metal shaking off it's homophobic image.
posted by jonmc
on Mar 21, 2002 -
17 comments
