Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2023/12/01/salad-fingers-and-weird-youtube.html
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God DAMN I miss the Web. But you can never go home again.
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The internet is still very much weird, it’s just that there’s so much noise that it’s harder to sift through it all to find the gems. Often times it’ll be hidden in more insular online communities, but i do miss ye olde internet humor from stuff like ebaumsworld or YTMND or albinoblacksheep. I also remember when ebay was still somewhat new there was a trend of people posting weird or funny listings as a way to maybe go viral and make some cash if it sold.
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Yeah…my youtube feed is now completely full of wordsalad names providing videos on stuff I don’t care about, which means I instead just look at the channels I’ve subscribed to, which removes the ability to find some interesting stuff.
And I have no idea how I missed Salad Fingers originally, but I’m glad (?) I found it now.
The Radiskull will kill you all— ONE BY ONE!!
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Just a quick list of the stuff the Flash-era Internet gave me:
- Tim Burton’s Stainboy, one of the first Flash films to really exploit alpha channels
- Joe Cartoon, whose interactive Flash movies were sophomoreish, but funny as hell.
- “We loves the Moon”, basically up there with “Ze End of the World”
- “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”
- Badgers!
- Glitch, a quirky game started by Stewart Butterfield and driven by a bunch of talented artists, who then did the math and figured out oh shit, game was never going to be profitable… so they made Slack instead.
I could go on, but I am now simply happy I got to experience that lightning in a bottle first hand.
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And this was actually the second time that happened to him. The first time around it was Game Neverending, which begat Flickr.
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No, dude, too creepy and out there. I tried to have my kid watch Salad Fingers when he was a younger child. We looked for old episodes on Newgrounds, where I first watched them. He typically likes weird stuff, but he hated and didn’t get Salad Fingers.
I do have to say that one of the earliest pieces of animation from the internet that really captivated me was the animator for the Bitey/Brackenwood videos. This one wasn’t the one i first saw but it does showcase how good their animation was back then
I checked up on them today to see what they’ve been up to and this is what their stuff looks like now 
I really hope their animation gets a wider audience some day, i’m still really in love with the Brackenwood world after all these years.
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Two early weird sites that I’ve never been able to find again:
The National Texture Administration – a fake government site, NIST-like but for textures.
“Webhappy!” – all I remember about this was a drawing of a smiling happy guy who’s hung from the ceiling by a bunch of fishhooks on lines.
In particular, these predate the World Wide Web Worm, much less the Internet Archive. If you can recommend any other place to search for them I’d quite appreciate it!
Plenty of others (e.g. all the rathergood stuff) migrated to YouTube long ago.
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