Having been Very Online in the mid 1990s is rough because half of your formative influences are like "yeah, this Flash video engages in pop culture deconstruction that's strikingly topical even thirty years later and did things to my vocabulary that persist to this day, and I can literally never recommend it to anyone because its core premise is a level of homophobic ordinarily observed only under laboratory conditions".
Them: Hey, you were around for the first wave of real webcomics. Which one was your favourite?
Me:
#thank god homestar runner aged well (via @shibascarf)
Homestar Runner is the way that it is in large part because it's a response to the 90s edgelord bullshit I'm talking about; while the characters had earlier appeared in print, the Flash animated version that everybody remembers didn't debut until January of 2000. If it's aged well, that isn't an accident ā it's a product of its authors looking at the state of 1990s Internet culture and making a conscious decision to be Not That.
U gotta name examples














