The Maitre d': A Legacy of Failure (in Pixels) - Part 3

The Maitre d'

OK, admittedly, I have been a frequenter of forums in my day. And I have posted many things on them. Behold, some of the amazing things I have posted!

For my first trick, let's go back to early 2001. The X-Files was in its prime, and Fox was about to release a spinoff that could not help but be awesome--The Lone Gunmen.

Well, that was before it came out. The show was kinda funny, but there was one moment that ruined it for many geeks. (And let's face it, that had to have been a nail in its coffin--it was to be the quintessential geek show.) Langly's hacking into a government computer. It's a real intense moment, as the audience is left wondering whether he's going to be caught or not. And then... his intrusion is detected! Langly tried to beat the clock, but it's too late. "Oh no," he exclaims, "COOKIE COMPROMISED!"

No. Bad writers. Bad. Go to your room and think about what you've done.

That was the most terrible line, technologically speaking, ever uttered on national TV. It burned my very soul just hearing it. On the plus side, though, I thought I might be coming in at the start of a new and miraculous meme. I had missed the boat with "All Your Base," but this time... this time I'd be one of the first! So I created these images that all might revel in them when "Cookie Compromised" became as popular and overused as "All Your Base":

The guy on the right is Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka, the man behind Something Awful. I think this was back in the days with the SA forums were free, so that's probably where I posted them. (SA was integral in the rise of the AYBABTU meme.) Needless to say, "Cookie Compromised!" never became a catchphrase. Oh well.

My next joke requires a little explanation. And by that I mean an economics lesson. (Yes, I was a business major.) No... wait, don't stop reading. I won't blather on too much about supply and demand and all that crap. But to understand this one, you need to know about the production possibilities curve. This graph shows the choice a society has to make between focusing their limited resources on increasing production capacity versus supplying immediate needs and wants.

In the same way, we at Jedi Legacy had to choose between posting interesting things in the Bespin Cantina Forum or in our IRC chat, the Cantina Cloud. The former would preserve the topic for all posterity, and the latter would be forgotten until someone dug up their old chat logs. Which would probably never happen. At the same time, anything posted in the IRC chat was sure to get many immediate responses.

Thus, we had the -Ite discussion possibilities curve:

I, for one, await the day that economics textbooks use this as their example for the production possibilities curve instead of silly things like "guns and butter" or "pizza and robots."

Anyway, let's wind up here with a few thread-enders. You know what I mean--those images that people post just to smart off to one of the other posters. First of all, we have Speak from JL, who's really excited:

Feel free to use that one next time you want to smack someone down off their high horse. (I'm looking at you, Chad. I know you love to use these things against certain people on certain forums which I shall not mention.)

The next one requires a little more explanation. I can't remember how it happened, but there was someone on the Massassi Temple forums that started posting this image reading "I HAVE DESTROYED THIS THREAD WITH MY PRESENCE." So, I had to respond with my own version:

Finally, we have my version of the Timeline. The original Timeline was basically what it says: a timeline. Except it had two arrows: one that said "you are here" and another that said "the present." I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what order they were in.

The Timeline is the low-key equivalent of posting "WOW, OLD NEWS IS SO EXCITING!" It was so popular, it became a verb--one could say that a thread got "timelined" if someone posted this infamous image there. I'm pretty sure its very use became a bannable offense on the Something Awful forums at one point.

Anyway, I had to make my own Jedi Legacy-themed version, complete with "All Your Base" reference:

Well, it's getting about that time (and by "about that time," I mean I've filled up three pages with crap), so I'm going to end it here. But I still have some funny pictures to post, and believe it or not, some of my best and funniest work is yet to come. So stay tuned for Part 4.

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