badday.mpg
January 12, 2018 3:30 PM Subscribe
The strange history of one of the internet's first viral videos. Seems he wasn't having as bad a day as we thought.
The first video file I ever downloaded and played was - seriously - a Quicktime animation of a Klingon Bird of Prey, that I got from, I guess, AOL, in 1995. Probably took an hour to download over dial-up and was about 10 seconds long.
posted by thelonius at 3:46 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 3:46 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
I remember the Metafilter discussion of this with lots of people insisting it was totally real and tkchridt constsntly stepping in with it’s absolutely not that’s not how people lose thier shit that’s not what a real fight looks like trust me and no one beliving him.
posted by The Whelk at 3:57 PM on January 12, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 3:57 PM on January 12, 2018 [10 favorites]
Man the fan site of the vid is like a cornucopia of late 90s internet. It's a beautiful thing to behold. Also:
You may have already received by mail or checked out on the Web this large video, often named badday.mpg (beware 5MB!, you may prefer a shrink down version to 416KB courtesy of Jeroen Paternostre).
*sheds a single tear (hosted on Tripod)*
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:59 PM on January 12, 2018 [9 favorites]
You may have already received by mail or checked out on the Web this large video, often named badday.mpg (beware 5MB!, you may prefer a shrink down version to 416KB courtesy of Jeroen Paternostre).
*sheds a single tear (hosted on Tripod)*
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:59 PM on January 12, 2018 [9 favorites]
I’ve seen badday, but the first viral video I can remember is shovel to the head, must have been 1999 I want to say? Before the Superfriends Wassup, but not by much.
I could still watch that all day long. Even though it’s pretty awful.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:36 PM on January 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
I could still watch that all day long. Even though it’s pretty awful.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:36 PM on January 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
Man, back in my day viral videos were viral flash animations.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:39 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:39 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
Completely staged eh? Just like most other viral videos then.. The roots run deep.
posted by Chuckles at 4:42 PM on January 12, 2018
posted by Chuckles at 4:42 PM on January 12, 2018
The Whelk, I think you're remembering one of the other fake videos of a guy freaking out in an office and throwing CRT monitors that was going around in 2008 where there was an actual melee going on.
posted by straight at 4:42 PM on January 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by straight at 4:42 PM on January 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
Clearly I can’t keep my CRT throwing videos straight
posted by The Whelk at 4:49 PM on January 12, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 4:49 PM on January 12, 2018 [10 favorites]
This 2005 thread about a Netop Firewall ad riffing off badday.mpg is the first Mefi post I could find that mentions it.
posted by zamboni at 4:49 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by zamboni at 4:49 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
ha ha straight, thewhelk, I was fully prepped to update Todd on this thread and that one, but now maybe I won't. He's still a good dude.
posted by mwhybark at 5:21 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by mwhybark at 5:21 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
Tell him I miss him!
posted by The Whelk at 5:24 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 5:24 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
(weirdly, that Russian brawl thread was posted by your pal and mine, the almighty loquacious, and the first comment is from vito90 - both, like tkchrist and me, Seattle cats)
posted by mwhybark at 5:30 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by mwhybark at 5:30 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
man, that old thread is hilarious. we seem to have matured somewhat.
posted by mwhybark at 5:35 PM on January 12, 2018
posted by mwhybark at 5:35 PM on January 12, 2018
The first video file I ever downloaded and played was
...probably porn
posted by AFABulous at 5:42 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
...probably porn
posted by AFABulous at 5:42 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
...probably porn
IIRC the first animated gif I'd ever seen was on an aix machine, running I don't even remember what window manager. It was a postage stamp sized loop of a train going into a tunnel.
posted by mcrandello at 5:53 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
IIRC the first animated gif I'd ever seen was on an aix machine, running I don't even remember what window manager. It was a postage stamp sized loop of a train going into a tunnel.
posted by mcrandello at 5:53 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
Oh man, I used to loop this video on campus bookstore demo machines back in ‘98. Probably downloaded it off of Hotline.
posted by porn in the woods at 5:57 PM on January 12, 2018
posted by porn in the woods at 5:57 PM on January 12, 2018
Woah woah woah woah...
It was impressive you could get anyone to download content? Haha who wrote this? Some post Napster baby? Did the author never just do a file transfer dump of someone's .mp3 and .mov files? Did this person not understand the use of the CDR to spread Doom TAC (that is the Total Alien Conversion - not that hack weapon mod) across a college dorm floor? Did they not know at least one kid who seemed to have built their own server off of a campus network and serve a huge amount of pirated music before it was really monitorable by The DCMA or campus IT? I mean... for my mom to see that? Yeah... that video survived by colleges and geeks until grandma and grandpa were old enough to slap it on the end of their forwarded email chain...
I mean... come on though - a short video... showing off your 9600 baud modem? This would be prime content to show folks how much better your rig was / the size of your epeen... (and folks yes, stupid shit like that is how we now have techbros - totally sorry for my part in emasculating other pencil nosed geeks that didn't have a stolen copy of WindowsNT or Linux on that extra box in your dorm room...
Also, my first streaming video conference was silent - but I did meet some guys at CERN.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:57 PM on January 12, 2018 [5 favorites]
It was impressive you could get anyone to download content? Haha who wrote this? Some post Napster baby? Did the author never just do a file transfer dump of someone's .mp3 and .mov files? Did this person not understand the use of the CDR to spread Doom TAC (that is the Total Alien Conversion - not that hack weapon mod) across a college dorm floor? Did they not know at least one kid who seemed to have built their own server off of a campus network and serve a huge amount of pirated music before it was really monitorable by The DCMA or campus IT? I mean... for my mom to see that? Yeah... that video survived by colleges and geeks until grandma and grandpa were old enough to slap it on the end of their forwarded email chain...
I mean... come on though - a short video... showing off your 9600 baud modem? This would be prime content to show folks how much better your rig was / the size of your epeen... (and folks yes, stupid shit like that is how we now have techbros - totally sorry for my part in emasculating other pencil nosed geeks that didn't have a stolen copy of WindowsNT or Linux on that extra box in your dorm room...
Also, my first streaming video conference was silent - but I did meet some guys at CERN.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:57 PM on January 12, 2018 [5 favorites]
My first one was probably Home Base or possibly a stick figure death video. Somehow, the timeline of this being from 2002 doesn't jive with my memory—it seems like it should have been earlier.
posted by koavf at 6:21 PM on January 12, 2018
posted by koavf at 6:21 PM on January 12, 2018
I remember the first time someone sent me a video as an email attachment -- that damned dancing baby -- and I knew in my heart that the internet was doomed.
posted by straight at 6:48 PM on January 12, 2018
posted by straight at 6:48 PM on January 12, 2018
Ohhh god the dancing baby. So much 1997.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:01 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by uncleozzy at 7:01 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
The earliest video I remember was the exploding whale, which back in its low-res MPEG-1 glory using the fancy new OS/2 media framework.
posted by adamsc at 7:23 PM on January 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by adamsc at 7:23 PM on January 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
Yeah, we caught hell for sharing The Spirit of Christmas, from the sysadmins and our evangelical supervisor.
posted by calamari kid at 7:42 PM on January 12, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by calamari kid at 7:42 PM on January 12, 2018 [5 favorites]
Yes, that's the one. Jesus vs. Santa, everyone in the office gathered around a QA team monitor, crying with laughter, late December 1995.
posted by mwhybark at 8:03 PM on January 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by mwhybark at 8:03 PM on January 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
SOXMAS.MOV is the official title, I think. I'll have to check out my Limewire logs.
posted by Cookiebastard at 8:10 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Cookiebastard at 8:10 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
Man the fan site of the vid is like a cornucopia of late 90s internet. It's a beautiful thing to behold.
You are not kidding. I had clicked on that without realizing that it was a Wayback link and when I got to the "[X] visitors since 05/25/98" widget, I thought, "oh man, this 90s-website parody site thought of everything!" But it is not a parody. It is sweet sweet late 90s reality.
posted by aka burlap at 9:51 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
You are not kidding. I had clicked on that without realizing that it was a Wayback link and when I got to the "[X] visitors since 05/25/98" widget, I thought, "oh man, this 90s-website parody site thought of everything!" But it is not a parody. It is sweet sweet late 90s reality.
posted by aka burlap at 9:51 PM on January 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
Oh whoa I just for the first time had the idea to use the Wayback Machine to go look at the Yahoo! directory from 1996 and it's so glorious. Such a hopelessly doomed attempt to categorize every page on the internet! So many links to old sites! Take note, future FPP makers; there is gold here if you can find a still-working link among all these...
posted by aka burlap at 10:06 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by aka burlap at 10:06 PM on January 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
Ah, the good old days when I spent a whole day downloading the Phantom Menace teaser trailer via the single modem the organisation I worked for had.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:51 AM on January 13, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:51 AM on January 13, 2018 [3 favorites]
the kind of tech startup where coworkers stay late to play Quake online over the company’s coveted T1 line.
Or, indeed, before lunch the last day before the Christmas break in a London office. Time has fogged the details, but Quake's networking protocol was rather messy and managed to do some serious DOSsing on the corporate systems on the other side of the Atlantic.
It being early over there, it took the steamed ops some time to work out what was going on, by which time we'd all gone to the pub. IT got its act together just as our French colleagues came back from their lunch and settled down for a post-prandial Quake battle - at which point, the fury of corporate was unleashed. On them. Not us.
Happy days.
(As for viral porn - first one for me was 1986, I think. A two-frame 8-bit 256x192 animation called Pigman, which starred a farmer and, well, a pig. Two frames were all you needed, and it was available in what we now call cross-platform formats. A bad man could go around a computer show with a selection of floppies and cassettes in his pocket and seed demo computers rather faster than the stand droids could spot them and close them down.)
posted by Devonian at 5:56 AM on January 13, 2018
Or, indeed, before lunch the last day before the Christmas break in a London office. Time has fogged the details, but Quake's networking protocol was rather messy and managed to do some serious DOSsing on the corporate systems on the other side of the Atlantic.
It being early over there, it took the steamed ops some time to work out what was going on, by which time we'd all gone to the pub. IT got its act together just as our French colleagues came back from their lunch and settled down for a post-prandial Quake battle - at which point, the fury of corporate was unleashed. On them. Not us.
Happy days.
(As for viral porn - first one for me was 1986, I think. A two-frame 8-bit 256x192 animation called Pigman, which starred a farmer and, well, a pig. Two frames were all you needed, and it was available in what we now call cross-platform formats. A bad man could go around a computer show with a selection of floppies and cassettes in his pocket and seed demo computers rather faster than the stand droids could spot them and close them down.)
posted by Devonian at 5:56 AM on January 13, 2018
The first video I remember as an example of "a video you could look at over the Internet" was a short clip of some lambs jumping around. Early '90s. I forget what the viewer was, but it predated the web.
posted by lagomorphius at 7:18 AM on January 13, 2018
posted by lagomorphius at 7:18 AM on January 13, 2018
I wonder.
Watching the video again, I saw a man flip out, break things, and storm away from his space. Maybe it's the cold meds I'm taking, but it surely seemed to end on a grim note.
posted by doctornemo at 9:16 AM on January 13, 2018
Watching the video again, I saw a man flip out, break things, and storm away from his space. Maybe it's the cold meds I'm taking, but it surely seemed to end on a grim note.
posted by doctornemo at 9:16 AM on January 13, 2018
Oh gawd, I remember around 20 years ago some idiot buddy at work shared a funny video by sending the file to my home email. It was a 2 minute video advert for a Jewish deli. The file size was massive. For some weird reason I couldn't delete that file from my email server until it was loaded, and I couldn't access any other mail until after it was loaded (don't ask me why, I don't know; my home system then was a pretty crappy PC clone); That fecking file took all weekend long to load by the time I could delete it. It was like passing a grapefruit sized kidney stone. I expressed cursing at my idiot buddy at work on Monday.
posted by ovvl at 9:33 AM on January 13, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by ovvl at 9:33 AM on January 13, 2018 [2 favorites]
The first viral video I saw was the IT guy at work showing me the original South Park short. I didn't even have an internet connected computer.
posted by emjaybee at 8:32 AM on January 14, 2018
posted by emjaybee at 8:32 AM on January 14, 2018
Oh gawd, I remember around 20 years ago some idiot buddy at work shared a funny video by sending the file to my home email. It was a 2 minute video advert for a Jewish deli. The file size was massive. For some weird reason I couldn't delete that file from my email server until it was loaded, and I couldn't access any other mail until after it was loaded (don't ask me why, I don't know; my home system then was a pretty crappy PC clone); That fecking file took all weekend long to load by the time I could delete it. It was like passing a grapefruit sized kidney stone. I expressed cursing at my idiot buddy at work on Monday.
Back in the '90s my parents lived up in the mountains in PA where the best they could get was 56K. My dad spent hours downloading Elf Bowling as an email attachment his neighbor sent from two doors away.
posted by lagomorphius at 10:39 PM on January 14, 2018
Back in the '90s my parents lived up in the mountains in PA where the best they could get was 56K. My dad spent hours downloading Elf Bowling as an email attachment his neighbor sent from two doors away.
posted by lagomorphius at 10:39 PM on January 14, 2018
oh man, elf bowling
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:36 PM on January 15, 2018
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:36 PM on January 15, 2018
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