໒𓏼⨷　　ƒִ֗2ⓤ bυׁׅt ᥴrediɬ เƒִ֗ 𝕣ᧉ᩠֗𝚙o𑂘ȶ　パ𓈒フ

somewhere between a chat and a fixation

This is one of the first pictures I saw on the internet back in the day, a picture of a dolphin and a cow jumping out of the water. This is a meme and psychological humor. The joke is that if you see anything other than two dolphins, you are overworked and need a vacation.

According to many websites, this picture is used as an illustration in a stress study at St. Mary's Hospital. It is said that a study of a group revealed that even though the dolphins are completely identical, a person experiencing stress would notice differences in the two dolphins.

If you think this is AI-generated, it's not. This image, as of the time of this post, is over 20 years old. Based on my findings, this image was first posted on 14 April, 2003. This image is photoshopped but not AI-generated. I have seen this picture before back in the early 2010s.

What I want to say is old internet images like this, usually memes, especially from 2000s, and 2020s AI-generated images, usually fall into the uncanny valley, where things look almost real but slightly off, making the viewer question the authenticity of the image.

so there i was, watching hockey, as one does on a monday night. the calgary flames (my hometown team) are currently getting absolutely pummelled by the colorado avalanche (the best team in the league). it's like 5-0 at the end of the first period. kadri is on hat trick watch. calgary has pulled their goalie already and their backup isn't faring much better. it's bad.

anyways this post actually has nothing to do with the hockey game. the hockey game was just some set dressing. midway through watching this absolute travesty of a team get scored on again (it's like 8-2 at this point) i remember this old comic from the mid 2010s. it's been a while, but i remember it originated from the league of legends community. it was about two or three league teams, and one of them was beating up the other two and there was a panel with the phrase "time's up! time for unspeakable violence" or something like that. it was a fun way to kinda characterize different sports teams and give them personality. felt pretty applicable to this absolute travesty of a hockey game too (it ended 9-2).

ok so now i had a hankering to find this old comic. i found a reddit thread about it pretty quickly but the comic itself was nowhere to be found. someone had uploaded a single panel from the comic on twitter a while back, but not the entire thing. the artist that originally drew it (one "t b skyen") is now a fucking youtuber. good for him i guess. but the site where the old comics were hosted is completely dead. they don't appear on wayback machine. i can't find the comics on his twitter because he's locked that account down too. they're not on his bluesky account because he created that two years ago, and these old comics are from 10 years ago! so for all intents and purposes, unless someone downloaded a local copy of this comic before the artist's website went down, it's basically lost media now. it's nowhere on the internet to be seen.

tbh this could probably be applied to a lot of other media online, especially as the internet gets older. there's this old adage about how stuff on the internet is there forever but i really don't think that's true, every year tons of media probably goes offline forever because people lose interests or websites go offline or social media accounts get locked down or wholly deleted. in all honestly the internet actually does a pretty terrible job at archiving media. honestly i sometimes think about how if i deleted my reddit or twitch account, a good amount of stuff from communities that i'm involved in would simply vanish overnight. back when i was super into valorant/esports i used to make a lot of content for the community, and if i decided one day that i completely lost interest in that niche and deleted my account, a good amount of that content would probably never be seen again.