White Team Flash Mob : The Hunger Games Salute

Here are Teh Trollz' two videos of our team participating in the White Superteam Flash Mob holding up The Hunger Games Salute:

Assignment #3: Ginger Take Cream Pie to the Face [video]

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do! By the way, don't be afraid to "share"; sharing is caring :]

by Ying Ying Louis-Jean

Cinnamon challenge is a popular dare game which requires the person being dared to take 1 tablespoon of cinnamon and try to swallow it within 60 seconds without drinking any fluids. This was originated in 2001 and became popular on YouTube around 2011.

Google Interest

Although swallowing a tablespoon of cinnamon sounds easy to do, it’s nearly impossible and could be dangerous. Cinnamon can quickly dries the mouth and make it hard to swallow; and because cinnamon powder is very fine, it can be inhaled simply by taking a small breath. Some people have been known to choke on the cinnamon, which has not been reported to cause any deaths, but very well could. However, this dare became popular because although it sounds easy to do, 99.9% of people fail with a entertaining effect involving dramatic coughing and “dragon breath,” when the person spit out a bunch of cinnamon powder.

Dragon Breath

Epic Cinnamon Challenge

Hot Girl Attempts the Cinnamon Challenge

MissingNo.

by Gabriel Orellana

"MissingNo." short of missing number, usually pronounced Miising-NO, is a Pokémon species found in the Pokemon Red and Blue video games that became famous around 1996. The species usually appears when the game attempts to access data for a nonexistent Pokémon species as a result of a glitch, which eventually became one of the most infamous in the Pokémon franchise. It's origin lies in the original title "Pokémon Red Version and Blue Version," which was published in the May 1999 issue of Nintendo Power. Described initially as a "programming quirk", it was advised to gamers to avoid the MissingNo as it would cause the game to reset in order to remove the graphical error.

Since becoming well-known among gamers in 1999, there have been many discussions of finding the Pokémon on purpose, involving a series of events as illustrated on this video:

Despite warning from Nintendo, information on how to go about finding MissingNo. was printed in several magazines due to it's possible positive effect. The positive effect it had in the Pokemon games was increasing the amount of your #6 item in your characters' bag to over 100, giving the opportunity to increase say, Rare Candy's which leveled ones Pokemon up, in order to bypass the time it takes to train Pokemon.

Additionally, in the game "Minecraft" the text "MissingNo" would appear when the certain text file had been modified or deleted without a specific folder.

IGN, a gaming review blog, listed MissingNo. in 2009 as one of the top Easter Eggs in video games due to it's perceived usefulness. As the google insight chart indicates, the popularity of "MissingNo." began in 2004 and radically increases over time spiking randomly until recently in 2010:

Leeroy Jenkins

by Cindy Xiao

The Leeroy Jenkins video was uploaded to Warcraft movies on May 11, 2005 by the guild PalsForLife. A thread was posted on Blizzard Forums by the group to ask what strategies they could utilize in their game; responses included options to download the video, paving the way for uploads on various sites. The video became increasingly popular, as it was spread throughout the Internet not only to gamers but also the mainstream community. The video consists of Leeroy’s teammates with one of the players explaining a “strategic” plan to his team moments before a raid and a player calculating a percentage of survival. Meanwhile, Ben Shultz, the creator of the character Leeroy, is supposedly away from his computer claiming chicken. All of a sudden, Leeroy returns to the game and screams “Leeeeerooooy Jenkiiiiins,” charging his character into a raid and perhaps unintentionally ruins his teammates “strategic” plan. After this incident, Ben Shultz states, “at least I have chicken.” This phrase as well as Leeroy Jenkins has become a meme.

Whether this incident was staged or not, the video has become very popular. The video has the conventional “geeks,” evident by what they were saying such as having a percentage for survival. It is Leeroy Jenkins that ruins their plan and viewers laugh at the fact that the serious and geeky gamers all die. Viewers think of Leeroy as a hero because his actions went against the geekiness of his teammates. In addition, Schulz “chicken” statement pokes even more fun at his teammate’s seriousness. Moreover, the term and how Shultz says “Leeeeeroy Jenkins” is very catchy and sticks in the viewer’s mind.

The video has attracted over 30 million views on YouTube since its first YouTube post on November 19, 2005. According to Google Insights, Leeroy Jenkins reached its peak interest in June 2005 among consumers but the public continued to show interest at high rates. High interests were also due to the mentioning of Leeroy Jenkins on College Jeopardy in November 2005, which helped break Leeroy Jenkin’s into mainstream media. It is not until the end of 2007 when interests begin to stabilize.

Due to the video’s popularity, Ben Schulz has given a keynote speech at ROFLCon, interviewed with several websites including GGL.com, and WOW even made a figurine of Leeroy with him holding a piece of chicken.

Other “memes” that emerged were reenactments of the scene, such as in the movie Year One and Monster Vs. Aliens. Year One skit:

Viewers have created parodies of Leeroy Jenkins as well as developed creative ways in using the meme, including the creation of a techno mix of the character:

Paula Deen Riding Things

By Dzinya Djugba

Paula Deen Riding things originated from a photograph of Paula riding a fellow food network chef Robert Irvine at the south Beach Wine and Food festival the event was put on YouTube, as well as a video posted of Paula Deen riding her co-star. Within 24 hours two colleges students named Nick and Robbie launched a tumblr page of the original meme of Paula Deen riding a stick of butter.

This image soon became known as the meme “Paula Deen Riding things”. The site also featured three templates that would allow anyone who visits that chance to create their own “Paula Deen Riding Things” meme. The site quickly gained popularity and users started to create Paula Deen Riding all kinds of pop cultural figures and event. How the meme works is that an image of Paula Deen riding is placed on anything and anyone. The image has also been animated to Paula Deen riding characters in movies and cartoons in a scene. There are three images to choose from Paula Deen holding a glass of wine the other two with her yelling and smiling.

The meme got mainstream coverage when in March 2010 the Rolling Stones photo shopped their own image of Paula Deen riding a silver rocket while holding onto her wine glass. Over a span of time Paula Deen Riding things was featured on various magazines, Internet sites, news channels, talk shows and more. The highest degree of popularity was from the end of February 2011 to early May 2011 according to google insights. The meme has not generated any other successful memes such as Paula Deen Riding things.

Angry Bert

Tracking the «Bert is evil» meme by Solfrid Federley Kirkemo

Most people know Bert as the grumpy, but still quite innocent puppet from the TV-show “Sesame Street”. However, if you put “Bert” into your google search box, the first thing that’s going to pop up is a link to a website called www.bertisevil.tv. Why would this happen?

This phenomenon started in San Francisco as early as 1998, when a man named Dino Ignacio started a website where he posted pictures of Bert manipulated into different historical photos. The photos were jokes, revolving around the thought that Bert was evil, thereby the name of the project; “Bert is evil”. In these photos Bert was seen posing with people like Adolf Hitler, or placed in historical events like the crowd surrounding the shooting of John F. Kennedy. The photos also included backstories, and the project gained somewhat of a cult-like status. After a while the website became too costly for Ignacio, so he offered people to mirror-host his website. This led to a quite a few mirror-sites, which again raised the popularity and spread the meme.

The popularity of this meme reached its peak in 2001 right after the terror attacks, when a news photograph of a Bangladesh pro-bin Laden protester holding a picture of Osama bin Laden and Bert started circulating on the internet. The picture he was holding originated from Ignacio`s website, and were apparently being sold in thousands at a local store in Bangladesh, which owner was not familiar with the Sesame Street. The whole incident was seen as quite puzzling in the West, and horrified the owners of Sesame Street. They threatened to sue Ignacio, and in response to this he chose to remove this particular section from his website. They also released an official statement in response to the use of their character being used in this context;

“Sesame Street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding. We’re outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner.”

As the statistics from Google Insights below show the interest for “Bert is evil” has declined quite a lot since 2004. The reason for this might be because the phenomenon itself is rather limited, and in the end it`s hard to keep a thing like this going forever. I guess people basically grew a bit tired of it, with other memes taking its place.

The “Bert is evil” phenomenon probably caught people’s attention because it was funny and also quite well-made. By combining the puppet character and real-life situations with Photoshop including short-stories it created something unique and interesting. It was also something that people could, without too much effort, participate in by creating their own “Bert is evil” photos, which in turn helped spread the meme.